Author Archives: Daniel

ストーヴ ≠ stove

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I’ve found another great set of equalities for my never-ending quest to debunk all mistranslations of 外来語 and 和製英語.

ストーヴ  =  stove1

stove         =  stove2

I’m sure the usage of ストーヴ overlaps slightly with the English stove, as is evident from a Google Images search, but for the most part ストーヴ refers to a Japanese-style kerosene heater. Anyone who has ever taught English on JET, especially out in the countryside, is probably well familiar with these. I have great memories of them. In addition to heating the room, on top there is always a kettle boiling or a big tub of water being warmed – like water usage in toilets, another great example of Japanese efficiency. In the winter many of my students warmed up their lunch milk in the tub of water. Be warned: doing this will make you extremely sleepy and may even affect your post-lunch teaching ability.

Stoves as Americans think of them, on the other hand, are few and far between in Japan. The ovens underneath take up space that isn’t available in Japan, and there’s also less of a tradition of bread-making and other baking. In most cases a smaller microwave oven will do the trick. Gas or electric ranges are common and generally referred to as レンジ. Additionally, there is a small fish-sized drawer which noobs can use to grill eggplants and toast. The area where the oven would be is generally storage space where Japanese people keep all their cleaning supplies and 2D girlfriends.

JR Station Pub Crawl – Yamanote Line

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You have to be a particularly cold-hearted person not to fall in love with the Japanese rail system. The way it all runs on time (barring natural disaster or extreme personal injury). The way local train routes overlap in order to make long distance travel cheap. The comfort and service of the limited express trains. The sheer speed of the shinkansen.

One of my personal favorite parts of the JR system is the array of services you can find within the station gates. Shopping, food, personal hygiene. It amazes me that there is enough demand for these services inside stations. It’s hard enough to run a restaurant outside of a station. Although I guess the foot traffic alone makes a station the ideal place for a business.

I recently spent 12 hours over two days in search of beer within the station gates on the Yamanote Line. The rules? Konbini beer does not count. Preference for draft beer. Must not leave station gates.

Here is what I found:

JR Station Pub Crawl – Yamanote from Daniel Morales on Vimeo.

Shimbashi – Goody De Cafe is on the lower level of the Karasumori Exit (might be called the Shiodome Exit?) just before heading down to the Yokosuka line. They have Guiness in a can and that silly machine that shakes the pint to foam it up a bit. Assorted snacks and some other beer on tap, too. Open from breakfast onward on weekdays and Saturday (closes early afternoon on Saturday).

Tamachi – Becker’s is by the South Gate, and they have Kirin Ichiban Shibori on tap in addition to the standard menu of burgers and sandwiches. I was surprised a station as small as Tamachi had a restaurant with beer, although it later became obvious that real estate must be pricy at some of the bigger stations, so perhaps it actually makes more sense that a station like Tamachi has one.

Shinagawa – Shinagawa Station has several beer options including sushi and some actual sit down restaurants (all near the Central Exit). There is an eCute shopping center as well, which is where the cafe Paul is located. They have most excellent pastries (cheese bread in the video), Heineken on tap, and patio seating. Definitely one of the classiest places to get a beer in Yamanote Line stations.

(Yes, giant jump here from Shinagawa to Ikebukuro. I checked pretty much all of the stations and was surprised to find no beer-serving restaurants, although I feel like Ebisu and Shinjuku probably have them somewhere. If you can confirm any beer-serving restaurants, I’ll add them to the 号外 list below. Send a pic and I’ll put that up, too.)

Ikebukuro – London Pub is by the Chuoguchi 1. (That’s what I wrote down, but I was drinking and it was a month ago, so it might be Central 1.) Loved this place because it had Bass on tap in addition to a couple of other beers and a variety of little snacks. I had the tortilla chips. Reminded me of a HUB Pub miniaturized to fit within the station, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was connected to that chain.

Tabata – Sanuki Udon are common within stations, but not all of them serve beer. The one in Tabata Station by the North Gate has it on tap along with their standard menu of noodle dishes. Unsure if the beer was Asahi Superdry or a happoshu offering like Honnama. Not much else to say about this one.

