This is another picture, courtesy of my new Panasonic 3G phone. I dropped into a bookstore late one night after dinner, and saw this.

It’s called the Roppongi Kawaraban. Kawaraban is what they used to call local community newsletters in Japan. Roppongi is the location of this bookstore.

Anyway, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a handwritten newsletter like this, so I had to take a picture of it. Whereas in the U.S., a handmade newsletter like this would seem incredibly amateurish for a nice bookstore, it’s considered a homey, quaint way of reaching out to customers in Japan. I think this is a good example the funny cultural differences we see.

This particular kawaraban talks about nothing special — a restaurant that employees like to go to that got featured on a television show, popular books, the rain during rainy season…
It’s just chatter, but it’s kind of nice. I can’t wait for next month’s issue.

You may not be able to read Japanese, and this may not be the greatest picture (it was taken with a phone camera), but trust me, it says it’s whale sushi.

My parents and I were in Shizuoka for lunch this weekend before my mom and I headed to the hot springs. We ended up at this rotating sushi place in the train station building. The fish was fresh, the cuts were generous, but imagine my astonishment when I saw this sign.

If you’re wondering, I didn’t try it. The last time I had whale was in fifth grade in elementary school. It was probably one of the last school meals that served whale in Japan. We were served whale steak, and it was pretty terrible. It sort of reminded me of liver, which I also hate.

More recently, PMK and I were once served a little bit of whale tongue as a little appetizer. According to PMK, what we ate was probably about 10 years old because that’s how much whale Japan has stocked up. His point was that I wasn’t saving any whales by not eating what was put in front of me. I’m not typically a squeamish person about eating foreign foods. I’ll try anything once, but the thing about whale meat is that it doesn’t taste good. I know some people love it, and I think that’s fine as long as they’re not driving whales into extinction, but it’s one of the few foods in the world that I don’t understand.

Getting back to the sushi place. If you’ve never been to a rotating sushi restaurant, plates of sushi are placed on this belt that moves in a circle along the counter. You pick up what you want to eat and stack the plates in front of you. But not every plate is the same. There are usually different colored plates with a different price for each color. Fish like fatty tuna or sea urchin are placed on the more expensive plates than say a cucumber roll. At the end of a meal, someone comes by to add your plates and present you with a bill.

In the case of this store, they just waved a little handheld machine near the plates and, voila, we had our bill. It turns out the plates have IC chips in them and can be scanned. I’d read about this, but never saw it before.

I wasn’t crazy about going out of my way to have rotating (cheap) sushi with my parents in Shizuoka (an hour away by bullet train, about $40 one way), but it turned out to be worthwhile.

Last week’s flower project involved sticking flowers in a vase with dark pink jelly in it. My instructor said that they come in the form of little pellets that turn into jelly when you soak them in water. It’s quite pretty, but the flowers died quickly because the jelly gets in the way of the flowers’ ability to soak up water.

PMK and I went to see Star Wars last night at 10:40. We’ve never gone to the movies in the evening in Japan before, let alone so late at night. But I figured this was Star Wars, which just opened here. Of course, the place would be abuzz.

But imagine my astonishment when we got out of the theater at 1am to see big lines at the concession stand and tons of people milling around. There had been another Star Wars showing on another screen that just started around that time, but it still didn’t explain all the people. I decided to stop by the ticket lines to see what other movies were showing.

It turns out they had half a dozen movies that would start between the time that we got out and around 3:30 in the morning! And here I’d been thinking Japanese movie theaters tended to close a lot earlier than in the U.S..

A whole new world opens up when you venture out at night.

This was passed on to me from a friend of mine:

The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

This is the wedding bouquet I made a couple weeks ago (I’m a bit behind with my blog because of my new duties as bakery editor for Fugu Diaries).

Too bad I’m not in Chicago because I would’ve given it to Sue.