Itadakimasu!

When I was staying on the farm in Fukushima, the kids would lead us in a little pre-eating chant that I hesitate to call grace, but anyway, a pre-meal chant.

o te te o pon!

oishii gohan

itadakimasu!

Which roughly means, "Hands together! Yummy rice, itadakimasu!"

Adults mostly just say the itadakimasu part. I'm not sure what the literal translation would be, but it's what you say before you eat and both has the connotations of bon appetit as well as thanking your host for the meal. You bring your hands together and bow slightly as you say it all together in unison. Then you can start!

When you're done eating, you do the same thing but instead you say gochisousamadeshita, thank you for the delicious food, more or less. Again there's both a sense of thanking the host or chef, and saying that the food was delicious, and maybe even thanking the food for being delicious. At a restaurant you say it to the staff as you're leaving.

Gochisousamadeshita, Japan!

Edited to fix the spelling mistake I persistently made. Thanks to Raph for pointing it out. He also points out that itadakimasu is usually translated as "I humbly receive".

Washoku & Yoshoku

The prefix wa- just means Japanese. So, wagyu = Japanese beef; washi = Japanese paper; washoku is Japanese cuisine. The food that I ate on the farm in Fukushima was a lot of traditional, homestyle cooking: bowls of rice and miso soup, pickles, boiled slices of vegetables, fresh and pickled salads. At the other ends of the spectrum are the highly refined, painstakingly sourced and beautifully presented dishes of kaiseki and other professional cuisine. Both rustic and cultivated traditions are highly dependent on the seasons and the particular foods available and traditional for each time of the year.

But yoshoku is also Japanese food, though the word means "Western cuisine". Western foods have been being assimilated into Japan for centuries and naturally in the process they are transformed. So while the origins are clear, the dishes become something other, unique, and just as Japanese if with less of a history here.

Bread was brought to Japan in the 1600s by the Portuguese, hence the word for it: pan. Because the earliest and most sustained Western influence in Japan was here in Kyuushu (Christianity was introduced into Japan here by St. Francis Xavier, and when most of Japan was closed to the rest of the world, the port of Nagasaki was open to Dutch trading ships), there are a particular set of specialties of the area. Nagasaki is famous for castella, a delicious light spongy cake that comes in various flavours including green tea. I assume soft ice cream is also a yoshoku borrowing but flavours like matcha, sweet potato, and even shiso could only come from Japan!

Yoshoku also got support from the American Occupation of Japan after WWII, which was naturally used as an excuse to create a market for US wheat and other goods. When staying in Kagoshima, I ate "shi-chikkin" or canned tuna (from "chicken of the sea")! Clearly it was regarded as a different animal from the native maguro and bonito. The extensive use of mayonnaise might date from this time, though again it's changed in the translation. Recently I shared a mall food court with approximately all of the young teenagers from Kagoshima, many of them, like me, eating omu-raisu or omelette rice, one of my favourite yoshoku dishes. Fried rice is wrapped with a thin layer of omelette, which is then topped with a sauce. This can just be ketchup, or Japanese curry or demi-glace, but I had the typical okonomiyaki topping of brown sauce, mayonnaise, bonito flakes and pickled ginger.

Fast food chains abound in Japan, serving a much wider range of foods than do North American chains. There are rice bowl chains, udon chains, and Mos Burger, which serves its burgers on a bun made of molded rice rather than bread! Pasta restaurants are very popular and serve many options from creamy ham or mushroom dishes a Westerner would find familiar, to spaghetti with cod roe, green onions and poached egg.

And the recent influence hasn't only been American. French-style bakeries are everywhere, but again the food is transformed. All the breads are much softer, and while there are croissants and baguettes, there are also anpan (small buns stuffed with red bean paste), karepan (buns stuffed with curry and coated in panko or fried breadcrumbs), breads with little hot dogs baked into them, and seasonal treats like the breads studded with sesame and sweet potato or pumpkin that I've been enjoying.

All this to say that far from Japan being a culturally isolated place, various influences have been added over the centuries, gradually being made anew. Itadakimasu!

Something Problematic About Japan

is that everywhere I go, I realise I will need to go back again later because it is so awesome.

Also, it is very difficult to pay your own way, as people are always snatching the bill away and not letting you have it. It's surprisingly hard to do anything about this when you can't talk to the staff and they can. And then even when you do succeed, it's a Pyrrhic victory because your host will probably add on something else more expensive that you didn't know about and sneakily pay for it when you are not looking.