Uguisudani – Another small station with a sad little Ajisai Soba/Udon restaurant. They had cans of Asahi Superdry, so I gave it a go. It’s actually kind of pleasant to sit up on the quiet second floor and look out over the train tracks and buildings. Walking through the walkways of the station you can also get a good view of the nearby cemetery.

Ueno – Ueno Station might have the most options in terms of beer. There are several large sit-down restaurants, including Chabuzen which is by the Iriya Exit. Mostly grilled/fried meats and seafood, but as is clear from the video they also have some decent set meals, including sara-udon, one of my favorites since visiting Nagasaki a couple years ago.

Okachimachi – Ramen Suika is by the North Exit and has super frosty glasses of Sapporo in addition to their ramen and gyoza menu. Just across the way from Ramen Suika is a small Italian restaurant that also has beer. Excellent representation for such a small station.

Akihabara – Akihabara Station also has good representation near the Central Exit including a nice curry restaurant and a couple of soba/udon places. I went with Nama Soba near the Showa-dori Exit because it was the only restaurant I saw that is actually inside and outside the station at the same time. There’s a divider in the middle of the eating area that separates the two (that’s what the beer is resting on in the video), but the kitchen is just one big area. Very cool. Judging from the posters, they serve Superdry.

Kanda – Elysee Cafe and Dining Bar was the uncelebrated gem of the restaurants I went to. It’s in the basement of the South Exit and is actually surprisingly expansive once you descend the stairs. They have a very respectable selection of whiskey, shochu and nihonshu in addition to wine and lots of beer – Suntory Premium Malts and one other Japanese beer on tap, and Guiness and Corona in bottles. Draft beer and a lot of the liquors are half off on Wednesdays and Fridays, which means you can get a decent sized glass of Premium Malts for 325 yen! They also have a reasonably priced food menu with lots of choices.

Tokyo – As you’d expect, Tokyo Station has a lot of choices for beer and sit down restaurants (some of my favorites are in Tokyo GranSta in the basement), but the best beer on tap is by far Gargery Stout at Tokyo Grand Cafe which is right between the Yaesu South and Yaesu Central Exits. Nice roasty stout. Highly recommended. I got there too late to try any of the food, but it looks pan-Asian, which also happens to be the theme of their import beers – they have nearly a full selection of tasteless Southeast Asian beers from Singha to Tsingtao and everything in between.

号外 Additions:

Osaki – According to my roommate, the Becker’s in Osaki Station now serves beer, although I explicitly asked for it and was given only a strange look when I went last month.

Cool Language Thing – 並び

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ninarabi

Here’s a cool language thing I learned on TV and have heard used at work. I was watching Mecha-ike at some point and Okamura was joking about how much he wanted to be paid to do a certain job. (It may have been when he was doing the wedding MC “offer” [Sadly all the YouTube video links on that page are dead, but there is still explanation of different Mecha-ike skits, including “offers”].) He said he wanted to be paid 2並び (にならび). Fortunately for me there are tons of subtitles on Japanese TV and they displayed “￥22,222,” so I instantly knew that 2並び literally means “2 lined up.” Not lined up forever but in the basic Japanese counting unit – the ten thousand.

This works for any number: 11,111 (1並び), 22,222, 33,333 (3並び), 44,444 (4並び), 55,555 (5並び), etc all the way up to 9. Apparently we use it at work as a guarantee for narrators. Should we book a narrator for a job and then have the client cancel last minute, the narrator would still get their guarantee, which would be some number in this X並び format. Most excellent stuff.

I think the way Okamura used it is typical of the pattern – it’s a semi-arbitrary large amount of money but not always in the realm of impossibility.

Game Lingo – 発売

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hatsubai

発売 is a sneaky little compound that isn’t unique to the game industry. You see it all over the place, notably on posters for goods that aren’t being sold yet. The reason I say it’s sneaky is that pesky little 売 hanging around. Yes, 売 means “sell,” but the translation of 発売 should almost never incorporate the word “sell.” In terms of kanji categories, it falls into the V + DO category and literally means something like “start sales”; hence, the correct translation is “release” or “launch.” The most frequent usage is X月Y日発売, but you’ll run into the passive form 発売される・された quite often when translating marketing material for game companies.

