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Experiments, Japan

Every Language Learning System Is Wrong: Total Immersion & the JLPT

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You might think from the title that this would be a story of me walking in to the testing hall, 4 weeks of nothing but Japanese on my mind, waving to the only other white guy in a room of 60 Taiwanese high school kids, then sitting down to obliterate the highest level Japanese test they’ve got.

Man, it would be great if I could write that post.

I won’t say I definitely failed the test. People have a habit of low-balling their expectations as a coping mechanism.  I will say that there came a point about half way through the kanji and grammar section where I decided reading the question was only taking up valuable time which I could devote to less pointless questions.  Maybe it helped me, I can’t say until I get the results back in February.

So what does this mean for the idea of total immersion as a language learning tool?  Well, maybe nothing.

There are a number of ways to view the situation, depending on where your loyalties lie.

Bombing the JLPT, as Explained by:

A total immersion “input” learning  supporter

“See, this just goes to prove that the test isn’t really testing your ability to speak and understand Japanese. It’s just studying your ability to memorize obscure grammar points in a book.  It’s also a completely unnatural way of accessing the information.  When, but a test, will you have to answer 70 questions and read 10 reading passages within a 2 hour time limit?  Failing the tests just means you’re bad at tests.  Besides, eventually your Japanese will be native level fluent if you keep accessing native materials, and then you can walk in and pass the test on intuition.  Suck it up, and go read something in Japanese while listening to J-pop to make yourself feel better.”

A textbook/studying learning supporter

“See, this just goes to prove that you can’t learn higher level Japanese without going out of your way to  focus on and study it.  You can’t have enough exposure to higher level Japanese by randomly stumbling across it, even if you make a flashcard or two to represent that grammar point, or word.  There just isn’t enough random exposure to progress to a deeper understanding.   Studying can be unpleasant, but the idea that you can do nothing but fun, fluffy stuff and expect to make serious high level gains is ludicrous.  Suck it up, get it done, thank me later.”

An immersion “output” learning supporter

(I don’t know exactly what to call it, but that comes close. This would be the work of Benny over at Fluent in 3 Months.)

“See, this just goes to prove that you can’t internalize a language into your subconscious unless you are actively using it in conversations. Massive output is the only way your brain can really come to understand all that information, and if you do it right you can be speaking fluent Japanese, which is the fun part anyway, not reading books, a hell of a lot faster.  As far as the test goes, tests throughout history have always suffered from a profound disconnect from reality.  Suck it up. Learn the test. Study specifically for the test.  Treat it as something separate from your real studies if you have to.”

Why Immersion Is (Mostly) Wrong

Let’s start with the total immersion crowd, since that’s the one I was specifically playing with this month.  Did it help my Japanese? Sure it did.  I learned all sorts of interesting words, from hand grenade, to indecisive.  I’m also sure hearing and reading the same grammatical structures thousands of times, helped to imprint them into my subconscious Japanese brain.

Using native materials is also a great way to get native sounding Japanese.  If nothing else I think the decision to favor materials designed for Japanese people was infinitely better than anything designed for people learning Japanese, because you are guaranteed natural Japanese.  Too many textbook learners sound like robots.

But.

At a certain point, I am forced to acknowledge the writing on the wall:  fun and progress are detrimental to one another if you try to combine them. If all of my fun is tainted by work, then I enjoy it less.  If all progress is filtered through repeated exposure in the name of fun, then I progress significantly slower from all that redundant effort.  The point is not to disguise work as something fun, so that you can eat it 24/7, 365.  Fish oil in a glittery capsule with a cartoon dog mascot still tastes like death.  Similarly, even if you can get something good out of it, junk is still junk.  Chocolate chips and sugar is still bad for you, even if you sprinkle in some granola.

Also I think it begs mentioning that the guy who came up with this idea reads almost exclusively non-fiction.  If you’re, say, the type of person who doesn’t happen to like self-help books, you might find that there’s a certain range of Japanese you just don’t get enough exposure to.  That is, unless you force yourself to read something, well, kind of unpleasant.  And even if you do, you still suffer from the same wasted effort problem.

Admittedly the idea of total immersion works fantastic for the first 90% of a language.  Really. If you’re aiming for functional fluency, I think grabbing a bunch of native materials and stewing in them is probably the most absolutely painless way to bring your abilities up. 

It’s definitely not the fastest. It assumes that you cannot actually get anything done if you’re not constantly having fun.  It assumes you will give up if it’s hard.  Personally, working 24/7 is unsustainable, even if it’s fun.  I’m sure people would say I’m missing the point, that it’s not supposed to feel like work.  But there’s a balance.  If the returns and progress I’m getting on my invested time are too low, then even if it’s supposed to be fun it instead becomes ungodly frustrating because of all the missed opportunities, all the other stuff I could be doing with my time. Learning is fun unto itself for me, so the efficiency of the system is a big part of whether I’m enjoying my time, or forcing myself.

No one likes to work hard, and achieve nothing.

But I think for people who have a hard time motivating themselves to do anything, it is an amazing way to overcome that hurdle. The system seems designed for people who have been chronically bad at making any kind of progress in their lives. It removes all the barriers. For most people who’s idea of studying Japanese is lamenting the fact that they should be studying Japanese, this is an incredibly powerful place to start.

So, Does This Mean We Have to Study?

Yes and no.  If your goal is to pass the JLPT, I suggest you approach it with the following mindset:

The JLPT is not Japanese.

Study for the JLPT as an exercise in learning the test.  Assume that after you are done you will maybe have learned some new Japanese, but mostly you will have learned to pass the JLPT.  It’s like the SATs, or whatever arcane testing system they threw at you in high school.  You’re not really learning all those words, or how to do all that math, you’re just learning what they like to throw at you, how they think, and how to beat them.  How else could income correlate so strongly with test scores? Rich kids get all the cool toys, that’s why.

The JLPT is basically the SATs, in Japanese.

When it comes to actually learning Japanese though, the “suck it up and study” crowd is, in my opinion, just as wrong.  You’re just as likely to have tons of wasted effort by studying.  After a certain point, hell, even from the very first page in some cases, most textbooks for learning Japanese don’t use vocabulary you actually want to know, or will use frequently.  The grammar is equally hit or miss.

And the drills and exercises are absolute garbage.

There’s a difference between using something 100 times, and applying something 100 times.  The best (musicians/athletes/scholars/etc.) in the world aren’t the best because they’ve put in the most time, it’s because they’ve put in the most quality time.  And every textbook I have ever seen is just too simple to engage your brain on the level it needs to be engaged.

The monotony of it all, one of the things which the immersion system goes out of it’s way to overcome, not only leads to slow progress, it leads to a pretty high degree of burn out.  Especially if you’re out of school, and don’t have a grade to motivate you.

If you’re finding that the textbooks are working, by all means plow ahead.  Personally, I can’t handle them.

There has to be a better way.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

Total input immersion “works”, but it’s inefficient.  This is actually something Khatz over at All Japanese All the Time himself seems to be coming around to.

Textbooks probably don’t work, unless you’re a textbook type, because your odds of quitting before you reach fluency are rather high, and also because they are, all said and done, pretty irrelevant to what you actually want to use the language for.

I think the solution might lie somewhere in between All Japanese All the Time and Fluent in 3 Months.  I haven’t talked about Benny and his craziness yet, because I’m extremely conflicted about the man.  His basic shtick is to speak the language as much as possible, massive output, rather than read or listen to the language, massive input.  On the one hand, he gets results. Crazy results.  On the other hand, he writes at you, not to you. Like I’m a 4 year old. Like anyone who doesn’t speak 8 languages by the time they’re 30 is not only a failure, but a stupid one, because it’s all your fault.  I also get the feeling lately that a lot of what he’s preaching now doesn’t work nearly as well if you haven’t already learned at least one language.  There are certain fundamental truths he has begun to take for granted.

Regardless, for now I think it might be time that I shelled out for his language hacking guide, and see what the man has to say.  I will admit, the curiosity has been building.

Ultimately what I come up with is probably going to be a mix of all sorts of different systems, as it should be.  I think people can get really devoted to systems and teachers that have given them some results, so much so that they never take the time to evaluate what parts of the system are working, and what parts aren’t. Take the best parts, and leave the rest.

I learned a lot from All Japanese All the Time, and am really grateful for how much it moved me forward. If I hadn’t stumbled across the site, I’d probably still be poking my JET program Japanese textbook and swearing I’ll catch up tomorrow…on the year and a half of backlog.  But while I totally agree that native is the way to go, I definitely disagree with the “all the time” part, and think the input/output question still needs to be worked out.

Stay tuned.

