"With a Side of Kanji, Please"

I did something absolutely mortifying today.

I take private Japanese lessons every Thursday morning, and this morning was no different then usual. My typical Thursday schedule consists of me rising around 9, showering, downing a cup of coffee, reviewing a few last minute notes, and then shuffling off to a 20 minute subway ride in the hopes of showing up at the Higashi Betsuin Women's Center by 11. I am usual not fully aware at first, but having to think in another language wakes you up quicker than you can imagine. So I breezed in at 10:55 this morning, and finally feeling the effects of my caffeine intake, started to excitedly talk to my teacher about my plans tonight. But my verbal barrage took a turn towards the worse as my own stupidity quickly reared its head, and my teacher reacted to it.

The conversation alone can convey my faux pas. So, for the mixed reasons of a better explanation as well as for entertainment value, here is the conversation. Translated and transcribed, to the best my memory serves.

(Kate walks in to see Keiko sitting at a table.)

Keiko: Long time no see! How are you?

Kate: Great, thanks. How about you?

Ke: Great. So do you have to work today?

Ka: No, actually. Tonight my students and I are going out for dinner.

Ke: In Kanie?

Ka: No, Takaoka. I'm going to Kanayama first, then Takaoka for dinner at 7. (Kate pauses, an uncertain look on her face.) An end of the year party!

(Keiko does a slight double take, then gives her a confused glance.)

Ka: (repeats uncertainly) End of the year party...? (looks frantically through her dictionary)

Did I say it wrong?

Ke: No, no. Usually they're in December. Between Christmas and New Year's.

Ka: Oh its November. What's today then?

(Keiko keeps the confused look on her face.)

Ke: Today is a holiday.

Ka: (genuinely curious) Really? What?

(Keiko blanches slightly in surprise, as if it had been obvious)

Ke: Kate, today is Thanksgiving.

(Kate gives a long pause)

Ka: Oh.

END SCENE

Keiko then went on to laugh, saying that she had went to a Thanksgiving party the night before, while I was clearly looking forward to Japanese traditions. She went further to say that today, she was the American and I was Japanese.

I laughed too. I just find it sad that my Japanese teacher had to remind me that today was Thanksgiving.

Oops.

It's not like I didn't know of its approach either. All week, people asked me about the holiday, and if I was going to eat turkey on Thursday. ( And to which I replied, while I would love to, how in the world would I prepare it? This is my cooking area:

I can't bake cookies, let alone a whole turkey.)

So even thought I knew it was coming, talked of it all week, on the day of, for some inexplicable reason, it completely slipped my mind. I feel like a horrible American.

One would think the thought of the food alone would keep it foremost in my thoughts. How I salivate over the thought of the Thanksgiving treats today. And one look at my "oven" is proof enough how much I miss baked goods. And while I do miss the food from home, I am fine subsisting on what I do. In fact, it makes me appreciate it more. So if I find really great food like that from home, the scarcity makes the taste that much better.

For when I find a really great cheese in a country severely deprived of fermented milk-based food products, I gratefully shell out the high price and relish it that much more when I finally eat it. And when, on a whim, I decide to pay 500 yen for that tiny bunch of grapes, the wait alone makes the grapes that much better. And ethnic foods, like Mexican and Indian, the kinds I took for granted in their abundance, become special places to find and eat at. (One in particular, Mugal Palace, has become almost a weekly pilgrimage spot. Besides making me a bit of a connoisseur of Indian food for all the items I have tried, it is hands down the best Indian food I've ever had in my life.)

But in truth, and as expected, I now live on a highly Japanese diet. To what I'm sure would be

my mother's chagrin, I haven't had pasta or hard bread in months. I eat rice all the time, and various stir fry are the main dishes I consume.

I even eat salad with chopsticks.

