Kenroku-en: Fall Light-Up

We previously showed you some pictures of a light-up of Kenroku-en, the local major garden. Apparently, they do one of these in each season, and the past two weekends were the fall light-up. We were able to go one evening to see the garden in all its autumn glory, lit up at night. This is a very nice event because it's free, it's beautiful, and it's rather romantic to walk through a softly-lit garden at night, even if your significant other isn't interested in holding hands in public.  (Ed. Note: It was pretty freaking romantical to begin with, no need to get crazy with it, especially in Japan)

We managed to go on a not-so-perfect evening; it was a bit chilly and there was a constant rainy mist. Not bad enough to use umbrellas while in the park itself, just constant moisture.  Some of the views are quite dramatic lit up, and the whole place feels smaller and more private at night, even with all the people around.

We ran into another teacher we work with who had come to see the park, and we stuck together for the walk.

A classical string band was playing on the porch of one of the shops at the edge of the pond, so most of the park could hear them play, which further contributed to the pleasant ambiance.

After satisfying our need to witness the spectacle of illuminated vegetation, hamburgers were in order, so we took the bus down to Freshness Burger and got our American food fix.


Full, mostly not great pictures available on Flikr.

Campus Pictures

Yet another post from the deep archives, we bring you Kanazawa Institute of Technology in spring.  All winter last year was wet and dark and dreary, so we held off wandering around campus taking pictures until spring.  After that, we held off blogging the pictures until now. 

We had been planning to document our place of work for those who might be interested on the first really nice day of spring, and a nice day it was indeed.  Just about everything green was blooming.  We took a nice long walk around campus around lunchtime and took pictures of the concrete and flowers.  At the beginning of this trek, Ana mentioned that she had seen some particularly attractive white bamboo trees near a cherry, but as she had been following co-workers to a meeting in an unfamiliar part of campus she did not know where, precisely, they were.  Finding and photographing these mythical white bamboo became the epic quest of this adventure.

We started out on the road outside of the cafeteria.

Then went past building 24, where I work. (2nd floor, room 215 to be exact)

Through the main quad of campus.

Up to the base of the library center.

We checked around the back of it too.

Then to the top of the library center.

We caught a glimpse of our prey from the top of the LC.

Where we saw the trees she was looking for, reinvigorating our quest for them.

It still took us a while to find as the tiny quad they were in was an interior courtyard and we had walked entirely around the outer building looking for it with no success.

They were, in fact, good to look at.

You can see the full set of pictures on Flikr.

Daijoji Temple Visit

The first weekend of November was supposed to be the last nice weekend before the cold, wet winter. Taking advantage of the lovely weather, we decided to take an afternoon stroll to a temple and park located just down the street. We took a few pictures of the scenery along the way. The fall scenery isn't quite as good as what you see back home, but it is nice.


We walked along a fairly major road, past some neighborhoods and farms, up to a heavily wooded area. Most of the foliage directly behind our apartment is bamboo, but down the road you can find some deciduous trees with some nice colors. Midway up a hill is a fairly large temple and graveyard, Daijoji, or Big Something-or-other (Power according to Yahoo) Temple. The entryway is guarded by what seem to be similar to saints, each one for a specific purpose or type of person, or such was our deduction based on the kanji accompanying each statue.


Inside the graveyard area, there are separate plots for each family. Some look really fancy and expensive, with lots of marble and a finished floor...


...whereas others are just a few stones in a dirt plot.


Once past the family plots, you encounter the temple itself. If you go on certain days, you can catch ceremonies or meditation. There is also a big gong that you are allowed to ring with a donation box you are requested to use if you strike the gong. There are areas to burn incense, like at the guardians at the front and in front of a golden statue within the temple, where you are also asked to donate in return for burning a stick of incense to pray. It's a pretty good system, I think.

Main entry gate for the temple area. Wheelchair accessible!

After passing through the temple area, we continued on to the park next door to the temple. This park has the most grass we've seen in one place in Japan, and has a pretty amazing view of the city of Kanazawa. You can see out to the ocean:


Check the Flickr set for more photos of Daijoji and the park.

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.