Fingers

I was fortunate to find a yoga teacher in the neighborhood where I live. She gives lessons out of an apartment just a five-minute walk from where I live – talk about convenient. Most of her students are older women, so the lessons aren’t that intense, but she does try and challenge us. Mostly it’s nice to sit and just focus for 90 minutes and also to meet some people in the neighborhood.

Like most instructors she does some of the pseudo-spiritual talk associated with yoga – prana, chakras, etc. Personally, I do believe in the power of the breath and breath control, but mostly as method of physical and mental fitness.

The best part of the lesson is corpse pose at the end. Just that total sense of relaxation, letting the body go into complete rest and having the brain focus on the breath. The teacher guides us into a nice meditative state by telling us to focus on different parts of the body starting with the toes and moving up the leg, the abdominal area, the chest and then the hands and arms. For some reason it’s super relaxing to lie completely still and move your concentration from body part to body part.

It’s also a useful vocabulary building exercise. I learned all the names for fingers and toes, so I thought I’d share them here:

親指(おやゆび)               thumb/big toe   
人差し指(ひとさしゆび)    index finger
中指(なかゆび)               middle finger
薬指(くすりゆび)            ring finger
小指(こゆび)                  pinky finger/little toe

Unlike English, those names are exactly the same for both fingers and toes, so there’s no difference between “big toe” and “thumb,” basically. Do the other toes even have names in English?

The most interestingly named finger is 薬指 – medicine finger. Wikipedia says this is because long ago, when medicines were all powdered, people used the ring finger to mix and apply different medicines. Apparently it also gets called 紅差し指 (because it is used to apply makeup?), 無名指 (finger with no name), 薬師指 (I guess the whole ‘mixing finger’ thing was institutionalized), and お姉さん指 (because girls don’t have wedding bands yet?).

TGIF, I guess

Sorry, everyone. I need a Friday.

TGIF doesn’t really exist in Japan, but I think the closest phrase is 「やっと金曜日なんだ!」 with the appropriate emphasis applied. I tried to teach TGIF to JHS kids for years but never got them to memorize it until I said that phrase somewhat dramatically…to the dismay of the Japanese teacher I was working with.

号外 – ビール追加

I neglected to mention Yokohama Cheers when I wrote my short post on beer. Cheers is just a short walk from the West Exit of Yokohama Station. It has to be the only beer bar in Japan with an Israeli chef who can make genuine hummus and falafel. They have some Rogue beers on tap as well as an amazing selection of Belgian beers. Definitely worth several trips.

お疲れ様

お疲れ様 (おつかれさま) might be the ultimate “get used to it” phrase. I hear it all the time these days – when anyone returns to the office from an outing we say it to them, I say it to everyone before I leave work, I say it to the guy who empties the trash, I say it to someone if they are leaving.

I’ve started saying it a lot more than I used to, partly because I hear it so much. I did hear it in Nishiaizu, too – when I paid my bills, after I got back from elementary school, when I left school – but it gets used a lot more now.

I guess it literally means something like “You look tired,” but a more accurate translation is, “Thank you for your efforts,” which I learned from Kitakata Alan. That effectively expresses the idea that it is a set phrase used when someone completes something. If you look at the times when it is said, it is generally at the point where one activity ends and another begins. You can emphasize this by making it past tense – お疲れさまでした. If, on the other hand, people are still working (i.e. the activity has not reached completion), then you can say お疲れさまです.

Perhaps the best, most ritualized example of this is at elementary school. The kids all do the cleaning themselves after lunch. Sixth graders run groups of kids from all grade levels. All the groups line up and begin cleaning by collectively yelling, お願いします. They end the cleaning by saying, ご苦労様(くろうさま)でした, which is just a more casual way of saying お疲れさまでした. I would always air on the side of お疲れさま, since it is more formal.

Try not to think of the meaning too much. Focus on the situation when it is being said and then try to notice when a similar occasion arises, so that you can use it. And say it a lot, just kind of throw it out there sometimes.

Oyster Day!

Note: I wrote most of this before Gustav was even close to New Orleans.

In America (New Orleans?), we say you should only eat oysters in months that have an ‘R’ in them. That doesn’t stop us from eating dozens when we watch the basketball playoffs at Cooter Browns. Or from ordering the Peacemaker at Domilise’s in the middle of the summer. The real places (Casamento’s), however, are closed when it’s hot and raw oysters are more dangerous than they usually are.

Oysters in Japan are more of a December to February type food, but to hell with it, I declare today Oyster Day! September is the first month with an ‘R’ in it after May, June, July and August (incredible how that works, eh?), and today is the first day of September, so let’s go get oysters!

There’s a famous tongue twister about oysters in Japanese: 隣の客は、よくカキ食う客。(となりのきゃくは、よくかきくうきゃく。Tonari no kyaku wa, yoku kaki kuu kyaku. Translating tongue twisters is one of the most useless linguistic exercises that you can perform, but to hell with it, it means, “The customer next to us is a customer that eats a lotta oysters.” I guess that last bit sounds pretty cool – “ Eat a lotta oysters.” Oh, and the kanji for oysters, used mostly by restaurants with discriminating taste, are 牡蠣.)

