Boat Festival In Matsue

Once every twelve years, there is a boat festival in Matsue. I went to the last day of this year's. Enjoy this multimedia experience and live vicariously.

Sakana no ko

This pretty pink fellow is an itoyori, for which I can find no translation. I did find a recipe, however, so I simmered it with ginger and whatnot. Pretty alright. The lady at the store even asked what you do with these fish. Nobody had heard of them, either. Thanks, internet. I'll probably post something more substantial soon.

Even Littler Mermaids

I recently watched Ponyo, which I think I had previously posted about. It's the latest of the Studio Ghibli movies and has a wonderful theme song that spent months boring its way into my brain. The full title is Gake no Ue no Ponyo, meaning Ponyo from the Cliff by the Sea, or something like that.

The story is very loosely based on The Little Mermaid. In this version, the mermaid is actually more like a fish girl, who escapes her somewhat crazy-seeming dad, who is not a fish-person, but rather a guy who wears crazy suits and bubbles over his head and drives some kind of finned submarine. She meets a kindergartener named Sosuke, who saves her life and names her Ponyo, thinking she is just a fish despite her having a weird human-like face. Ponyo falls in love with Sosuke (this seems rather strange if you consider she is a fish and they are both just little kids), but her dad captures her back. She insists on being called Ponyo and escapes again, this time magically growing legs and arms and eventually becoming totally human. Her magic starts throwing off the balance of nature or something, though...

It's a nice little movie, but I was kind of disappointed by how derivative it is. For example:

1. One of its main characters is a little girl (Ponyo, actually a little fish/mermaid) who has some sort of magic that is undefined but clearly important to the world. It's kind of like Kiki from Kiki's delivery service, or Princess Mononoke, or the girl from Spirited Away, or Nausicaa from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds, and on and on. I guess one should expect that from a Studio Ghibli movie.

2. The wave demons here are rather reminiscent of the blob monsters in Howl's Moving Castle.

3. The last part of the movie involves Ponyo and Sosuke looking for Sosuke's mom in a sequence that seemed reminiscent of the search for Mei at the end of Totoro.

I'm sure there are more, but these are just off the top of my head. It was still a decent movie, and I imagine that the English version will be even better because Tina Fey is doing the voice of the mom, which seems perfect for the character.

Foodstuffs

Since people have submitted a (barely) adequate number of verses for my jazz experiment, I'll bless you all with a terrible food update. This one will center on weird but normal for Japan ingredients like aburaage, fried tofu:

I've cut it up into bits so as to put into miso soup, but it also affords you the opportunity to see the sickly white color of tofu. The outside is that yellow color and has a weird packing foam like texture, but it's pretty good.

I also sometimes put this in miso soup. It's made from fish and probably some other stuff, but it has a rubber like texture. I forget what it is called, and the package doesn't say, but it's pretty common in soup and such.


Don't forget your sea vegetables. This is wakame, 若布, a kind of seaweed. The characters literally mean "young cloth," which I suppose is kind of weird. Here it's in its dried form. I keep a bag of the dried stuff so as to put in, you guessed it, miso soup, but it's common fresh, too. I just can't use very much of it by myself, so it's better to keep the dried stuff with its seemingly infinite shelf life.


You can't really tell from the picture here, but this is the wakame after being put in some warm water for a few minutes. It becomes soft and slippery and great for soup, salad, vinegared stuff, whatever.


Here's some nori strips. That's another kind of seaweed, the kind that is wrapped around sushi. It's also good for on top of some kinds of noodles or rice or just to eat like chips. These little strips are for putting on top of stuff, though. The kind for sushi comes in bigger rectangular sheets, and there's a triangle-cut kind that is for making onigiri, rice balls.


I don't have any kombu, the only other type of seaweed I can think of off the top of my head because I don't know how to use that. I think sometimes they candy it, actually. This is some pickled uguisuna, for which I can't find a translation, so it's probably either a variety name or a regional name. Uguisu, 鶯, means Japanese bush warbler, and na, 菜, means vegetable, so there you go. This stuff is pretty good. What's weird is Japanese people will always ask me if I can eat Japanese pickles, after they ask if I can eat natto and sashimi, but unlike those foods, I've yet to find a Japanese person who actually likes pickles. Some people will eat them, but nobody really seems to like them. I'm a fan and make my own out of daikon sometimes.


And here's the star of the show, miso! It's made from soybeans in what actually seems to be a pretty simple, if long, process. Apparently, you basically just smash the beans, make the bits into balls, and add some salt and koji, some sort of microorganism. Then you leave it for a few months and it turns into this. Some people may have had it. I think it's probably available, at least in the form of soup, in the US, but just hasn't caught on. I don't know why. It's got a great salty flavor and it's not like we're going to run out of soybeans any time soon.