This being a blog about Japan, and Japanese being a pretty big part of living in Japan, I don’t think this is the last you’ll hear on the language learning front.  Being a language learner, and also a language teacher surrounded by frustrated students, it’s something of an obsession of mine.

Experiments, Japan

Testing Total Immersion Part 2: The Method and the Madness

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In Part 1, I talked about the grand experiment in inefficiency that was my Japanese studies up until about a year ago.  Today, I’m going to talk about the idea of total immersion language learning, also sometimes called the “input method”, since its core idea is to expose yourself to just a criminal amount of Japanese, or whatever language you’re learning.

I actually subscribe to more of an input/output split, but it’s all still 100% Japanese.

I’ve already started full immersion by this point, but  I wrote up some posts ahead of time so the blog could keep rolling.

So without further ado.

Enter, Total Immersion

So there I was, getting along ok. I had definitely not gotten worse at Japanese since coming to Japan, but I wanted to be moving faster than I was.  I wanted to be able to read books, and watch Japanese TV without giving myself a brain aneurysm.  I wanted to be funny and charming again damnit!

So I started scouring the internet for a way to self-educate myself in Japanese.  This eventually led me to the writings of a plucky young Kenyan-born, US-educated blogger calling himself Khatzumoto.  His blog claimed that he went from zero Japanese, to employed at a Japanese software firm in Japan, in about 18 months by employing a seemingly insane idea: All Japanese All the Time.  That’s right, a literal 18-24 hours a day doing something in Japanese.  He even listened to Japanese while he slept, just in case it helped. All without ever leaving the comfort of America.

The really fascinating part of Khatzumoto’s system though was that he wasn’t proposing that you “suck it up and buckle down soldier! Success takes sacrifice! If it were easy it wouldn’t be called work!” Rather, he was proposing that you go get yourself something fun, like a comic book, or a video game, or a drama, and watch read or play it in Japanese.  Repeat for 18-24 hours a day until fluent.

Make learning fun? I mean, after school specials and made for TV movies might get away with that stuff, but this is the real world Khatz!  But my curiosity had been piqued I decided to see just how deep the rabbit hole went.  By the time I realized just how much my idea of reality had been knowledge bombed into oblivion, 3 days had passed, and I had read every single post.

The first step he proposed was to learn the meanings of all 2000 or so of the kanji which a literate Japanese person is expected to know.  There’s a lovely old dude named James Heisig who developed a system to do this with the exciting title of Remember the Kanji.  Since I like kanji, I tore through this part of the pre-immersion process in about a month.  I felt like a god.  All those obscene little squiggles had meaning now!  Even if I’d never seen that word before in my life, by looking at the kanji like 証拠 and thinking “(evidence)(foothold)” I could get some idea of what it means.

But then, for I as true as there are idiots I am their king, I hit a mental wall.  I really wanted to do the immersion thing.  It seemed so cool on paper! But some part of me being on a tiny island in Japan, in a place where there were literally no other English speakers, made me hesitant to remove the one little oasis of familiarity and comfort I had at home.  This, my palatial island shack, would remain a free outpost of America!  Even if it killed me, or at the very least severely hamstringed my efforts to get face-meltingly good at Japanese.

Even though I started reading a lot of manga (comic books…basically) in Japanese, and even managed to finish my first honest-to-goodness Book in Japanese, I could never take that final step into full on immersion.  I always had my English music, and spent a lot of time on English websites.  There were also parts of my life which I just couldn’t switch over to Japanese.  Like, you know, the part of my job where I teach English.  Also occasionally my parents and friends like to hear that I’m still alive, and their Japanese is not so spectacular.  It’s almost as if most of them never studied it a day in their life.

My New Experiment: 30-Days of 99.99% Japanese, All Day, Every Day

In a month I will be sitting the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.  Personally I hate the living hell out of tests, and test culture in general, and value passing one of these tests as much as I value being able to spit the farthest.  Actually being able to spit the farthest would be pretty awesome.  So less than that.  Unfortunately most of the world won’t just take my word for it that I’m awesome at Japanese, so passing this test is something I’ll eventually have to do if I want to work with or in Japan, e.g. as a translator, interpreter, or sexy TV-idol.

I took my first practice test about 2 days ago and it soundly destroyed me.  Now I could certainly blame the fact that I was in a noisy office, in the middle of a hurricane, and hadn’t taken a test in about a year and a half, but either way this test is not going to be the cakewalk through picnic forest that I was imagining.  So I’ve decided that now is as good a time as any to really try and give 100% immersion a proper shot.  I may not pass the test, but I’m going to try something new and see how it goes.

So from now until the test on December 5th, I’m running under the following rules:

  1. There should at all times be something in Japanese going on in my environment.  Japanese books at hand at all times. The TV on in the background.  My small collection of Japanese pop and rock albums set on repeat.  If I even have a thought in English, I damn well better think of a way to say it in Japanese right after that.
  2. I’m aiming to pick up the pace on my SRSing (Spaced Repetition System. More on this in an article to follow, but for now think of it as flashcards + robot secretary who can read my mind) but I’m not going to stress about it too much.  If I’m doing fun things in Japanese SRSing is, surprise surprise, actually really fun.  It’s like the save button on all the new Japanese in my head.
  3. The few daily English tasks which I can’t avoid I’m going to try and limit exposure to.  Not my job of course, that would be silly.  But checking and responding to e-mail, maintenance on this blog, etc. I can lump together and get done in one shot, once a day.  The TV or music will be on in the background.
  4. If anyone wants to talk to me who doesn’t speak Japanese, they should try to find a way to do it on the weekends.  Conversations are one thing which require a certain degree of focus, so even though as per rule 3 I can have the TV on in the background, too much English conversation in one day tends to throw a wrench into my general immersion trend.  If anyone has any important or emergency type stuff that needs to be talked about, I’m ok with breaking this rule, but I’m going to try to bunch up the bulk of my English conversation on the weekends.
  5. Due to the nature of my job, there are a few other unavoidable moments of English.  When the ALT from the next island over comes to Kikai, I’m either going to have to ignore her, speak English, or participate in one of the most contrived games of charades ever conceived.  So I’ll probably speak English if she comes over.  Similarly at some point I’ll be going to the mainland for a seminar, and I’m pretty sure that will be in English. I may try to sneak an iPod in to the seminar hall with some Harry Potter books on tape though. Love me some J.K. Rouringu.

Don’t worry about the blog. I mentioned it at the top of the post, but much like when your 1950s mom goes out of town for the week, I’ve got a few articles chilling in the freezer so that you all don’t starve in my absence.  So even though I won’t be writing, the blog will keep on being updated.

I’ll be back in person after the test in early December, to tell you all how the grand experiment went.  For anyone trying to improve, or learn a language of their own, feel free to try one of your own immersion experiment.  We can compare notes after the break.

Experiments, Japan

Testing Total Immersion: 30 Days of 100% Japanese

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Total Immersion is a fairly simple idea.  Remove all forms of English from your life, and use Japanese for everything.  Japanese books, Japanese music, Japanese conversations, and as much as you can Japanese thoughts.  I’ve decided to test it out for the next 30 days or so, but before I explain the rules of this little experiment, there are a few things I want to get on record.

Ehem…

One way or another, I am going to walk away from Japan fluent in Japanese. Not just regular fluent. Talk-circles-around-Japanese-people-dream-think-breathe in Japanese fluent.

Tim Ferriss, a blogger/author who makes sport of breaking the preconceived rules of reality (and is loved and/or reviled for it) once wrote that you could learn enough of any language in 3 months to be at about 95% comprehension and 100% expression, i.e. become functionally fluent in the language. (For evidence that supports this, see Benny over at Fluent in 3 Months, who has done this about 7 times) Tim further argued that the other 5% might well take you 10-15 years and be more effort than it was worth for most people.

Well…

I want my 5% Tim.  I want it more than I want air.

Any other language I will ever choose to study, I am perfectly happy with “basically fluent”.  If I learn French, it will mostly just be to chat up French girls anyway.  I don’t need to be able to discuss nuclear physics.  But by the mighty hand of zombie Christ, I am going to master Japanese.

One way or another, my life appears to have become inexplicably tangled with this goofy little string of islands half-way across the world from the place I was born.  I love Japan and Kikai as much as any place I have ever lived, and it’s not just because people think I’m Leonardo DiCaprio.  Even after I have moved back to America, odds are good that my job will in some way involve Japan, and Japanese.

My current level of Japanese is pretty good.  I can talk my way around any problems or gaps I might have.  I can tell jokes, and be both funny and charming in Japanese.  I have read books in Japanese.  I occasionally dream in Japanese.  I have my 95% comprehension 100% expression taken care of. I am functionally fluent.

