True Martial Arts Mastery

Forget kung-fu. Forget karate. Forget judo, tae kwon do, and ninjitsu. The real king of martial arts, apparently, is yoga:


^ I certainly hope most of that movie was faked. The cracking sounds coming from the joints of Dhalsim (or whatever his name was) truly freak me out.

So the moral of the video is this: when fighting an opponent who cannot be stopped like a normal person, the only solution is to glue them to themselves. ~Oyasumi!

Bizarre Teaching Moment #7: The Secret to Perfect Health

~Japanese children are freakishly healthy. Remember the sports festival I blogged about a few weeks ago? For me, it was a fun, out-of-the-ordinary experience. For a Japanese student, it's an everyday occurrence. They exercise for at least an hour in school every day, and always start the school day with morning exercises. The school cafeterias serve rice, miso soup, and green tea. It's scary.

Anyway, on to the bizarre moment. Today I had my weekly private lesson with a girl who is the youngest of three sisters, in her first year of high school (which begins a year later than it does in America). While reading out of a textbook, we came across the word "unconscious", which she didn't know. I explained that I once had to have dental surgery done and was made unconscious for the operation; next, I asked her if she'd ever been unconscious.

Her answer was immediate: "No." Further questioning revealed that her health was near-perfect. Aside from never passing out, she'd never missed a day of school due to sickness. She couldn't recall ever taking medicine for anything.

I doubted that the regular exercise regimen of Japanese students could explain this unbelievably good health, so I asked her what the secret to her good health was. She considered it for a moment, then replied with these immortal words: "Eat everything, and sleep well."

"Eat everything"? Surely "everything" was a mistake? Perhaps, I suggested, you meant "Eat healthy foods", or, even, "eat anything"? But she was adamant in her definition: eat everything. In other words, if you see food, eat it!

To clarify, this girl is not fat. In fact, like most Japanese girls, she's thin as a rake from all that exercise. Yet despite her philosophy of devouring all food in sight, she's in perfect health. Overactive metabolism? Secret Japanese herbs? Health-conscious parents? I suspect a combination of all of the above. By the way, she defined "sleep well" as getting at least seven hours of sleep per night.

So, there's the secret to perfect health: eat everything*, and sleep well. Despite the fact that I get plenty of exercise running around the classroom with my younger students, I'm not about to take her advice. All the germs floating around the school seem to have gotten the better of me, and I'm feeling a bit debilitated at the moment. This is bad, because tomorrow is what may be my most difficult day yet. Wish me luck~

~Oyasumi!
[*I strongly recommend only eating substances you can identify as edible. This is not always easy in Japan.]

Tsunami Attack

~As you may have heard on the news, there was a tsunami warning in Japan after a magnitude 8.1 earthquake hit some islands to the Northeast. Fortunately for me, I'm on the other side of the main island (i.e, "the other side of the tracks"), so everything was fine over here. Besides, I'm not even on the coast! The only disruption here was a tsunami monopoly dominating the evening news.

^ When it hit, the tsunami was only ~16 inches high; enough to beach a few boats and scare some Russians, but otherwise insignificant. Actually, more damage was done in Hawaii and California, thousands of kilometers away, than was done in Japan.

On a lighter note, here is some Japanglish I ran across in Okinawa on the wall outside a nightclub. Enjoy:

^ Text reads:

SUN, SEA AND STARRY SKY.
SOUTHERN ISLAND,
THE VOICE AT WHICH IT LAUGHS
TODAY HAS BEEN FILLED
IN THE SOPHISTICATED SPACE,
LET'S DO A HAPPY SPEAKING.
SO, SPECIAL TIME TO YOU.

~Special Time to You!

The Darker Side of Nagaoka

~The city of Nagaoka, and Japan in general, are for the most part safe places. Of course, all towns, even the safest, have their bad sides--the streets that you just *shouldn't* hang around after dark. Nagaoka has places like this, but they're easy to avoid.

^ Hananomachi Avenue, the "bad street" of Nagaoka. It's locally known by the charming English title of "Sin Street".

^ Hananomachi Avenue is almost completely dead by day; in fact, I usually commute through here on my bicycle. But by night...

^ ...it becomes a wretched hive of scum and villainy, to be avoided if possible. Pimps patrol outside of seedy establishments, "discount" jewelry stands spring up along the sidewalks, and double parking is the norm. The horror, the horror!

^ With bar names like this, who in their right mind would want to hang out around Hananomachi Ave.?

The criminal elements of Nagaoka usually keep to themselves. The trouble happens on those rare occasions when the darker elements of society decide to make themselves a bit more visible. Such as what happened tonight.

Around 8 pm, I was waiting in the lobby of my school waiting for some students to arrive for my last class of the day. I noticed that quite a large crowd was gathered just outside, all looking at something nearby. It was a man standing on top of something, yelling to the crowd. Of course, I didn't understand a word of it, but I found out quickly enough: the man was a yakuza, a Japanese gangster. Yes, they are here in Nagaoka, but mostly keep a low profile. Not tonight.

The man was spewing out ultra-nationalistic venom. When he saw one of my English co-workers, he started railing on about racial purity for the Japanese bloodline (the yakuza have a long-standing alliance with Japanese ultra-right wing political groups). He was probably drunk, but had some friends with him...it didn't look good.

His audience was mostly confused-looking students waiting outside for their cram school lesson to start. I think everyone was disgusted by this, but it was a bit unnerving to see such a public display of blatant hatred. The manager of my school called the police, and apparently the yakuza ran away before they arrived (I was teaching a class by this point).

I'm just glad this kind of thing is kept out of sight most of the time. It's really sad, but I'm sure it's no different that what goes down at a KKK rally in the United States. Pathetic, really.

~Oyasumi.

BAM!

~Today's cultural event was cooking gyoza, which are Japanese dumplings. The cooking event was sponsored by the Nagoka Civics Center. About forty people showed up for a cook-off that would make Emeril proud.

^ The first step in making gyoza was to mix the meat and greens together. Soy sauce and oil were added to the mixture, followed by the secret ingredient: a special Chinese spice that store-bought gyoza don't have.

^ The finished mixture. Doesn't look very appealing, does it? Fortunately, this was only the first step in the cooking process.

^ While some of us were stirring the mixture, others were making dough. When both groups were finished, everyone began rolling the dough to make skin for the dumplings. Although it looks easy, it was a lot harder than it looks. To make gyoza properly, you can't just roll the dough flat; you have to keep the middle thicker than the outer edges of the circle. It took me a few tries to get the technique down.

^ Next we put the stuffing in the middle of the dough circles...

^...and closed the circles, creating the dumplings! Closing the dough pockets was also easier said than done; there's a "traditional" way of folding gyoza that took some time to learn.

^ My first successful effort is there on the right. As you can see, my technique still needs a little work!

^ Making the gyoza was a lot of fun. Many of my friends were there, and I also met a lot of interesting people there. One of my students even showed up!

^ Once the gyoza were wrapped up, they had to be cooked. Everyone was quite hungry at this point, so we were all waiting around the pots watching our meal boil.

^ Finally, everything was ready. Aside from the dumplings, we were also given bean-fried rice and green tea. What a delicious lunch!

^ As you can see, we made a lot of dumplings. There were far to many to eat; I could only eat about half of my portion. Of course, there was always the option of taking home a "wan-chan no kaban" (a doggy bag--I translated that myself!).

^ Cooking gyoza with a group of friendly people was a great experience. The dumplings we made tasted far better than the ones that you can buy at supermarkets in Japan. Cooking a quality meal takes more time than I usually have, but it's well worth the effort.

~Oyasumi!