Japanese culture: 年賀状 Nengajyo (New Year cards)

Everyone sends New Year cards to their colleagues and friends at the end of the year. These come in the form of postcards, usually with a picture of whichever animal the coming year is (they have the same 12 animal zodiacs as the Chinese) or you can get them specially printed with photos of your children on them. The postcards have prepaid stamps printed on them. Most of my colleagues send between 50-100 cards every year.


You can drop the New Year postcards into a special box at the post office before 28 Dec and all the postcards will be kept and delivered on 1 Jan.

Each postcard has a serial number printed on it. After New Year's, the post office will conduct some kind of lottery and publish the results in the newspapers. Recipients of cards with the lucky numbers can claim their prizes from the post office.

良いお年を！ Happy New Year!

First ski lesson

We haven't had much snow at all this year, so the ski resorts have not been able to open till today (thanks to a full day of blizzard yesterday!).

Off for my first ski lesson with PE teacher! Managed to borrow an old set of skis and boots from a friend :)

Check out this car buried under snow after yesterday's blizzard! (I kid you not, there was no snow on the ground before yesterday. The snowfall we had 2 weeks ago had all melted.)

Macrobiotic 忘年会 bou nen kai

Kyoko organised a bou nen kai at a macrobiotic restaurant. Really nice place.

(L-R): Malaysian guy, Adilah (Indonesia), me, Kanae, Takeshi, James (Tanzania) and Kyoko

We had some pretty strange food...

Rice field pizza. Pizza was square in shape and divided into 4 patches, so it looks like rice fields. Each patch has rice cooked in different flavours: curry, seaweed, basil and tomato.

There were some surprises on the menu as well...

Teriyaki tempeh! Unbelievable! And it tasted like tempeh too!

忘年会 continued: Baths, baths and more baths...

I woke up at 8am so that there was time to take a bath before breakfast and good grief, I was the last to rise! The other female teachers woke up at 6am to do that!! On the ball, man...

Anyway, before breakfast I enjoyed a dip in our private outdoor bath...my Japan Hour moment!
Then, breakfast time! It was a buffet breakfast. FYI, in Japan, buffet is called "Viking".

Then, we went to enjoy more of the 28 baths! Fantastic! But I was taking so many baths that I felt like a raisin.

School bou nen kai

My school had its 忘年会 bou nen kai at the very posh 双葉 Futaba hotel in Yuzawa. It's a really big hotel and has some 28 onsen baths exclusively for the use of hotel guests only!! There are medicinal herb baths (for beauty, health, strength, etc), sleeping bath (just a shallow layer of water and a headrest), jacuzzi bath, hot stones bath, etc. The 28 baths took up 2 entire floors in the hotel!

First of all, we checked into the wonderful room prepared for us 6 female teachers.

It has a private 露天風呂 outdoor bath!! Just like what you see in Japan Hour!! Even the Japanese teachers were ooohing and ahhhing over it...first time for them too! All the male teachers were given normal rooms though.

But no time to enjoy the baths...off to dinner first! You draw a number as you enter the room and that determines where you sit. There is a present on every seat. I had a set of towels...another lady teacher got 4 bottles of shaving foam! Haha!

Really exquisite dishes! And as with all enkais, there was too much food.

Then it's off to the second round enkai - karaoke! The teachers got really drunk and crazy.

Here's the link if you cannot see the video on this page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK8gDdBUv_8

And there was a third round as well - going out to eat ramen and drink some more! I and some other female teachers excused ourselves and went to enjoy some of the baths in the hotel!

I ate cod sperm...puke puke!!

Towards the end of the year, Japanese will start having 忘年会 bou nen kais. Bou nen kais are held for every conceivable corporate and social grouping. Hence, it is literally a season. Some bou nen kais start as early as late Nov!!

I have bou nen kais every single night this week! In my first bou nen kai for the season, which was held tonight, I was "treated" to cod sperm flown directly from Hokkaido that very day. It is white and looks kinda like short stumps of intestines. Doesn't really have any taste, but has a juicy feel. Everyone said it was really fresh and good. We had it in sashimi form and in nabe (soup). I think it tastes better when cooked. Firmer and less juicy. Urghs!

My very own hand-made salad dish!

I made a flower-shaped salad dish about a month back at the Homura flea market. We went to collect our salad dishes today after lunch with Kyoko's English camp participants.

TA-DAH!!

Wow! Better than I expected. A little disappointed with the cracks. The workshop said it was because of the flower petals...grrr!

Blanketed by snow...

The skies have cleared and the town looks beautiful with a fresh blanket of pretty white snow!

D-day...

and I was late!! There were so many people were taking the test that I could only get on the fourth bus to Saitama University from the train station despite arriving early...urghs! Everyone looked at me when I ran into the room. The question booklets and answer sheets had been distributed but the test hadn’t started yet. Naturally, my seat had to be all the way across the room! Very embarrassing! Luckily my skin quite thick ar!

I was surprised by how seriously they conducted the test. There is a centralized broadcasting system that announces the rules, start and end of each part, so every room starts and ends at exactly the same time. At the beginning of every part of the test (3 parts in total) the rules are announced with the invigilator flashing a yellow (warning) or red (immediate failure) card as the offences are read out (that was quite funny, I thought). The most serious offence is letting your cellphone ring during the test, which would result in a red card. Con-chan (who took the test in Aoyama University) had the privilege of witnessing someone getting sent out because of that and listening to the first 3 questions of her listening test again (lucky girl!).

Anyway, the test went ok. Maybe, hopefully, I can pass… I will receive my results in Feb so keep your fingers and toes crossed for me till then! ;P

After the test, I met Con-chan for dinner at Harajuku before heading back to Niigata.

Check out the sight that greeted me in Niigata (first day of snow!)
My suede boots got completely soaked through while I cleared the snow off my car *BRRR!* But it looked really pretty and Christmassy with the falling snow and snow-lined fir trees.

Japanese culture: Manga kissa

Haha...sounds weird huh? Manga kissa is the Japanese name for manga cafe (kissa is short for kissaten, which means coffeeshop). Many of them are open 24 hours and offer private booths with huge reclining leather armshairs, internet computers and TVs. They offer a wide assortment of free hot and cold drinks and some manga kissas are even equipped with shower rooms! With a cheap overnight rate (known as night pack), manga kissas have become a popular place to spend the night for budget travellers.

So, after being played out by a capsule hotel, I headed for a manga kissa at Akabane city that's just 15 mins away by train from Saitama University, where I'm taking the JLPT exam tomorrow. This was my private booth! Cost me less than 2,000-yen for the whole night. Free toothbrushes in the bathroom too!
The booth is small, but there's enough space for the armchair to recline and there's a door to give you privacy. The armchair with footrest is definitely comfortable enough to sleep in (more comfortable than in an airplane). For light sleepers however, the lights and sounds of others' snoring in their booths might be a bit of a problem. Bring ear plugs and eye shades!

Give it a try...be surprised by the number of Japanese who spend the night at manga kissas reading or surfing the internet or playing computer games! There was a news article a few months back about a guy who got kicked out of a manga kissa after a month cos he couldn't afford to pay the bills he racked up!