2042

2042 is the number of characters (kanji) taught in a book called Remembering the Kanji. There are about 2000 kanji in general use in written Japanese, in addition to the ~150 kana (hiragana and katakana) phonetic elements. I've been studying kanji based on the method laid out in this book near daily since we arrived. To keep the kanji in order and review them efficiently I used a spaced repetition system available through a website called Reviewing the Kanji, which waits progressively longer intervals between successful reviews of the same kanji. This means that I only have to review the basic ones every few months, while troublesome ones will come back within days. Last week, after thirteen months, I put the final kanji into rotation for review. I now know, or at least expect myself to know, the English meanings of over 2000 kanji, which should comprise almost any I need for any writing in common use.

See the big green bar on the right? That took FOREVER.

I filled seven notebooks, each with 5,000 squares gridded specifically for learning to write kanji, reviewing the kanji over the last year, for more than 35,000 individual kanji reviews during this process. This is in addition to the pages and pages of scrap paper used before committing to the dollar store kanji books. I will need to buy an eigth tomorrow for continuing review. The notebooks are intended for use by Japanese schoolchildren who are learning the kanji, and come in a variety of cutesy designs.

The cute exterior.

The "I buy ten-packs of ink refills for my pens" interior

The system taught in the book helps you to create names and stories for different elements that are found in multiple kanji. Thus, when I review the kanji all kinds of colorful people, animals, and places show up, often with elaborate personal histories and tendencies. Thus, Fingers the Thief, whose mark is the element for human fingers, is usually stealing or infiltrating something in his kanji. For instance, the kanji for "hold" (持) is made up of the element for fingers (I can't find this one on its own) and the element for temple (寺), so my story is: Fingers is making sure to hold on to the loot from the temple as he makes his escape. There are dozens of radicals and thousands of stories using them. The majority are a lot more complicated than that. The worst are the ones that sound similar and feature similar components. Ocean, sea, and open sea have similar elements that confused me for a long time.

Anyhow, the worst is over on that front. I've been able to read bits and pieces for some time now, but I need to make the jump to really reading and writing instead of fishing around for things I can translate. Wish me luck!

August Nagoya Trip

No denying we were lazy about getting this one posted. The Japan Society for Engineering Education had its annual meeting in Nagoya this year in August, and we went. I (Lee) had a paper to present, and Ana got KTC to cover her travel so that she could attend the conference for free as well. The paper I was presenting was not really mine, but I was the only one of the thirteen listed authors who spoke English as a native language and was planning on being in Japan at the time. The JSEE has one international track in English and about ten Japanese tracks (in Japanese), and I presented during the international session. The paper itself was about a project I've been involved with where we team up Japanese, Chinese, and American students to work on engineering projects, using the internet and web conferencing to share information.

It also involves buying the most and biggest monitors possible.

Nagoya is about a four hour train ride southeast of Kanzawa, on the east coast of Japan between Tokyo and Osaka. It's a pretty big city. We left on a Friday as it would not be possible to travel there early enough on Saturday to make the presentation time. We had a hotel reserved that had been suggested by my boss, who was also attending, but apparently he valued cost over convenience as it was on the other side of the city from Nagoya University, where the conference was being held.

We took the subway across the city, and had just figured out where we needed to go when we were ambushed by a Japanese person who felt we needed navigational assistance and proceeded to help us with the manner and enthusiasm of an overactive puppy. This is a natural and not uncommon hazard if you make the mistake of being A) foreign and B) unsure in public. He walked us to the right train and apologized profusely for not taking us all the way there, citing the necessity of attending prior engagements. We of course thanked him and were pleased to know that we had, in fact, correctly determined where we were and where we were going, though this is more helpful when one is actually lost.

We made it to Nagoya Univerisity and wandered the whole campus before finding the sign-in desk. We spent a lot of time looking at the posted maps and calling my boss, who had his phone off because he was watching early presentations. I should mention - Nagoya in August is positively sweltering. Incredibly hot and sticky. People told us that Kanazawa is like that sometimes but Nagoya is like that always. We're quite glad not to have to deal with that on a regular basis. After finding the conference's base of operations, we discovered that about half of my department was already in attendance so we had some people we knew to hang out with until the opening dinner started.

