Teaching: Lesson One A couple of months ago in the office, Mr. T asked me what I was about to teach on that day. 'Globalisation', I replied. He must have seen through my anxiety about teaching that subject, so that he had an expression of 'ah ha, that topic!' to tease me. I then talked to him about my indecisiveness about what information to 'teach' or to 'share with' students on that day. I was very much troubled, since my own position became very strong when talking about issues like this. There were so many to say about the subject, and I didn't feel justified if only one type of views was emphasized. So it turned out that I had too many materials to go through within the sapce of 90 minutes. Mr. T asked about the level of the class. A few minutes later, he came back with a set of cards with vocabulary items on each of them, and, of course, every word was related to globalisation. He then talked about what he did when he had a class on globalis...
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Just Another Interesting Anecdote, Isn't It? A couple of weeks ago, O. visited Tokyo, or technically the East, for the first time. I was very relieved when he told me that the journey was immensely enjoyable. O. is a very optimistic, adventurous, and out-going person by nature, so perhaps the horror of being surrounded by a graphic language like Japanese could be overcome easily. On the night before he flew back to Europe, we had dinner together. He told us an interesting anecdote that happened to him during his stay. On his first day in Japan, he was stopped by two policemen in Ueno station, who asked him for his passport. According to the immigration law in Japan, visitors to this country are obliged to take their passports or any other identification certificate that is legally equivalent. He said he had left it in the hostel. Then the policemen made some questions concerning about his visit and where he was going at the time. Then they realized O. was a traveler and his nationa...
Green Curtain Since the early summer, the city council started growing trailing plant outside its main building. First, they set up a net hanging down from the top of the building to the ground floor; a week or so after, vines started climbing upwards along the net; then it didn't take too long before the foliage covered up the entire wall. It was quite amazing to see such a massive green curtain in the city especially when its purpose was still unknown to me. The buckets in the bottom, one day when I got a chance to have a peek, explained that it's an effort to fight against global warming. The natural shade that the vines provided to the concrete building would efficiently shut out burning sunlight and thereby reduce room temperature significantly. In this way, the use of air-conditioners would be economized. Afterwards, I noticed that the ideas had been put into practice in many households throughout the neighborhood. In addition to the environmentally friendly economy that...
鯛焼き（taiyaki） This afternoon I posted replies to friends who had kindly sent us warm greetings for the wedding. K took the chance to take a walk around the neighborhood. It has become a pleasure for us to promenade and explore unseen places near the house. We stopped by a taiyaki shop and bought two fish for our afternoon tea, custard and red bean paste. In the snack shop, while we were checking menu, figuring out prices, and talking in English as if we were all alone, the young owner of the shop kindly interrupted us explaining to us in English! That was quite unexpected to me. Immediately I was embarrassed. I hope he wasn't laughing at me in private when I was telling K how I was amazed at a gigantic shredding machine that was sitting in the shop. It is the kind of machine that people used to make shredded ice when I was little. Shredded ice with a scoop of syrup rocked! 'How nostalgic it is!' I said. On our way home, K wondered why the shop owner opened his taiyaki shop...
My Domestic Goddess Project: Light Eats and the Rainy Season We had a short break from the non-stop rain of the season yesterday. It was breezy and sunny. Shadows of laundry trotted across the curtain like running horses. It provided a wonderful atmosphere for light and simple eats in this suffocating season of humidity. We had tomato flower cum plum pickles and cold plain noodle for lunch. Both were refreshing and very appetizing! I love beautiful presentation of food than the food itself, to be frank. The tomato was cut in a vertical direction so that it was able to bloom. Plain noodle dipped in dashi (だし) sauce (1 dashi: 2 water) was simply tasty. It tasted clam, cold, and pleasant. It felt as if pores, eyes and ears were temporarily immue from the heat and humidity in the air. The Japanese vocabulary that I just picked up, 素直な, might describe the taste well, or perhaps 'rustic'. I admit that the description sounds rather pretentious or exaggerating, but I really liked ...
Hydrangea (あじさい, Azisai) 紫陽花 Hydrangea has been dominating the landscape of our neighborhood since a month ago. They are definitely showy and daring in posing for their beauty. A couple of weeks ago when I visited the house of my aunt-in-law, she had a hydrangea standing on her dinning table. I was astonished at the close look at the flowers and was amazed at the vivid traces of veins on its petals and leaves. To me the net of veins manifested the vigor and power of their life. It was pouring on that day, but, I remembered, all the hydrangeas stood stubbornly and bloomed extravagantly despite the torrential rain. It was as if they had no fear at all of braving the weight of the rain but enjoyed the down-pouring water as, perhaps, their name denoted. My aunt-in-law must have told me that it is called 'azisai' (あじさい), but my command of Japanese language is too shallow to make it memorable. Then in my textbook I came to know that Azisai, or hydrangea, is the flower of the rainy se...
My Domestic Goddess Project: Pork steak and Komatsuna (こまつな（小松菜）) Ever since I started cooking Japanese food, the Chinese characters of Komatsuna, 小松菜, has intrigued me. The characters, according to Wanchen's dictionary of free translation, were literally interpreted as "the vegetable of Little Pine". Of course, it was partly because I didn't know how to pronounce it in Japanese. Yet, the pastoral image that my literal translation projected, 'the vegetable of Little Pine', had been quite satisfactory to me. I imagined that it was a kind of vegetable that was initially grown by a little boy called Little Pine. Every morning, he would jump out of the bed and hurry to his small allotment in order to see how the little veggies had been. Dews on the leafy komatsuna were shining like pearls and mirroring Little Pine's happy face. Then I found an easy recipe to try komatsuna. (Imagine how I was excited in the supermarket when I picked up a bag of this romantic ve...