Food, numbers, and rain

So, right now I’m eating zunourooru, which literally means “brain roll.” Before you recoil in horror, let me describe it: It’s a sweet roll, about a foot long and averaging 1.5 inches in diameter. This roll is split along its length with cream and some other flavoring layered down inside. There are many different flavors, including banana, apple, chocolate, coffee & milk (don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it), and the one I’m eating at the moment, honey. As you can imagine, this is basically a carbohydrate loaf ergo an effective pick-me-up. Brain roll.

Alisha and I were talking about Japanese foods today and we both noticed that in our (limited) experience, the Japanese don’t really seem to go for sour flavors overall. There is lots of sweet, along with bitter, salty, oily, and rich foods. That is not to say that nobody in Japan likes sour. I’ve seen all kinds of citrus and it’s my understanding that oranges (orenji) are a big hit with most people. In fact, when I tell people I’m from California specifically, they usually mention fruit right away.

Thinking more about the differences in culinary practices between these 2 countries, it occurred to me the other day just how drastically my sugar intake has been reduced since I got here. It dawned on me that even on days when I’d had 8-10 hours of sleep, reasonable exercise, and plenty to eat, I was still feeling exhausted by 4 or 5 in the afternoon. And this included days where I did and didn’t need to use Japanese a lot. I once read a statistic, whose source I can’t remember at all and I apologize for that, that around 1/3 of Americans suffer from low levels of glucose poisoning almost constantly. Even if that’s an exaggeration, have you ever stopped and thought about how many calories from sugar you consume in a day? How about the percentage of your diet that contains a derivative of corn? If you’ve noticed an increase in the price of cereal based groceries recently, you might be interested in researching the socio-economic effects of corn ethanol. Anyway, that’s not what this is about. I’m thinking that I and some of the other American students who I’ve talked to about this are going through sugar withdrawal. It’s interesting to consider.

Today for lunch I had cabbage salad, curry on rice, fried chicken, and custard for dessert. It was amazing and dirt cheap for the quality and quantity of food. Everyone tells me that Japan is generally more expensive than anywhere. In some ways, that’s true. Also in many ways I am protected from a lot of expenses. I lived in an apartment building for international students with rent that is 3 or 4 times cheaper than surrounding domiciles and I pay tuition through Chico State and not through Chukyo University. In my experiences buying food and household items, however, prices have been comparable if not less than where I live in the US. It could very easily be that I’m missing the big picture, but it’s just something I’ve noticed.

In class today we practiced counting in Japanese. This is not as trivial as it may sound. In the US and many other places in the world, in order to count to very high numbers we count in units of thousands. The counter word changes every factor of 1000, which can be seen in the way we place commas: 1000 thousands is a million (1,000,000), 1000 million is a billion (1,000,000,000), 1000 billion is a trillion (1,000,000,000,000), etc. In Japan, and perhaps other Eastern countries (I don’t know), the high number counters roll over every 10,000. So 1000 thousands isn’t a million, but rather 100 ten thousands. I had prior knowledge of this, but was never really forced to practice it, or even apply it before now. Not only does Japan have 2 phonetic alphabets and an enormous (30,000+) pictogram set, it also has a different way of counting past 1,000. Talk about getting your money’s worth.

Not much else is going on. I’m starting to get homework, which is nice for establishing routines. The weather today was drab but I snagged an umbrella at the suupaa (supermarket) for about $3 that’s better than the one I have back home. Hooray!

Bye for now.