From here on out, is the part where I go from functional, to eloquent.  The sticking point is how exactly to do that, and here’s where things get a little bit complicated.

Since this post ended up being just about as long as the Old Testament, I’m breaking it into 2 parts.  This part, part 1 if you will, covers the twisted Japanese road I walked up until I came across the idea of Total Immersion.  Part 2 will cover Total Immersion, and the rules of the experiment.

Adam in Japanese-Land: A Semi-Historical Account

Even though I majored in Japanese in college, my love affair with Japanese didn’t actually begin until I got to Japan.

My college Japanese studies were punctuated with what can only be called “glaring adequacy”. As long as my grades were good, my goal was to do as little work as humanly possible, freeing up valuable time for watching bad TV, and going to parties.  I was quite good at this, managing to get through a solid 2 and a half years of Japanese without ever actually trying.  I wasn’t the top of the class, but I was doing alright, and was (as far as I know) the only person in the class who could say “I have to go make Milton kill Mr. Cactus now” from memory.  Oh college.

At the ripe old age of 21, I came to Japan for the first time on a semester abroad program.  Full of pluck, and cactus related witticisms I set out to conquer Japan in a manner fitting one such as myself.  Straight-A report card 2 and a half years running! I’m unstoppable baby!

Realization: I absolutely sucked at Japanese.  Turns out that casually dicking around for 2 and a half years does not produce any significant gains in speaking ability.  Who knew?  Before my landmark study, probably no one.  You may inform the Nobel Prize committee at your leisure.

So I signed myself up for the most intensive Japanese course I could find, and decided I was going to start taking this seriously and study my ass off until by god I could talk to my host brother about something other than the weather.  Turns out that there was one fatal flaw with this plan.

2nd Realization:  If the main reason you’re not studying is “because it’s boring”, trying to do 4X more of it will not only not work, it will make you want to jump in front of a train.  Especially if you have to get up at 5:30 am in order to get to class in time, and stand near just an awful lot of trains during your hour and a half commute.

After dropping pretty much all my other courses to keep up with the work/stress load from the Japanese, I eventually decided to white flag it out, and return to my usual holding pattern of doing the absolute minimum possible to avoid failing.  And then The First Great Miracle of Adam’s Japanese Adventure occurred.

With my new found free time, I spent a significantly larger part of my day talking to my host mom, and hanging out with my host brother.  A truly criminal amount of Wii-sports was played, and the epic “無限ボーリング” (Infinite Bowling) variant was invented, in which my host brother would reset the game every time he missed a pin.  He really, really wanted a perfect game. (Never got it.)  I started going to his hip-hop dance classes, hanging out with a lot more Japanese people, and generally using Japanese in a way which was a hell of a lot more fun than anything I’d done up to that point.  For the first time since I started learning Japanese, I was actually doing something with it, instead of studying for the fabled day when I might do something with it.

When I pen my first novel in Japanese, Ryunosuke and Atsuko Furukawa are getting a shout out for getting this ball rolling.

By the time I left Japan, I wasn’t conversationally fluent, but I had made some significant progress in that direction.  For the first time, I realized that I actually could learn a foreign language, despite the 3 years of Latin, 2 of Spanish, and 2 and a half of Japanese telling me it was more or less impossible unless you were one of those naturally gifted types.

But then wouldn’t you know it, I get back to America and go right back into doing absolutely nothing.  In my defense, my Econ major was coming on fast and furious at that point, and I was grateful for a class I could sleepwalk through.  But it wasn’t exactly like I did anything out of class either.

I think my mistake was that I looked back on my time in Japan, and concluded that rather than the the hundreds of hours spent speaking Japanese, instead my Japanese ability was the result of me actually being one of those “naturally gifted types”, and it just didn’t manifest itself until I was in Japan.  I was the kung-fu film hero, who can’t use his ultimate technique right up until the moment where he has to fight the final boss, and then suddenly something in his enemy’s sneering face drags it out of him.  Like that…only with a hundred million sneering Japanese people.  I’LL SHOW YOU JAPAN! LANGUAGE ABILITY MULTIPLICATION TECHNIIIIIIIQUE!!!! Explosions the size of Earth as I perfectly conjugate the past-passive-causative.

So I knew that as soon as I was back in Japan, I would be right back to winning linguistic hearts and minds.  I didn’t need to study.  I was just naturally awesome, and this non-Japan environment was throwing off my chi.  And I was half-right.  Once I graduated, and moved to Kikai, my language ability did start improving again. Or at least stopped getting worse.  But now I was out there on my own.  I didn’t have a class pushing new material into my brain, so I had to go find my own way of getting new material to test out.  I used the JET Program’s series of textbooks for about 30 minutes, before deeming them utterly worthless tripe, unfit to grace the halls of my palatial island shack.

I tried a bunch of other really random, really stupid ways of teaching myself Japanese after that, ranging from online textbooks, to literally printing out every word required for the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test and trying to learn them.  Alphabetically.  My daily interactions with Japanese friends and coworkers was enough to smooth out my conversation abilities, but I could feel the wall in front of me.  I was progressing incredibly slowly, and it was starting to bother me.

————————————————–

Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll tell you all about the crazy solution I came across, and the experiment I’ll be running with for the next month or so.

Japan, Travel

Snapshots of Japan: The Shinjuku Golden Gai

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Some of the most interesting moments in my life have occurred when I have suddenly found myself on the other side of an otherwise closed and locked door.

Shinjuku.  It’s probably what you’re imagining when you imagine “Tokyo”.  It’s the floor to ceiling neon, the backstreets lined with izakaya and bars, the literal hundreds of thousands of people flocking and swarming around it, mild-mannered Clark Kent’s by day, and all manner of super hero-villains by night when they’re just too drunk or lost in the moment to care.  For some it’s Korean-town. For some it’s the gay district.  For some it’s the red light.  For some it’s nothing more than the world’s busiest train station which they have to suffer through on their way the hell out of Shinjuku.

Shinjuku was our playground the first time we were in Japan.  Our school was one stop away on the Chuo-express.  A 3-5 minute ride even on the worst of days.  We spent more time wandering the backstreets, chatting with drunk salary-men, Yanki teens, Gyaru, and East African bouncers for sex clubs, than any sane pasty white kids should ever imagine.  We were not unique in this.  There is something about the faint hints of danger that float around Shinjuku which make it seem exciting.  It’s a break from the usual over-safe Japanese sterility.  Some nights, it’s just dodgy enough to almost feel like home.

But Shinjuku is full of locked doors.  Some of them, like the host clubs, I don’t want to open.  Others like the soaplands, I don’t even want to be close enough to realize they are a door.  But there are a few locked doors in Shinjuku which are just downright fascinating.  Doors you really, really want to take a look behind, if only you knew someone who could get you in.  The Golden Gai is one of them.

A relic of old Shinjuku, before modernization put a convenience store on every corner and piled the izakaya one on top of another, seven floors high.  Dwarfed by Shinjuku proper on all sides, the Golden Gai is a single cramped block that feels like a feudal Japanese village.  The smallest streets you have ever seen wind their way past cramped 2-story buildings inseparable from one another save their different doors and signs.  Each of these buildings houses, in all likelihood, 2 different bars: one on the bottom floor, and one on the top floor which is only accessible by climbing a staircase so steep it might as well be a ladder.

There are over 200 bars and izakaya packed into these 6 cramped alleyways.

Almost all of them seem to be run by a single female bartender.  It’s somewhere between a host club and a normal bar.  There’s no expectation of anything except drinking and talking, but they pour your drinks and are de facto supposed to pretend to be interested in what you’re saying.  Because it’s so intimate, the people who work in bars in the Gai are a big part of why regulars keep coming back to the same bars.

Getting into establishments in the Gai can be tricky.  While a number of the bars have started to embrace that the Gai is now a stop on tourists’ itineraries, English menus and a slightly friendlier attitude, a large number of the bars can only be frequented if someone else brings you there first and vouches for you.  Even if the bar doesn’t require a sponsor all of them have a service charge tacked on at the front of the bill, and none of the drinks are anything close to cheap.  For being a rundown alleyway, the Golden Gai attracts a well off group of clientele.

For two fairly poor gaijin wanderers the Golden Gai would usually be a locked door, albeit with a big window on the front.  Maybe you’d get to wander in, see the streets, maybe try to order one beer and wonder why the hell it cost you 20 dollars and why the waitress/bar girl is as prickly as an ice-cactus, but you don’t really get to “go in”.  You’re still just window shopping without the keys.  But thanks to Dan’s old man, and his years working with Japan, we had just gotten an introduction to a guy holding a set.

