Coffee Shop in Japan

Nothing too new, but I am happy.

Last month, I was walking around, exploring my new home and when I went to a coffee shop, I got asked if I wanted a job working there. So now I work at this amazing little Japanese coffee shop with such nice people. It is helping my Japanese so much and I am making some nice friends. All of my co-workers are close to my age and they all speak Japanese with me. The customers are really friendly too. I have no time now because I work every day, but I really like my life. 

I Love Chie from Tokyo's Watanabe Hair Salon

So many of you guys keep sending me messages telling me that you found out about Watanabe Hair Salon from this site. Chie Funakura is my hairdresser at Watanabe, and she is the best hairdresser I have ever had. Please, if you find out that Watanabe Hair Salon is the best hair place in Tokyo through this website, tell Chie where you read about it. Here! She is so nice and I want her to have so many happy-headed customers like me.

 For the first time, I am actually wearing my hair down because it is doing what I want it to do and it feels so healthy. I have always had tangly or over processed hair and since I'm a very low-maintenance person, I've never known what to do with it. Ever since Chie started doing my hair, I have never had to spend time on it or even think about it. Last time she did my hair, she curled it and I felt like Camille Javal in Le Mepris. 

Chie has lived and worked abroad, so she speaks perfect English and also has experience dealing with foreign people's hair. She dyes and cuts my hair better than anyone ever did back home. I liked my hairdresser back home, too, but Chie is just better. She's so experienced with "Gaijin Hair" and has the right products do do it properly. 

I live in Kansai now, but whenever I go back to Tokyo to visit my friends, I will continue getting my hair done at Watanabe. I know I keep writing about Chie, but that's just because you really have to trust me on this one. As far as I'm concerned, Watanabe Hair Salon is the only hair place in Japan.

Watanabe Hair Dressing

You can speak English on the phone with them: 03 3405 1188

Address: Jingumae 3-35-6 Shibuya-Ku 

Who's your favorite SMAP?

SMAP is one of the cheeziest things in Japan. I don't even know what to call them. They're like a boy band singing group that also does advertisements and acts in skits and hosts TV shows. It would be like if the Backstreet Boys started their own SNL-type show and also hosted late-night shows and also worked as spokespeople for every marketable product in the country. But they actually are kind of funny and entertaining. 

SMAP looks too old to be doing what they do, but teen sensations have a much shorter shelf life across the ocean than they do in Japan. SMAP is a long-term career for these guys and the same cannot be said of the guys from B44. I have watched some TV shows SMAP been in with my roommates and some of them have been sort of funny. There was one sort of iron-chef type TV show where the guests had to surprise the chef with a request. The premise was that the guests thought it was actual chefs in a competition, but really it was just the SMAP guys and it was funny to see the guests ask for Korean food and watch SMAP scramble around trying to figure out how to cook.Most young people don't admit to liking SMAP, but everybody has an opinion on them and I've never met any person in Japan who dislikes them. And everybody has a favorite SMAP guy. Even if the person acts too cool for it or even if they have to be tipsy before telling you, absolutely everyone in Japan has a favorite SMAP. I guess my favorite SMAP person is Tsuyoshi Kusanagi because he speaks Korean and seems interested about the rest of the world. He's kind of an actor and is also on all sorts of daytime television shows that my roommate watches in the morning. Here is Tsuyoshi Kusanagi in an advertisement for ion water.

Basically these guys can sell anything in Japan. I am constantly amazed that there is no such thing as overexposure in this country. I wrote about the Kimura Takuya advertisements before. He is in SMAP. Go on any train in Japan and you'll see the SMAP guys in billboards.

It's not really very cool for young Japanese people to admit to liking SMAP, but it's kind of like a default thing where even if they're neutral to SMAP, they still know who they are and they still have a favorite person. Being a foreign person talking about SMAP to young Japanese people is sort of like being a foreign person talking to young Canadian people about Celine Dion. They sort of cringe over it but usually act polite. The difference is that most young Canadians can't stand our most famous singer while most Japanese people like SMAP, at least a little bit.

大福餅が大好きです Daifuku Japanese sweets are delicious.

