A month ago I went to somewhere I’ve been wanting to go
since college, the famous Fuji Q Highlands amusement park. It’s fondly known on
the internet as Fuji Queue Highlands for its insanely long wait times. My
opinion is they should rename it Fuji at least we don’t sell you overpriced
soup as we freeze you in line Highlands. Each ride’s wait time was about 2-3
hours so after an entire day spent there I only got to ride three roller
coasters and eat a Mt. Fuji shaped taiyaki.
The Fuji Q Highlands experience is rather reflective
actually of my perception of Japanese culture. The park only has four real
roller coasters, which is partly why there’s such a long wait, but these 4
roller coasters are all AMAZING. Each one has in the past or present set some
kind of world record and they’re pretty famous to roller coaster enthusiasts in
the world. It’s amazing to me that one park would have 4 record setting
coasters, but only 4. As in, when they were designing coasters they made sure
that each one would be notable in some way, the fastest, the most turniest, the
longest wait. At Fuji Q and in other ways, there is a huge emphasis in Japan on
quality versus quantity. It’s better to wait 2 hours to ride a really good
roller coaster, then get through like 3 good ones in the same time.
You see this a lot in other scenarios as well. Last year
when I was in Japan I had the best peaches I’ve ever eaten, at an amazing 5
dollars a peach. Sadly this year I haven’t had as good peaches, BUT, boy the
pears in this area are just out of this world. I’ve never had any pear as good
as I’ve eaten this past year. The sugar content is so concentrated it’s almost
alcoholic. They were also 5 dollars. But I can’t stop eating them, I’d sell
blood for these pears. And that’s basically how all fruit is. It’s super good
but super expensive. My area is known for melons and they go for about $50
dollars. But the area has such a reputation that if you brought these melons to
Tokyo you could get ~$200 for each one. Anyone want to smuggle melons with me?
The only thing that doesn’t fall into quality over
quantity is power lines, which I feel the strategy was ‘how much of the sky can
we cover and still teach kids what ‘sky’ means.’ Also roads, where it was like
no quantity or quality suckers! Also like the amount of trash cans in public,
no quantity hahaha suckers! Also like paper towels in public bathrooms, no
quantity suckers!
Which brings me to appliances. Now when you go to Sears
or Target and look in the kitchen appliances section, what kind of prices do
you expect to see? What comes into your mind when you think ‘microwave’, or
‘blender’, or ‘rice cooker.’ I thought I’d see the same here but boy was I
wrong. Some genius Japanese scientist somewhere must have seen a microwave once
and thought: No, there aren’t enough features, it’s not expensive enough. And
so the Frankenstein microwave was born. Just press this button and you’re good.
Oh what you want to enter in a time? Too bad. Oh what do you mean you didn’t
want to turn on the oven? Should I heat this one spot in particular instead of
the entire plate, okay sure! It’s crazy and to this day I still don’t know how
to use one of these frankenmics but they’re pretty awesome. You can microwave
your food (I think) or turn on the oven function, or a multitude of other
things based on your level of Japanese. To date I’ve managed to burn food, not
heat it up enough, heat it up too much, and generally everything but actually
heat my food properly.
And last but not least, rice. Rice is really important here.
I mean rice is generally important in every Asian country that eats rice, but
it’s much more important in Japan. Like rice is important in China, but people
will still put rocks in the rice bags to make money. Correction, money is
important in China*. In Japan small families grow their own rice, they go on
rice harvesting field trips, they eat it every day and not one grain wasted. Food
is put on a pedestal in Japan, and that culture of quantity over quality leads
to people really caring about where their food comes from and how good and
clean and delicious it is. And rice is at the top of the food pyramid. It’s
hard to even describe how much the Japanese seem to like rice because I don’t
think I understand it fully. Sometimes at school lunch when there’s leftover
rice, the teacher will announce ‘Who wants rice balls’ and kids will line up to
just eat plain rice with salt.