Meet Yoshi

Yoshi

Dan’s dad used to do a lot of business with Japan.  He told some of his old contacts that his kid was going to be in the area, and one of them offered to show him (and his lovable friend) around Tokyo.  We don’t know anything about him at first, except that by day he helps oversee the Japanese branch of a fairly major US financial services corporation.  This means he falls into the category of “high powered salaryman samurai”, a group which are somewhat terrifyingly infamous for Jekyll and Hyde-ing out come nightfall to deal with the pressure.  He sends Dan a message and offers to take us on a “night tour of Tokyo”.  Dan and I are immediately both worried and excited by the possibilities.  What the hell is a “night tour”?

We  met him near Shinjuku station, on the red light side. Dan and I had done our best to not look like homeless people, but we were over 3 weeks into a trip we started with 3 days worth of clothes.  Washing these clothes with bar soap in hostel bathrooms, and carrying them around crammed into packs which were not designed to keep garments fresh and wrinkle free did not help things.  So there we stood, Dan in his vibrams,  I in my  bright orange hiking boots, and Yoshi in what I can only remember as professional looking leathery footwear.

We made introductions. His English was quite good, we would later learn he had lived in America for a few years.

Then came the moment of truth. Just what the hell would we be doing on this fine evening?

“Have you guys ever Yoshinoya? It’s Japanese junk food!” We informed him that we had, in the wake of our wildly receding imaginations.

“Oh, well forget that then.” We proceed deeper into the heart of Shinjuku. Not quite in the red light, but close enough that I’m still not sure where this is going.   He asks us if we know what the “Golden Gai” is.  Apparently it’s one of his old haunts and he wants to take us drinking there.  Awesome.

Our first stop is at a dimly lit but refined restaurant on the border of the Gai  to get something to eat.  Dan and I wonder why he wanted to go to Yoshinoya first if he was planning on something like this anyway, and the only thing I can think of is he wanted something more substantial to soak up the alcohol that would be coming soon.

I had managed to track down a bottle of Kikai shochu liquor somewhere in Tokyo with Eli’s help and gave it to Yoshi as a thank you gift over dinner. Japan is big on gifts and it is very much the thought that counts.  Fortunately Yoshi was into shochu (it’s getting very popular all over Japan now) and at least faked appropriate enthusiasm.

Then he took us deeper into the Gai, and it is here that the night crossed the border from more or less normal into the strange and surreal.

Bar Hopping in the Golden Gai

We walk through narrow alleys. Yoshi tells us that in the past, the top floors of many of these bars used to be brothels. You’d do your drinking downstairs then move on to the top floor for…well…

Our first stop is on the far side of the Gai.  We climb the vertical stairs into a bar with room for maybe 6 people if they don’t breathe too much, and a loli-goth hostess girl not-really-smiling behind the counter.  Yoshi is a regular here but the girl working tonight is new.

We drink beer and shochu, and talk about how she first realized she was into BDSM in middle school playing with blood pressure meters.  She seems to be going out of her way to create dissonance.  We talk about how she’s on the M side of the equation, while she takes medicine and complains about her cold.  We talk about how riding motorcycles turns her on, while she does dishes.  We explain the difference between an “outfit” and a “costume”, and at exactly what point in her life her choice in fashion crossed from one to the other, while she fusses with the stereo.  We drop somewhere in the neighborhood of 7000 yen, and I am glad I’m not paying.  She poses for a photo for us, tells us to come back later if we have time, and then we’re out the door drifting again.

二軒

Never have I seen a more forced smile

2nd stop is on the ground floor, North side.  Another round.  Yoshi seems to be a regular here too.  The girl working here has a butterfly tattoo on her arm with “Love” written into the wing pattern, and keeps talking about either her boyfriend or her ex-boyfriend who lives in Okinawa, and how she’s going to move back there some day.  We leave after the first beer.

三軒

Smiling in general not a strong suit in the Gai, apparently

We wander around a little bit more.  Yoshi has us look into a couple of places and tell him what we think of the girls working there.  “It’s no fun if the girls aren’t cute” he says.

We move on to a bar which looks like what Japan imagines a Mexican cantina looks like.  Tequila makes an appearance, and I do a quick mental catalog of “occasions in which I drank tequila” and “occasions in which I got violently ill” and find a surprisingly robust correlation.  But then, this is part of the adventure.  We ask the girl here if she speaks any Spanish. Dan’s been finding more Spanish speaking people in Japan than Japanese speaking ones.  But she’s disappointingly normal.

“Man, it would be so cool if I could speak Spanish!”

Yes. Yes it would.

四軒

Back outside. We have long since missed the last train, and Yoshi is now in on this night for the long haul.  The next train is is at 5 am and Yoshi has made it his mission to find a friend of his who owns a lot of the bars in the Gai before the sun rises.  We leave the Gai proper and head towards Shinkuku 3-chome, stopping in a bar with walls covered in US dollars, and Okinawan paraphernalia.  No sign of the mythical club owner, but Yoshi seems to be a regular here too.

五軒

We start singing karaoke along with a younger couple (they seem newly married) and what looks like their mom and grandma.  The girl behind the bar also plays along, or at the very least eggs us on and encourages us to sing things in English.  Yoshi at one point sings an incredibly impressive version of “What a Wonderful World”.  For a moment he actually is Louis Armstrong.  Dan sings “La Bamba”, and we realize that it is a surprisingly hard song to sing at karaoke, even if you do speak fluent Spanish.

Well past the time where sane people would have gone to bed, Eli hails a cab all the way from Shibuya to come meet us.  It’s his last night in town, and I guess he figured why the hell not.  He sings a few with us as we continue to bask in the generosity of our Japanese host, and the bottle of shochu he has the bar keep for him.  Yoshi disappears at some point.  We assume he went to go meet his friend, but we’ll never really know. Reality and I were on shaky terms at that point.

The bar we’re in starts to wrap up, but the hashigo-zake (alcohol ladder, each bar is a rung) train keeps on moving.  The waitress from the current bar joins our party, and takes us to another bar nearby.  This one is run by people from Kagoshima, so Eli and I can immediately pretend to have something in common with them.  I think there was still karaoke going on at this bar, but by this point the lack of sleep plus the 8+ hours of continuous drinking had liquefied my brain.  The major salient points that stood out on this rung of the hashigo-zake ladder were: the cardboard cut out ukulele (not pictured), and the incredibly drunk girl (also not pictured) who was very interested in gaijin. Any gaijin would do really.

六軒

The blurriness is an accurate picture of what the world looked like by this point

The sun rises.  The trains start back up.  The bars close down, and we stumble out into the daylight.  One by one our friends, new and old, go their separate ways.  Bartender girl goes home. Yoshi hops on a train. Eli heads back to Shibuya, and not long after America.

It’s just Dan and I standing in the daylight.  The only people out at this time of day are people like us who have just enjoyed or survived an all-nighter.  It feels like we’re in on the same big secret, and are slightly embarrassed about it.  There’s a reason bar-hopping happens at night.  Everything is too bright in the day.

It’s almost 8 am.

We find an internet cafe to get some sleep.

All told, start to finish, meeting Yoshi to passing out in a smokey net cafe cubical, the evening lasted about 14 hours, 10-12 of which involved drinking.  Certainly a record for myself, but I can’t speak for Dan.  Earlier in the night, Yoshi had told us his record:  he started on a Friday evening, and just kept going all the way till Sunday.  Yoshi is a monster. We may never reach such lofty heights of wanton partying, but it was a true pleasure to spend a night on the town with someone who had.  It gave us a chance to see a side of Tokyo, of Shinjuku, which a lot of tourists never even get wind of, and meet some fascinating Japanese people along the way.

Japan, Travel

Snapshots of Japan: The Osaka Tenjin Festival

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There’s a lot that could be said about my month long trip across Japan, but a lot of it is pretty mundane. Dan and I were wandering around the country for a fair bit of time and I don’t think you really want to hear about every “nap in a smokey coffee shop while the waitresses made concerned eyes at us”, funny as they were sometimes.  I’ve decided to pick five of my favorite parts of the trip and give them each a proper post, starting right now with my adventure attending one of Japan’s top 3 biggest/best festivals, the Osaka Tenjin Matsuri. I may fill in some other posts if I have the motivation. Lately, it has been lacking.

A Little Backstory…

Dan and I set out on our grand adventure as per our original plan of having no plans what so ever, and seeing what happens.  Naturally, there were bound to be some mistakes, and some adjusting to this new way of life.  We ended up jumping through Fukuoka, Hiroshima, and Kobe in about 3 days.

Protip: Don’t do this. You will want to die.