A cool day in Nagoya

As usual for this kind of thing, dinner was opened by speeches followed by a toast, and because the there were guests of honor representing the ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) and SEFI (Société Européenne pour la Formation des Ingénieurs, aka Europäische Gesellschaft für Ingenieur-Ausbildung, aka European Society for Engineering Education), those being American and European engineering education societies, two of the speeches were pleasantly in English. The dinner was better than usual as it was a more casual affair and that means fewer sea cucumbers and more dishes containing no unspeakable fish parts whatsoever. There was also wine in addition to beer, so things got convivial rather quickly. Despite my utter lack of importance in the grand scheme of things, several Japanese individuals from major industrial and academic concerns felt the urge to make my acquaintance during this time. I have no idea why Ana and I were introduced by my boss to several people far more important than us whose names and titles I can no longer remember, though I have a stack of business cards half an inch thick. After the party, he lead us back to the hotel which was good because we never would have found it alone.

Us with important European engineering education guy and some other people.

The next morning, we got dressed up and went all the way back across the city to the school to attend the international session. I found the presentations to be pretty lightweight, fluffy stuff, much like the so-called paper I was responsible for presenting. Lots of "hey, our school is doing this nifty thing" and not a lot of "rigorous analysis of this nifty thing our school did shows that...". There were some good ones. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait that long for my turn despite the fact that some people completely ignoring their time limits, and did an adequate job of giving the presentation with no major faux pas to speak of. I believe aside from the ASEE representative I was the only person in the room who was a native speaker of English so mine probably sounded darn good in comparison.

The room actually had about a hundred people in it, sitting further back.

A bit after my presentation the session broke for lunch and we took the opportunity to fly the coop to go see Nagoya. We were feeling a little bit guilty about skipping the rest of the conference, but then we encountered my boss on the subway, skipping it himself to go to a pottery museum. The pangs of conscience un-panged. It would have taken over an hour to go back to the hotel, so we didn't, and therefore didn't have the camera for the rest of the day. This was unfortunate, though I'll fill in with pictures from the internet. The first order of business was lunch, and we went for Chinese. We both got a lunch set, which in this restaurant apparently means "please bring us enough food for six people". We really had three full lunches apiece to choose from, and most of them were pretty good. I wish this place was local instead of four hours away; I've never seen that much food served in Japan, period, let alone at that price.

We had an English tourist guide to Nagoya along with some coupons from the conference packet, so we took a look at what was out there. There were more things we were interested in than we had time to do, so we basically each picked the one we wanted most and did those. I wanted the Tokugawa museum and garden (Tokugawa-en) and Ana wanted the Nagoya aquarium (actually the zoo, but since we've done so many zoos already and the aquarium was open later, we went with that). We did the museum first. After getting totally soaked by the heat traveling there (I'm in a collared shirt and dress pants in the blasting August afternoon sun) we arrived, going through the garden first and then the museum. The garden was much calmer and less crowded than Kenroku-en both in number of people and design. It worked better as a whole, feeling much more natural and sedate, though it does not have the awe-striking 400-year-old trees of Kenroku-en. There were a few stunning waterfalls though. I really wish we'd had our camera for this. I recommend searching for it on Flikr like this to see many pictures of mostly this garden.

Main pool of Tokugawa-en

The museum showed artifacts from the sixteenth and seventeenth century mostly. Swords, armor, pottery, clothing, and scrolls, among others. Some of the items shown were loot from the expeditions into Korea, or otherwise descended from non-Japanese origins. I found most impressive some of the items that had belonged sequentially to many of the most powerful feudal lords, including several swords. To compare, you might think about a cavalry saber that had been carried and used by both Grant and Lee - if your eyes don't bug out, you don't know what you're looking at. These were items of the most pivotal men in Japanese history before 1850, and they would have been impressive even without the history behind them. A few of the items were exceedingly old, in excess of 700 years of age, mostly from China. We enjoyed the museum considerably, and understand that there are more museums with more extensive collections elsewhere in Japan. Hopefully we'll get a chance to see some of those.

Next up was Ana's choice, the Nagoya aquarium. Apparently the sigil of the old lords of Nagoya was a dolphin, because the city is all about dolphins, and so is the aquarium. It wasn't the biggest aquarium we've been to, or it didn't seem that way, but it had all kinds of dolphins and some smaller whales like beluga. The rest was pretty standard aquarium stuff, with a few really cool multilevel tanks, and at the very end we caught the last dolphin show, which combined incredible cheesiness with some pretty good tricks. You can see pictures of the harbor and aquarium here.

The aquarium is in a district similar to the Baltimore inner harbor, with a lot of development and tourist stuff in the area. One of the tourist attractions was a genuine Red Lobster, with big windows looking out over the harbor. Now, I don't think Red Lobster is the most amazing restaurant one can find, but in Japan, looking for something that tastes more like New England, Red Lobster sounded pretty good. The menu was not the same as you would find in the states (no biscuits, the horror!), and it was definitely a bit more upscale than usual, but it had a lot of interesting choices and reasonable prices. After that we went back to the hotel for an early night in preparation for catching the morning train back to Kanazawa.