Japanese sweets are really delicious. My favorite sweets are made with mochi and anko. I like Daifuku and dango very much. Daifuku are the Japanese sweets in the pictures you're looking at. They're rice balls filled with bean paste and covered in flour. Dango look like lollipops but they're the same things and sometimes dango are flavored with fruit. Anko is a sweetened bean paste made from crushed red Azuki beans. It takes a while to get used to eating anko, but when you acquire the taste for it, it is really delicious. Mochi is rice that is pounded to make something that has the texture of cookie dough. (...or the consistency of a fat person's upper arm, but the cookie dough sounds tastier, don't you think?) Here is a video of some people making mochi. My favorite Japanese dessert right now is called ichigo daifuku which is a ball of mochi filled with anko and an entire strawberry. It is beautiful. Sometimes daifuku has different fruit fillings, but the most common fruit is strawberry. People eat ichigo daifuku during the Spring because that's when the berries are fresh and in season. I'm sad that they just stopped selling my favorite dessert, but it's probably just as well because summer is coming and I always try to eat less sweets in the spring and summertime.Many Japanese desserts also have green tea powder in them and matcha is also delicious. Japanese sweets are not sweet in the way that Western sweets are. They are plainer and have less sugar and almost no fat in them. I don't like cake and most Western desserts are too sickly-sweet or creamy for my taste, so Japanese sweets are perfect for me. They also, like almost every other type of food in Japan, look like art.

Please watch this awesome video of the cutest girl eating mochi. It is the the most typical reaction to anko and mochi by a foreign person that you will ever see. It is basically the reaction that every single person who has ever tried mochi and anko dessert for the first time has. I wish she allowed imbedding for this video because it is really funny and a great example of what East Asian sweets taste like to a foreign person. I love how the girl looks like she isn't enjoying it, yet keeps eating. It makes me laugh because the reaction is exactly like how mine was the first time I tried daifuku. I liked it and didn't like it at the same time. Then the next day, I started to want another one. 大福餅が大好きです

I think that mochi was actually invented in China. They had daifuku style sweets in Shanghai and Hong Kong when I was there in December. In Chinatown in Yokohama and Kobe, they sell delicious sesame-covered mochi balls filled with sweet sesame paste and served warm. I know they also have this kind of dessert in Korea.Those of you who have tried it: what do you think of mochi, anko and Japanese sweets in general?

血液型 Blood type horoscopes in Japan and Korea

In Japan, one of the first things you are asked when you meet someone new is "What is your blood type?" which to most foreign people is sort of a funny or even almost creepy question to ask a near stranger. We only think about blood types when we think about donating blood or about being in an accident and needing a transfusion. Basically, blood types in the West only make us think about hospitals. But here in Japan, blood types carry significance and are similar to horoscopes for Japanese people. There are four blood types: A, B, O and AB. If you don't know your blood type, people will be shocked. Blood type is called ketsueki gatta in Japanese.

I first found out about the blood types when I worked at a Korean school in Vancouver. Only Japanese and Korean people care about blood types. (Occasionally Taiwanese people, too, but it's not a pan-Asia thing. For example, in mainland China, nobody knows about ketsueki gatta.) I asked my students to tell me about the blood types and learned a lot about them from the kids I was teaching. Some people said that type A was loyal, trustworthy, generous and sweet while others thought type A was boring, strict, controlling and too shy and quiet. The same goes for all the other types. It's important to remember that whatever you say your blood type is, you will be judged and depending on who asks you, they may take it really seriously. If you're an English teacher, don't ever tell your students what your blood type is. I am serious. Some students think that certain blood types are lazy or unmotivated and if you're that type and you're their teacher, they won't respect you. This has happened to two different people I know.

That's where being a foreign person comes in handy. Just say you don't know. Unless you've donated blood, you probably aren't lying: you probably really don't know or care what your ketsueki gatta is. Just be coy and ask "which one do you think I am?" or ask them about their own type and what types they are most compatible with. If you're a guy and a Japanese/Korean girl that you want to date asks you what your blood type is, I'd recommend saying you don't know, even if you do know. If you really like her, don't say anything until you find out what she says about it, because usually, this is a dealbreaker sort of question. Especially if you're AB, which is the "crazy" blood type who nobody likes or the B type, who most girls think are cheaters. Most girls 15-30 take this pretty seriously. Word of warning. The picture at the top of this post is from a Korean movie called "My boyfriend is a Type B" about a type A girl who falls for a passionate, wild, irresponsible type B boy. People (especially girls) take this stuff seriously.

