Permit the Free Ring!

Babelfish is one of the worst ways to translate things from Japanese to English, but people still use it all the time. It's the worst because it translates everything absolutely literally so that half the time, everything ends up sounding metaphorical. You open your email and there's this weird poem-like message from the person you met last weekend. You have no idea what the meaning of the message is, but it's still pretty awesome to receive. That's why it's also kind of the best translation method. I'd say that until you have received a weird Babelfish translator message from a new friend, you haven't really experienced living as a foreign person in Japan.

Please allow me to present... the last paragraph of Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech translated from English to Japanese and then back to English by Babelfish.

I today possess dream! I day all valley am noble, clearly be able to do the rough place where all hills and the mountain low speed have the thing dream which is made, you can do the place where it bends straightly; " And the glory of the main thing to make clear, as for all meats that together." You see; this is our desires, thing this where I return to with south is reliance. By this reliance, we the desired stone are cut off from the mountain of despair. With this reliance, we can deform the mismatch which our nations sounds earnestly in the symphony whose same trade union is beautiful. By this reliance, we cooperation, in order to pray together, in order to fight together, in order to do to be imprisoned together in order to protect freedom together, have informed that we are 1 days freely to be possible. And this is day -- As for this day God' It is everything; New meaning you can sing the child of s: My national ' tis of the land where the freedom of thee and thee is sweet, I sing. Pilgrim' My father it died the land somewhere, whether of land; The pride of s, from all hillsides, permit the free ring!

PS. The Nintendo picture is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time, and I hope that Tofugu.com won't mind that I put it on my site. The Japanese says, "I can't read!!" for those of you who, uh, can't read it. Please go to Tofugu.com for more funny.

Disappearing Japanese Friends

This is long and more personal than usual, so I'm sorry if it bores you. It's about how in Japan, friends can "dump" you like a boyfriend or girlfriend. It has happened to almost everyone I know here. A close friend will just suddenly block your phone number and mail and disappear from your life. And it's so sad.

I have never had a bad breakup, and I've only had one that actually made me truly sad. This is probably because I have only dated nice, great people. Also because I have never been dumped and haven't had very many boyfriends.

So couple breakups don't make me sad. But sometimes, friendships end suddenly and those are for me a million times worse than a couple breakup. They're horrible mostly because you never really expect a friendship to end. I expect friendships to change and for people to drift apart, but not to end in some tearful, bitter goodbye speech. So when a close friend "broke up" with me a few years ago, I was pretty devastated. She had good reasons, but I still wished we had been able to just talk things through and offer apologies to each other and stay friends. Then, I moved to Japan. Friendships break up all the time here, and it's awful.

When I first moved to Japan, I had a friend whose name was (close to the name) Hanako. She was a really sweet girl and she showed me around Tokyo. She introduced me to her family and we took day trips and had sleepovers together. She even took me to the hospital when I got sick once and couldn't speak any Japanese. We were pretty good friends. (If you've been reading this thing for a long time, you've seen her picture before.)

Then, I introduced Hanako to some other people in my circle of friends and soon she just stopped calling me. I guessed that she just wasn't interested in being as close as we'd been before, so I stopped bothering her with messages and phone calls. I am not desperate for friends and I don't like always being the only one who invites others out. Months later, Hanako phoned me to tell me that she had to meet with me and that it was very important. We went out for dinner and I was happy but a little bit worried, guessing that she was having family problems or some important thing she needed to talk about.

What Hanako wanted to talk about was ME. More specifically, she wanted to show me a long list of sins that I had committed during our friendship. Among them were not commenting on some facebook picture of her friend (a stranger to me)'s wedding, not "properly thanking" her for taking me to the hospital (I made her a card and took her out to dinner. But even if I hadn't, who wouldn't help their friend go to the hospital?) and being late 20 minutes to meet and go shopping at Ikea once. (The trains in Japan were hard to get used to when I first moved here)
I was really surprised and very sad that she had felt this way about me for so long. I was also kind of insulted and indignant, since I don't keep lists of my friend's faults.

