Tag Archives: culture

So Cute You Want to Slap It

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No one does cute as well as the Japanese.

This is mainly because no one else thinks the idea of “cuteness” is as important as the Japanese do. European clothing comes in two basic colors “dark” and “not as dark” as Europeans try to appear sophisticated and/or imagine they are invisible in dark alleys. In the USA we’re running through our collections of university sweatshirts and beer brand t-shirts because we got suckered into going to college for degrees in Antarctic Poetry and Elvis Studies. (Oh, like you didn’t consider those.)

In Japan, though, cuteness is a martial art. Only Japan could make a perfect family movie like Totoro, which has a cute monster and no villain and yet still manages to have tension. Even the dust balls are cute in Totoro.

Also, only someone from Japan would have this conversation:
A-san: I’m sick of all the doom and gloom in heavy metal.
B-san: Me too. It makes me so depressed I got another skull tattoo. But what should we do?
A-san: Let’s take a heavy metal band and front it with cute teenaged Gothic lolitas
B-san: What would they sing about?
A-san: Chocolate.

The result is the annoyingly cute Babymetal. (And they actually do have a song about chocolate.)

What strikes me about Babymetal is that it’s a concept that couldn’t work if the girls were from the West. We would be more prone to turn them into Cherie Currie or dress them in European black to show how they are serious musicians. They’d only dress like Gothic lolitas to be ironic.

Even when the Japanese try to dress gothic and dark, they’re still pretty cute:

She will eat heart, adorably.

She will eat your heart, adorably. Then she’ll go to math class.

This propensity for cuteness for cuteness’ sake effects even the all-boys school where I work. Last year one of my biggest troublemakers went for the shirt untucked, loose tie, loose trousers look. He even attempted a greaser pompadour. The effect, though, was ruined (from a Western perspective) by the chain full of cute stuffed animals he carried around with him.

I’ve seen another boy with a similar look but with Dragon Ball hair. He had a Hello Kitty doll hanging off his belt.

 

 

 

Oddly Strangely Fun and Symbolic

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One of the things I like about Japan is it’s collection of odd museums and odd traditional ceremonies.

My favorite museum is the Tobacco and Salt Museum (currently closed pending a move). It’s owned by Japan Tobacco, which controls 66% of Japan’s tobacco market and is, by law, at least 33% owned by the Japanese government. It is a testament to, well, two things usually considered bad for you in excess, although at least one is essential to survival (hint: not tobacco). It has displays of how Japan produced salt and a few floors of occasionally interesting displays on tobacco and tobacco culture in Japan. It also used to have one of the best cheap coffee shops in Tokyo. I hope the move hasn’t ruined it.

To satisfy two other cravings, I recommend what I call the Eat Beef and Shout Competition, which involves consuming delicious dead animal flesh and then going behind a bush and shouting anything you want as loudly as you can. Participants have been known to express their love for someone else or their contempt for their boss. Prizes are given to the loudest shouts.

Niigata, where I used to live has everything for the newlywed couple. Every March Tochio hosts the Hodare Matsuri (link may not be safe for work) in which women can ride, well, some wood carried aloft by some men. Hodare means, more or less, “male naughty bit” and newlywed brides are encouraged to, well, ride the wood, so to speak. Traditionally, the most dangerous moments in the festival occur when an attractive foreign woman, um, rides the tremendous woody, and all the photographers nearby trample each other to get the best pics for next year’s brochure.

Whereas newlywed brides in Niigata get to enjoy a tremendous woody, newlywed grooms in Niigata are thrown off cliffs. Every January 15th in Matsunoyama Hot Spring, newlywed grooms are marched to the top of a snowy cliff, given some booze, tossed up and down and then hurled off a cliff as part of the Muko Nage. The festival ends with a pile of rice straw being burned and everyone rubbing ash all over everyone else’s faces.

The symbolism is obvious: You are now at the peak of life, but soon marriage will cause you to start drinking. You will now fall from the peak of life to the bottom of life where your wife waits for you. Soon you will watch your dreams go up in smoke and have it rubbed in your face. Good luck! Happy marriage! (Something like that.)

 

 

When and If You Go There the Price Is the Same

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I spent part of today wondering how I was going to spend the rest of the day and how much it was going to cost me.

