It’s a bit startling to notice that we’ve been back from Japan for over a week now. I’ve been busy with getting back into the swing of the businesses, catching up with yard work, herding the cats, etc. (Speaking of the cats: if you’re in Boulder and need a cat or dog sitter, ask me for the name of ours. She does an excellent job; our cats adore her.) I’ve been meaning to jot down a few retrospective notes about our trip.<\/p>\n
On this trip to Japan we were honored to be invited to the home of our friends, Sid and Takako Makino. They live in Nishinomiya which is not far from Kobe (and, if you happen to be a baseball fan, the home city of the Hanshin Tigers). We took a shinkansen from Kyoto to Kobe; Sid met us there and we took a local train to Nishinomiya. Takako met us near the train station with their car and gave us a brief tour around the town, stopping at a couple of highlights, before driving to their house. Their home is mostly furnished in Western style although the sofa, nearby chairs and coffee table were lower than you’d likely find in a house in the US.<\/p>\n
Takako cooked a delicious dinner for us. The first course included gyoza<\/a><\/i>, tofu with a sauce that had some kind of small mushrooms in it, and pickled veggies. The main course was sukiyaki<\/a><\/em>, prepared with genuine Kobe beef. (Yes, its fame is justifiable: it is excellent.)<\/p>\n Eating sukiyaki involved setting aside my Western biases: traditionally, eating sukiyaki includes beating a raw egg in each serving bowl before adding the ingredients from the cooking pot. They did give me the option of omitting the egg, and seemed faintly surprised (but pleased) that I cheerfully accepted it, and I’m glad that I did. Sid explained that the egg “smooths” the spices, balancing the flavors, and I understood his point as soon as I tasted the dish. Obviously I’m not going to make a habit of eating raw eggs here in the US since obtaining sufficiently fresh eggs isn’t easy, but “when in Rome…”<\/p>\n Takako mentioned that her preferences for seasonings differ from Sid’s because she and he are from different regions of Japan. She grew up in Nishinomiya while he is from the northern part of the country. As a result, he prefers hotter, spicier seasonings while she prefers sweeter flavors. Their children also grew up in Nishinomiya and hence have a palate similar to hers, so she’ll season dishes accordingly depending on whom she’s serving. (I have a suspicion that Sid’s preferences were\/are frequently outvoted, or overridden by the person doing the cooking.) Given that there’s a Western perception that Japan has a homogenous population in part because of its relatively small geographical size, it’s interesting to learn that different regions of the country are associated with variations such as flavor preferences.<\/p>\n We also learned that the Japanese language also varies with the region, more so than one might expect. I noticed early in my outsider’s observation of Japanese that the placement of syllabic accents is unpredictable (to a non-speaker, at least) and some sounds–‘u’ in particular–are often dropped altogether. This came up in conversation because Takako’s pronunciation of sukiyaki is fairly close to “skee-yah-kee”. I mentioned that these sorts of details were difficult to learn (not that English doesn’t have similar difficult details) and Sid and Takako allowed that they can be difficult for the Japanese themselves because of regional variations. They went so far as to say that they at times couldn’t understand each other because of differences in their respective pronunciations.<\/p>\n Not surprisingly, the recent disasters were topics of conversation. Sid and Takako have somewhat first-hand experience with such calamities, having lived in the area during the earthquake that flattened much of Kobe in 1995 and killed over 6000 people. We have ourselves seen that Kobe was reconstructed into a beautiful city with no trace of the disaster, other than the memorial museum near the waterfront. Sid observed that yes, Kobe was rebuilt, but it took 10 years to do so–and there was no tsunami associated with that earthquake. He was cautious optimistic about the ability of the Japanese people to recover and rebuild after the recent earthquake\/tsunami\/nuclear-plant mess, but freely acknowledged that it would take many years. We tried to convey to them that one positive aspect of the tragic events is that the rest of the world may now have a greater understanding of, and appreciation for, some of the strengths of the Japanese people, such as their deeply ingrained senses of community, compassion, and unselfishness.<\/p>\n We had a fine time and a delicious dinner, and look forward to seeing our friends again on our next visit to Japan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s a bit startling to notice that we’ve been back from Japan for over a week now. I’ve been busy with getting back into the swing of the businesses, catching up with yard work, herding the cats, etc. (Speaking of the cats: if you’re in Boulder and need a cat or dog sitter, ask me… Continue reading Dinner with the Makinos<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan-2011","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1692"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1693,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1692\/revisions\/1693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}