Then, Hanako told me something useful for life in Japan. It's something that is very important to Japanese people and it's called Isshin Denshin. (I'll write about it someday, but until then, you will have to look it up on the internet.) Hanako also told me that telling me what I'd done wrong had been "very hard" for her to do and that I should consider myself lucky that she'd met with me because most Japanese people are too shy to meet with the person face to face and just prefer to drift away by blocking all phone calls and text messages.

I didn't think that was true. I actually thought Hanako was just crazy. She was such a thoughtful and great girl in so many ways, but there was a petty, mean streak in her that I could see sometimes. So it was easy to dismiss Hanako as a friend I was simply better off without. Until I started hearing about disappearing friends from every foreign person I met and realized that it's a very Japanese thing to just suddenly end a friendship with no forewarning whatsoever.

Your closest friend can just suddenly block your phone number and disappear from your life. This is not at all uncommon here in Japan. Since the incident with Hanako, I have tried really hard to notice the moods of my friends and to try to behave accordingly if I value their friendship.

But now, suddenly it happened to me again and I don't know what I did wrong. I just miss that friendship so much. It feels like my heart is breaking and it makes me so lonely. Friendship breakups are so much worse than couple breakups. If you are Japanese or know about this aspect of friendship in Japan, please tell me what I can do (if there is anything) to keep this friendship. Every day, it's all I can think about.

The Quiet Life

Japanese people are often far better at reading and writing in English than they are at speaking and listening in English. The reasons why are pretty obvious. Japan is the most ethnically homogeneous country in the world and there aren’t a lot of occasions where the average person gets to speak English. Schools in Japan focus largely on memorization and learning correct rules while schools back home focus on being able to give opinions and explain things in your own words. Both have their good and bad points, but the outcome is that Japanese people are usually stronger at reading and writing than they are at speaking.

Partly because this fact makes people self-conscious, partly because people here are less apt to brag about (or even mention) their accomplishments and partly because Japanese people tend to be shy compared to people from other countries, I often meet people who are secretly really good at English. So after I’ve made a fool of myself speaking to them in my broken Japanese and trying my best to understand everything they’re saying, they’ll exchange text addresses with me and I’ll receive this beautifully fluent English message from them a few days later.

It started off as a joke with one of my friends, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. We were joking about how people are often so much more attractive in writing. You have to think about what you want to say, so you rarely write something rude or ignorant without thinking. You rarely use annoying filler words or expressions that make you sound like an idiot. People are usually better in writing. Without exception, all of the people I have ever found attractive have either become more or less attractive to me after writing to me, and I have never dated anyone who has been unable to write me good letters or emails.

That’s how the joke started. My friend and I were talking about how the ideal marriage / relationship would be with someone who doesn’t speak your language at all but can read and write it well and has great taste. It would be perfect. You could go for walks together and appreciate the scenery without listening to their boring story about work. You could watch good (subtitled) movies together and sometimes just lie around reading together in silence. If you had anything to say or comment on, you could write it down. You wouldn’t bore them with annoying gossip about your friend’s lives because that would take too long to write down. You’d never have to hear the same anecdote twice and you’d never yell stupid things at each other in the heat of an argument. Basically, there would be no arguments.

You could listen to great music together and show each other all your favorite musicians while eating delicious dinners and nobody would be yapping about anything. You could just listen to the music and enjoy the taste of the food. There wouldn’t be much jealousy because you wouldn’t hear about what they think about their attractive co-worker and you wouldn’t be able to mention that your neighbor invited you out for a drink last week. If you wanted to know their opinions about anything or what they’ve been reading lately, you could just read a nice, well thought-out letter full of all of those things. Then they could reply to it with an equally lovely letter. You could go swimming together and play board games together and learn to cook or play an instrument together and just kiss all the time. You could communicate through letters and emails and good eye contact. You’d probably actually end up getting to know them better in the long run. If you were with the right person, life would be richer without talking. You’d never get tired of each other.

My friend and I were just joking about this until later when I got home and kept thinking about it and realized that it actually sounded almost perfect.

Akira Yamaguchi

On Sunday, my friends took me to a café. We drank really good coffee and looked at all the art books that were lying in piles all over the café. I found some very interesting and detailed paintings by an artist named Akira Yamaguchi 山口あきら. He borrows the style of old Japanese paintings and settings and mixes that with very modern situations and recent inventions.