ジュース ≠ juice, except when ジュース ＝ juice

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I was at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto a couple weekends ago and stopped in the 湯豆腐 (boiled tofu) restaurant on the grounds as I almost always do. A friend and I split a single serving (enough for two unless you really like your boiled tofu) and took in the view of the pristine garden.

A couple came in at some point and ordered their food and drink. When they ordered their drinks, the guy said, ビールを一つと、ジュースを一つ. Simple enough: one beer and one juice.

The lady’s reply was awesome: ジュースは、コーラ、アップル、どっちがいいですか。Something like, “Which juice do you want, Coke or apple?”

I smiled and basked in the linguistic awesomeness that allows me to make the following sets of equalities and inequalities:

ジュース   =  juice1

juice          =  juice1

juice          ≠  juice3

ジュース   =  juice3

ジュース   =  juice2

ジュース   =  juice4

ジュース   ≠  juice5

Wikipedia explains that beverage companies long sold soft drinks under the label ジュース, and the name has stuck despite the Japan Agricultural Standards’ best attempts to define it as stuff from fruit.

I was surprised that Wikipedia didn’t mention anything about alcohol. I have this impression that ジュース implies non-alcoholic, which is why I added that last equation. Part of this comes from vast 宴会 experience. At the start of an enkai, tables or trays are supplied with bottled beer and a selection of non-booze – usually ginger ale, orange drink, oolong tea and cola. (People dip into nihonshu and shochu after the initial toast.)

ジュース also happens to be one of my favorite words to over-enunciate. ジューーース.

Good Eats – 武蔵 (Musashi)

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炉端焼き (ろばたやき) originated in Sendai at a restaurant called 炉ばた, which literally means “by the hearth.” Wikipedia makes it sound like chefs from the restaurant gradually dispersed to various locations all over Japan – Osaka, Hokkaido, Aomori, Fukushima – and spread the unique cooking style: customers seated around a hearth where chefs grill fish and veggies. The cooking style took the name of the restaurant, and now it can be found everywhere.

I stumbled into Musashi in Shimbashi completely by accident the first time I went. The robatayaki across the street was full, and when I did a quick 360 to see what the other options were, the red lanterns at Musashi must have drawn me through the doors to the counter seats around the grill. To be honest, before Musashi I had never been to a true robatayaki. Musashi doesn’t have an irori style hearth, but there are counter seats around a grill, and the grillmaster (seated seiza style the whole time!) does serve up food on a giant しゃもじ. The food is cheap (many items are only 290 yen!) and incredibly tasty. Here’s a video review:

Good Eats – Musashi from Daniel Morales on Vimeo.

A few other items I would highly recommend:

Nattō-bukuro – Fermented soybeans wrapped in tofu bags. The bag definitely cuts down on the ねばねば factor.

Tsukune – The tsukune at Musashi is nice and plump and dotted with sesame seeds. Very hearty.

Nasu – Japanese eggplant with bonito flakes and grated ginger. Add a little soy sauce on top.

Hotate – The scallops are great, as are all the other shells they serve.

Kujira – They serve whale meat in several different ways, raw and grilled being the two that I can remember. A friend I brought insisted that we try something crazy, and whale it was. Surprisingly tasty.

Basically everything they make is good. I guarantee that you will not be disappointed. Here’s a map in case the video wasn’t clear enough (it looks like they actually have a second location further from the station, cool):

大きな地図で見る

Cool Compound – 初耳

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hatsumimi

Short and simple today. 初耳 (はつみみ) is a nice quick way to say that you’ve heard something for the first time. Makes sense, right?

This:

それは初耳だ。

is 40% more efficient than this:

それを聞いたのは初めてだ。

And 初めて聞いた (the pattern I always used that now makes me think of an Eastern-European-accented “First time I hear this!”) I think should really only be used as a modifier, i.e. 初めて聞いたとき.

1Q84 Postmortem

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1984

Well, my 1Q84 review is online. I can’t say enough about the guys at Néojaponisme. They did a fantastic job helping me turn my thoughts on 1Q84 into a cohesive article. Major props to Matt over at No-sword.

This is as good a time as any to give a postmortem on my 1Q84 predictions and add a few thoughts about the book. Some very vague spoiler-ish type material is included, but nothing too critical; still, read at your own risk.

Prediction 1: It’s going to be a monster.

