Saturday, September 29, 2018

Tottori Prefecture

I woke up on my thin futon on the floor, and slid open the delicate Japanese paper doors. I gasped as outside, the most breathtaking, whimsical view faced me. The mountains directly in front of the window were coated in licks of clouds right outside our door. I opened the sections of huge, glass wall that made up the entirety of the front of the house (essentially floor to roof windows that also function as doors), and breathed in the crisp mountain air as I watched the clouds move in front of me.






Leaving the glass wall open, I crept back into the room to wake Jason. Together we walked outside in our jammies, the wet grass on our feet. We cuddled and watched as the clouds twisted around the mountains, and the sun slowly peaked out amongst them.

So... this is Tottori.





We had arrived the night before to a spacious traditional Japanese house we had booked through airbnb. The rooms were entirely tatami rooms, with a low table, cushions, and tatami beds. The furniture and paper walls were all delicately detailed.


After eating a small breakfast, we couldn't resist heading out into the lush scenery around us, so we went for a walk. Around us were rice paddies, turning yellow at the end of their season, lush, thick green vines, dawdling rives, and... spiders. Lots and LOTS of spiders. Everywhere. Any two things close enough to have a web between them, did. And in this web was anywhere from one to five huge golden orb spiders. We got into the habit of Jason walking first, because no matter where we walked, we were bound to run into one of their webs at some point. If I had to walk somewhere outside by myself, I had to walk with my arm waving out in front of me to make sure I didn't walk face first into a gigantic disgusting spider.

After our beautiful but spider-filled walk, we headed out to Tottori city. We were staying in Misasa, a small onsen town part of Tottori Prefecture, about an hour from the actual Tottori city, and the beach that Tottori is so famous for. When we booked the holiday, the weather forecast had looked promising. Temperatures of 31 degrees. What a wonderful way to spend the last warm weekend of the year, I had thought... But alas, the closer we got to the holiday, the more the weather forecast changed, and now, it was cool and raining, with the next day predicted for thunderstorms!

In Tottori, we explored the site of the Rabbit of Imabari Shrine, where legend has it, a rabbit was stuck on a small nearby island, and tricked a group of sharks into lining up so that he could cross over their backs to get back to Japan. He told the sharks what he had done, and subsequently a shark bit him. A bunch of other stuff happened, and long story short, he bathed in the nearby clear water, and was healed! There was a shrine covered in rabbit statues and tiny white rocks, and the island that supposedly the rabbit was trapped on held a small Torii gate.


Next stop was the Tottori sandunes. Sanddunes are not really something you'd expect to see in Japan, but here we were, surrounded by large rolling sand dunes, and even camels! They were not as impressive as Lancelin in WA though!



We had wanted to see the beautiful Uradome Coast, but after getting drenched on the sand dunes, we decided to call it a day. The rain was pouring, and the wind was getting crisp.

The next day, I woke early and opened the paper doors again, peering out the glass wall to see my morning clouds. I was disappointed to find that today only the whispiest of clouds could be seen finding among the mountains.

As the weather for today was so crappy, we decided to go into Misasa Onsen and have a steaming hot onsen (hot spring bath). Misasa is famous for having some of the world's highest radon water. By bathing in its onsens you can breath in the radon, which, they tell you, can help with healing. That sounds great! So we entered a private hotel onsen that had rotenburo (outdoor onsen) and went through to our seperate areas (boys through one side, girls to the other).

As is usual wih onsen, I entered the women's changing room, got naked, and put all of my gear into a locker. I then entered the first room, a shower room, and washed myself in the showers. I then walked through to the outdoors area. I tell you, there's something very freeing about walking out a door to an outside area while being naked. There were other people in the onsen, but my care factor was zero. Their care factory is zero. Bathing naked with others is a natural part of Japanese life and one needs to embrace their body and their nakedness and walk proudly through the outdoors areas, tits out, to the onsens.

This onsen area had a beautiful outdoors area. I walked over a large decking that had a radon steam room, into a garden area, which contained a large rotenburo spa. Part of the rotenburo had jets for massaging, and other parts were still. Waterfalls spilled into the spa on both sides. When I left this onsen, I walked further, walking naked up an outdoors staircase to find a walking foot spa alleyway where you walked through the spa, to get to another secret spa, which was perched in a small hut above the other spa I had been in previously. Here there was no one else (thank god, as it was quite a small spa) and I could relax by myself in the silence.