Yamaguchi's artwork is very beautiful and often very funny, too. He has pretty funny paintings of people grooming horses that have motercycle wheels instead of legs. His paintings look traditional like Yamato-e (大和絵) and rakuchu rakugai zu (洛中洛外図) but the detail is modern and subtle and sometimes kind of ironic. For example, he will paint a picture on an Edo-era village but use katakana (the alphabet for western/borrowed words) for the signs instead of traditional kanji. In one, a woman is pouring milk for a man instead of sake. Little things like that. I love his paintings of cities so much. The detail is great. If you are interested, some of my favorite paintings are called “One Hundred Unusual Scenes of Osaka Trams” and “A Man Following Others Blindly”. Akira Yamaguchi is new favorite artist for now.

Japanese insects are horrifying.

I was walking home tonight and saw something moving on the side of the road. I looked closer and could not believe it when I saw a greenish-brown spider larger than my hand. It was really awful. So of course, I looked it up on the internet and found out that it's not an uncommon spider in Japan. It's called the Ashidaka spider and it usually lives in homes. It eats bugs like cockroaches and doesn't build webs or bite humans. It's generally thought of as a pretty good bug except that it's massive and very, very fast.

I have no idea what I would do if I saw one inside my house. It's not even an insect. It's basically an animal. I would probably never sleep again. So then after finding that spider, I went on a rampage looking up Japanese insects and there are so many crazy bugs in Japan! Many of them are huge, too. Did you know that Japanese cockroaches can fly? And that it's not unusual for them to grow fat and as long as your middle finger? I don't think we even really have cockroaches in my home country.

I think I am someone who needs excitement. I'm pretty good at creating that excitement for myself, and I am pretty easily satisfied by things other people might not find as exciting as I do, but I think I am pretty demanding in terms of the excitement I need in my life. I wonder if I will ever be able to stay in one place. I constantly want to move on.

Yasukuni Shrine 靖国神社

Most people outside of Japan have heard about the 靖国神社 Yasukuni Shrine. This is the shrine in Tokyo most famous for housing class A war criminals from the Second World War. It is a very controversial shrine because every year, people wait to see if Japan's prime minister will make the annual pilgrimage there. If he does, it will alienate Japan from East Asian neighbors like China and Korea. Koizumi used to go to the Yasukuni shrine every year, and China's leaders refused to meet with him at summits throughout his presidency.

I guess that a good comparison that most Western people would understand is this one. Imagine that Germany had a huge monument and museum devoted to and commemorating Hitler and all of the Nazis who died in the Second World War. Imagine that, but with a religious overtone to it that says the spirits of those Nazi war criminals are still inside the shrine. Compare the outrage of Europe's Jewish communities to the outrage that China and Korea feel towards this Japanese shrine. If this isn't an appropriate comparison, please let me know.

Most foreign people living in Japan have strong opinions regarding the Yasukuni shrine, and almost all of these opinions are overwhelmingly negative. I've always wanted to talk to a Japanese person about it, but I've never felt able to ask. Last month, I finally got into an appropriate situation with one of my closest friends here to talk about this shrine and hear a Japanese perspective on it. It ended up being a wonderful discussion. Now, my feelings about this shrine are even more torn and confused than they were before. I still have very negative feelings towards the shrine and what it represents but I have some sympathy for the young soldiers who gave their lives for something they were convinced was right even though it was dead wrong. I always feel sorry for soldiers. They are in the lowest position; the most sincere and earnest, yet the ones who are the least informed about what they are actually fighting for. I feel sorry for the children, too, who are so impressionable and sincere. I imagine how difficult it must have been for the Hitler Youth children after Germany lost the war and how difficult it must have been for the Japanese children to hear their emperor renouncing his title as a deity over the radio.

It's an interesting thing. I am definitely on the side of Korea and China in my opinions on the Yasukuni shrine. I also definitely think that the Japanese prime minister should not make any public pilgrimages to the shrine. But that the same time, at least some consideration and sympathy should be reserved for the young people who died for something they were unfairly convinced was right.

