Living & Working in Ishikawa, Japan
I don’t care what anyone says, summer is my favourite time of year here in Japan (or anywhere for that matter). Yes it’s hot. Yes it’s humid. Yes you may feel a bit like the sun is parboiling you for breakfast. But August is also the month of that wonderous thing, the Natsu Matsuri, aka the summer festival.
by suneko
Many matsuris in Ishikawa have a history as long as your arm. Their origins can be traced back hundreds of years to the folk customs and beliefs of the rice farmers that populated this area. As they were originally religious festivals, matsuris nowadays are usually centred around a specific shrine – you’ll know which one by the rows of food stalls leading up to it. Matsuris come in all shapes and sizes, from the Wajima Taisai that draws the whole town out in a three day drinking, drumming and kiriko-carrying frenzy, to the local machi matsuri held at that little shrine up the road from your house.
If you feel up to braving the heat, then these are some of the big matsuris that will be going down in Ishikawa this summer.
Everyone has their own particular means of studying Japanese, whether it be pouring over textbooks, reading posters on the train or talking to any Nihonjin who’ll listen. My favourite method is simple: I turn on the TV.
Four times a year, Japan’s major televisions stations – NHK, Fuji TV, TBS, NTV, and TV Asahi – premiere around twenty new locally produced shows. In Japanese, these are known as terebi dorama. Unlike anime series’, which can last for years, J-dramas last on average about 10-12 episodes, with each episode running to about forty-five minutes. Most of the storylines are contained and quite simple, so even if your Japanese isn’t great, they’re easy to follow. Majority of the shows are also on crack – Japanese comedies are side-splitting in their absurdity. If that’s not reason enough to start channel-surfing, I don’t know what is.
The spring drama season, which began across most stations this week, is traditionally the highest rating season of the year, so the networks are pulling out their big guns. Highly respected actors who only do one drama a year do it in spring. The holy grail of Japanese timeslots, Fuji TV’s Monday at 9pm, this season will star Nakai Masahiro, the leader of super manband SMAP. His bandmate, Kimura Takuya (voted Sexiest Man in Japan 15 years straight), will also be gracing our TV screens come May. So if you happen to have some free time in the evenings this spring, consider tuning in.
by Aaron Escobar
Monday
Hancho – 8pm, TBS – About a small group of detectives at a new police station in Harajuku. Sounds like a comedy.
Konkatsu – 9pm, Fuji TV – The son of a tonkatsu restaurant owner pretends to be engaged to a waitress in order to keep his new job.
by Tanaka Juuyoh
What do you know, it’s sakura season again.
The cherry blossoms are sweeping up the the coasts of Honshu, they’ve already bloomed in Osaka and Kyoto, and a few hesitant flowers are starting to open their buds here in Kanazawa. In a week, the banks of the Saigawa river will be awash in petals and people. AJET will be hosting its own hanami – literally ‘flower viewing’ – on April 18th by the river, for those who fondly remember riverside picnics or just feel like getting tipsy under the pretty trees.
Unfortunately all such prettiness has its price. We’re finally, finally nearing the end of hay fever season.
Hay fever, or kafunshou, is the most common springtime ailment in Japan. The main culprit is the cryptomeria cedar.
by Chris 73 (Wiki Commons)
Planted in great swathes during Japan’s post-war boom, cedars kept the construction industry flush with cheap timber. Then in the 1970s, the economy started to recover. Suddenly it was cheaper to import lumber, and all those cedar forests were left to fend for themselves. They not only flourished, they ran rampant. In Greater Tokyo alone, cedar accounts for over 70% of the city’s forests (that’s about 22,000 hectares). Now every March, as more and more of these trees seed and mature, massive clouds of pollen are released to torment those 20 million-odd unfortunates who suffer from pollen allergies.
Several JETs have reported, and I myself can confirm after a week and a half spent sneezing and sniffling and coughing like a consumptive, that sensitivity to local pollen tends to increase the longer you stay in Japan. So what can you do about it?
