What I did for HAPPY New Year’s Day 2008

These are what I did during Dec.2007 to prepare for New Year’s Day.
Most of them are common in Japanese, but some are particular for me.

- What I did before Xmas day
1. Cleaning up my room: Especially throwing bulky trash such as a bed, a broken CD player and so on.
2. Writing New Year’s greeting cards manually: It’s a bit easy work for me because I could use a printer in my office to print address on the cards.
3. Maintaining my room’s Japanese window screen “shoji”: “Shoji” is a paper based window screen with wooden frame. Normally it belongs to Japanese style room. My room isn’t Japanese style (thought it used to be), but shoji is left as it is by my request. So I usually change the paper in the end of year.

- What I did yesterday
4. Cleaning up my house, not only my room but also any other rooms: In this case, I had to clean all pendent lamps in my house even though I’m not enough tall to do easily. So I used a step ladder to do…They made me heavy muscle pain on my neck and shoulders.
5. Preparing my mother’s birthday present: I guess it took the longest hours to have done. Finally I determined a long-sleeved T-shirts and a skirt but I tried to put clothes again and again…
6. Cooking a “Osechi” dish: I cooked steamed chicken with Japanese Sake. Though this dish isn’t a traditional Osechi but our family really loves it so we make it in this season.

- What I did today
7. Cooking some “Osechi” dishes: I cooked one is a traditional Osechi dish “Kuri-kinton” As it is made of sweet potatoes and chestnuts, it is very sweet. I usually mush 3 or 4 sweet potatoes in hand…so my muscle pain is getting worse, as you know.

What I posted here is actually a part of my work, so truly I worked more and am getting more tired than you thought. Anyway Tokyo is 9pm now, 2007 is just 3 hours remaining for me.
I wish you a happy New Year from Tokyo!!!

Santa Clauses are coming to Shibuya

What do you know Dec. 22^nd was? It was a Santacon 2007 in Tokyo (you can get some information from here.) I never know such an event but I’m really interested in how big it is, so I went to see at Hachiko-mae (a famous statue of dog) in front of Shibuya sta.

According to the website, Santa Clauses should be there at midday. But there aren’t so many Santas beyond half past 12. I suspected slight rain made their motivation low.

So I gave up to see them outside, I went to LOHB, a restaurant close to Shibuya intersection. Because I thought I might see their moving from there. Finally I succeeded to take some pictures.

Eventually it seemed there were about 40-50 Santas. And where they visited first was 109-2, a famous fashion department store in Shibuya. Santas might get some gifts there first…

Rush train in December Friday midnight

Tonight I went out to see a talk show hosted by my favorite Japanese jazz player, Naruyoshi Kikuchi in Shibuya (although that wasn’t as good as I expected).

The show finished up around a half past 11pm and that’s early enough for me to get back home by train…by “really crowded” JR Yamate line, the green, loop line in Tokyo.

Basically the midnight Yamate line is always crowded because this line has a lot of transfer stations. Especially Friday night is usually especially terrible because a lot of people drink in Tokyo before going home. Additionally, most Japanese people have year-end drinking parties in December so there's not only regular drunken people but also people who don’t drink normally (amateurs) all surging onto the Yamate line.

So today was one of the most terrible nights to get on the line!!

For half an hour, I was standing in the car and for a lot of the journey. I couldn’t help leaning against people around me and sometimes I was almost squashed when a lot of new passengers came into the car…I can’t avoid this terrible situation as long as I live in Tokyo and as long as I go out in Friday night, as well.

Cooking class – Round two “Traditional Japanese dishes (maybe)”

4^th December, it was the first Tuesday of December…so it was a cooking class day!!

We made a quiche and a soup (and something…) last month but this time, our recipes turned out to be Japanese ones! It’s so difficult to explain the name and how it is made that I plan to introduce just one dish I made.

The dish I wanted to tell you is like this;

This is a big dumpling which is made of Satoimo – it’s a kind of Japanese yam.

It’s easy to boil satoimos, mash them and cook a filling. But spreading mashed satoimo on my palm to make the dumpling is a bit difficult because it might feel itchy unless done quickly.

After making the dumpling, we fried them for a few minutes and put the soup on them. Finally we put Japanese horseradish and sprouts on them.

Actually the process was not too complicated but it looked like a nice, expensive one for Japanese people. So I’ll try to make it for my parents this weekend again.