Lately, I've been wanting to go to the Yasukuni shrine. Here is a fantastic article about a non-Japanese man who visited it. His article is beautifully written and articulate. I especially liked the part where the elderly man talked to him. Some of my best early experiences in Japan were when strangers would come up to me (in tourist areas like museums, back when I didn't speak any Japanese at all) and explain things to me in fluent English. I remember all of the names and faces of these people. If you're Japanese and you're reading this, please remember that if you see someone in Japan looking like an obvious tourist, you can make their day and spark an interest in aspects of Japan just by talking to them. Don't be shy! (But remember to only do this to obvious tourists... if you approach a person who has been here for years and start speaking in English, it's not usually appreciated.)

Also, this site about Japan is great.

I love all of the random parades in Japan

I think that everyone who has lived here for a while will know what I mean because it has happened to everyone I know here. One of my favorite things about living here is that sometimes you can be taking a walk and run into a random festival. Japan has so many matsuri festivals (it's redundant to say matsuri festival since matsuri means festival in Japanese, but I want you to know what I mean) at different times of the year and at different places. You will hear drums and music on an ordinary day and then suddenly you'll be in a crowd of people wearing traditional clothing and pulling a golden cart down the road.Many matsuri festivals are like parades. They have to do with pulling a cart down the road and wearing costumes and chanting or playing music. The other day, on my day off, I was on the train and saw a matsuri parade happening at a station the train passed. I just got off at that station and walked over to look. Yesterday, some random people with dinosaur costumes and accordions paraded through the street in front of my cafe. (though that probably wasn't a matsuri, and we have that kind of random parade back home, too.) A few days ago, I was woken up by a child-matsuri parading around the street in front of my house. There were about 25 children pulling a golden cart down the road. The reason why they pull a cart down the road is because it's a Shinto (Japanese religion) tradition. During the festival, a local shrine's kami (the name is the Shinto deity) is carried or pulled through the town in an ornate golden or red box (called a mikoshi) or a decorated float (called a dashi). Matsuri time is the only time when the kami is able to leave the shrine, so it's an important event. Sometimes the parades are really loud and wild and other times, the parades are solemn.

All my favorite Japanese food is going away. Now Konyakku Jelly.

Since June, I have been eating Konyakku jelly daily. They are chewy, delicious fruit snacks made from potato extract. They only have 6 calories in them, so I eat them at night when I get hungry after dinner. I love konyakku jelly. If you put it in the freezer, it tastes better than any ice cream. They are heart-shaped. My favorite flavors are red apple, mango and peach. But there is a pretty massive warning label on the package, as you can see...That warning label tells customers that Konyakku jelly is thick and poses a choking hazard. Because of the choking hazard, it shouldn't be eaten by children or the elderly. In case you are retarded or can't read, there is a cartoon of a baby and a grandpa with X marks for eyes, which absolutely everyone in the world knows means death. (I'm not being sarcastic. Everyone actually does know that.)But of course, some lady had to ignore the warning and feed this dangerous, adult snack food to her one year old. The baby died, the company was sued and now there's no more Mannen Life brand batake Konyakku jelly for me to eat. And I'm so disappointed. I noticed that they have been harder to find and buy recently, but I didn't realize that they had been discontinued.

All my favorite foods in Japan are going away. Bananas, Konyakku jelly... I just hope nothing happens to otokomae brand tofu and persimmons. I eat that tofu for breakfast and I eat about four persimmons every day.

A Story About My Potato Vendor

This is a yaki imo cart. Yaki imo is a kind of cooked potato. It's really healthy because it is just a plain old potato. The peel is purple and the inside is yellow. It's sort of sweet and it's very nice. It is usually sold by old people from the back of yaki imo vans and carts. There is usually a loudspeaker blasting a yaki imo song. It sounds like a Muslim call to prayer, "yaaaaaki immmmmmo, yaaaaaaki immmmmmmo" very slow and almost mournful. In the fall and winter, these carts are everywhere. They are like the Dickie Dee ice cream vans in the summer in Canada, except healthier and warm and more traditional and more of a spectacle.One of these potato vendors really loves me! He is the cutest old man and he drives slowly down my block every night in his little van filled with wood, fire and potato. The first time I saw him, I said "Good evening" and he just stopped the potato van right there, got out and immediately began telling me about his grandchildren.At that time, I was pretty happy about it. Listening to him was a good way to practice listening to the Japanese language and I never really get to talk to old people in Japan. But now, every time he sees me, he gets out and starts a very long conversation. His favorite thing to talk about is San Francisco, even though I'm not American and I my knowledge of San Francisco doesn't go to much further beyond the fact that Full House was set there, Berkeley is there, a lot of Japanese people live there, the San Francisco pride parade is really big, the Golden Gate Bridge is there, the big jail in the ocean is there and hippies used to love it there.