During this season of particle plague, most chemists and drug stores will have a special kafunshou display set up, prominently close to the front doors. Look for the kanji: 花粉症. Here you will find a wealth of pills, sprays, tissues, masks, eye drops, eye baths and anything else you could possibly imagine to treat this rather torturous ailment. Most medicines in Japan are quite good about illustrating the symptoms they treat on the box, however, here are some symptoms to look for if you want to be sure:
kyuusei bien – 急性鼻炎 – acute rhinitis (aka breathe in and suddenly it feels like your nose is on fire; I love kanji ^_^)
hanamizu – 鼻みず – runny nose (literarlly ‘nose water’)
hanazumari – 鼻づまり – blocked nose
kushami – くしゃみ – sneeze
namidame – なみだ目 – teary eyes
nodo no itami – のどの痛み – sore throat
arerugii – アレルギー – allergy
zuomo - 頭重 – heavy-headedness (literally atama ga omoi – 頭が重い)
pusoidoefedorin – プソイドエフェドリン – pseudoephedrine (for those who want to know when they’ll be falling asleep at their desks ^_~)
Dosage is usually clearly spelled out on the back of the box.
For example, the dosage for this particular med, Pabron (パブロン, worked very well at drying up my nose to the consistency of sandpaper), reads thus:
On the top line, １回量 (ikkai ryo) means one dose, which equates to two capsules. The second line, 服用回数 (fukuyou kaisuu) means ‘dosage frequency’, which states two doses in one day (１日２回, ichinichi nikai). Essentially, take two capsules twice a day. The little note at the top advises you to wait twelve hours between doses. The big red cross is for people under 15 years, so if you have kids, don’t give them Pabron.
If you’re still unsure, ask your supervisor to read over the information leaflet inside the box.
And if all else fails, there is a simple home remedy that I was told: find some local honey and start spreading it on your toast at breakfast. The idea is that by introducing the smidgens of pollen that remain in the honey into your system, a day at a time, you’ll slowly build up a tolerance. It might do you the world of good, and it certainly won’t do you any harm ^_~
- Lauren
With Kanazawa once again buried in snow, holing up under the kotatsu and never moving again is sounding like a really good idea. We’ve got another month of this to look forward to, so now would be the time to dust off those doorstop-sized tomes you’ve been meaning to read for years: War and Peace, Les Miserables, Proust, Joyce, or maybe the complete works of Charles Dickens.
But in this season of rain and lightning-lit snowstorms, tackling a book as heavy as Ishikawa’s grey skies can be a bit, well… daunting. As much as I would like to finish The Tale of Genji this winter, it’s more likely I’ll turn to the books I think of as my guilty pleasures. Below are two of my favourite brain candy series’ to help get you through the long winter nights.
.
MARCUS DIDIUS FALCO Mysteries
by Lindsey Davis
by Maurice
I discovered Falco in a manner befitting his circumstances as a ‘private informer’ (part detective, part spy) in Imperial Rome: one of his books was sitting out of place on a shelf in the Reject Shop. My interest was piqued by the characters and rich backstories that had evidently been built up in the previous books. Intrigued, I went hunting for more. Ten years and a trip to Rome later, I’m still reading.
The Falco mysteries (of which nineteen books have been published thus far) are set in various places around Rome and the Empire, but the most constant setting is Falco’s flat at the top of a six story tenement on the Aventine hill, where Rome’s poor and working class plebs made their homes. Each book is a self-contained mystery in the style of the old 30s gumshoe novels, written with the tongue firmly in cheek and social satire on the agenda — a former civil servant, Davis captures with damning accuracy every crooked profession from plumbing to politics. Falco himself is more reminiscent of Edmund Blackadder than Sherlock Holmes: his cynicism is a perfect foil to the colour and drama of Rome in its early glory, not to mention the creaks and groans of its bureaucracy. Delightfully anachronistic, these books are fun and funny as hell.
The first chapter of the first book, The Silver Pigs, can be found here. Even if detective novels aren’t your thing, give this one a go; it’s so much fun, I doubt you’ll regret it.
.
PHRYNE FISHER Mysteries
by Kerry Greenwood
by kchamberland
Yeah, okay, I’ve a thing for sardonic detective fiction. Phryne is a relatively new addition to my library, but what the Honourable Ms. Fisher may lack in literary chops, she more than makes up for in personality and panache. It takes a woman with class to crack skulls with a pearl-handled pistol.
Phryne Fisher is the headstrong bon vivant daughter of an English lord in the late 1920s. Tired of waltzing through the respectable tea rooms of London, Ms. Fisher packs up her eye-popping outfits and moves halfway round the world, to the city of Melbourne. Laying aside for a moment my natural antipathy toward the place (being a Sydneysider and all), these books do give a lot of insight into what my own country was like in the period that Fitzgerald immortalised for Americans. Australian cities in the 1920s were still very much colonial ports and Ms. Fisher, with her upper class poise, natural sense of entitlement and love of dangerous driving quite simply blazes through the Rainy City. Phryne Fisher’s world is a tonne of fun to read and immerse oneself in, if slightly darker in tone, as Greenwood draws extensively on her past as a Legal Aid attorney to bring both the crimes and legal processes of the early 20th century into relief.