Tori no Ichi

Last Friday, it was the Labor Thanksgiving day in Japan; I was going around Shinjuku looking for a heater and getting Pierre Herme’s macaroon. When I walked along the underground pavement, I found a poster, which indecated that a traditional festival “Tori no Ichi” was held on 23rd November at Hanazono shrine in Shinjuku. I know the festival but I’ve never seen before so I tried to visit there this time.

Tori no Ichi – it means “The Cock Fair” according to an online dictionary (Tori means a cock in this case, and Ichi means fair). But you can’t get any cocks or chicken there. This is held on the Day of the Cock in November - hence the name. I think you might have a question; what is the Day of the Cock?

We Japanese usually use not only the western calendar but also Oriental Zodiac. The Oriental Zodiac is related to twelve animals and we recognize a day or a year as a specific animal. For example, 2007 is the year of the swine, and the next year 2008 is the year of the mouse.

Traditionally, we'll get a decorated big fork as lucky goods there. Do you know why we get such a thing?

When you work at a farm with a fork, you can scoop something - potatoes, carrots or something like that. As well, antient people (especially the owners of retail store or restaurant) make a wish on a big fork to gain some good for them, such as a lot of customer and a lot of money.

Wine Parties at the weekend (2)

Here’s good news for those who don’t have any knowledge or any interest in wine!

When you feel like drinking some wine, you should do nothing but just care about the shape of glass you're use. I think that’s easy for you to remember .

If you feel like drinking some red wine, you should use a large, wide-mouthed glass. It makes you face front to drink it. On the other hand, when you try to drink some white one, you’re better to choose a slender glass. And you can realize you face up then.

I recommend you use glasses like this!

As you might know, red wine has an astringent taste. But you can experience a good taste rather than astringent if you keep red wine on your tongue. A large, wide-mouthed glass helps you keep wine on your tongue easily because of the weight and the shape.

As for white wine, it has a vinegary taste. But we can sense a sweet taste from it, so all you do is put white wine on the tip of tongue. If so, you can feel just sweet and deep taste rather than vinegary one.

If you compare drinking from an appropriate glass with a wrong one, you can definitely tastes the difference. It’s like a magic!!

Riedel, the wine glass company in Austria , helds a wine seminar last Sunday, and I joined it and tried wine tasting by comparing the glasses.

Though I don’t have the sensitivity of wine at all, I’m sure the Riedel glass makes the taste of wine better…it was an amazing experience for me.

Wine Parties at the weekend (1)

I joined 2 wine parties last weekend. Both were pretty nice. So I'll post they were like today and tomorrow.

- Friday, November 16 : Beaujolais Nouveau party in Ginza
As you might know, November 15 was the Beaujolais Nouveau release day this year. In Japan, a lot of enthusiastic parties are held at the release day every year because Japan might be the first country in the world to be able to drink Beaujolais Nouveau– I guess there was a big, weird party once, which was held at the international airport (or a hotel around there) and the participants started drinking at midnight.

Unlike such loud parties, our party was organized by the owner of a restaurant and we tried 4 kinds of Beaujolais Nouveau with our dinner. We normally buy Beaujolais around 1000 to 2000 JPY, but we had a little expensive one (between 3000 to 5000JPY) this time.

The wine list (in the order I drank them) was:
1. Domaine CHATELUS: Beaujolais Nouveau
2. Henri Fessey: Beaujolais Villages Nouveau TRADITION
3. Frederic Cossard: Beaujolais Villages Nouveau PRIMEUR Les Lapins
4. Leroy: Beaujolais Villages Nouveau PRIMEUR

They were very nice, but my favorite is Leroy. According to the Internet, Leroy is a famous wine "negociant" in France (“negociant” means shipper in English). Leroy’s wine is generally expensive but it is sells out pretty quickly. I think I know the reason too, the flavor is really like old wine even though it is NEW! So you can enjoy Leroy’s Beaujolais Nouveau around a year later as well as the release day.

How about the effect of INSTANT WORD POWER?

I know the necessity of increasing my English vocabulary for increasing my English skill, but I can't have memorised a lot of words with using an English vocabulary book written in Japanese!



So I've changed my mind - I shouldn't use a book written in Japanese but in English, and which is for English native students. It should be the fast way for me to improve my English!!!



And I've found what claims to be the best vocabulary coach among Amazon.com..."INSTANT WORD POWER"!!!







According to this book, to learn about the Greek or Latin roots, prefix and suffix called etymology is very important. It might be popular among the Western students, but I've never tried to learn like that.