The potato man loves geography and he's obsessed with San Francisco and he's proud that he knows street names and where all the San Fran tourist sites are in relation to each other. This is what he likes to talk about. I like the yaki imo man, though, so I politely listen to him talk and agree with everything.

I wouldn't even really mind listening to him talk, though, if it was just that. I think of my own grandparents and how they might possibly be doing the same thing. If they meet a person from, say, Laos, they might start up a conversation about how their granddaughter is living in Japan because Japan is in Asia / around the same area of the globe as Laos and that's just the way old people are. People didn't travel much back then. The Yaki Imo guy has never even asked me what country I come from. I have told him I'm not from San Francisco or even from San Francisco's country, but he doesn't care. To him, I am from Gaikoku. I don't mind, though. He's elderly.
The thing I mind is that while I am listening to him talk, I have to stand next to the Yaki Imo cart in which a fire is burning. There is a real wood fire in the back of the potato-man's van. That means that after every conversation, I have to take a shower and wash all of my clothes because everything reeks like campfire.

I really like this man and I want to be polite, but it's getting difficult. I usually take the long road home now just to save myself half an hour of listening to stories and being asked questions about San Francisco and then having to wash everything.

People who have lived longer than anyone else and are usually cuter than anyone else are often also really lonely. I think that's sad. But as I am sitting here typing this, all I can smell is campfire, campfire, campfire.

WE HAVE LASERS!!!!

NOTHING ABOUT JAPAN. 

This is just the best thing ever.

We have lasers!!!!

I wish it were just all lasers and no commentary.

I also wish it were longer.

Loving food and treating your body well

I can't get away from Japan's banana diet. It's all over the TV and people are always mentioning it. It's Japan's new fad diet involving a banana for breakfast. Fad diets don’t work because they are an unnatural way to eat. You will eat that way for a short time and then fall right back into your old eating habits and your old weight. I think that portion control and reducing chemicals / refined products / sugars / saturated fats is the only way to actually have a healthy eating plan you won’t give up.I think the best thing you can do to control your craving for unhealthy food is to convince yourself that the food that isn’t healthy also isn’t tasty. Read a book like Fast Food Nation, where you learn that McDonalds hamburgers are just bottom-level meat flavored with chemicals made from a perfume factory in the Midwest. Read a book like The Hundred-Year Lie or The Quickening and learn about how we don’t even know the long-term effect of the chemicals in our foods and we can’t trust the FDA for reliable, unbiased info about food. Learn about dairy industry mistakes or chicken battery cages if you want to be grossed out of eating that. Read The Secret Family for information about processed desserts. That book had a whole chapter about a Danish breakfast pastry and instant coffee. So crazy! All of these books are easy to find and read. I think they were almost all bestsellers.
Another thing you can do is replace gross food with healthy food according to your cravings. Here is a really great chart that will help you replace your cravings.

If you crave … what you should eat is …

For example, if you crave bread or toast, you may actually be lacking Nitrogen, which means that you should eat more high protein foods like fish, meat, nuts, and beans. If you crave chewing ice, (which I always do) that may be your body crying out for Iron. For Iron, you should eat meat, fish, seaweed, greens or black cherries. People who crave oily snacks and fatty foods often actually just need Calcium, which they can get from mustard and turnip greens, broccoli, kale, legumes, cheese or sesame.But for most people, I think it’s all in simple portion control and exercise. People are fat because they eat too much, not because of what they eat. People are fat because they don’t walk very often or because they have an unappealing view of exercise. Swimming is fun. Dancing is fun. Exploring a new city on foot is fun. Hiking is fun. You don’t have to join a gym or a sports team if it doesn't interest you at all.I recommend getting out of the house and not being bored. Those two things make people eat. I recommend eating slowly and getting massages. I recommend carrying around snacks like cut vegetables in your bag. I recommend having healthier friends who don't eat as a hobby. I recommend just being really busy and having a very satisfying life. I recommend developing a taste for high quality food so that you won't even be slightly interested in the cheap stuff that makes you fat without giving your body anything beneficial.I think the idea of GOING ON A DIET is ridiculous.
Have you ever done a "diet" before? If so, what were the rules and how did it go?
What do you think the healthiest and best alternatives to fad diets are?
Please add anything to my list.