Jason and I met up an hour later, after we'd both inhaled enough radon fumes to be beneficial. I then used the wifi to google radon, out of interest, wondering what the science was behind this "healing effect". I soon found out that radon was a carcinogen. The largest cause of lung cancer in the US after cigarettes... So... the healing effect is cancer?! That's great... But at least we will die relaxed, I guess.

Our afternoon stop was Enchoen, a chinese garden. The grounds and building were just beautiful, and overlooked a large lake. The pictures say it all.

I had never thought of going to Tottori before, but honestly, it was one of the most picturesque places I have ever been to in Japan! Definitely one of the most underrated prefectures!



Japanese Sports Day

Last week I participated in my first school Sports day, or in Japanese, Taiiku no Hi.

As with many things, Sports Day in Japan is a big ceremonial affair, carried out with precision and full of rituals. All lessons were cancelled on the day before Sports Day, as the whole day was devoted entirely to rehearsal.

The day started off with all of the school factions, or "blocks" marching around the oval in a procession, carrying their block flags. These flags are completely different each year, designed painted by the students from that block. The student band played the marching song as the blocks slowly made their way around the oval and stood in front of the podium.


Next, came groups of student representatives marching around the oval holding 3 flags- the flag of Japan, the flag of Hyogo, our prefecture, and the school flag. Once the flags arrived at the front of the oval, the band continued playing as the students raised the three flags to the top of the flag poles.



Next, the principal and a variety of people gave speeches, and we watched the blocks (who had been standing in their organised teams in front of the podium) run around the oval to their designated areas. And finally, the games began...

The first competitions were relays. A whole bunch of different relays. My favourite relay was a relay where instead of individual runners, each turn consisted of a team of 5 runners, bound together. The first team was bound in a front to back line, with each student bound to the person in front of them by the legs. When they completed their run, they had to tag the next group in the team, who were bound left to right, with each person's ankles bound to the people on the left and right of them. When they returned, they had to tag the next team, which was another front to back team, and so on. There were lots of spills, and it made for a damn entertaining watch!

The next game was tug-of-war, done in large teams of 20 or so , followed by a skipping challenge .


Before lunch, we got to my favourite part of the day, the cheering competition. For this, each block had to create a dance. The students choreographed, made music mixes,  and practiced this themselves. The students were completely responsible for the running of this event. Which is incredible, if you think of how this would go in an Australian school (or perhaps I'm just jaded).






Have a look and tell me if you can imagine every kid in an Australian school putting in the time and effort to learn these dances, and then actually perform it.


Monday, September 10, 2018

Australian foods I miss

1. The brand name chocolate- Mars bars, cadbury dairy milk. The sweet chocolates.
2. Blocks of cheese! There's no damn blocks of cheddar cheese here! It's killing me! All the cheese is fake, processed cheese. Or small bags of pre-grated cheese. Want a slice of real cheese in your sandwich? There's no such thing here! You can only have a plastic slice of cheese...
3. Meat pies. I'd kill for a gravy-filled meat pie right now...
4. Sausage rolls
5. Low fat beef mince. There appears to be no such thing in Japan. I really miss making low fat beef mince meals... The beef mince here has so much fat, and well over double the calories!
6. Dip. This is such a weird thing for a country not to have in my opinion! And I miss it dearly!
7. Roast lamb with gravy and roast potatoes
8. Polony. Again, there's no such thing here... :(


Getting so hungry thinking about these things!

All you can eat, all you can drink!

Recently, Jason and I have been to some events that have been both all you can eat AND all you can drink.

I understand why these sorts of places are not really a thing in Australia. I do. Australians would bankrupt the places. I get it. But they're soooooo good!

The first place we went to was an all you can eat, all you can drink Chinese restaurant. It cost 3200 yen for women ($35) and 3500 yen for men (around $37). As soon as we sat down, we ordered our first round, being able to choose anything on the drinks list. I ordered whiskey and everyone else ordered beers. We did our first kanpai, and started ordering food. A lot of food!

The great thing about these sorts of restaurants is that you can try A LOT of dishes, without having to pay a huge amount. You can try risky dishes that you normally wouldn't order, and you can try things that you don't know what they are!