The only way I judge a personality by blood type is by whether or not a person asks you what your type is. You can tell a bit about the kind of person they are by whether or not they ask you about your blood type. The same kind of people that would ask you "what's your sign?" in Western countries are the ones who will ask you about your blood type. Namely friendly young people, girls who read and care about fashion magazines, slightly flaky/hippie people and people who are trying to hit on you. Do you really want to date someone who judges you based on your blood type? That's just like dating someone who cares about what horoscope sign you are. If you're ok with that, wonderful. The only thing I think is a little bit odd is that I asked my students to do a show of hands as to who was which type and almost all my favorite students were O type blood. Of course, I couldn't ask them about that, though. Does anyone know an interesting English language website about these blood types?

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY TO MY WONDERFUL MOTHER!!

Golden Week Camping in Yamanashi, Japan

Golden Week is a special week-long holiday kind of like the March Break of Japan. Japan is famous for having many, many national holidays and Golden Week is a special time in early April where a bunch of those holidays (Greenery Day, Children's Day, Showa's Day...) happen really close to each other and the entire week becomes a National Holiday. I went camping in Yamanashi this Golden Week. Camping in Yamanashi was fun even though if I had had the money, I'd have planned to go to Thailand. But camping was nice and it reminded me of home. I like camping, and this time was really great because we rented a huge lodge and slept on the tatami floor together. It rained on one of the days and I was so happy we weren't in a tent. This is a picture of the beautiful lodge we stayed in. It was a bit cheap and a bit dirty, but it was lovely because of the river and the great people I went with.I went with only Japanese people and most of them don't speak English at all, so I learned a lot of new Japanese expressions and words. The most useful expressions I learned were how to use Koto for "things about something else" and Kanji for similar feelings. Once I learned these expressions, I couldn't believe how I went for so long without knowing them. I would hear people talking about "Julie no koto" quite often but always just figured out what they meant by context and never really realized what koto actually meant. I also learned that a lot of expressions I was using before were male-specific expressions. Hmm. Japan is the first country I have lived in where my girl friends and guy friends are in about equal numbers. Usually, most of my friends are always guys. In Japan, I am lucky to have a lot of both boy and girl friends.For breakfast, we had curry and whenever I eat curry for breakfast, I feel so happy to live in Japan. Curry for breakfast is sort of normal here in that it's not unusual at all. I don't know how many of my friends back home would be into a curry breakfast. I guess I've had curry for breakfast a few times with other people, but I don't think you could call it a common thing. The house was right near a river. Everyone went fishing. I don't know why, but I like fishing even though I'm vegetarian and don't eat fish. I just like being with a bunch of my friends just relaxing near a lake. Some of us were good at fishing, and other weren't so great. Yuya caught six small fish. Junpei caught a tree.Japanese people are often really serious about food quality. If you watch TV in Japan, you cannot escape food channels and food programs and shows featuring celebrities eating food made by celebrity chefs. My Japanese friends here are far more into gourmet than many of my friends back home. The ones I went camping with were cooking all sorts of small octopus on skewers and random, beautiful shellfish. They even rented a smoke machine and made smoked cheese and smoked salmon.I went camping with really funny people. Some of the guys brought xylophones, masks, castanets, goggles, Matsuri costumes and a bunch of recorders (You know recorders. They're that musical instrument you had to learn in elementary school. You can probably still play "when the saints go marching in" "Hot Cross Buns" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on one if you can remember what a recorder looks like.) Every so often, one person would disappear and then reappear wearing something retarded and do a skit or a musical performance. So funny.Yamanashi is a beautiful area that reminds me a lot of BC except for the trees. The trees look tropical, kind of like the ones I saw in Hong Kong and the trees I've seen in pictures of Brazil or Jamaica. The bridges and small, rural houses and rivers looked like inner BC, but the trees made me remember that I was away from Canada. The houses we rented was on a small mountain, so in the morning I could look out at the trees that were always covered by this weird mist. I did a bunch of other things over Golden Week, but camping in Yamanashi was really beautiful and a lot of fun.I'm going back for ten days or so to visit my family sometime in July or August. My family and friends are the only things I really, really miss about home. I can't wait to hug my parents.