My first plan was to go see Guardians of the Galaxy but then two things happened. Mother of She Who Must Be Obeyed announced she’d be coming home on the 19th of this month which means She Who Must Be Obeyed will go down to help out over the weekend which also means I can’t go but it’s not convenient to take the train which means we had to go buy a car navigation system for our car (there’s a long story about why SWMBO doesn’t have a smart phone, but I’m not in a bad enough mood yet to tell it)

The other thing that happened was our land line phone died in a very interesting way that stopped it from working when the power cord was plugged in but let it work, without any tones, when the power cord was unplugged.

This meant we had to go to an electronics shop. However, this led to some miscommunication. I said I’d take a pass on the movie because the only times I could see it were 11:50-2:05 and 9:30-11:45. The latter was way past my bed/blog writing time and the first had me getting home around three and then us going shopping at an annoying time. I worked on something else and waited for the word to get ready and go. Then all of a sudden, our youngest was studying and practicing piano and then it was lunch time and we hadn’t left yet. We ended up leaving well after three, which had me in a bad mood which is a bad thing to be in when going to a Japanese electronics shop.

Japanese electronics shops are very odd beasts. They are typically huge; very bright and shiny; and full of lots of cool looking stuff. Unfortunately, even though there are several major chains, they all have the same prices. Now, in bookstores, the pricing is set by law. Basically, a book in one shop costs the same as a book in another shop. This is supposed to prevent the consumer from developing any “confusion” or worry that the product might be cheaper somewhere else. (Keep in mind, the Japanese government hasn’t heard of the internet or smartphones yet.) In the electronics shops, the pricing seems to be a gentleman’s agreement. This means shopping around is useless.

This leads to the next problem, which is the staff are not always knowledgeable about the products they are selling or the store they are working in. I’ve been in one major chain where the workers couldn’t tell me what floor I was supposed to go to. In another chain, I was on the correct floor, but no one could tell me anything about the products except where they were.

Luckily, the electronics shop experience went better than expected. The first staff member we spoke to found the correct staff member to help with the car navigation system. Even better, he was actually helpful–although he did tend to favor the more expensive items. Then, when we went to the wrong floor for a new telephone, the staff member we spoke to quickly sent us back upstairs where we ended up in the hands of the same guy, who directed us to a better cheaper phone.

We now have a new phone, with a working cordless phone–the cordless phone on our old system died very early on, but it was used so we couldn’t invoke a warranty–and I get to spend tomorrow afternoon after work installing a navigation system. That should be a simple process, but, well, we’ll see.

 

 

Early Finish Often Means Well Done

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One of the things I like about Japanese TV is very similar to what I like about British TV: The seasons are short, only really popular shows come back and the come back seasons are short.

A Japanese drama typically runs for 12 episodes shown in 12 straight weeks (which is much better than US broadcast television’s two episodes now and three months later we’ll give you three new episodes in a row before a one month hiatus).

Also, because each series is short it doesn’t run the risk of getting stale and being forced to have every living human on the show and one or two robots have relationships with every other living human on the show and one or two robots. The truth is that, even in “gun free” Chicago, someone at County General would have gone into jealous rage and killed at least three people in the e.r. whilst trying to remember who they were in a relationship with.

I find the notion that any woman on E.R. actually spoke to any other woman on E.R. to be absurd. (Even I can’t suspend disbelief about that and I’m looking forward to the chance to see a movie with a talking tree and a talking raccoon when it arrives in Japan in a couple days.)

The other good thing about a Japanese drama is even if it’s not popular you always get a resolution to the story.

The most popular shows, however, will eventually be brought back. Since I’ve been here that’s happened to only a handful of shows. Shomuni, about a group of, well, super office ladies came back for two more series and a couple movies. The most popular, though, was Hero, starring the ubiquitous Takuya Kimura of the (still) ubiquitous SMAP. The show was a huge hit in 2001–and people still quote the bartender’s one line–but the full sequel didn’t get released until this year. Instead there was a special in 2006 and a movie in 2007.

