Halloween in Japan

A holiday about dressing up in costumes? Hai! The Japanese do love their costumes. 🙂

Surprisingly, Halloween is everywhere around here. I had no idea. But it’s been in decor, in/on food items, on store shelves, and was even on a few students yesterday. (I only wore some skeleton hand hair clips that I bought from Seria.) I took several pictures of Halloween I encountered in unexpected places… which all pretty much had to do with food. Behold…

My eggs suddenly became Halloween Eggs

Even my lunch yesterday was Halloween themed. Hamburg with pumpkin sauce:

Oh! A few costumes in a mall in Okayama. I didn’t take a picture of it, but I was sorely tempted to buy a furry panda head for 2000 yen, but I just couldn’t do it. No room in my luggage.

Gudetama!

You can be a pudding (flan), a squid, or a… fidget spinner. Under the fidget spinner was an onigiri (rice ball) head costume.

Pretty self-explanatory? The booby one says “Boin (boing?) chan.” Chan is a diminutive/affectionate name ender for (mostly) girls.

Respect for the Aged Day

Apparently that was today, and as a young whippersnapper I don’t get the day off. This explains a couple of things. First, the note in my box at work giving me a “substitute holiday” on a Saturday  (Oh, I can have Saturday off? Thanks!) Most Japanese work on Saturday,  which is a travesty. We don’t usually.

Second, it explains why when I finally dragged myself across town on the bus to the eye doctor, I was met with the shutters rolled down and this sign, the only parts of which I clearly understood were the kanji for day and rest.
I  really dont know what it says and was too lazy to translate. I went through the adjacent mall on my way back to the bus. I bought myself two melon breads, figs on sale (8 for 400 yen), and some mystery purple fruit (2 for 200 yen). When I listened to the news at home they mentioned it was a holiday, and that’s when everything clicked.

I wish I’d remembered this holiday was today in time to give gifts to some more-aged-than-me friends. 😛 What a missed opportunity!

Melon bread

Yesterday I visited an eye doctor near the mall, so on the way home I cut through the mall. I was tempted to stop by one of the bakeries and pick up something tasty, because as much as wheat does not like me very much anymore (thanks, IBS!), I still love bread. I sometimes roll the dice and indulge, accepting the possible future consequences as worth the present deliciousness. I’ve been eating at home, so everything else has been on-diet, which increases the likelihood I won’t overstress my system. So I was a little naughty and got some melon bread. It looks a lot like Mexican pan dulce. Very pretty on the outside.

Rochelle and I had a kind of melon bread when we went to see Mt. Fuji, and she decided it was like a yeast roll covered in a layer of cookie. The melon taste comes from the outer cookie part. They also had choco-melon bread, and in this one you can clearly see the two different doughs used. The inner, chocolate bread (not sweet) and the outer, crusty, sweet melon cookie layer.

They were both delicious, but the choco one didn’t really improve on the original. Just thought I’d share some more “Eats in Japan.” 🙂

Mystery eats in Japan

So one of the most ridiculous things in Japan is the writing system. Or rather, writing systems, because there are three, not counting writing it phonetically in “English” (that’s called Romanji). Determined to be prepared for Japan, I learned the first syllabary, hiragana, before I came.  (A syllabary is like an alphabet, but (more or less) each character represents a syllable, i.e. a vowel or vowel and consonant group: a, i, u, e, o, ma, mi, mu, me, mo, sa, shi, su, se, so, etc. In Japanese, each of these symbols is called a “kana.”). I also started learning kanji, the Chinese characters, which have multiple pronunciations. Then I arrived and saw so many things in the store written in the second syllabary, katakana. So I started learning that. And since all three writing systems are mixed up together within sentences or sometimes even within words, it can get very confusing. There isn’t a consistent method to the madness. Sometimes they’re written in one system and sometimes in another. It’s enough to make you nuts.

But being able to read things is so, so helpful when you’re in a strange place, so I’m still learning kanji, and I’m still practicing all the time, trying to read whatever I can find and learn what I’m seeing. So even though I can read both syllabaries and hundreds of kanji by now, I am still confounded by things like this…

MYSTERY GREENS!

I bought these greens not knowing what they were, but figuring greens are greens and I’d be able to eat them. They were

Toothbrushes

If you’ve never lived overseas before, you may never have experienced the extra little inconveniences that come when you’re just trying to do a normal thing, like buy a new toothbrush. So I’d like to share. My toothbrush has been looking pretty ratty, so getting a new one has been on my to-do list. So I put on outside-appropriate clothes and walked myself down to Kirindo, the neighborhood drug store/beauty store (like Walgreens, but I don’t think it has an actual pharmacist). I just wanted a toothbrush which looked more or less like mine, a typical American toothbrush.

“Normal” American-looking toothbrushes

Below were some of my Japanese options, none of which looked exactly like what I was looking for.

L-R, we have small head (about the width of my index finger), twisty bristles; regularish head, rubber sticks in the middle; teeny head and black bristles?; more black bristles and super fine “diamond” points sticking up beyond the regular bristles; normal-ish mountain-shaped bristles on a small head; the mohawk toothbrush, with a blue row of long, fine “diamond” points rising out of the middle of the brush; (ignore group photo of toothbrushes, that was just an accidental shot I needed for filler in the Google Photos collage); and a toothbrush that has three, count them, three rows of bristles only.

There were many, many more variations. So many choices, so much indecision. So many of the toothbrushes were really small. Like child or dog toothbrush small. If everything is bigger in Texas, is everything smaller in Japan? (In many cases, MDRC*, the answer is yes.) I ended up with these two:

The one on the left because it looked the most normal in shape and size. It’s a little squat, and it has some of those fine “diamond-point” bristles on it. Feels good though, like a little furry caress.  I got the one on the right because… well, because it has a mohawk. No idea what good this is supposed to do. I can’t read enough of the packaging to tell you. But come on… a mohawk!

Packaging is, I swear, one of the hardest things to read in a foreign language. It’s so hard to know what is the brand name, what is a description, what is advertising jargon, etc. Look at any package you have in your kitchen or bathroom. Look how many words are all over the front of it! Even if you can use a translator, it’s a heck of a lot of things to examine without knowing what is what. And if you have to use a translator, you can bet that you’re probably searching through many items to find what you need. This means you sometimes end up standing in a store having hot flashes, needing to pee, or otherwise being terribly uncomfortable yet not going home because you’re still trying to find the dividing line between moisturizing body wash and just plain moisturizer because you really, really need moisturizer, dangit, and why are there so many creative names for moisturizers and body washes?!

The toothbrush adventure (and the previous hunt for a moisturizer), were really not huge dramas, but it is typical of the extra little complications that come in daily life in a foreign country. Seriously, I put off getting a toothbrush until I had enough time and energy reserves to deal with picking one out, because who knows what you will find when you actually go to the store. One really good thing that always comes of my jaunts abroad is a renewed desire to go out of my way to help newcomer students find their way. Daily life has so many little hurdles.

So if ever you envy this life of mine, just remember that you can go to the store and read ALL THE LABELS! 😉

 

*MDRC is My Dear Reader Chum, because I recently finished another of Miranda Hart’s memoirs (Peggy and Me, about her dog), and in all her books she speaks directly to her reader/listener in this way: My Dear Reader/Listener Chum, later abbreviated as MDRC or MDLC. I love Miranda! Such fun!