Over the time we were there, we ordered vinegar pork, century eggs, crunchy noodles, pot-stickers, dimsims, soup pumplings,  tempura pork, chilli shrimp, pepper beef, garlic vegetables, fried rice, raamen noodles, french fries, and a whole bunch of stuff that I'm not sure what it was. Basically, everyone just orders anything they want off the menu, and then we put it all on the table and eat together, dish after dish. So I got to eat dishes ordered by my Japanese and Chinese friends, and they got to eat my more reserved favourites.

The second place we went to was a beer garden in Himeji called Coconuts. It was up on the roof of a building, decorated with fake palm trees, and sun umbrellas. This one was similar to the buffets we had in Australia, like Sizzlers, but with one key difference- The booze was also buffet style!

For 3200 yen each we were able to serve ourselves as much booze and food as we liked, until the place closed!

On one side of the roof they had the food buffet, with asian dishes, western dishes, and desserts. On the other, they had post-mix machines that allowed you to press the button and pour out whiskey, dispensers of wine, liqueurs, and beers. You simply took your cup and refilled it yourself with your choice of liquor! Cocktails were also available and one simply has to ask the staff for one, and they will make it.

Again, this gives people the chance to try cocktails they wouldn't otherwise have wanted to pay for.

Australia, step up your restaurant game!

Japanese food



I've been in Japan 9 months now, and there are a lot of foods that I've grown to love. Foods that are not necessarily popular in Australia.

Edamame
Image result for edamame
The first of those things is Edamame, green soy beans. I liked these a little when I came to Japan, but now I have a deep love of their salty, umami flavour! In Australia, we pretty much only get edamame if we go to a fancy Japanese restaurant, given to us in a little complimentary bowl. That was the extent of my experience with edamame. In Japan however, not only are edamame a common bar snack, but they're also a deeply appreciated flavour. You can buy edamame chips, snacks, and my favourite thing, edamame cheese bread. This is a soft, sweet white bread, with cooked edamame and cheese tossed through the dough before cooking. The beans are slightly chewy, and add a certain meatiness to the bread, in contrast to the sharp cheese. It's delicious with butter!
Every time I go to a festival or picnic, I always want to bring a tub of salted edamame from the grocery store near my house. They are always fresh, with super salty outsides, and soft,delicately flavoured insides.

Red Beans
Red beans are of course, very important to Japanese people. A sweet filling in mochi, pastries, pancakes, and sandwiches, and a savoury addition to rice, red beans are versatile. I had already been acquainted with red beans before, loving red bean paste (adzuki) dando (mochi balls on a stick) and daifuku (red bean and strawbery stuffed mochi. But again, when you live in Japan, there are so many more ways to eat red beans.  First of all, you learn that there's different types of  bean paste. Anko is the generic word for bean paste. Tsubuan means that there are whole beans in the paste, tsubushian means that the beans are smashed, leaving bits of beans in the paste, and koshian which is a smooth bean paste, passed through a sieve, with no bits of beans remaining. These pastes are all used in a variety of products, most commonly desserts. They're even found in pre-packaged icecreams! But my favourite red bean product is something from the small bakery near my house. It's a fresh, chewy french bread stuffed with red bean paste and salty butter! And it's amazing!
Image result for バター あん ぱん

Condensed milk
Condensed milk... What child didn't love that sweet, sweet syrup? I remember being in grade 7 and going on camp... My mum packed me a tube of condensed milk in my bag! It was great! But condensed milk is not REALLY an eating item in Australia... It's more an ingredient... People don't usually eat it by itself, or even on things. Only inside delicious slices to lend sweetness.
But here in Japan, condensed milk is a big part of Summer! It's put on stawberries and fruit as a sweet, cold dessert, it's used as a topping for kakigoori (shaved ice), and it's put inside and on top of icecreams! And I'm loving it! I love biting into an icecream, to hit a well of condensed milk! I don't understand how, when every child's guilty pleasure is licking the can of the condensed milk, we still don't make the most of its deliciousness!
Image result for condensed milk strawberry japan


Tea
Britain is famous for its love of tea. But I don't think they have anything on Japan. Most of the items in vending machines in Japan are unsweetened coffees and teas. Green tea, black tea, jasmine tea. All completely unsweetened, cold tea. In Australia, if you want tea, you have to either make yourself a cup, or buy a bottle of hugely sweetened, flavoured tea that tastes like cordial. You can't really buy any simple, healthy tea.  My shopping center has a whole row full of different bottles of cold tea. So many more types of tea than I'd ever known existed, to be honest, and nearly all of them with zero calories. There's rice tea, wheat tea, something called 16 tea (made with a large variety of things), red tea, health tea, macha tea, and soooo many more. Honestly I don't know what some of the names even mean...