Picture of fire from:

http://www.davesdrumworld.com/Misc-pics/images/Fire.jpg

Picture of Tokugawa-en from:

http://www.city.nagoya.jp/_res/usr/c/059/550/tokugawaen.jpg

The Origin of the Flavor

Have you ever wondered why grape flavoring does not taste like grapes? 

Japan has taught us the answer.

Grape flavoring is obviously designed to taste like these enormous Japanese gift-grapes, which we got as a house-gift at a recent dinner party.  They taste like grape flavoring, which, coming from an actual grape, is strange.  Not bad, but not worth the price premium, this is probably about seven dollars in grapes right here.

Buffalo Wings Party

Thanks to some friends back home, we came to possess an abundance of authentic Buffalo wing and barbecue sauces.  It's not really convenient or cost effective to deep-fry wings  for just the two of us,  so we called in a bunch of other gaijin (literally, outside-people, or foreigners) for a wings party.

 Lee demonstrating some Personal Protective Equipment

Mmm, I love a man in safety glasses! We went a bit Martha Stewart and put the melba toast and carrots for blue cheese dipping in our bread pans because all the bowls were being used in the wings process and had biscuits and garbage bread. We also offered a salad and ice cream sundaes for dessert, with homemade caramel and whipped cream. Lee scoffs at my dessert making attempts, but the caramel finally worked after burning only two batches of sugar.


Lee had a nice assembly line for his frying going on, drying raw chicken in the sink, pot of cornstarch to coat the chicken before dunking them into the oil:


We had about 15 people, so it was a good sized party. It was nice to be able to have a little taste of home, even if it wasn't quite the same.  The "suicide" sauce from the Anchor Bar was definitely not as spicy as the stuff they serve in the restaurant after the server warns you about it two or three times, but the wings were deep fried and hot and plentiful and there's a lot to be said for that combination, especially here where the "large" McDonald's fries container would pretty much fit into one of your wallet's credit card sleeves.

Lee's Birthday Meal

I made a lovely cold-weather dinner for Lee's birthday as it finally started getting cold around here. I made Feather Stew, by request, which is a family recipe from Lee's side, and is pretty simple to make, though this version was slightly different than the standard recipe.

You take a bunch of chicken, preferably with skin and bones (hard to come by around here), and brown it in some oil with garlic. Add sauteed mushrooms and water until chicken and mushrooms are just barely covered. We didn't saute the mushrooms and used Shittake mushrooms because button mushrooms are about 25 cents each. I also am not a mushroom person, so leaving them whole meant they were easy to work around for me.


Simmer until chicken falls apart, remove bones and skin and shred the chicken. Typically, you'd then refrigerate this overnight, and remove the layer of congealed fat the next day. Re-heat (or use these fancy oil and fat sucking pads we accidentally purchased here and make it all in one go), then add some white wine and cream, salt and pepper to taste.


Serve over rice with the wine you used to flavor it (we had a very interesting Riesling) with some crusty bread. For dessert, there was apple pie using the extra filling that I made last time before I remembered I only had access to one pie dish.

Trout Goes On the Menu

We got invited out to dinner by the president of Ana's school (Dr. Yamada) and his wife.  They suggested going to a grilled fish restaurant about 10km outside of Kanazawa.  This sounded a little different than some of the other Japanese styles we've tried like yakitori and yakuniku and we like fish and this is Japan, so we went for it, and never in my life have I eaten so much trout.

This restaurant's true specialty wasn't just fish - it was a fish, that being trout.  Baby trout, little trout, medium trout, and me/my trout and I. Corollary to this specialty: all the trout were raised on property, as the restaurant farmed all their fish right outside the doors.  I will return to the trout, and at length, but fish, I mean first, I want to talk a little bit about getting to the restaurant and the place itself.

The drive to the restaurant took us over some of the most winding, mountainous hills I have ever been driven over.  I well know that there are mountains close to Kanazawa, and we didn't exactly go above treeline,  but I considered the possibility of trying to bike up and down that terrain and basically resolved only to attempt it if I decided I wanted to experience the local intensive care unit.  We were swiftly out of the urban areas and things got pretty primeval pretty quickly.  The last maybe mile or so was on a single lane winding road that went by farms and then increasing stretches of nothing much in particular.  When we reached the restaurant, it was alone, on a hill, in the center of its own small valley, with a stream running right by the front door and turning a waterwheel. Very picturesque indeed for a lovely early-fall evening.