It took us a little while to figure out that when you’re moving that fast if you don’t have hotel reservations waiting for you, you can spend a lot of brain power accidentally stressing.  And so over mediocre ramen (but some pretty delicious meat buns) in Kobe’s semi-famous Chinatown, Dan and I made the executive decision to hole up in Kyoto for a longer stretch of time, and maybe get out to the other parts of Kansai (Osaka, Nara) if we had the time or inclination.

We found a reservation at a lovely little hostel called The Sparkling Dolphins Inn (you cannot make these things up), run by a charming younger Japanese couple.

Most of the other people staying in the hostel were Spaniards, Germans or Scandanavians of some kind, although one of our favorite weird travel buddies was an 18 year old French kid traveling alone around Japan named Sebastien. He came to Japan after winning a scholarship/contest, and had managed in very short order to get all of his assets frozen. He was living off of small money orders from his parents. He had not-so-great English, and no Japanese. He also had a profound love for Coke-a-cola tallboys, and Mr. Donuts brand donuts, and was often heard remarking to that effect.

Sebastien, the Scholarly

Sebastien: Wanderer, scholar, lover of “the big can coke-a-cola”

What the Hell is a “Tenjin”

After hanging out in Kyoto for a day or two, I remembered that way way back when I was still on Kikai I had read something about some “huge”, “magnificent”, “best in Japan” type festival called the “Tenjin Matsuri” which always happened in Osaka around the end of July.  Our timing just happened to work out that we could go see it first hand, and decide whether it lived up to the hype.

The Tenjin matsuri is held in honor of a scholar who was deified as the patron of learning and art after his death.  “Tenjin” 天神 are the kanji for “sky” and “god” and are either the name or type of the god he became. Someone can probably explain that better than I can,  but since the purpose of the festival in theory: honor Tenjin, and the purpose of the festival in reality: get smashed with your friends, wear traditional clothes, and watch something move or explode or both, are completely separate it’s mostly academic.  The Tenjin matsuri is famous for a huge parade in the afternoon, followed by an equally huge boat precession down at the river in the evening with accompanying fireworks.

The train networks being what they are, it was no real difficulty to day-trip down into Osaka for the festival, then return to the hostel at night.  Sebastien, our young French friend, was also along for the ride.

Pre-Festival-Nanigans

Our adventures began on the express train between Kyoto and Osaka.  Dan, Sebastien and I were standing on the train, making our little gaijin-circle of protection, and a random girl from New Zealand walked up and asked something train related. I can’t remember what, but for the sake of the story lets assume it was important, and Dan and I looked very roguishly handsome and talented in the course of answering it.

She was then so charmed that she stuck around to talk to us, and the conversation eventually swung around to “we’re going to a festival”. Since we were so very handsome and talented, she asked if she could come along, and of course we let her. It would have been an affront to our handsome, talented selves not to.  It was not however in my handsome and talented best interests to remember her name, soooo…

Japanese festivals, at least the summer ones, almost always have the same basic feel to them.  Every street and open area within a certain radius of whatever is being blown up, or paraded, gets lined with tens to hundreds of stalls run by enthusiastic Japanese hawkers selling Japanese festival food, or sometimes small trinkets or tiny live fish (I’m 95% sure they’re not food). The Osaka Tenjin festival was like this, only the stalls stretched for about a mile in every direction, centered around the river that flows through the north of the city.

The walk along the river was an endless mess of fried noodles, candied apples, takoyaki (octopus donuts, as my kids like to call them), and just about everything on a stick you could ever want, from the ubiquitous frankfurter (In Japanese: Huranku farutaa. Sometimes it gets written on the signs in English like that, and we get to have a good laugh), to whole squid and salt grilled mackerel, from pork-belly to cucumbers. While the number of sticked foods might have given the average American festival a run for its money, I would like to point out that they have yet to come up with cheesecake on a stick, and it also begs mentioning that there was no sign of chocolate covered bacon anywhere on the premise. Minnesota – 2.

Squid Stick

Squid on a stick, anyone?

The 4 of us walked around the riverbank, soaking up the pre-festival atmosphere, getting to know our new Kiwi friend and listening to Sebastien recount The Tale of Sebastien’s Money (which he was getting much better at telling), while watching the stalls set up. In Dan’s case he was also trying to see if he could leverage his functional Japanese vocabulary of about 50 words to talk his way onto one of the boats which was going to be in the parade later that night.  He did not succeed, but it was an admirable effort.

I for my part enjoyed chatting with random toothless-to-varying-degrees stall owners, and ambushing them with my Osaka accent.  Most of my major Japanese parent-figures have spoken with some degree of the Osaka accent, and it crept in at some point.  Under normal circumstances I can confuse people a great deal by using it. It would be like a Japanese guy who spoke with traces of a southern drawl, or maybe a Bronx or Bostonian accent would be a better analog.  Just take a moment and picture it.

Apparently though, using this accent while actually in Osaka just completely melts faces.  I was particularly pleased when I responded to one of them and his 9/10 year old kid, with this just priceless confused look on his face, screams out ” HE’S JAPANESE!!!!” and his dad proceeds to slap him on the back of his head and tell him “Don’t be an asshole”.

In Which Dan Is Shameless to Great Effect

After a good bit of wandering and eating things on sticks, we settled down near the river under some trees to wait for the boat parade and the fireworks to begin. It was still pretty early so we managed to get close to the front, with only one large group of picnicking 20 somethings between us and the water. It was a pretty sweet spot.

We sat around chatting as it grew steadily darker, admiring how well prepared (and cute) the group in front of us was.  Tragically, as we were waiting it got dark enough that the food stall near us decided to turn on their portable generator to power their 2 sad, bare little light bulbs.  All generators come with some amount of noise, but this generator was apparently up for generator of the month or something, and was particularly enthusiastic.

At some point I wandered off to go to the bathroom and take photos of strangers (2 separate activities) and by the time I returned Dan had managed to:

  1. Approach the group of Japanese kids in front of us, completely cold, and with no real Japanese to speak of, and challenge one of them to rock-paper-scissors.
  2. Ride this introduction into being invited to sit with their group, and drink their beer.

Jan, ken, pon!

After I returned Dan then managed to:

  1. Further expand on this invitation to merge our two groups.
  2. Ascertain that every girl in the group was either married or had a boyfriend.

Proving once and for all that being utterly shameless in the face of potential embarrassment will get you much much further than fluency.  Knew there was a reason I traveled with that guy.

In Which Boats Are Paraded, and Fireworks Fired

Right around sunset the boats started moving. We’d been seeing them moored along the riverbank for hours now, and during some brief moment when we weren’t looking they snuck down and filled them with people and entertainers.  They started gliding by, beginning a wide circuit which would take them up one bank and down the other over the next two to three hours.  Then all at once they started shooting off the fireworks, and at this point it gets hard to do the moment justice in words.

Tenjin

The water reflected every pinprick of light, from the fireworks over head, to the torches, paper lanterns and giant glowing advertisements for beer to insurance to colleges riding on some of the boats.  The floor to ceiling plate glass windows on the skyscrapers all around us also caught all that light and reflected it back, filling the otherwise darkness with hundreds of thousands of glowing tracers. The crowd behind us had filled in so thickly that there was almost no hope of escape (without the clever use of a gaijin-smash or two), everyone wearing flowery summer yukata, and sporting elaborately styled hair (the men, often more so than the women).

Each of the boats was packed with customers seated at tables and as they’d drift by the MCs on the boats would call out for everyone on shore to wave to them and cheer.  Sometimes they got so close we could reach out and shake their hands, and at least once the four of us got called out by an announcer asking us how we liked Japan, or cheering that we could make it down to enjoy the festival with them.

All the while somewhere in the middle of the river a large traditional looking barge had some sort of very long, elaborate, religious ceremony going on as far as we could tell completely independent of the rest of the festival. I guess that was the “honoring Tenjin” part of the festivities.

The boats and fireworks went on like this, with no noticeable drop in momentum, for no less than 3 hours.

It went on for so long in fact that we started taking it in turns to go watch, a group up at the fence near the water, and a group continuing the serious business of drinking all that beer and having conversations in broken English and Japanese.

At some point during one of my beer rotations later in the evening, two of the guys from the group walked up to me and took positions on either side of me. With very solemn expressions painted on their faces, one of them looked me in the eye and then slowly gestured towards his crotch:

“In English…penis?”

A discussion of synonyms and the nuances of English vocabulary followed. There are now two 20-something Japanese guys running around in Osaka armed with a cold war era nuclear arsenal of English vulgarities, and names for their junk.  Apparently they had asked Dan this same question earlier in the night, but either found his answer unsatisfactory, or wanted a confirmation.