These are the kinds of problems that I am having currently.

In other words, I am having an amazing time.

(though I am thinking of implementing a policy, once I'm back in Canada, of randoming paying for things for Japanese tourists I've never met before just to even the scales a bit!)

Ine, Kome, Gohan

Rice, of course, is the staple food of Japan and as such has great cultural importance. So much so, that there are different words for it in its various stages. I went north to Fukushima prefecture to stay on an organic rice farm and among many amazing experiences, learned a few new words.

Ine is the rice plant. I arrived in the last days of the rice harvest on the farm, so I was able to work with bundles of ine that had already been cut. The host farmer built a frame of wood and bamboo and then we twisted the rice stalks and hung them over it to cure for a few weeks before they can be threshed. I went crazy taking photos of the gorgeous green and gold bundles! The wild pigs who come out at night also go crazy for the ine, so one of my tasks was to help raise the electrified fence to preserve the carefully placed rice stalks.

Kome is the uncooked rice grain. While it was too early to sample this year's crop, there were huge bags of the farm's rice still remaining from last year. The small farm, which is totally organic and largely tended by one person, with sporadic volunteer labour coming and going (much of it, like me, totally unskilled), produces about 1200kg of rice per year. Most of the farmers in the area have their own threshing machines, but they tend to store the grains whole (as brown rice). Vending machines are of course practically a symbol of Japan in their omnipresence, but rice-producing areas have their own particular kind. There are apparently small machines dotted over the country roads that, for a 100 yen coin, will polish a bag of rice from brown to white! Sadly I didn't actually get to do this myself as I really loved the idea of it.

Gohan is the word for the cooked rice, as well as basically meaning meal or food, as it does in many Asian languages. And we ate gohan every day, sometimes three times a day.

Coming as I do from Canada, I've never before been able to eat rice where it was grown. Here, I could look out the kitchen windows and see the fields that it came from. I can't possibly express what it was like to eat this rice. I could have happily eaten it on its own with no seasoning at all, and needed no more to my meal. It was so full of flavour, so bright and shiny, each grain soft and sticky yet retaining a subtle chewiness, a feeling of being alive. We ate it polished white, we ate it brown, we ate it cooked with a few grains of black rice, so that there was a scattered purplish colouring through it. We ate it in the mornings with miso soup, and at lunch patted into little onigiri and flavoured with tsukemono (pickled vegetables).

Rice.

Street Proportions/Ebbing and Flowing.

The stereotypical image of a Tokyo street is something from Shinjuku or Shibuya, lined with tall buildings flashing with neon lights, and mobbed with people filling the intersections at each walk light (but not jaywalking - that's not really done here).

And that definitely exists. But what makes Tokyo so much more interesting to me is the huge contrasts available in the city, and not necessarily ranging over a large area. In fact one of the things I found amazing on my first visit here was that you can take a turn off one of the huge high-tech boulevards of Shinjuku and turn into a little narrow street filled with old-fashioned wooden buildings, traditional lanterns hanging to advertise the kind of food served inside. Or turn between two skyscrapers into a small Shinto shrine sandwiched at ground level and looking quite ageless.

While the main thoroughfares have raised sidewalks, the smaller streets can get quite narrow, and are paved all flat, sometimes with a line painted to divide a small side lane, though I think that's supposed to be for bikes. They're not closed to cars or motorbikes, but pedestrians are free to roam widely, and cars will yield to them, usually quite patiently. It makes the city feel like it belongs much more to pedestrians and cyclists...

While most of the buildings are new thanks to the various disasters of the 20th century (earthquake, fire, bombing), the streets have retained their old-city feel in their variable width. Maybe for a wide-streets North American it's especially impressive, but I always love little tiny alleys that give the feeling they've been occupied for centuries...here they range from the smaller streets still wide enough for a car to the narrower ones barely wide enough for a motorbike (not that that deters anyone) to the little tiny ones not wide enough for two people to pass side by side.

And everyone seems to cultivate a little garden along the outside of their house (so that the tiny streets appear to be long lines of spiky and exuberant green with narrow bands of sunlight separating them) Another example of Tokyoites' trust in their neighbours' good behaviour. Sometimes flowers or ornamental plants, often little pots of edamame or eggplant, even huge fruit trees, growing in pots right on the street. So far I've seen mikan (Japanese mandarins), several different oranges, and persimmons. Everything is so beautifully tended. Yesterday, stepping off Omotesando, one of the fancy Champs-Elysees-esque shopping boulevards, I found this adorable cafe called Motoya Espresso Express, which was indeed an espresso bar operated out of a little VW van, parked in a little parking lot of the type that has a car stacking-elevator to fit more in. It was quite cosy - chairs, ash trays, art books and newspapers to look at, and all presumably tidied up every night when the owner had to park the van! Despite this, the owner had carefully placed tiny plants in a neat row all along the front and side of the van. Of course I had to have a latte - it was delicious.