So being in Japan, I've just gotten used to drinking cold green tea while at my desk, bought from a vending machine at the train station, or my local convenience store. It fills you up, and has lots of good health benefits, as well as a little caffeine boost. I'm going to be so sad when we return to Aus as to continue drinking my cold tea, I'm going to have to brew big batches of tea and then leave it overnight to cool. It's so inconvenient compared to Japan.
Image result for cold tea aisle japan

Japan's love affair with tea doesn't stop there though. They have tea flavoured puddings, tea flavoured breads, cakes, and icecreams! I even see tea flavoured chocolates, and biscuits!

These things have become a big part of my life since being in Japan, and I'm going to miss them and lots more! Although I AM starting to miss Aussie foods now...


Monday, September 3, 2018

Summertime in Japan

Whenever the seasons change, I feel that we, as humans, begin to forget the way the opposite season felt. In the cold of Winter, we tend to forget what the heat of Summer really felt like. We start to romanticize it. "How nice it would be to be warm!" We forget the burning seatbelts, the inability to wear jeans, and the urge to lay naked on your couch at all times. 

But I will never forget my first Japanese Summer. 

Never. 

Japanese Summer comes in stages. 

Summer starts in June, but at this point, it's still pleasantly cool on a lot of days.

By the end of June, we entered THE WET SEASON. At first, it was pleasant. It became so warm that the rainy days became steamy and fragrant. You could literally feel the rain turning to steam as it fell on the pavement. The rice had started growing, and everything smelt perpetually like hot wet grass. It was beautiful. It kept raining. And...  raining. It was common for it to be raining all day. It got so bad, that at one point, the rain didn't stop for days. Schools closed, people were evacuated, as rivers flooded, dams burst, and mountains slid across the wet terrain. West Japan was declared in a state of emergency, as the rain poured on, uncaring.  Over 200 people died that week and 5 million people were evacuated. 
West Japan rains to be designated ‘extremely severe disaster’ to increase state aid subsidies

The temperature continued to rise, and it went from warm to disgusting very quickly. By July, the temperature and humidity were close to unbearable. The weather forecasts often include the phrase "33 degrees but feels like 40 degrees". And this was so true. The Australian temperatures are technically hotter than Japan. But with the temperature combined with the crazy  humidity, never have I suffered from the heat as much as I have in Japan. 

As soon as you leave the house, even at 5am, your body becomes fairly instantly covered in sweat. We have aircon in 2 rooms in our house. We have to leave the aircon in the room that connects to our bedroom on all night, with the door linking the two rooms open so we can benefit from it. But this means that in the morning, when we open the bedroom door to go into the kitchen, we are smacked in the face with a thick wall of steaming hot air. The air is so hot you can feel its weight. 

At this point, we started developing daily headaches, despite trying our best to keep hydrating in the constant sweat-producing heat. We soon found out that this is common, and the reason was that even if you drink 4 litres of water a day, you won't stop your body from feeling dehydrated in this heat unless you eat/drink extra salt and/or ions. Because you were losing so much of them from sweat every hour. Luckily, all shops had displays of the necessary salted and ionised sachets that you need to add to water to avoid this.  

To make matters worse, both the school and the office don't turn the aircon on until a certain time, despite the fact that it's hot enough to warrant it at 5am in the morning. Getting changed was a tricky matter, with clothes sticking to your body. Working out was an even more disastrous affair, with rivers of sweat running down our limbs and pooling on the gym floor from even easy workouts. 

After the rainy season stopped, we then entered typhoon season, which is currently still going.  During this time, the weather became thankfully less humid, although the dry stretches are interspersed with days of heavy rain and crazy winds. At the moment we have typhoon 21 hitting tomorrow, and all train systems will likely be suspended. Which is greeeeat because I'll be working in Kobe, so I can only hope they'll be running again by the time I need to go home. I usually enjoy looking at the seasonal products in the shops, but the current seasonal display is canned food that people can stock in their cellars and cupboards with in case of emergency. That's the fun seasonal display... Yay, emergency rations!

I'll never complain about winter again after this Summer. I swear.