Alas, eventually the festivities had to start wrapping up. The crowds began slowly shuffling off towards the subway entrances, the vendors hocking the last of their food at cut-rate prices (which we took advantage of to get chocolate covered bananas on sticks), and the boats returned to the riverbanks from which they came.

We said goodbye to our Japanese hosts, and the four of us joined the crowd to slowly work our way back to the trains to catch a ride back to Kyoto.

Experiments, Japan

30 Days of Natto: The Aftermath

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A package of natto contains just about 40 grams.  Doing some quick math the sum total amount of natto I have consumed over the last 30 days comes to 1200 grams which, for those of you who find that touching the metric system causes you physical pain and blisters your flesh, is over 2 and a half pounds. 2 and a half pounds of beans and slime.  I have eaten it with mustard, with soy sauce, with mayonnaise and kim chee.  I have consumed it for breakfast, as workout fuel, as dinner and as bedtime snacks.  I have tried almost every single brand of natto they stock at 3 different supermarkets and can tell you the differences between them.  Let no one question my natto credentials. I have earned my wings.

So what have I learned?

1) Natto is gross, but then so are a lot of things when you really think about them.  One of the things which constantly eating natto did was get me thinking about a lot of the other things we routinely consume, and how they’re just as gross and weird.  Is “beans + bacteria = natto” really any weirder than “milk + bacteria = yogurt”? What about the myriad range of cheeses with molds that are not only present, but desirable and indeed an integral part of the flavor.  Let us not even broach mechanically separated meat and the other myriad forms of strange processed foods.  Hell, give me a description of natto and mech-meat side-by-side and I’ll take the natto every day.

2) Natto does not give you superpowers.  It’s damn healthy, don’t get me wrong.  But if you’re looking for a magic bullet to help you lose 40 pounds of fat, put on 50 pounds of muscle, quit smoking, learn French, build a rocket and then perform brain surgery on it, well then I’m afraid you’re SOL.  Now it can certainly help with at least…2 of those things (maybe 3? correlation to smoking or French learning abilities untested), but I’ve got something of a pet peeve for the magic food mentality which has become increasingly common. “It has 10 times the vitamin C of an orange!” Great, maybe if you eat enough of it it will equal a negative cheeseburger.

3) Natto + any other food = Natto.  Ad infinitum. Inclusion in the same meal can produce this effect, even if strict segregation protocols are maintained.  For a food which is not honestly all that strong tasting, it has the uncanny ability to make everything taste like it. You have been warned.

4) We’re mostly bad at things because we think we are.  It’s a recurring theme throughout my time in Japan so far.  I couldn’t eat natto mostly because, well, I assumed I couldn’t eat natto.  But the reality was I couldn’t eat natto, and didn’t even try to eat it, because I assumed I would throw up all over whatever kindly Japanese host was thoughtful enough to give it to me, which would be rude, and embarrassing for everyone involved. Someone would probably have to kill themselves to make up for the shame of it all. A bad scene all around.  Assumptions beget reality.  The implications are staggering.

Meta-implication: Next time there is something you want or need to get done, try ceaselessly drilling the idea that you are absolutely awesome at X, born to do X, and the only way you could fail at X is if the laws of physics themselves changed to spite your birthright.  Now it’s possible that I’m just way better at lying to myself than anyone else who has ever lived, ever, but I do not think this is an isolated phenomenon.  I have always had the vague sense that my subconscious is toiling away at secret machinations, but shoves them under the bed or something whenever I come by for a visit.  I think that constantly bombarding your subconscious with this kind of positive reinforcement will eventually always start to affect your actual success with that project.  If for no other reason that you aren’t wasting untold hours and days building your own walls with a lousy attitude.

In Conclusion

The mission was by and large, a success. We’ll see over the coming weeks if I continue to consume natto in any form. I’m keeping a few packs around for snacks, since it really shines as an appetite killer when you get hungry at odd times.

All in all, a pretty fun way to spend a month, albeit it wasn’t like every waking hour of my time needed to be devoted to natto related activities (now that would be a challenge).  I’ll be spending the next few weeks entertaining random guests to the island while paradoxically trying to avoid spending any money outside these guests so I can make the most of my Summer vacation and the Japannanigans I have planned.  Stay tuned.

Experiments, Japan

30 Days of Natto: Week 4

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I am now so used to natto that I I am jaded to its visage.  Does one more photo of natto evoke its stickiness further? Just like 3 days of hiking through primeval forests, no thank you, I have ceased to care about epic, thousand year old trees covered in moss. They are common place now.  And natto slime is no different.

The final full week of natto consumption (can you believe it’s been nearly a month already?) yielded a few interesting discoveries.  Chief among them is that natto is among the “Swiss Army Knife” categorization of foodstuffs. Not in that it can be prepared in so many ways, or that it contains a corkscrew, but in that it is just so useful at so many times of the day.

Natto is Awesome at the Following Times:

It’s great in the morning, when you have zero time because you were up too late watching South Korea/America/Mexico/England, or any of the other soccer teams you care about fail to succeed. You can make it in seconds, and it’s got good staying power combined with a piece of fruit or something, so you don’t start feeling hungry again until right around noon.

It’s wonderful when you get home from work, and have an awkward little window where normally I would either end up eating dinner early either because I spent the day throwing little kids around and have worked up an appetite. Or more likely it’s because of prolonged exposure to an island on which half the population is has cleared the half-century mark, which means I am basically a senior citizen by osmosis, and thus my body recognizes that 4:30 is the perfect time to have dinner. Natto to the rescue.  A pack of natto is only about 40 grams of food, which is enough to fill the void until I can eat at a reasonable time, rather than hate myself at around 9:30 when I got hungry again on an earlier schedule.

Natto is also nice for a little something pre-workout if I’m feeling a little draggy. If I only eat a banana or something I die about half way through, but with some protein mixed in (and all the natto slime superpowers) I can keep genki-ly throwing my ball of metal with a handle on it around well into the evening.

Natto is Incredibly NOT Awesome at the Following Times:

Natto is the last thing you should ever try to eat if you’ve got any kind of nausea.  Even though I’m used to the stuff, there is nothing like slimy beans to really bring that feeling of nausea to the forefront.  Unless you find slimy things soothing for some reason, probably best not to test this one.  I have already thrown myself in front of the bullet of progress for you on this one, and you may consider yourself honored to know such a hero and patriot, one that would suffer so that you need not.

I also find that post-workout natto loses some of it’s appeal for some reason. I think the general loss of appetite that comes with working hard + aforementioned slimy oddness is just enough to remove it as a viable post-workout protein source.  Go eat a dead animal, or some other form of legume instead.

Home Stretch

I’m almost done with 30 days, as of today I should be at 28ish, minus the one off day.  I’m calling it mission success this Wednesday, and I’ll be back some time this week for my final thoughts on the whole gruesome experiment.

I’ve got some other things in the works right now which I started about a week ago which I should also be going live with some time soon, so keep your ears pricked and your eyes glossy and any other marginally old-timey body-alertness related metaphors you can think of.  I’m going to go watch Japan decide whether my tomorrow is full of bright, perky, patriotic co-workers, or bitter, angry, sarcastic hate-balls.  たのしみ～(/^ ^)/|  o |

Experiments, Japan

30 Days of Natto: Week 2

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Day 8: Karashi and soy

Day 8

Went out with some guys from the shamisen group tonight after practice, so I didn’t get home till 11:45 or so.  I decided to take it as a challenge to see just how quickly I could eat the natto. Two or three minutes later, I was staring at an empty natto pack and a fairly unexpected result.

Now it might just be the new brand of natto I’m trying out, a lovely Kyushu local variety, but tonight’s shot of beanie goodness was…good?  Either this brand just tastes more like beans, or I’ve gotten so used to the slimy and bitter parts of natto that I’m starting to notice the other flavors that have always been there.  It’s encouraging.

Day 9: Strangely sweet dressing, prepackaged with new brand

Day 9

A friend was over and I explained my perverse desire to get used to natto. His favorite preparation was with soy sauce, and nothing else added, which might explain why he also said that the dressing that comes with this new stuff would be good. To be fair, it wasn’t bad, but man was it ever sweet.

Also I apparently still look like I am going to die while eating natto. My subconscious is still grimacing.

Day 10: Soy, mustard

Another shot of the late night natto, but I think I’m pretty well used to the stuff by now, so I can start adding it in in the morning and seeing how it holds up.  Japanese TV is apparently on my side on this one, as there was a feature about how natto with cheese is apparently famous in some prefecture or another. Tomorrow perhaps?  They also made natto cheese toast, which I think is also worth a shot. It seems strangely palatable…

Day 11: The usual fare

Day 11

Natto is officially a viable breakfast food.  I have so many people I need to thank.