The ebbing and flowing thing is a more general observation from travelling in places like Venice or Prague, which seem to be mobbed with tourists all the time. My experience there has been that stepping one or two blocks away will take you to places that are completely deserted. We seem to flock together in huge congregations, or not at all.

And it's that way here. In a city of so many people you might think it would be crowded all the time, but actually I keep wandering through places that are almost empty and silent. It's not just that I have been getting up early - you can go from the hurly-burly of Ameyoko, former black market and good place for cheap shopping and meals (on which more later), on a Sunday afternoon to pleasantly quiet pretty backstreets where you could hear crickets chirping if it weren't for the fact that they don't chirp until evening.

Monday was a holiday, which affected my plans a little (I showed up at the fish market at 6:30 to find it was closed!) but ended up turning out well as I ended up wandering around the nearby neighbourhood (and island) Tsukishima and finding the most beautiful, peaceful shinto shrine I've yet seen, all green and stone in the morning light, and with incredible wooden carvings of waves tucked into the upper corners of the buildings. Hardly anyone was up early on a day off, so I seemed to have the city to myself for hours and hours. Eventually I was so hungry I headed for Shinjuku to have breakfast (the part of the city that never sleeps is a good bet even on a holiday!) and was almost disappointed that the famously busy station was almost sleepy at what should have been rush hour! A few hours later though, the holiday crowd made up for it.

Crowded or deserted, narrow or wide, this city is fascinating.

Wrapping your mind around Tokyo and Japan.

Well, it can't be done. Too immense! But just to give some kind of idea...

Imagine that every single Canadian moved to Toronto (or maybe Vancouver, it's coastal), and invited an extra two million people to join them. That's a city the size of greater Tokyo. (We'll imagine that the infrastructure suddenly and magically adjusts to cope).

Now imagine that millions of people ride bicycles. Since naturally 35 million people can't all drive cars, public transit is used a lot, but bikes are a great option for getting TO the subway station or just getting around for short distances. Subway stops, schools, etc, have huge lots to leave bikes in, and they are also everywhere just hanging out on sidewalks.

The thing is, PEOPLE DON'T LOCK THEIR BIKES. Sure, a few do, but nearly all the bikes I have seen are just peacefully resting on their kickstands, waiting for their owners to reclaim them a few minutes or many hours later.

That to me says so much about Tokyo the city, and Japanese culture as well. Imagine doing that in Montreal - your bike would be gone in about 5 minutes, in a city less than a tenth of the size. Amazing.

Familiarity.

A lot of posts today as the computer is unexpectedly free, and I don't expect to have much access, if at all, after this for another week or so...

Very little about Japan should feel familiar to me. One glance marks me as a permanent outsider, not to mention my highly imperfect grasp of the language, my lack of knowledge about the culture, etc, etc. But what's funny about travelling is that way that familiarity quickly becomes a very relative concept.

Arriving in Narita Airport after the long flight felt a lot more like coming home than it really should have, at the start of such a long trip and in a country that I know so little about. But it did - the way the arrivals area is laid out, which ATM I could take money out of, where the convenience store was on the way to the train station...I knew them all, and so felt comfortable and relaxed. Just having been through the airport before made such a difference even if it was already a year ago.

And it's been the same thing over the last few days. Seeing things that I have seen before, revisiting Senso-ji Temple in Asakusa or getting a pon de ringu at Mister Donut (ah, Mister Donut!) gave me these strong feelings of nostalgia, however little sense that makes.

Not that I'm complaining. While I've had my moments of feeling incredibly foreign and hopelessly unable to blend in or even function, I appreciate very much having at least some small sense of belonging to this wonderful city. Riding the Tokyo Metro, usually the only blonde(ish) head in the car, I realised how much I take for granted being able to move around this city already! It's a good feeling.

Child mind.