The first book of the series is called Cocaine Blues and deals with — you guessed it! — cocaine trafficking, specifically in Melbourne’s dank opium dens. Unlike the Falco books, where each book builds and develops upon the previous, each addition in the Phryne series seems to stand alone in a relatively set universe. I admit, I do sometimes yearn for more lingering consequences but if we’re talking about brain candy, I’m happy (relatively) so long as each book is entertaining. And Phryne is endlessly entertaining!
.
Happy reading! ^_^
About halfway down Tatemachi, on the left hand side if you’re walking down from McDonalds, you’ll find the Belsel building. A year ago, no one knew the place existed. Now, it has become the centre in Kanazawa for one of Japan’s biggest counter-cultural movements – gothic lolita fashion.
by Jesslee Cuizon
‘Gothloli’, as it’s known, has been around in Japan in one form or another since the late 70s. Currently, the fashion has several sub-branches that mix gothic, punk and Victorian styles in various ratios, from the sweet lolitas in their pristine paniered skirts to the slashed, splattered and tattered rags of the guro goths.
While purists will argue that one should never mix brands, let alone styles, one of the things I like about gothloli gear is its versatility. A blouse from Baby the Stars Shine Bright can be worn to work just as easily as under a jumper dress. A skirt from h.naoto can be dressed down for an afternoon’s shopping and then dressed up for the following evening. Yes, you are talking to a (literal) closet convert.
by Carlos Castillo
The Belsel building is small when compared to the gothloli meccas in Harajuku, but it does have a fairly wide range of styles displayed on the first floor – the Alice in Wonderland cute of Angelic Pretty, the London-inspired punk of Super Lovers, and my personal favourite, the more elegant gothic lines of Black Peace Now.
Surprisingly, a lot of gothloli garments I’ve found will fit Western bodies, if only just. The clothes that are quite loose by design have plenty of room for those of us not built like matchsticks. As with all things branded in Japan, these clothes do not come cheap. Luckily, the first months of the year are the best time to buy anything gothloli as the stores discount all of the previous year’s stock — right now, Black Peace Now has three counters full of merchandise at 70% off the marked price.
Even if you’re not all that partial to the Japanese taste in fashion, the store racks are worth a look if just for the novelty value! You won’t find anything like it back home.
.
The Belsel building is located along Tatemachi St, next to the Lawsons combini. The stores within open for business at 10AM and close at 8PM.
by Lauren
“O Oysters, come and walk with us!” The Walrus did beseech…
If the Walrus and the Carpenter are still kicking round, I reckon they’ll be heading up to Anamizu this weekend.
Saturday marks the beginning of the Kaki Matsuri, a two day orgy of oysters and just about anything else you can throw on a barbecue grill. This festival has no pretensions: it’s all about the food.
Photo: Steph & Adam
Anamizu (穴水) is located on the eastern side of the Noto peninsula, between Nanao and Wajima. The fastest way to get up there would be to drive, but there is also the Hokutetsu bus that operates from Kanazawa station. I’d recommend calling a taxi or arranging for someone to pick you up from the Anamizu bus stop, as it is on the outskirts of town.
Entry into the festival itself is free. At the entry gate, nice men will offer you bags of fresh-caught oysters – 10-15 of them – for 1000円, along with chopsticks and a cotton glove to aid in cooking them.
If you don’t care for shellfish, worry not, the outer perimeter is lined with stalls selling everything, and I mean everything: fish, squid, octopus, beef and pork slices, yakitori and pork and onion skewers, chahan and azuki rice, slabs of mochi and raw vegies for grilling, ramen, udon and soba, and that’s only what I can remember.
For those keen on a more liquid diet, every stall sells beer of some variety along with the standard array of teas and waters, and connoisseurs can sample drafts from the Nihonkai Brewery, who have a stall of their own.
The festival runs from Saturday 31st Jan (10am-4pm) ’til Sunday 1st Feb (9am-3pm).
Photo: Steph & Adam
Happy gorging! ^_^
.
For those interested, a JET posted her experiences of the 2007 festival here.
Upcoming Events