In fact, I have even discovered some food items I will sorely miss when I leave Japan. The fried gyoza found in the food stores are out of this world. Asahi makes this yogurt granola bar that not only is amazingly delicious, but has become my weekly Wednesday afternoon snack. There is a spicy tofu and rice dish at my local convenience store that I cannot live without. And in a country of crab flavored potato chips, I have fallen in love with Azuki Pepsi. And it actually tastes like Azuki paste, or sweet bean paste, a staple of most Japanese desserts.

Which is another odd item I have grown to love.

But eating out is truly the height of my diet in Japan. The food is not necessarily expensive, or well seasoned, but its comforting and filling without being overwhelming. Scrumptious is really the only appropriate word. And izukaya food is designed to be communal, so the whole atmosphere is as social as the food is delicious. From the grilled meats and nabe pots to tabasaki to salads with unnecessary corn. I enjoy it all.

(And deciphering the menus at such establishments is always an added treat, because there are usually several characters none of us can read. Believe me, jokes like "the Kanji salad" or "I'll take the tomato, garlic, and Kanji" seriously never gets old.)

But all that aside, at my end of the year/secret Thanksgiving dinner tonight, though I was surrounded by the Japanese foods I have come to love, I was dreaming of pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce. Mulling over mashed potatoes. Fantasizing about stuffing. Pondering the delights of hot biscuits.

And desperately wishing I had an oven.

Of Hopefuls and Heroines

I've had quite a full week.

Over the course of this week, the final stages of the massive redecoration of my apartment went into full effect. But because of the long hours spent moving furniture and meticulously sewing tablecloths (and oh how I wish I was kidding), its left me time to watch lots of ridiculously trashy television. TV of the kind I have not watched since I was in college, and my roommate and I would sit on the couch on a Sunday afternoon and marathon America's Next Top Model while we pretended to do homework and recovered from the weekend.

While finding my mindless reality TV online was not difficult, watching it actually brought back to mind many things I had forgotten. Like the fact that the second season of Project Runway was surprisingly great, both with the drama and the clothes produced, so much so the current incarnation is a poor substitute. I remembered that Tyra taught me that there is a difference between smiling and smiling with my eyes, and the seriousness with which she imparted this lesson. And lastly, how ridiculously stupid some people on these shows can be.

Now most of my reality show viewing, limited as it was, was really reserved for Project Runway (high on drama queens, low on the stupid people), but Top Model was ripe with stupid comments. And I think the pinnacle was from the beginning of season 11 (I refuse to call them cycles), which I never saw the first time around.

In the audition process we meet Susan, a recent grad from Harvard University, lamenting how her ivy league education was detrimental to her being taken seriously as a model. Besides the fact that her comment was extremely condescending, I would have told her not to worry about her brains getting in the way of anything. Because after talking about her university, and the fact that she majored in English Lit, Tyra then innocuously asked her to name her favorite literary heroine in English literature.

The girl could not name a single one.

I mean, are you kidding me? Not only could it give Tyra, god bless her, a chance to act superior by talking about Jane Eyre and White Fang (umm...heroine?), but I actually find it extremely sad the girl could not name one! Leaving aside the fact it was her major for four years, and at the risk of sounding like a unrelenting feminist, you can't think of a single strong woman in literature since the invention of the English language?

Are you crazy?

Mind you, the males generally have it better in literature. For awhile in my teens I had a mixed literary crush/hero worship for Edmund Dantes because he was just that deliciously bad ass. But despite the role that most women were placed into in classic literature, I could still name an innumerable amount of awesome ladies that I admired almost as much as the Count.

The aforementioned Jane Eyre. Elizabeth Bennet had wit and sense in spades. I always felt Miranda from the Tempest had a certain strength. Hester Prynne, Lucy Honeychurch, Isabel Archer. Jo March was, personally, my ideal as a young girl. Still is, in fact.

So I find it extremely disheartening that this girl could not name a single literary lady. There are so many to choose from! Make a sister proud.

But speaking of awesome ladies, and literary heroines, I also reread Northanger Abbey this week. I am quite the self proclaimed Austenite, but Northanger Abbey has always been low on my favorites list. But reading it with fresh eyes, I had a lot more patience for, and in fact finally found the charm, in Catherine, the heroine's, naiveté.