Also if you will turn your attention to the rear-right you will see the first of the island passion fruit which is just coming into season, served with some yogurt.  Ah, the perks of island life.

Day 12: Oh no!

So I went out diving with an English teacher from the next island over who is occasional forced to fly to Kikai and teach, and spent the whole day underwater, sightseeing, and eating wild boar feet (complete with just a little bit of boar hair, mmmm). I just didn’t want to make the run all the way out to the supermarket that’s still open at 11 at night.  So Day 12 was a natto-free day.

OH NO!!! Is this the end of natto as we know it?  I mean, I have pretty clearly stated that I need to be eating it every day, regardless of circumstances, so by this rubric I just failed and need to go sell all my possessions, retreat into seclusion in a mountain monastery, and spend my days in quiet reflection of just how much of a failure I am.

Well, no. At times like this, it’s important to remember that my actual goal is to get used to natto, not to eat it for 30 days. Eating it for 30 days is just the means I chose to get to this goal.  Short term failure does not equal long term failure. In fact, I would argue quite the opposite: short term failure is often necessary for long term success.  We learn so much more when we fail.  For example, I have learned to buy in bulk. I have also learned it’s better to eat it in the morning if I can, since I should eat some breakfast anyway and it’s an easy time to make sure I get it done.

Day 13: Cheese, parsley

Day 13

As per the recommendation of a Japanese tv show.  The cheese is pretty much entirely masked by the natto, but the parsley is kind of present.  All in all not one of my favorite ways to eat the stuff.  Mustard and soy is still a heavy favorite.

Day 14: Natto Toast!

Natto Toast: Day 14

Saw this one on the same show which recommended yesterday’s recipe. I honestly don’t get it though. Natto+cheese just tastes like extra slimy natto. Natto plus melted cheese doubly so.  Even the flavor of the toast is hard pressed to shine through all the natto funkitude.  However for those of you who have never seen Japanese bread, there’s a hearty inch-thick slice of it lying under all the goo.

Sliced Japanese bread gives me the general impression that the first people to manufacture such bread in Japan did so with a good deal of guess work.  It’s like a lot of the “western” inspired food over here. Vaguely resembling the original in theory, but uniquely Japanese in reality. If one were to describe them they would both seem to be a thing called “bread”, all the essential descriptors are there, and yet the Japanese version possesses unique qualities that would prevent anyone from mistaking it for the thing on which it is based.

Final Thoughts for the Week

As much fun as I’m sure you’re all having of the blow-by-blow, I think I’m going to write the next 2 weekly updates in summary fashion.  See which way feels better.  Plus there is certainly a point of diminishing returns to “photos of natto slime”. I think you get the point.

I’ve got some other posts I’ve started working on, but the weekly projects keeps the blog present in my tragically disorganized mind. I know reading about natto may not be exactly what you’re looking for if you fall into the “family” section of the readership, or the “friends who do not have an unhealthy obsession with Japan” section of the readership, but stick around. Other things in the works.  Besides, you know you that while you are overtly disgusted you are secretly fascinated.

You want to run out and try it right now.

Experiments, Japan

30 Days of Natto: Week 1

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Day 1:

If the camera work wasn’t too bad, there should be a video of my first run at natto floating around the top of the page somewhere.  Initial thoughts:

Yeah, I could do this for a month.

It was more or less like I remembered it, although as stated repeatedly in the video, the addition of soy sauce and mustard, plus a little green onion really did change the flavor dramatically. The aftertaste and the feeling like your lips are coated in slime for 3-4 hours after eating were the same as always. But then, it wouldn’t be natto if you weren’t still tasting it on your lips 3 hours later.

So why could I eat it relatively nausea free this time, despite there being no real change between now and 2 years ago in Tokyo?

The main difference is that since I am voluntarily going out of my way to eat the stuff this time around, it is infinitely more approachable.  It’s like the difference between volunteering to go first on presentation day, and hiding in the back hoping the class runs out of time before you have to go.  The more you build something up, the scarier it becomes and the harder it is to actually dive in.  So dive in early.  Don’t be natto‘s bitch.  Don’t make it a big thing, and it won’t be.

Day 2:

Day 2

Immediately after a workout, so my arms are more or less down for the count, and wasn’t in the mood to do anything fancy with the natto. Plain, with the soy and mustard.  I wanted to see if the green onion changed the edibility of it significantly, since yesterday seemed almost too easy. Turns out it’s still pretty…good, isn’t the right word. Turns out it’s still pretty not horrible with just the soy and mustard.

It’s only been 2 days, but I already feel like I’ve overcome a significant hurdle in the natto challenge. I still wouldn’t say I “like” or “want to eat” natto, but I will say that the smell no longer really bothers me, and the taste and general slippery mouth feel are both totally manageable.  If snickering Japanese people put it in front of me I think I could defend my honor.

Tomorrow I’ll give it a shot during it’s traditional breakfast time slot, see if it gets any more or less appetizing when I’m half-asleep and cranky.

Day 3:

Day 3

Today’s natto bears no special preparation but does bear the distinction of being the first shot of natto eaten during its customary time slot.

A note for future generations: while natto is certainly no more or less edible during the morning, and could easily be part of a balanced and energizing breakfast, I do not recommend eating nothing but natto, and I particularly do not recommend eating nothing but natto in 3 minutes because you are in a rush.  I felt like natto slime was crawling back up into my mouth for the entire first half of my day.  Gross.

Day 4:

Chibiko Natto

Trying a new brand of natto today, with this adorable animated…circle? as a mascot.  It’s also pretty much the cheapest natto available, coming in at an epic 120 yen for 4 packs.

Also trying a way of eating natto recommended by my dive buddy, and quasi-island-father Yoda-san.  He claimed that mixing natto with mayonnaise, drastically reduces both the smell and the sticky, sliminess. He was half right. Guess which:

Day 4

Open Wide Kanshoku Desu

However, the taste was pretty surprisingly good. It tastes kind of like slimy Camembert, but not as buttery.  I’d be ok eating this on a fairly regular basis, except the mayo certainly takes a chunk out of the “healthiness”.

The quest for the perfect natto preparation continues.

Day 5: Natto with mysterious green sauce

Day 5

Tried the new natto brand’s condiment tonight, which tastes something like…honestly I don’t know if I can describe it.  It’s definitely Japanese, kind of sweet, vaguely reminiscent of some kind of sea vegetable, and only barely noticeable alongside pungent natto.  Went down pretty easy, and the preparation phase had a lot less of the “poking and prodding to ascertain whether it is indeed food” stage than previous days.

My subconscious is beginning, I believe, to grasp that natto is indeed some kind of food, and that consuming it will not cause me to die in some kind of horrible, sticky, smelly manner.

Note: Post-natto dishes should be taken care of with all due haste, or you will come home to your entire house smelling vaguely like bad feet, good cheese, and day-old bodily secretions. It is every bit as unpleasant as it sounds.

Day 6: Karashi mustard, and soy sauce

Day 6

Tonight’s natto is brought to you by the letter L, for lazy.  I have an avocado which is sitting in my fridge ready for tomorrow morning’s natto but tonight I made homemade spaghetti sauce and meatballs and wasn’t feeling additionally inspired.

I will say this though, using real karashi and soy sauce rather than the packet which comes with the natto makes for a much tastier product. The mustard is much more pungent and present.

Day 7: Soy sauce, and half an avocado

Day 7

So.  It turns out that natto has superpowers. Not particularly cool superpowers, but superpowers none the less which really need to be taken into consideration when mixing natto with other, non-sauce substances.

Natto by itself is a sticky, strandy, slimy mess.  Adding sauce adds flavor, but no extra mass worth noting.  The actual physical amount of stuff you have to consume has not increased significantly.  An avocado on the other hand, is quite a bit more mass.  And it turns out that natto + anything causes a horrible chain-reaction in the “anything” which causes it to have the exact same sticky, slimy, strandy-ness as the natto itself.

Natto with avocado is actually pretty good. But there was about 2-3 times as much of it as I’m used to eating.

It’s also worth noting that this superpower does not limit itself to consumables.  Doing the dishes, I learned early on that you do the natto last unless you want to be using strandy natto-soap on the rest of your dishes.

Final Thoughts for the Week

I hope it has been an entertaining first week, and that the photos have not caused you any undue psychological trauma.  It’s honestly not nearly as bad as you might suspect.  So far I myself have been surprised by the general ease with which I have already gotten used to natto. I have not yet reached a point where I am actively desiring natto, but I’m about as willing to eat is as any of the other myriad “it’s good for you but tastes like the inside of a sewer” products available on the market.