Not about Japanese food trends.
Zimbabwe's annual inflation rate just went up to 231,000,000% and it was already the world's highest by far. This has gotten me so sad and upset.

はっぴいえんど Happy End is the best Japanese band!

I have a really great new friend! We have identical taste in books and music, so I am thrilled that I finally have someone to share books and music with in Japan. I have never met someone who likes the exact same variety of things I like, so I am happy to finally have some good recommendations on what to read and listen to.

I asked for a recommendation on a good Japanese band. I really only like old Group Sounds and psychedelic pop. And The Boredoms. So he told me to listen to a band called はっぴいえんど Happy End. They are so good! They remind me a little of Neil Young or The Band. They lyrics that I can understand are great. The music is relaxing and cool. The best part about them, to me, is that they don't sing at all in English. It breaks my concentration and enjoyment when I suddenly hear bad, mispronounced English in a good song. Even if it's not badly pronounced, cheap lyrics really bother me so I enjoy listening to music in languages I can't fully understand. Rolling Stone Japan rated Happy End's album 風街ろまん (kazemachiroman) as #1 rock album of Japan. It is just so good.

風 <--- This means wind
街<---- This means city
ろまん<---- This means love story, I think.

"When rock music first became popular in Japan, some felt that it must be sung in English to be authentic, and many bands peppered their albums with covers of foreign hits. Happy End veered from this by performing original songs only, and singing entirely in Japanese. As a result some consider Happy End the first Japanese rock band. While this might be praise heaped too high, at least they were one of the first bands to try to make rock with a Japanese sensibility rather than merely copy foreign music."
-Keith Cahoon

Also.

There is a 24 hour diner in Osaka! It is so neat and doubles as an art space. It's called dig me out and it's in Amemura. It's easy to find. I know a lot of you are probably pretty nostalgic for breakfast places. They still don't really have diner-type food and vegetarians are almost completely out of luck but the atmosphere and music is great, the service is incredible (My waiter was stylish and handsome and he actually refilled my water 29837394 times without you asking ... the water refilling is rare in Japan) I had a very nice salad with asparagus, lotus roots and sesame dressing. It's decorated all 1970s with big booths and these great, orange lamps.

Also.

I read a book called Naomi by Tanizaki, who I have always been meaning to read. It was excellent. The narrator was so funny, but sad and pathetic. Please read it.

Tokyo Banana is just a Twinkie that tastes like chemical banana

Here's another banana-related thing. There is a very popular souvenir snack in Tokyo called Tokyo Banana. People usually buy this souvenir for their family and friends when they visit Tokyo from small towns. If you're a tourist in Tokyo, you can try it but I will warn you and tell you that it tastes like a banana-flavored Twinkie. It's banana cream inside a sponge cake and tastes like chemical. Twinkies are one of the grossest food ideas that anyone has ever had, but if you actually enjoy the taste of Twinkies, you might like Tokyo Banana.

If you hate Tokyo Banana snacks, you might want to try bringing back another thing. It's made by the same company and looks almost the same, but it tastes more like manjyuu and has banana-flavored anko inside it instead. It is still sweet and unhealthy, but it tastes a lot better than regular Tokyo Banana. Just ask the people at the store for the ones with anko inside, not cream.

Good luck buying bananas in Japan right now.

There's a new diet that everybody in Japan seems to be doing right now. It's called the Banana Diet, and the rules are is easy as the name is to remember. All it is is that you eat a banana and drink a glass of water for breakfast. During the rest of the day, you eat whatever you want.

It sounds like a hoax to me. It sounds like an average day when you're in a hurry and you have no time to sit down for breakfast so you grab a banana and quickly just eat it while you walk to work.  

