The Japanese still haven’t really figured out bread. They’re good at pastry, but rice is the grain that goes with meals, so breads tend to be snack foods, such as the ubiquitous melonpan, whose name comes from the melon-ish shape rather than the contents.

Speaking of shape, care to guess what kamelonpan looks like?

more...

I’d want to add indoor plumbing, a good HVAC system, and do something to keep away the tourists, but yeah, I can see why one of the Ashikaga Shoguns thought that Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion would make a nice little retirement shack. Even 600+ years later, it’s got a nice view.

Mind you, it’s impossible to do something original with one of the most-photographed objects in Japan, but this wasn’t a serious-photography trip. I was a tourist, and I did what tourists do. :-)

Okay, only one, and she’s a very little girl, but you have to start somewhere…

Unless your lifestyle allows you to get into a four-year college program, most available Japanese classes will dump you back into the world at the High Beginner level (JLPT level 4 would be easy, level 3 is quite possible with some study, but you’re in desperate need of real conversation practice, and functional literacy is waaaaaay out there in the distance).

One real frustration is the lack of good reading material. Things intended for Japanese kids will have the furigana you need, but assume a much larger working vocabulary, as well as cultural context that may turn a simple sentence into a half-hour Google search.

Late last year, Ask released a set of graded readers in four clearly-defined levels. I stumbled across them a few weeks before my trip to Japan, and picked up the level 3 edition. It was quite readable.

more...

Singing:

Where, oh where, are you tonight?
Why did you leave me here all alone?
I searched the world over,
and thought I found true love.
You met another and *phbbt* you was gone.

Until just now, I hadn’t realized I remembered that bit, and I have no idea what dredged it out of my memory. Apparently, Hee Haw is eternal and unyielding.

According to a stand at Kyoto Station, it tastes like this ekiben:

We bought them in the Gion district in Kyoto. A little bag of ginger candies wrapped up in a label that read 「まいこさんのおちょぼ口」 (for the kana-impaired, that’s “Maiko-san no Ochobo-guchi”). It means “the maiko’s [apprentice geisha] tiny mouth”. They’re darn tasty, and the farther away we got from Gion, the more I wanted to go back and fill my suitcase with them. I didn’t.

But surely I can find them in Japantown in San Jose or San Francisco, or at least order them online! Or maybe not. It turns out that “Maiko-san no ochoboguchi” is a cliché, and 99% of the references you’ll find online are of the form “even a maiko’s tiny mouth could eat this”. Which is of course why they were called that in the first place.

This means that even explaining what I’m looking for will require visual aids. Better snap a photo of them before they’re all gone:

I’ll try to find them locally, but realistically, my best shot is finding someone who’ll be in Kyoto and giving them a copy of the photo and detailed instructions on how to find the shop. It looks like this, and it’s about a block and a half west of the main entrance to Yasaka Shrine, on the south side of the street [Google Maps].