Week 2 might see some inclusion in actual meals, natto tempura or natto fried rice, and I still need to tackle natto over plain rice at some point. I intended to do so at some point this week, but an incident involving a bowl of rice, a tray, a thin ledge, and a general failure to understand the laws of physics as they pertain to centers of gravity deprived me of that opportunity.

Always next week.

I also need to do the natto + raw egg one of my students recommended.  I don’t think she was just doing it to mess with me, but then she’s one of the smarter ones so I wouldn’t put it past her entirely.

Experiments, Japan

30 Days of Natto

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Creative Commons License photo credit: snowpea&bokchoi

The Mission

The slimy little beast you see in the photo above you is natto. Its major claim to fame in the greater Japanese sphere of influence is that gaijin such as myself, hate and cannot eat it, while Japanese 4-year olds happily slurp it down and laugh at us.  Well I’ve had enough!  No longer will I suffer the indignity, the shame of having to bow under natto’s cruel yoke!

For the next month I’m going to be eating natto once a day, every day, without exception.

For this, the inaugural admittedly scientifically unsound experiment here on Kikai Castaway, I resolve to test whether I can overcome my aversion to natto with overwhelming force, and a simple change of viewpoint.

A Little History

“Nihon shoku…daijoubu desu ka?” Can you eat Japanese food? For some reason people all over Japan always ask this question like they’re diffusing a bomb.  I suspect they may be afraid they are going to offend me. That they will force me to admit my terrible gaijin-y shame, and I will burst into a tearful chorus of:

“DEKINAI!!!! DAIJOBU JYANAIIIII!!!!” I CAN’T! IT’S NOT OK!

Then I will be so shamed that I will have to leave the island forever, perhaps the country, maybe get a job somewhere selling body parts in a land with a less harsh culinary climate.  They don’t want to do that to me, but they just have to know.  So they ask like they’re cutting the blue wire.

“Un, daijobu.” “Yeah, it’s fine” I am entitled to reply smugly.  Or at least I would be if not for the, sigh, single Japanese food I have still not managed to conquer. My Achilles heel, my nemesis, my foe of foes: Natto.  Instead, I have to settle for “Un, daijobu…natto igai ni” “Yeah, it’s fine…except natto“.

Do not get me wrong, by any rubric I am already a mighty combatant in the Japanese food arena. I have enjoyed every raw sea creature that it is legal to consume (and perhaps one or two that are not, I’m on too clear on the legality of some of the shellfish they keep dragging up), blindingly sour homemade umeboshi plums, and every manner of slimy sea vegetable that has been placed before me. Salted fish ovaries, raw horse and goat, whole grilled sardines (head first), roasted pig face, shark steak, and conch mouth.  I will not only eat every last one of them, I will enjoy them.

But it rings hollow.  Though there are plenty of weird Japanese foods I haven’t eaten yet: bee larvae, fish sperm, and tiny live fish drunk whole in a bowl of water to name a few, I would have no problems trying any of them.  I would eat them.  Natto is the only thing which I, as of this moment, will reject on the basis of can’t.

(Note: I also make it a point not to eat whales, dolphins, or turtles. I’m a diver, and I rather enjoy meeting all of them underwater. And it’s kind of a have cake or eat it situation.)

It’s due time I climbed my Japanese food Everest.

But Adam, Just What Is Natto?

I’m glad you asked! Natto = soybeans + bacteria + time. It is a food renowned among terrified foreigners for its overpowering stench somewhere between old cheese and gym socks, as well as it’s truly mighty neba-neba-tude, a Japanese adjective which combines all the best parts of slimy and sticky.  If you’ve ever eaten okra, you have some idea of what neba-neba is, only natto makes okra look like dry crackers. Natto expresses its particular brand of neba-neba by producing long, incredibly sticky strands of rotten bean juice, that have enough structural wherewithal to stretch from bowl to mouth  without flinching, often requiring the poor eater to have to take several swipes at the strands to dislodge them. Yumm!

Natto is customarily consumed as a breakfast food, and the two most common preparations I have come across seem to be:

A) Given a vigorous stir to really rile up the natto for maximum strandy neba-neba, plain, over warm rice.

B) Given the same aggressive once over with some chopsticks, then further mixed with soy sauce, and Japanese karashi mustard.

But it doesn’t stop there.  Natto can be seen mixed with mayo, served as a filling for onigiri (rice balls) and a topping for sushi, or battered and deep-fried to make natto tempura.  There’s even natto ice cream. Google it.

Given its checkered reputation, you are probably wondering exactly what has possessed me to decide I want it in my diet.  Perhaps the island sun has finally gotten to me?

Aside from the visceral joy of furthering the myth that I can do anything, bragging rights throughout the Japans, and the added fun of getting to learn and teach along with the folks playing the home version (or just reading along), there is one other major reason why I decided I really need to learn to love this particular fermented treat:

Natto is nutritional gold.

If we are to believe the word of the wiki (and I see no reason why we should not), natto consumption can lead to one or more of the following superpowers:

  • Reduced likelihood of blood clots.
  • Alzheimer’s prevention and potentially treatment.
  • Super-human bone density from all that vitamin K. Watch a 90-year-old Japanese dude sprint up a mountain wearing a full pack and then tell me that bone density doesn’t matter.
  • Suppress excessive immune reaction.
  • Prevent cancer.
  • Lower cholesterol.
  • Shoot fire from your finger-tips.
  • Antibiotic properties.
  • And a truly impressive 7-8 grams of protein per serving to boot.

Did I mention the fire from the finger-tips bit? It’s very important.

You Can Get Used to Anything

Despite the dogma, the truth is that not all Japanese people are in love with natto. A lot of them denounce it for the slimy beast it is along with the foreign natto hating public.  Certain regions of Japan have a particularly insatiable lust for the spoiled bean goo, generally starting in Tokyo and reaching north to Hokkaido.  Other regions, basically everything east of Tokyo, are not head over heels for the stuff. You can find it, but the rate of exposure tends to be lower.

My dive buddy, and island otousan (father) Yoda-san comes from Kansai, where Osaka and Kyoto are, a region located firmly in anti-natto territory. As a result, he did not grow up sucking natto down with breakfast, and didn’t really like natto throughout much of his early life.  At some point though, after coming down to Kikai, he started eating the stuff for reasons he refuses to explain, but I cannot discount mob involvement.  Wouldn’t you know it, slowly over repeated exposure to the rotten slippery mass he came to tolerate and then enjoy eating natto.  I don’t think it was the result of any sharp skull trauma either. I think he just wasn’t used to the flavor at first, and over time he got used to it. This isn’t a particularly novel leap of logic, but for some reason it’s one that people are surprisingly slow to make.  You can get used to just about anything, with enough experience.

There are a lot of things which people tend to try the first time, denounce outright, and then repeatedly reinforce their hatred of.  I didn’t like natto the first time I ate it, probably because everyone told me that I was going to hate natto the first time I ate it, so I went out of my way to make sure I ate it in a fashion which was most likely to meet my expectations (plain, in a bowl, scowling).  Every time after that, whenever natto was around, I’d start up my chorus of “oh how awful that stuff is, how can you stand the smell, and it gets everywhere, and you feel like you’ve been making out with a dead fish after you eat it, and did I mention the strands of rotten bean juice…”

The hatred naturally grew stronger. I reinforced my own largely irrational hatred of natto every time it was presented before me. I’m sure I also helped to plant that image in a lot of other people’s minds.  But there’s no reason it has to be like this.  Clearly from Yoda-san’s story, there is no reason why someone can’t learn to like natto.  Further, if we accept that people are particularly good at interpreting events to meet their expectations (self-fulfilling prophecies, if you will. More on these in later posts), then someone looking to add natto to their diet could potentially do so by:

A) Eating a lot of natto to get used to it and,

B) Doing so with a positive attitude. I really do want to be able to eat natto. It’s one of nature’s super foods, and one of the healthiest foods in the famously healthy Japanese diet.

It’s that simple.

Bring it on.

So, How Are We Doing This Adam?

Once a day, every day, for 30 days.

I’m defining a serving as one single-serving natto fun-pack, which comes in at about half a cup of natto. No, I’m not going to actually measure it as I don’t want to create a precedent of scientific rigor.

I’m arguing that at least one day a week should be for each of the two most common natto preparations, with the other days open to the addition of other less-common ingredients, or even some really oddball fun stuff like tempura.

Aside from that, expect me to be back about once a week to keep you updated on this project.

I fully encourage any of you who want to play the home version to do so in the comments section down below.

Happy Eating!