Verdict: Yes

This was a gimme prediction. I needed one to guarantee I didn’t embarrass myself with a bagel. At 1055 pages it’s gigantic, but we all knew that going in; that was one of the few things Murakami DID reveal about the novel. Ben Dooley at The Millions noted that The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is longer, but only when you take into account Wind-up Bird’s belated third volume. It still only edges out 1Q84 by a meager 100 pages or so. If Murakami adds a third volume to 1Q84, it will easily crush Wind-up Bird.

That said, unless Murakami adds a 700 page third volume with 20 new characters and lots of action, Wind-up Bird will still feel longer. There are more characters and more things happen. And there are no coddamn “Little People” in Wind-up Bird (this will make more sense in a few years). 「ほうほう」と俺が言う。

Prediction 2: He will not re-work a previous short story or novel.

Verdict: Yes

Alright! I’m really happy I got this right, but as mentioned in the prediction, I was hoping he would incorporate something old. Using old material forces him to edit and refine. He’s had a lot of success with that technique (Hard-boiled Wonderland, Norwegian Wood, Wind-up Bird, Sputnik Sweetheart), perhaps because it’s the only form of editing he’s getting. In a college class, I once heard a professor compare the relationship between author and editor in Japan to one of sensei and student – the editor accepts the manuscript from the writer and thanks him deeply before taking it straight to the press.

And this book feels like it could lose some weight. If, say, it had been edited down into one volume, then he could have written a kick-ass second volume to wrap things up. But he takes his sweet time, dragging six months of calendar time in the novel out over 1000 pages.

Prediction 3: World War II will be a theme.

Verdict: No

What a terrible call. The answer was sitting there right in that section of the article I quoted, but I didn’t realize it. Murakami does not use WWII as a theme, but he does use religious cults as a theme. Yes, there is one section in the novel where WWII is mentioned, but it’s brief, not fully connected to other sections of the novel, and there is nothing about the brutality of Japanese soldiers in the Pacific. More about the cult topic below.

Prediction 4: It’s going to be great.

Verdict: No

Well, points to me for being optimistic, but this is not one of Murakami’s better works. I think it’s clear from the beginning of my review that Murakami’s best year was 1985. That five-year period from ’82 to ’87 (A Wild Sheep Chase to Norwegian Wood) is just incredible, and ’85 is, in retrospect, the peak. For whatever reason, his post-Norwegian Wood novels have been all over the place, including Wind-up Bird. That’s one thing 1Q84 did to me – it has changed my opinion of Wind-up Bird. I remember enjoying it the two times I read it, but looking back at it through this most recent novel, it seems more like an unstable collage of randomness, not unlike Kafka on the Shore. In all three novels, there are discussions of WWII that don’t really fit in with the rest of the novel. Wind-up Bird is the strongest of the three, but it’s nowhere close to Hard-boiled Wonderland in terms of construction. Murakami’s technique seems to be much stronger on a smaller scale, like afterdark or A Wild Sheep Chase. Hard-boiled Wonderland seems to be an exception since he had to revise an old work and admittedly rewrote the ending after his wife didn’t like it. (Rubin mentions this on page 115 of his book, referring to the supplement to the Complete Works).

Prediction 5: There will be a flush of short stories later this year.

Verdict: Unknown

We’ll have to wait and see what he produces next, but I imagine that he’s already at work on something. He’s a machine.

Prediction 6ish: The Aum attack will be a theme.

Verdict: Kind of.

After seeing Dmitri Kovalenin’s livejournal and his commenter’s research showing that 1Q84 is some kind of weird gene-thing, I brought up the fact that the Aum attack could be a topic. Well, cults definitely take up a good part of Book 1, but not for the reason we thought – sarin gas has nothing to do with the book. So I’m giving myself half a point here. It seems like Murakami tries to address the cult mindset, combine that with the idea of a similarly powerful groupthink situation, and the fuck everything up with some weird fucking moral quandary (that involves baby-raping, no less). (Yes, baby-raping. Well, more like statutory “rape.” But that can be our little secret until the translation comes out.)

The cult theme, however, gets dropped for the most part in Book 2, so I guess this should really only be a quarter of a point, which means…

2.25/5 = EPIC FAIL! (Although I could end up 3.25/6 depending on how his short stories pan out.) Oh well. It was fun. It pains me even to think it, but Murakami may be losing a step. But hey hey hey, don’t think about that, let’s look at one of his old short stories!