Actually there are nothing but the words I've never seen before - biped, centennial, bifocal, bicuspid, impede, expedite and so on (you might recognize which prefix I've learnt). So this method has impressed me, and thankfully, I've enjoyed learning a lots of new words very much because I generally can't remember many new words as easily.


But I have a little problem - I don't have a chance to use these words in my real life so far. How would you say anything with using "bicuspid" in your life??

Short stories in the weekend

Yesterday I was out to get a couple of colorful sticks like this .

Do you know what they are? These are the incense sticks. Basically we Japanese are very familiar with incense sticks very much because we are used to offer them at Buddhist alters or burn the mosquito-repellent incenses in the summer.

Unlike the incense which is offered to Buddhist alters or to "debug", these smell like flower, wood or fruits.

In the picture above, "LULLABY" smells like lotus. However, I really don't know about the smell of lotus - but it's nice. The next one "SUNNY", which is my favorite incense, smells like cypress. This smell always makes me calm down. Finally I chose 9 kinds of scent, and have got 50 sticks in total.

By the way, when I chose the incenses at the store, there were 3 or 4 other customers at the same time. Surprisingly, they were all men and they seemed to take choosing the incenses very seriously. However, I've generally only seen a few men before who seemed to be there with their wife or girlfriend - each of the men this time were alone. It looks the number of men who care about their room fragrance is increasing.

The sequel to the HOT match

As I mentioned before, the HOT match in Japan between Habanero to Jolokia resulted in Jolokia's winning (in my opinion anyway).


But now, new faces have joined this exciting match from the US - their names are Habanero chips and Jalapeño chips!!

However, the Japanese Jolokia and Habanero are much better than new ones because the new chips aren't as spicy as the Japanese ones (additionally, Jalapeño tasted and smelled like REAL green pepper...was that a snack?).

To add more credibility, this latest match was held in my office and not only my colleagues but also the president of my company were looking forward to see the tide of this battle - work hard, you guys!!

Cooking class - Round one "Christmas dinner"

There're two things I've started doing in this year - one is writing my blog in English, the other is joining a cooking class!!!

The cooking class is held on the first Tuesday night of each month. I could put the recipes on this site correctly in English but I guess that isn't so interesting for you..., so I'll introduce the name of dishes and some points about then.

First dish - Quiche with a few kinds of mushroom and spring onion

Basically, we have to make a piecrust from the beginning (but we used a ready-made one because this is just 2 hours class). I believe the most difficult thing about making quiche is preparing the flacky piecrust. In this case, "preparing" means thourghly mixing the ingredients together - flour, butter, sugar, salt and eggs.

So I'm not sure whether I can make it successfully at home, I might use the ready-made frozen piecrust then. Anyway, it tastes pretty nice and it costs less than the one which is sold at department stores. That's really nice.

Second dish - Creamy potato and cauliflower soup

This soup is made from just the vegetables - potatoes, cauliflowers and onion. We don't need to use milk or fresh cream. So I was surprised that it was very thick. I like the decoration on this dish. The red dots are some pieces of red bell pepper.

Third dish - Steamed chicken with onion and olive

...I can't see the chicken, it's a bad picture. The two other item on the plate behind the chicken aren't made by ourselves, but just garnish. The left one looks like a Christmas tree, doesn't it? This is made of boiled spinach.

This was my dinner on Tuesday. I had a lot of fun at this class and every dish can be made easily but looks so nice. After all, I think to take dishes' pictures, which look tasty, is the most difficult part of the class for me!

The Uber-tyrant vs the Great satan

Now, a very HOT battle has started in Japan - That is "Habanero, the uber-tyrant vs Jolokia, the great satan" - the Japanese snack match, which is made from the spiciest chili peppers in the world?

Habanero chili is well known as the spiciest chili pepper, however the Naga Jolokia pepper is newly certified as the world's spiciest chili pepper by Guinness. And now Tohato, the Japanese confectionery company, has released new spicy snacks at the same time which use these hottest chili peppers so people can decide which is the hottest snack. "Habanero, the uber-tyrant" and "Jolokia, the great satan" are the names of the each snack.

How do they taste? - I've tried Jolokia first...that's pretty good. It is not only spicy but also good taste. And how about Habanero...yeah - very spicy, excactly. It irritates the nasal passage, but it isn't as spicy as I expected.
After trying them again and again and again, I think the spicy taste isn't too different each other, but Habanero is a little bit spicier(ish) than Jolokia. Basically I could lose my sense of taste at this point.