The result is that good shows never get a chance to go stale and actors get a chance to play different types of roles. Takuya Kimura has played a quirky crime solving scientist in Mr. Brain and a kind of terminator in the surprisingly clever sci fi drama (with the terrible title) Ando Lloyd – A.I. Knows Love?   You don’t have to worry about Kate getting shot or Ziva leaving or the Doctor regenerating into a right wanker.  You also don’t have to worry about the writers making up crap as they go along and then stumbling into absurd/bullshit endings. (Lost, Battlestar Galactica, etc.)

Mind you, there aren’t that many good shows and there are far too many RomComs. Also, there are exceptions to the 12 episode rule, but those are for another post.

Questioning the Nature of Personal Questions

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Since yesterday I mentioned how the Japanese have no problem announcing the personal to the public, today I thought I’d talk about the personal nature of the questions people are often asked prior to the personal being made public.

The first question I always get is “How tall are you?” My first reaction is “Why the hell do you need to know that?” but then I realize such questions are possible back home and in Japan I used to be freakishly tall compared to most Japanese–that’s slowly changing–and I decide to answer. But that leaves me with a problem: Do I tell them I’m 6’2″ and shrinking knowing it will be lost on them or do I spend a minute doing metric conversions and tell them I’m 188 centimeters tall?

The second question is “What is your shoe size?” Again, I have a problem. It’s not that one foot is a 12 and the other foot is a 12.5, it’s that I don’t actually know my shoe size in Japan as the stores rarely have shoes that fit and I’m forced to import. I think I’m a 31 but I can also wear a 29 in some brands. This question is so popular I’ve had naked guys in saunas stick their feet next to mine in order to compare foot size. This usually triggers a response along the lines of “What the hell are you doing? Do you know how gay that is?” (Because, going to a bathhouse and getting naked with your male friends once a week is totally not gay, right?)

The third question is the Japanese equivalent of “What is your sign?” The problem here is they don’t understand “Scorpio” they want to know if I’m a tiger, snake, dragon, rat or any of the other eight signs in the Chinese zodiac. The answer is “I’m a horse.” (And by the way, 2014 is the Year of the Horse so #$%^ you, rats, sheep, roosters and pigs.)

The fourth, and most important question, though is “What is your blood type?” Here, positive and negative variations are unimportant, all that matters is A, B, O or AB. In my case I tell them “I’m A.” As soon as I do this people typically go “oooh” and their smiles become more forced and they look around to make sure they know where their children are (even if they don’t have kids).  A’s are considered calm, patient, sensitive, responsible, overcautious, stubborn, and unable to relax. (Pay no attention to those contradictions behind the curtain…) It’s also interesting to note that famous A’s include Adolph Hitler, Ringo Starr and Britney Spears. (I think it’s that last one that worries them the most.)

There are other random questions about income and weight but they aren’t that important.  The best question is reserved for women: “What is your BWH?” (Meaning Bust, Waist, Hips.) It’s a terrible thing for someone to ask, but it is fun to watch a Western woman get asked it.

 

Help Without Awareness is Not Helpful

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I’ve mentioned before about how complicated the Japanese train ticket system can be. However, I did once learn that the train staff being too subtle can also be some danger. Well, especially if you’re dealing with people who believe that you didn’t believe everything you said and acted accordingly but didn’t bother telling you and thus left you believing that they believed you.

Confused? Well, let me try to explain. At the end of our first year in Japan, the group in my area decided to head down to Kobe for the annual Renewers’ Conference. This is a time of great seriousness where those who’ve decided to commit to another year in the J.E.T. Programme gather to enjoy a series of lectures and presentations by those who’ve been there and done that and then enjoy a pleasant time in the evenings with new and interesting people. (Translation: it’s one giant festival of bacchanalia interrupted by boring lectures and one of the world’s most boring dinner parties.)

Because the party, er, conference starts on a Thursday, it is a renewers’ tradition that people heading to the conference take Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off and do some traveling on the five day weekend. In our case, we decided to pass Kobe and go to Hiroshima and then work our way back toward Kobe. Because we had a lot of time and masochistic streaks the size of, um, well, a bullwhip, we decided to take an express train to Kyoto and then save money by taking slower local trains from Kyoto to Hiroshima. I bought my tickets in Nou-machi, some bought their tickets in Itoigawa whilst at least one person bought his tickets in Toyama.