This truly surprised me.

I know it was written as a satire of the Gothic novels of the time period, but a few years ago I found her annoyingly gullible. But her artless observations and judgement of the world actually make her unknowingly witty, and I finally found the humor in it. And this realization gave me a new appreciation for the love interest of the novel, Henry Tilney. He was constant in affection, amazingly clever, and found delight and admiration for Catherine's good nature along with me. This, coupled with Jane Austen's proto-feminisist comments as an omniscient narrator have made me reassess its position on my favorite Austen list.

But its interesting that I get so mad about stupid girls on American TV, read Austen's criticisms of patriarchy and delight, and yet can exist happily in Japan. I think its part of being a foreigner, clearly labeled as such, and the exclusion from society as a whole also affords me a sort of freedom from the restrictions of said society.

I do not exaggerate when I say that, in terms of women's rights, its 1964 here. I could write a dissertation on the parallels, but suffice it to say that this is a country where women have a taste of education and are in the workforce, but men still hold all the power. For most of them, their only drive in their early 20s (and truly, what many see as their only option) is to get married and have children. A valid choice if it is just that, but here females are pressured to the extent that women over 25 are referred to disdainfully as "Christmas Cake," or past their prime and unmarriagable.

I wish I was making this up.

There is a younger generation, women in university or just out, yearning for something more than what they see set out before them. And as a Western woman, they confide in me, sharing with me the desire to keep working when they marry. To do more with their life then just find a man to support them.

If ever there was a country in serious need of some bra burning, Japan is it.

So what can I do? Bite back the bile I feel at the inequality and continue to encourage those who do want more to just take it. But Japan is still a country where, in 2009, there are certain jobs only men can apply for. Where there are true office ladies, low level paper-pushing positions with no chance of promotion, who are sometimes forcefully phased out of their jobs at the age of 27 to make room for a 21 year old girl. Where being a flight attendant is seen by most girls as a dream career, international and unattainable. A society where they are expected to giggle and wink and be just the right mix of cute and subservient, while never contradicting the men around them. A country where husbands are out drinking till late every night, but dinner is still expected to be ready and waiting on the table when they stumble home.

But I don't parcel the blame to the men, its the society as a whole. And there are some accomplished women, and many good men. But the system is flawed, and no where near what it's like back home. Its quite jarring at times, and turns me into the angry feminist I never set out to be. And suddenly silly posts about reality TV turn into something more.

So I leave someone more capable to conclude it then I. Miss Jane Austen said it best in Northanger Abbey, and though speaking of Regency England, I find it frighteningly applicable to Japan today. It is the facetious assessment of the qualities good in a women. So please enjoy the wit of Jane, the kind of which I could never supply.

She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance. A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.

Famous Words to Live By

Everyone makes mistakes ~ Big Bird

Words I have taken to heart and tried to live by since I was a little girl and watching Seasme Street like it was a religious experience. In fact, I still think fondly back to those days, and a certain nostalgia fills me every time I come across old Sesame Street videos on youtube.

Its a funny thing. Most people my age treat Sesame Street with an almost reverence. It was such a perfect and undeniable part of our childhood, that it can't help but put everyone in a good mood whenever it's brought up. And it's funny to go back now and look at some of the skits. There is a certain element to them that I think is sometimes actually better appreciated as adults.

But times change, and there are a few things I mourn from the old Sesame Street. The fact that Elmo has eclipsed Grover in popularity, because I think we all know who the superior muppet is. (You know he was the best waiter around and where there is life, there is hope.) The fact that Cookie Monster doesn't eat just cookies anymore. (Now its a "sometimes food.") But for all the changes, for all the flaws, Sesame Street will continue to be something that I can't help but love.

And since today marks the 40th anniversery of Sesame Street, I just wanted to do a little honor to the show I fondly remember. So in celebration, I would like to present my all time favorite of the Waiter Grover series, and then my favorite song on Sesame Street.

(And you know I wasn't the only one who had that same rubber ducky.)