I could care less about fad diets, but this one actually has an effect on my daily life because I love bananas and eat them almost every day. Now I can't buy them. I went to three different grocery stores today looking for them. None. I had forgotten about how collectively zealous Japan gets over health. Remember Billy Blanks Fever last year?

I miss bananas.

Nice to meet you. I'm Jeff. My girlfriend is Thai. What's your name?

Why do people feel like they need to randomly mention the race or family background of their boyfriends and girlfriends in casual conversations with strangers? In Japan, this happens far more often than you’d imagine. I think it’s tacky and often really gross. It reminds me of how some people will talk about their dogs using the name of the breed instead of the animal. “My poodle Tutu did the funniest thing yesterday” instead of “My dog did the funniest thing yesterday.” That’s fine if you’re talking about a dog. If you’re talking about people, tacking on their race in an unrelated conversation just makes you seem creepy, like you really, really need people to know that you own this special and exotic pet parrot.

Your girlfriend or boyfriend is just another random person to an acquaintance. Nobody cares what your boyfriend looks like. I think that a lot of people in Japan use their partner’s race as an advertisement to make themselves seem more cultured, sexy or worldly and that's really creepy. Most of the time, a random acquaintance doesn’t even care that you have a girlfriend let alone that she’s Thai. I am always surprised when I hear people say things like, “I’ll bring my boyfriend out tonight. He came from New Zealand and has blue eyes.” That’s just lovely. And I’ll show you a picture of my tabby cat. I got her at the SPCA last year.

It happens all the time. You ask some random person what they did last weekend and they’ll tell you they went to see a movie with their Japanese girlfriend. Why not just say girlfriend? The grossest ones are the brand new acquaintances who tell you within five minutes of meeting that they have “dated white people before.” Do they want a medal? What am I supposed to say to that? “Oh, that’s great! I guess you’ve noticed that I am white, too. You have dated a white person, and I am a white person. We should be friends and hang out more often now that we know we share this common bond.”

I understand mentioning your boyfriend or girlfriend’s background if you’re discussing something like immigration or discrimination against mixed-race couples or something related like that, but if you’re writing a review of a Turkish restaurant, why does it matter if your husband is Japanese? (Yes, she did it again)

There are very few occasions where you’d ever need to mention your partner’s race in casual conversation with an acquaintance. Here are some examples of when mentioning where your boyfriend or girlfriend comes from is fine and good.

Wow, Aiko! How are you able to afford going to Australia for two months without getting a part-time job there? You must have saved tons of money!
I have a lot saved. But it also helps that my boyfriend is Australian and I’ll be staying with his family for the two months. At least I won’t be spending any money on hotels.

Wow, your English is really good. Have you lived abroad?
No, but I studied English pretty hard in high school. Also, I am dating an English teacher who doesn’t speak much Japanese. That helps a lot!

For example, if you go to a Japanese language school and invite your classmates to go for dinner, you might be worried that none of you will be able to read the menu very well. Then, if one of your friends says “Don’t worry. My husband is coming. He’s Japanese, so at least one of us will be able to know what we’re ordering.” There you go. It’s in context. It has to do with the topic.
It doesn't make you look like a moron.

Kidnapped and taken to Nagano for my Birthday!

I had a wonderful birthday. I got happy birthday wishes from my friends and family. My father called me at midnight! My mother sent mail to me! I got flowers. I got a beautiful song written for me. Someone made me a collage. Then I got kidnapped.

I went to Tokyo and was told I would be “kidnapped” by my friends and taken somewhere I have never been before. I guessed I would be taken to Hakone or to Disney Sea because my friends like those places and they know I have never been to either place. I was excited when I found out that they’d be taking me on the Shinkansen all the way to Nagano to stay at a mountain resort!

I stayed in an area called Megami-ko. In Japanese, it is spelled女神湖which sounds really pretty because I think it means Lake of the Goddess. Nagano is beautiful. It looks like Canada. It looks like the drive from Ottawa to the rural area my grandparents live in Ontario. The resort was gorgeous and we soaked in the Onsen the whole time. The food was delicious and all Japanese vegetarian. There was homemade plum wine and pickles. We had vegetarian hot pot (nabe) and a mochi dessert. The most famous thing the whole world knows about Nagano is that it held a Winter Olympics game. I would love to come back in the winter for skiing.