When we were in Kyoto trying to figure out which platform our train departed from, I showed my ticket to one of the JR employees. He said something in lightning fast Japanese and pointed toward the bullet train platforms. I decided I’d misunderstood and we boarded our local train and took our slow ride to Hiroshima.

Towards the end of the long ride I, bothered by the JR employee’s reaction, took a good look at my tickets. I realized I did, in fact, have a bullet train ticket from Kyoto to Hiroshima. The others mocked my mistake for a minute before realizing they also had bullet train tickets. It turned out that there was a special package deal. If we took the express to Kyoto, there was a discount on the bullet train.

What surprised us was 1) that even though we’d purchased our tickets in different stations in different cities and had all carefully asked for local trains, we’d all received the package deal and 2) that no one had bothered to tell us that we didn’t have the tickets we thought we had.

We then spent the rest of the ride and 25 minutes in Hiroshima trying to get a refund for the difference between what we’d bought and what we thought we’d bought.

In the end, the difference was only about $18 each, making us wish we’d actually taken the bullet train and/or had bothered to look at our tickets.

 

 

Losing the Train in Translation

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Soon after I got to Japan I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea for learning Japanese. Because was in Niigata, and Niigata was nicknamed “Snow Country” (Yukiguni) I would study Japanese by studying Yasunari Kawabata’s novel Yukiguni (雪国) in both English and Japanese. (I remember a guy doing this with a novel when I was in Albania and it seemed to work for him.)

This idea crashed and burned fairly quickly and all because of a train. Snow Country is famous for its simple opening line: “The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” In Japanese it looks like this: 国境の長いトンネルを抜けると、雪国であった.

I broke out a dictionary (more on that later) and started translating:

国境の–border
長い–long
トンネル–tunnel
を抜けると–exited
雪国–snow country
であった–was

Somehow, someway, I’d missed the train. I went through each word several times trying to find the train. I copied the words onto paper and double checked to see if I’d missed a word. I even got a different copy of the book in case there was a mistake in the version I had. Eventually I gave up and asked Ms. Ogura, my Japanese colleague for help,

Me–Umm, excuse me, Ms. O. Where’s the train?”
Ms. O–It’s implied.
Me–It can’t be implied. It’s the opening line of the novel. It’s like walking up to a stranger and saying “guess my name” and never telling them your name.
Ms. O–Because it’s トンネル (tonneru) in katakana, we know it’s a train tunnel.
Me–That doesn’t mean he’s on a train. He could be walking out of the tunnel.
Ms. O–Why would he be walking in a train tunnel?
Me–How do you know it’s “he”? (Remind me again: why don’t I get invited to parties?)

Something like that. Either way I threw that idea aside, along with the Japanese version of the book, which actually turned out to be a good idea. Sort of.

Back at university when I attempted Spanish (and for one semester, Latin) my bad habit was relying on the dictionary too much rather than the context of the sentence. This meant I’d look up every other word and feel as if I wasn’t making any progress through the assignment. When I went to speak, the introvert would take over and all the grammar rules would lock up in my head (If I were to use the subjunctive at this point in the conversation I would look impressive. If I were capable of understanding the subjunctive I would remember how to use it.) The result was me blabbering on about nothing, usually with a bad accent.

In Japan, I eventually learned to just try to speak more, but the perfectionist would eventaully take over as the other person got faster and faster and the panic and the brain lock would ensue. I was also torn between reading Japanese and spent a lot of time studying the four Japanese alphabets and getting nowhere.

My solution was to pretty much punt and marry a woman whose English was better than my English. I know it’s lazy, but it works when your goal is never studying.

Getting Back in the Future

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When it comes to technology, Japan typically has the reputation of being several minutes into the future compared to the rest of the world. Tokyo has a modern, almost space age look. Everything is bright and polished. The trains run on time–much to the shock of people from England and anyone who’s ever suffered a ride on Amtrack–and the bullet trains look really cool. Everyone has a cellphone and is too cool to actually use it for making calls. Japan has the second (or third depending on the survey) fastest internet in the world.

For while, the several minutes into the future reputation may have been true, more or less, in a way, if you only stayed in Tokyo.