Miso is one of the essential Japanese flavors, and all sort of stuff is flavored with it, from ramen to snack foods to pickles to fish. Japanese people generally seem to love it and can't live without their daily intake of it as soup, at least around here. It is actually derived from a Chinese food called djang, as I recall, but only sort of distantly. Djang refers basically to a kind of sauce which is made by fermenting various stuff, often fish or vegetables. The Japanese took the idea, removed all the spices and applied it to soy beans because that's more wabi or maybe sabi. I'm not up on all my Japanese aesthetics.

What else can you do with soybeans? This:




Natto, straight out of the supposedly-but-not-actually-recyclable box!




Natto always seems to come with some kind of sauce, called tare, in convenient little packets. This particular one is shiso, which translates as perilla, I guess. It's a kind of leaf with a sort of astringent taste that they often use as an edible garnish for certain kinds of food. There's also a little packet of soy sauce that you mix in, as well, but I didn't film that.




Mix it on up and eat with rice. I hope you enjoyed the pictures and movies. That's what Friday nights are for.

Ultimatum

There will be no further updates (oh no!) until somebody submits a comment in the requested form to my last update.

Jazz by Committee

Sometime last week, I think, I was fiddling around with setting common songs to jazz chords because that has already worked out once for me and I didn't feel like trying a more inventive approach to songwriting at the time, and I came up with a song that uses bits of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Of course I have to add stuff to make it my own song, which means that I just borrowed parts and made my own melody, etc., but the original song was a jumping off point. Anyway, here is what I've written, mostly while walking/driving around.

Twinkle, twinkle
Little Star
How I wonder
Where you are
Could you be crying in a private dressing room?
Serving dignitaries in a hostess bar?
Could you be dressing some poor child's wound?
How I wonder, little star

Twinkle, twinkle
Little star
How I wonder
Where you are
Could you be addressing an empty lecture hall?
Could you be sleeping it off in a car?
Could you be hanging portraits on a wall?
How I wonder, little star

Wish I may, and I wish I might
Catch the next eastbound rocket flight
Second star on the right
And straight on till morning
But heaven was built for angels
Not wayfaring strangers
And a man must heed the dangers
Of Daedalus's warning

Twinkle, twinkle
Little Star
How I wonder
Where you are
Could you be lost on a stormy sea?
Could you be dearer to my heart?
Could you be any farther from me?
How I wonder, little star

So it's not too complex a song, but I can't fight the urge to Dylan-ize even the simplest of themes by adding characters that do nothing but draw a picture. Not that I'm as good at it as he is, or that he's not usually drawing pictures of people for some meta-purpose. In fact, he's just about the only person who seems capable of writing songs on multiple levels, but I digress.

One other characteristic of Dylan writing that maybe people who aren't fans of his don't realize is extras. He's always writing new verses, or changing old ones slightly, and Dylanologists eat that stuff up, keeping track of when he sings each variant and trying to decode if even the smallest changes mean something about his personal life. I've even read that the original draft of "Like A Rolling Stone" had twenty verses or so, which he pared down to the now famous four. In that spirit, here are some extra verses. I've left out the part that is the same in all of them for convenience.

Could you be selecting a diamond ring?
Could you be saving rubles in a jar?
Taking a rickshaw through old Peking?
How I wonder, little star

Could you be riding shotgun through the black hills?
Sweating in an alley in Dakar?
Could you be a footnote in an oil baron's will?
How I wonder, little star

Could you be bowing to a graying earl?
Could you be watching stray dogs spar?
Could you be a cigarette cowgirl?
How I wonder, little star

I'm calling the song Little Star for obvious reasons, but I'm calling the update Jazz by Committee because I'm asking you for submissions. It's pretty easy to write a verse like that; you just find a word that rhymes with star, and draw some pictures, making sure your first and third lines also rhyme. Additionally, if you have suggestions for imaging up my verses, feel free. I'm unlikely to change/add another B section, but feel free to do that, too, if you are up for AAABCCCB rhyming. I know it is strange to invoke a figure from Greek mythology there, too, but I like it and it's my song, after all. So comment away!

A Picture's Worth a Couple Rhymes

There are many flowers in the world,
Yes, flowers are all over


Some of them are dandelions,

Some of them are clover.

Some flowers are small and yellow,
Here are some of these

Some are even smaller fellows
Like little rooms for bees


Some flowers are little.


And some are bigger flowers.


Some flowers are tall and red,


Like little Tokyo Towers.

Did you like my poem? Did you like my pictures? Maybe next time I should take some with my fish eye lens.