Someone taught me that one the first time I came to Japan. It must’ve been at that point where they had exhausted my, at the time limited, range of conversation topics and had nothing better to do than make me say funny stuff for their own amusement. Shame on them. Actually, I should really be thanking them.

When you’re first starting to study a language, tongue twisters are a great way to exercise the muscles in your mouth. The muscles you use to speak Japanese are different from the English muscles, and they need training just like your pecs and gluts. Even if you don’t understand the meaning, the pronunciation practice will help you down the line.

Revisiting tongue twisters is a good way to test your progress. I heard this oyster one again recently but this time understood what was being said. It was a strange sensation. The sounds were no longer just sounds; there were specific meanings tied to all of them, and it wasn’t even that hard to say.

I haven’t decided where I’m going yet, but I’m debating between a place near Tokyo Station and another near Shinagawa Station. The former sells itself as a “gumbo and oyster” restaurant, whereas the latter is more convenient but is more like a New York oyster bar. If you’re in Tokyo and want to get oysters, get in touch!

Cool Kanji – 樽

 

This is a great kanji. It’s pronounced たる and means cask or barrel. 樽酒 (たるざけ) is a type of sake aged in cedar barrels, giving it a distinct woody flavor. The kanji has tree on the left and then the first part of 尊敬 (そんけい, respect) on the right. Respect the tree, it makes the cask!

This kanji can also mean keg, as in beer keg. Thankfully, good beer has started to boom in Japan. If you know where to look and have money to spend, there are a number of quality beer locations in Tokyo.

Dry Dock is a cozy little place under the Yamanote Line in Shimbashi. The bartender has a blog he updates just about every day. They have a “guest beer” every week, and if you look here, you can see he calls it a “guest keg.”

Popeye is the godfather of all beer bars in Japan. I don’t know the guy’s name that runs it, but he’s always there socializing with fans of big beer. All of the staff are extremely nice, and you can get free appetizers with certain beers from 5pm-8pm.

Tanakaya is the most impressive beer store I’ve ever been to at home or abroad. Beats the hell out of anything we have in New Orleans. Go to Mejiro Station, exit the station, walk left along the street, and it will be on your left before too long. Beers are kept at cellar temperature. They don’t take orders, but they will ship via takkyubin if you go to the store.

Chris Chuwy keeps track of everything on tap at most respectable bars on his boozelist. It’s an impressive collection of locations.

Bryan Harrell writes Brews News for bento.com. It’s published every two months and is a good list of upcoming events / review of past ones.

Who the Fuck is Gustav?

Well, judging from the facebook status updates of many of my friends in New Orleans, he’s the next hurricane, and he’s making his way through the Caribbean. He just hit Haiti and is heading for Cuba. After that he might strengthen over the Gulf and roll into New Orleans or some other Gulf coast city. It’s always a gamble.

Typhoon (台風, たいふう), the Japanese cousin of the hurricane, have a boring naming convention. They get numbers followed by 号, which I have written about previously. So you have 1号, 2号, 3号, etc. As in America, they’re really only dangerous to areas in the south like Okinawa and Kyushu, as they take the brunt of the force. Once they make it to the Kansai or Kanto area, it’s mostly just heavy rain, especially for inland areas. Even down south, a lot of the damage seems to come from the rain and subsequent landslides rather than from wind.

I’m not exactly sure when Typhoon season is, but wikipedia lists twelve so far starting from April. Actually, the English translation of that site says the season has no bounds but that most typhoon occur between May and November. I always think of it as a September thing.

You can follow all weather information as well as earthquake information at the 気象庁 (きしょうちょう, Japanese Meteorological Agency) website. Their earthquake updates are impressive; they post the information about 10 to 15 minutes after an earthquake, so it’s always the first page I check when we have one. You can also tab back through all their earthquake records for the day and see exactly how shifty the plates are over here.

Cool Compound – 高温多湿

 

This is a phrase you can use to describe Tokyo (or New Orleans) in the summer. It’s a nice, little non-idiomatic four-character compound – high, hot, many, moisture: high temperatures, lots of moisture.

The pronunciation is こうおんたしつ.

The usage is simple. You can attach this onto other words with の, so 高温多湿の場所 or 高温多湿の国. Can’t think of much else you would describe with this phrase.

(Note: This was written before this tease-of-an-autumn "cold" spell. It will be above 30 again later this week.)

Cool Kanji – 冠

 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t write something about the Olympics, so you get a cool kanji. Do you recognize it? You might’ve seen it if you watched Kosuke Kitajima take gold in the 100m and 200m breaststroke. In the upper right corner of the screen, most channels had this 「2冠 (にかん)」 Well, he won gold for both of those events in Athens, so you can guess the meaning from context – two in a row.

But the kanji itself has a different meaning. It’s also used in this compound – 王冠 (おうかん). It means crown, so literally he has two crowns in a row. Hmm, now that I think about it, I’m not sure that it has that “in a row” connotation, but it definitely means that he’s won two.

Kitajima’s feats have lead many to consider him perhaps the greatest breaststroker ever. *snicker*