I arrived in Japan with that expectation but when I got to my first school, I immediately noticed the lack of computers. Hell, even in tiny Hayden, Colorado we’d been using computers at school in the early 80s and I’d written programs on my high school’s computers in Kansas. In Japan, though, only one teacher had a laptop computer–his personal one–and everyone else was using large word processors that looked like computers but were basically large typewriters with monitors and floppy drives. There was a room full of computers upstairs, but to my knowledge no one ever used them.

Eventually I got a computer and an ISP and started surfing the growing web. The problem was, Japan was my first encounter with paying for local calls. At the time a call across town in the daytime cost 10 yen (about a dime) a minute. That made using a dial up connection for an hour cost six dollars. It was a little cheaper at night, but not much. Also, at the time, to get a land line installed from Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) cost around a $1,000 per line. (If you were a business and needed five lines, you had to pay $5,000 dollars for them.) Then there was the wait as it is a universal rule that all servicemen can only arrive on Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. which actually means sometime on Friday.

As a result, the Japanese gravitated toward cellphones because you could get one for only a penny and it was working within an hour. When writers came to Japan, they saw high school girls with cellphones and were convinced the future had arrived in Japan.

One consequence of the spread of cellphones was that when the Japanese government began pushing for faster and faster broadband, including installing fiber-optic connections, not many Japanese were impressed. They didn’t need computers as they already had internet on their phones. They could even watch television on them. Protected industries such as banking and insurance were also slow to adopt computers–She Who Must Be Obeyed worked for one of the largest insurance companies in Japan and did most of her data entry and paperwork by hand. Teachers were too busy teaching other mandates to be interested in having a “teach this computer stuff” mandate added on.

The second consequence of Japan’s early cellphone adoption was an initial lack of interest in smart phones. The iPhone arrived in late 2008 but didn’t really catch on until 2010. After that, you slowly began to see more and more smartphones.

The final consequence has been a complete lack of interest in wifi leaving Japan with some of the worst wifi coverage in the developed world. More than one intrepid traveler has arrived in Japan and discovered they could only use their computers’ wifi in the hotel lobby, Starbucks or the parking lot of 7-11. If they had smartphones, they discovered the joys and expenses of global roaming.

Recently, though, Japan has begun to arrive back in the future as more and more stores and restaurants have begun to add free wifi as they discovered they can use it to pump advertising. Some of the cellphone companies have subscription wifi services that can be used all over the country. Also, the price of fiber optic broadband has fallen and is now competitive with ordinary ADSL. (This may mean an upgrade is in my future.)

Party On The Clock, Dude

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In yesterday’s post I mentioned that Japanese parties, or enkai, can be rather formal (translation: boring) and that they are pretty much the same no matter who throws them (translation: always boring). Today I thought I’d explain that in more detail.

The Japanese like to drink and they are capable of throwing interesting parties, before that happens, though, there is an enkai which is pretty much the bastard offspring of a long business meeting and cocktail hour. Enkais are typically two hours long and happen strictly on schedule. There’s no such thing as being fashionably late. If the enkai is scheduled to start at 7:00 p.m. and you show up at 7:10 p.m. you will have missed the opening speech and the opening toast. There will be an empty space on the floor where you are supposed to be and you will be at least two glasses of beer and an appetizer behind your neighbors.

At this point a Westerner begins to encounter a level of culture shock. No only are you hunched up on straw mats behind a little floor table but you don’t actually own your own beer. Instead, in the spirit of collegiality, everyone pours beer for everyone else. To pour your own beer is considered greedy and impatient. In fact, you may not even have a bottle nearby (especially if you were 10 minutes late). Getting beer involves getting someone to notice that your little glass is empty and hoping they will crawl across the mat to you and pour you a glass.

There is also a tradition of waiting until you’ve taken a bite of the most delicious food on your plates (Japanese serve each dish on a separate plate) and then ambushing you with a bottle of beer. You are then expected to down your current beer, ruining the taste of the food, and then present your glass for more beer.

At a certain point in the enkai, about 75 minutes in, people start crawling around with bottles as an excuse to chat with the people they’re not sitting near. With five minutes left, everyone returns to their tables and the closing speech is given. At the two hour mark, the enkai and what is typically unmerciful boredom is over. (Note: New Year’s Parties are longer and usually more fun but that is another post.)