“The Twins and the Sunken Continent” is a great little short story. It was almost unreal to sink back into that same mellow tone courtesy of Murakami’s infamous boku. I started reading the story a year and a half ago but didn’t get around to finishing it until earlier this year. Some bloggy blog blog type thoughts:

– There’s this amazing scene where boku has returned to his office after seeing the photo of the twins. The place is a mess, but before he starts cleaning he chills out with a cup of coffee that he is forced to stir with a pen because the spoons are dirty. Such a simple scene, but it’s one of my favorite parts of the story, I think because the physical mess of the office mirrors his mental confusion, and he just kind of sits with it for a few moments, quietly enjoying a cup of coffee, before he begins to pick up the pieces.

– I’ve always been jealous of how Murakami narrators can just throw down their cups of coffee. The boku here has one at a cafe, and then two more, maybe three, in short order back at the office. And if he was visiting a client, you can bet that they probably served him a cup, too! Hard-boiled Wonderland has that great scene where he drinks a thermos of coffee and eats sandwiches with the old scientist. I start twitching after two cups and then go into an extreme crash an hour or two later, which is why I normally drink coffee in the afternoons, tea in the morning. Sometimes I wish I could drink coffee like boku, but maybe it’s healthier that I can’t.

– I find it very interesting that Murakami decided to write about his old boku after writing Hard-boiled Wonderland. As mentioned in the article, he wanted to go back and see the character again (along with the Sheep Man) after finishing Norwegian Wood (which resulted in Dance Dance Dance). “The Twins and the Sunken Continent” shows that it wasn’t just a one time thing. For the first 10 years of his career, it was a pattern that mirrors the way he goes from long novels to short stories.

– Loss is the main theme that this story shares with 1Q84. It’s kind of spooky how similar the language is. In both case he’s using 失われている. It’s a stranger choice of words in 1Q84, and I think Murakami uses it purposefully to stand out. It will be very interesting to see how it gets translated. In “The Twins,” it’s much more natural.

– Also interesting that Murakami uses the Sun and the Moon as his poles of reality in “The Twins.” In 1Q84, there is a very similar metaphor at play, and a change in the poles signifies a drastic change in reality.

– The dream discussion sequence is also classic Murakami – a character desperately trying to use language to explain something that is totally unreal but vital. If you look back through his works, I’m willing to bet that every single one uses storytelling in this way somehow. This is probably why he’s so much stronger in the first person – Murakami, I think, has strong doubts about the ability of language to accurately describe reality, or unreality, but that struggle is interesting, and it’s something that almost all of us have experienced at some point.

– There’s also an interesting music connection that I failed to mention in the review. In 1Q84, Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” comes up, and actually the novel itself is structured in the same way – two volumes of twenty-four. (Someone far smarter than I am will explain what this means. A scary thing to think about is the fact that there are actually 96 pieces of music in “The Well-Tempered Clavier” – both prelude and fugue for each major and minor key. Is Murakami going to write another 1000 pages?) In “The Twins,” boku puts on a piece of lute music by Bach as he cleans his office.

– Reading this story, I got the feeling that the twins weren’t real people. They seem much closer to Murakami’s poor aunt from the story “A Poor-Aunt Story” – a physical representation of an emotional state, one that is different for everyone. Rubin argues that the poor aunt stands for “everything unpleasant that we push out of our minds by subtly suggesting things we ought to know but have managed to suppress” (Rubin 60). (There must be some long German word that has the exact same meaning. Anyone? Bueller?) The twins, then, represent an idealized past, one that is lost and can never be reclaimed. Life with the twins was easy – boku had a pleasant life at home uncomplicated by sex; simply compassion and warmth. The twins with another man look different because to that man the situation that makes him feel the same as boku did is different. The two of them feel the same emotion, but they require different input for them to get to that emotion. The twins are the physical representation of that emotion.

On second thought, they could also represent a point in life where one is finally comfortable being alone (but lonely) in the world, assuming that the twins weren’t real people and that boku was living alone. This may require further more sober contemplation.

とりあえず、以上です。

(Graphic courtesy of Ian Lynam and Neojaponisme.)