Generally I think I’ve really been enjoying Japanese
food, though I swear I’d have a better life if I started carrying around a portable
salt shaker and some hot sauce. Like yeah I get it, I can really taste the
vegetable flavor, or the fish flavor, or the rice flavor, but what I want is
FLAVOR. You can’t just serve flavorless vegetables and tell me it’s ‘vegetable
flavor’. And if you tell them ‘oh sorry I can’t taste the difference between
these teas’ they’ll tell you ‘yeah that makes sense, you’re not Japanese.’
Anyways, for a little life update, I will be leaving my
current job teaching in public elementary schools after March. Though I enjoyed
the time for the most part, dealing with kids in a different language and the
wildness of the Japanese discipline system has left me feeling like I’m okay
not working another school year here. It’s funny though, when I first started
it felt like the 6th graders were kinda going through their
rebellious phase and not really listening to anybody, but as the year went on
most of them actually got pretty good and can follow instructions and not punch
each other in the face anymore. Ironically my 5th graders are
starting to become little monsters, but they started out really good.
Empirically this leads me to believe that somewhere between the ages of 11 and
12 is where kids go bad. Are shock collars still legal?
I won’t be leaving Japan just yet though. The church I’ve
been going to runs an international school for kids that need to learn in
English, or need to function in a special environment (i.e. not the Japanese
school system) or for a variety of other reasons. Starting in April I’ll be
teaching there for a few months and finishing up in August. I’m pretty excited
for the opportunity since it’s a way to be directly involved in working with
the church and I’ve always wanted that since coming to Japan. The time ends in
August so we’ll see then if I come back to the States or stay here for longer
or whatnot. Maybe Europe, I should go to Europe, they have good sausages in
Germany. One time I asked my German friend about currywurst and he said he’d
make me some. So we went to his house and he grilled a sausage from Costco and
just poured ketchup and curry powder on it. I just looked at him like he was
making a joke but he sincerely wanted me to eat it. It was like a spoonful of
heartburn in every bite.
I read this touching article about this high school
student’s mom who made her son lunch every day for all 3 years of high school.
And then on the last day before graduation she put like a letter in the bento
that said ‘This is the last bento I’ll make for you… Thank you for eating them…
I feel we communicated better through these bentos’. And I didn’t understand.
Like last bento? He’s graduating not dying, you’re still allowed to feed him.
And you know what helps people communicate better, words. Words help people communicate
better. Fried chicken helps when those words become ‘Do your homework… stop
bringing shame to your family… if you get a B you might as well not come home
tonight.’ But maybe I’m heartless. Also if I made lunch for my son every
freaking day for 3 years, in my letter it wouldn’t say ‘thank you for eating
them’, it would say ‘*insert your thank you to me feeding you for 3 years
here*’ But really I’d probably just ask my son to buy food at the cafeteria. I
cannot make those cute bentos, every day his friends would just think he’s
being abused at home.
There’s a certain nostalgia to gross high school food. I
think it’s good for people to experience all the joys that ‘chili cheese corn
dogs’ and ‘taco pockets’ give you that real homecooked meals can’t. As long as
you can pick it. I can’t pick my food and sometimes its fish. I’m so sick of
fish. It’s not like those big almost meat like fish, its mackerel. I don’t get
how someone caught mackerel and thought it’d be a good idea to cook it, he must
have been really desperate. I go to different schools every day and at my Wed
school it’s always mackerel day. Every week I go to school on Wed and don’t
look forward to lunch. Mackerel and cold soup. That’s another thing I’m super
excited about, HOT FOOD. Usually by the time I’m free to eat, the lunch they’ve
prepared for me is all cold. Now imagine if you hated mackerel like I do. But
now it’s cold mackerel and cold soup. Could you imagine if after a gym workout
you go to drink some water and instead it’s salty meat water?
But I hear at the new school I’ll be allowed to eat lunch like a real person! I
shouldn’t complain though, lunches are pretty good for the most part. Except
mackerel day, ugh. I hate mackerel.
Thank you to everyone for your prayers and support and uh
‘encouragement’ to blog more, I really appreciate it haha.
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