It’s at this point that the fun actually begins. You can either extricate yourself from the proceedings and go home or follow the proceedings to the first of the many after parties. Granted, at this point karaoke is usually involved–and in Japan karaoke is actually a martial art–but whiskey is also involved.

However, be warned, in Japan “drinking whiskey” is actually a form of rehydration. They give you a highball glass full of ice, put about a cap’s worth of whiskey in it and then top it off with water. I remember being horrified the first time this happened and I requested a glass of straight whiskey to accompany the watery ruin. I then had the odd experience of chasing straight whiskey with whiskey and water.

For the Japanese, though, this watery drink has a kind of placebo effect and they start singing, usually pretty well. And then they look at me and I’m like, um, no, not enough whiskey yet because there’s not enough whiskey in this town to make me go up there and sing. Now, at this point, some people go “Oh, DL lighten up. Live a little. Everyone’s having fun. Sing. Sing a song. Sing out loud. Sing out strong.” To which I usually respond “Go fuck yourself.” (Remind me again: Why don’t I get invited to parties?)

Granted, there was that time I sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” with my then boss and there was that other time I sang “California Dreamin'” but the first involved the New Year and the second involved She Who Must Be Obeyed and, oddly, England. (But those are future posts.)

After the Karaoke, the hardcore partiers either go to another karaoke bar or to a “snack” which has little to do with food and a lot to do with well-dressed women pushing expensive drinks at you. Or, those of us who’ve been there and done that and got a concussion because of it, go for a bowl of ramen soup and then go home.

Peel it Blanch it Dice it Fry it Skin it Eat it

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Back when I lived in Niigata, before I’d met She Who Must Be Obeyed, I was invited to a parent teacher party with the Parent Teachers Association of Isobe Junior High School, which was my smallest school. I was sitting next to the school’s cute secretary, whose name I don’t remember and whose interest in me ranked somewhere between “I’d rather have a root canal on all my teeth without anesthetic” and “I’d rather be set on fire”. She was polite, though, as I struggled through what little Japanese I knew. It is difficult, even if a woman’s interested, to impress her when you’re basically babbling like a child. (This is something I really wished I’d learned in high school and definitely before I got to graduate school.)

Japanese parties, called enkai, are heavily formalized and pretty much all the same, but that’s another post. The food is also usually the same. In this case, we had a tasty deep-fried fish that had been cooked long enough you could eat the bones. I devoured everything and set the heads on the plate (yes, almost all fish in Japan is served with heads; some is even still moving). About halfway through the meal (which, by definition is the party’s one hour mark) the cute secretary whose name I don’t remember pointed to my plate and said “don’t you like to eat the fish heads?” to which I replied, more or less, “um, am I supposed to like them?” I then found a rare moment of situational awareness and realized that mine was the only plate with heads staring forlornly at me. Being a male attempting to impress a female, I quickly at the fish heads, eyes and all. It was actually pretty tasty but she was unimpressed.

All this is a long introduction to the some of the odd differences between the way Japanese eat things and the way I do. I’ve mentioned before how She Who Must Be Obeyed thinks it so strange that I like raw broccoli and raw cauliflower that she can’t actually bring herself to leave it raw. However, I also remember one time, after I’d met She Who Must Be Obeyed, when we were eating somewhere with my adult class and someone started handing out grapes. I immediately attacked the grapes and made short work of them. However, every single other person in the room was peeling their grapes before eating them and they thought it strange that I would eat the skins. I, of course, was worried that I’d somehow poisoned myself, but nothing bad happened.

I thought , at first, it was because they were large grapes, but every Japanese I know will also peel small grapes. Since I’m already finished by the time they finish their first grape, there’s not much else for me to do but watch. They also carefully peel baked potatoes and apples which I find an unnecessary step for eating either.

Interestingly, the one food the Japanese don’t peel is eggplant. This time every year, Mother and Father of She Who Must Be Obeyed send us lots of round eggplant. It quickly gets sliced up and pan fried and dipped in soy sauce and ginger. It gets stuffed with ground pork and deep fried. It gets served in soup. It gets served with meat sauce and pasta. It gets pickled. It never, however, gets peeled. (It also rarely gets salted and sweated.) This shocked me the first time because I still remember the care my friend Steve put into peeling an eggplant before making moussaka many hundreds of years ago.

Now I realize, he may have been wasting his time.