One thing I realised, sitting on the plane, is that I still actually have no idea what it means to be travelling for six months. I can't really wrap my mind around it at all. I can tell this in several ways - how giggly I feel when I think of how long I have, joyful yet incomprehending; also how I feel nearly panicked in my huge desire to rush around and experience EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW before it's too late. (Note to self: not really the best strategy when jet-lagged.) I try to tell myself, relax, you have a whole month in Japan, you don't need to eat everything all in one day. Although, given the variety of amazing things to eat, I still can't afford to slack off!

The thing about travelling, besides the exciting travel seeing-new-places part, is that it's a way of being so open to the world all the time. I really admire the way babies are so single-minded about everything they experience, but as an adult it's hard to sustain that kind of attention (and also, it's tiring). But travelling and seeing new things all the time, you are forced to pay attention. You need to learn new ways to behave, read new signals, hopefully speak new languages and meet new people. Everything new! All your senses are alive all the time. What an opportunity, to get to be like a baby for six months! The trick will be to balance all that newness with enough rest time to take it all in.

Another reason I'm happy to have all this time to reflect is the anniversary this trip coincides with. Ten years ago, almost to the day, I stopped dancing, something which made me feel like my life was over. Obviously it wasn't, but at the same time I never fully reconciled with myself over that decision. Remembering that, it seems all the more important to be conscious, careful about the implications of what we do. In a way, this trip for me is a very long meditation on that.

Plus all the tasty food.

Sunny with a chance of scattered thoughts.

I've been in Tokyo for about 24 hours now, but it feels like so much has happened since I left home that I can't quite believe it hasn't been longer...as I sit here trying to sum up the day, all these images keep flashing past my eyes. I've been having all these great ideas for posts all day, but jet-lag leaves me with only the ability to string together streams-of-consciousness for now.

Saying goodbye to the condo for good...riding the Skytrain to the airport with Maman...the moment when the plane started taxiing and the full joy of the trip hit me so that I was craning over to see the ground falling away from the window, grinning like an idiot...

...and more of that same grin as we crossed the international date line, hovered along the coast of Honshu, and finally landed at Narita...as I bit into my first onigiri of the trip...as the narrow backstreets of Tokyo started showing up from the trainline...

My enthusiasm was checked a little bit by lugging bags about and having to relearn how to use the ticket machines for the train and subway, but getting lost on the way to the hotel was par for the course (I'm planning on writing a whole post on Japanese addresses) - it gave me a chance to wander around the narrow residential streets with their container gardens (fruit trees! edamame!)

Today was a brilliant blue warm sunny cool-breezy autumn day, which I needed to spend on foot, starting from the hotel and just wandering around. Tomorrow I've decided instead to get a public transit pass and ride around covering as much of the city as I can...and then Tuesday will have to be a combination of them both. Wednesday I head north!

J'voudrais respirer l'air de Kyoto

J'aimerais bien savoir à quoi sers-je?
J'aimerais voir une forêt vierge
J’voudrais comprendre pourquoi Tout?
Et ne plus rien vouloir du tout

If there's anything more appropriate to kick off a transcontinental adventure than a Québec francophone klezmer song about the perils and joys of globalisation, I don't know what it is.

In any case, that's what I'm doing. In a few days I'm setting out for a six month tour of Japan and South-East Asia, and while I'm currently in that stage of preparation known as "denial" where everything feels quite unreal, it probably really is going to happen.

My plan is to blog about the trip here, and since my Brooklyn blog languished fairly quickly, I've decided to give myself a bit of a focus. Another thing I did to help prepare for my trip (=procrastinate) was to make a travel playlist - about five hours of music that in my mind at least was connected with travelling. I'm still hoping to find a way to put it all up here for you to listen to, but that may not happen.

So my focus is to use the songs to structure posts about travelling itself, as well as the details of the places I visit. This is a risky project that might degenerate rapidly into pretentious rambling, in which case I will cut it off.

Today's song, "Kyoto" by Polémil Bazar, is my response to everyone who asked me, "Why Asia?" or even better, "Why travel at all?" It's not so much that I have a good answer, more that I have a worse answer to the question "Why not?" So in this case I think I'll let the song answer for me.

The photos in this post are all from my trip to Kyoto in summer 2008. I hope to be posting new ones soon...

Oh and yes, the little wombat will be coming with me. She wants to see South-East Asia too!

The full lyrics to the song are here:
http://www.hugofleury.com/polo/texte_chants_mines.htm#KYOTO

J'aimerais voler, quitter ma tête
Aller semer partout la fête
Visiter Bagdad à vélo
J'voudrais respirer l'air de Kyoto

--Polémil Bazar