        There is a waterfall behind us, which falls into a pool full of big trout.   The person who is not us is Mrs. Yamada.

As with many Japanese restaurants serving traditional food in the traditional style, each party gets their own room.  Ours had a sliding door that opened to reveal a view of the valley with the sun setting over it. A concession had been made to modern comforts as the table had an indentation under it for your legs and seat backs were provided so that you could sit up in the Western style while still being close to the floor, more like the old Japanese fashion.  It is a setup that we've seen before in traditional Japanese restaurants and is most welcomed over the less-comfortable alternative.

Then came the onslaught.  Candied trout minnows.  Tempura slightly-larger trout minnows.  Trout salad.  A different trout salad.  Trout soup.  Tempura bigger trout bits and veggies.  Trout sushi and sashimi.  Whole grill roasted trout with salt.  Whole grill roasted trout with miso sauce.  Trout with noodles.  No, there was not trout ice cream or anything, which was good, because we were just about trouted out.

              Pretty much everything but the beer and napkin is trout.

We liked some of the dishes better than others.  I would pass on the candied minnows if I saw them again, for instance, and the tempura'd minnows were quite bitter for some reason.  The roast trout with salt and some of the other dishes were really good examples of dishes that showcase the main ingredient well.  We experienced trout showcased in a wide variety of ways.  That allowed us to determine quite thoroughly that the trout did have some of that freshwater tang.  In many cases, I would advocate blunting that particular flavor with milk, cream, or butter, but this night we did it the Japanese way and it was pretty good.

After the tsunami of food subsided a little, the Yamadas proved prepared for a lull in the conversation as they were equipped with calligraphy brushes and paper which they gifted to us and then spent some time attempting to teach us to use correctly.  I felt like using them correctly was damaging the brush, but maybe that is par for the course.  In all, a pleasant evening, with many visually appealing parts, and the food was mostly pretty good through I will not feel the need to eat trout again for some time, I think.  I wish we had pictures but we did not feel it was appropriate to document our night out with the boss, so you'll forever have to wonder what exactly candied trout minnows look like.

KIT Summer Science

Over the summer, both KIT and KTC hold workshops to get kids interested in science and technology, and hopefully later attending the schools to learn more about science and technology. One such program was a two day balsa bridge building workshop at KIT for Komatsu Senior High School students.  Komatsu is a small city south of Kanzawa and this particular high school is a fairly high-end science and technology high school. The KIT brige program was designed to be not only an engineering workshop, learning about bridges, but also an English workshop.  Therefore, they called us.

Day one of the workshop was supposed to be all in Japanese, so we didn't attend. The students built balsa wood bridges individually, tested them to destruction by hanging juice boxes off of them, and then either alone or in small groups used the free West Point Bridge Designer software to improve their design (and/or design bridges that looked like a cat). They optimized or in some cases "optimized" (whiskers) their bridge design and decided who would do what  the next day before before leaving.


Day two was English day. The students would build a (hopefully) better bridge in small groups than they previously did on their own and then present their design process in English. They brought in Komatsu English teachers in addition to Lee and I to help the students write the English in their presentations and discuss their bridges in English.  Fortunately, these students had a lot more practice in English than most of our students and were quite motivated, so this was actually possible.  It was very nice to meet more native English speakers, as we know all of them at KIT, and we enjoyed guessing which bridges would be best together (Lee picked two of the top three finishers).

Teams were given points for both bridge strength and creativity in design, so the people who used liberal dashes of crazy in their designs were probably going for the aesthetics award. Professors and students voted for the most aesthetically pleasing bridge, and this was 1/3 of the final score. The number of juice boxes the bridges were able to hold divided by the weight of the bridge was the other 2/3 of the final score. There were three prizes, one for the best design, one for the best strength/weight ratio, and the grand prize.

This was a very interesting project, and in many ways similar to something you might see in an American program. First, individual projects that aren't that great, next learning about the problem, and then joining into small groups to make better projects. The two odd things to us were the foreign language (a given) and placing a high importance on the aesthetic elements of the design. One would seldom, if ever, see this as a consideration in engineering and technical workshops in our experience.  It was clear that at least some teams missed a lot of the subtlties of the instruction, and make mistakes that they were warned against in both the workshop textbook and in the lectures, but overall I suspect at least some of them learned something and most of the students had fun, though an informal poll towards the end did not indicate that many of them were planning to go into engineering.