Finally, I prefer Jolokia to Habanero because Jolokia has some other good taste to it as well as the spicy flavor. Well, I'm going to have one more Jolokia....

Legacy gadget!? (just my thought)

I started new English lesson yesterday. The name of class is "Listening and Speaking," and (as the name suggests) the lesson aims to expand English listening and speaking skills. The instructor, who comes from Australia, fixes our wrong expressions over and over again, so I think this lesson will be really useful for me.


We also train by listening to English phrases using audio CD, and we can copy the training materials as we like. According to a school staff if I bring a new MD I can copy them---MD!?!?


Exactly, MD (Mini Disc) was popular among many people in Japan until a couple of years ago, and I've also used it before. But now, I guess iPods or some other portable audio players with harddiscs are much more popular and useful than MD. And I have no MD players, just an iPod...

Looking at a few websites most MD players aren't so cheap. Additionally, I' ve found one which can be connected to PCs. Unfortunately it's so expensive (over 30000JPY) though I think very useful.

So should I get a MD player just for listening to the training material? This is a big problem for me.

At Tokyo International Airport

My mother's gone to her hometown this morning. She has to go there by air because her hometown is Ishigaki-island in Okinawa pref.

I wish I could go there with her and could tell something about Okinawa...the beautiful ocean, fun people and so on...but I couldn't this time.

Instead, I sent mother off from Haneda airport (the formal name is Tokyo Internation Airport) and took some pictures of the airplane which she got on.

Now on boarding (I guess)

All set! (ish)

Take off!!

Fly higher,

And higher...

The airplane went so higher at this time, so I really didn't take a good picture like this. Recent degital cameras are high quality indeed.

Character analyses

There are a lot of character analyses in Japan. Certainly some of them can convince me, and some cannot. Today I heard about a character analysis by your simple movement. Anyhow, why don't you try it just for fun? Don't go into deep thought!! Are you convinced or not??



1. Clasp your hands to make your fingers alternate - which thumb is top? The right thumb? or left one?

2.Cross your arms on your chest - which arm is top? The right? or left?

==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==

When you clasp your hands with your ---
Right thumb is top : You usually use "Left brain" for input information
Left thumb is top : You usually use "Right brain" for input information

And when you cross your arms with your ---
Right arm is top : You usually use "Left brain" for output your thought
Left arm is top : You usually use "Right brain" for output your thought

The role of Right brain : image, intuition, inspiration
The role of Left brain: logic, rationality, calculation

After all, people all around the world fall into 8 types...really!?

Right-input/Right-output women : daring women
She tends to act instinctively and to challeng everything she become curious.Therefore she repeats the same mistake, but she's strongly resilient.

Right-input/Right-output men : a bit narcissistic men
He tends to be proud of himself and to think everything positively and intuitively.Sometimes he turnes to be argumentative because he wants to show himself to be a logical person.

Right-input/Left-output women : tender-hearted women
She is a soft-hearted person, and act flexibly caring about everyone else.However she never plays a role as leader, she's good at supporting someone.

Right-input/Left-output men : conpassionate men
He looks so brusque but basically he likes to care for everyone else and have lots of curiosity for everything.He's apt to judge people by the his first impression, and he never talk to them whom he feel disagreeable.

Left-input/Right-output women : women someone rely on
She can not only make cool judgement but also concern for everyone.But, occasionally she sticks around her own thought and tends to torture herself.

Left-input/Right-output men : men like a fixer
He can see everything through an objective perspective and provide convincing explanations.On the other hand, he doesn't show his real feeling and he tends to focus on efficiency.

Left-input/Left-ouput women : talented women
She always desires to get the CORRECT conclusion, so her thought is always logical and objective.Additionally She is the real perfectionalist so she turns to be timid in the matter of love.

Left-input/Left-ouput men : robot-ish men
His only standard of judgement is "correct or incorrect", so he's fit to solve any problems. He gains the trust by his attitude, but he's weak at sharing someone's feelings.

---- BTW, I'm "Left-input/Right-output women."

The Coin Bank

Do you have a coin bank ? I've tried to put just 500JPY coins into my coin bank for a couple of years, and finally it is filled to capacity!!! I've recently been taking care to save the 500JPY coins I receive, and sometimes save 2000 or 2500JPY at a time - that's more than money I use most days.




The full coin bank - the simple way of making me happy. When I place them on deposit, I'll try again.