Fireworks and Fancy Toys

I'd hoped to this post done much much sooner, but had a crazy week at work and couldn't make it happen. Only once this week did I get out of work early enough to take a train home and got home after 2am on the other four days, which meant I only got to work on this in 15-20min chunks before heading to work each morning. Understandably, it took a while to finish...

Though not necessarily to the same extent as last week, I do spend quite a lot of time at work these days. While this means that I pretty much have to write off the idea of having a social life Monday through Friday, it is not completely without benefits. In Japan, the standard pay system for full time employment is a (rather small) base salary plus overtime. As such, the busier I am at work the bigger my paycheck at the end of the month. Not a bad deal. Anybody who knows me knows that I am careful with my money. Some would call me stingy, I would just say that I'm really good at saving. And here's the proof:



Back in November, I officially became a millionaire (albeit in yen) and have since tripled that amount, not even including the million or so I took back to deposit in the US in the form of traveller's cheques last Christmas. I won't say what that works out to in US dollars, but if you do the math I think you'll agree it's an impressive amount. It will probably be a long long time until I make four million, but only because the dollar has tanked again and I'm switching my yen to dollars at the moment, but you get my point.

Since moving to Japan, I've made it one of my goals to not let the cost of things keep me from doing anything that I would otherwise enjoy, and I can honestly say I think I've done a good job of sticking to that. For the past two years, I've been shooting with a Sony a200 DSLR camera that my dad gave me as an early birthday present before I moved to Japan. Along the way, I'd upgraded my lens to a super fast 50m f/1.4 and generally enjoyed using the camera. But 50mm is a bit of an awkward length on a cropped body camera and I started looking for other lenses that would give me a little more versatility.

I read tons of reviews for a number of lenses and they all pointed to one conclusion: if you want a good lens for a Sony camera, it's gonna cost you a ton. In fact, unless you drop ~$2,000 on a pro-level lens, there just aren't many good options. Personally, I'm not willing to shell out $500 on a lens that is just alright. If you're gonna spend stupid money, you should get a product that is at least worth it.

Before switching over to DSLR, I'd been using a Canon point-and-shoot, which was a great little camera that could kick out some really good pictures. Mike has also been using Canon's and always raves about them, so I thought I'd take a look in that direction. The thought process was that if I were going to invest in a whole new camera body (you can't mix and match camera bodies and lenses), it would have to be a significant step up from my Sony and something that would be good enough to hold on to for many years to come. I did a lot of reading up on a couple different Canon bodies and, to keep things simple, reached the following conclusion:


The Sony EOS 7D and the 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 lens kit. It cost me close to a month's base salary, but it really is awesome. I'm still getting used to it and it's a bit awkward being on a slower lens again, but I can already tell that there will be some great pictures coming out of this bad boy.

Since I worked so late this week, I only actually cooked dinner once, and that was pasta throw together at midnight, so I haven't had much of a chance to shoot any food with the new camera yet, but I did whip together some banana bread last weekend at Yuki's. I find that I almost always put in too much banana when making banana bread it ends up being very dense. It keeps the bread from rising much when you bake it and you end up with a squat, but moist, loaf like this little bastard. Ugly, I know, but it tastes so good that I can forgive it. I at half the loaf the same day I baked it. Delicious.


For more visually pleasing pictures, I've got a few shots of fireworks from last weekend. There was a big fireworks show being held in Yokohama, where Mike lives, so he set up plans to get all the Michigan kids together to check it out. In Japan, it is common for people to wear yukata, a lightweight cotton version of the kimono and my mom's favorite discovery from her visit to Japan, when they go to see fireworks and festivals in the summer, so decided that everyone who owned a yukata should wear theirs. It's kind of like decided to get dressed up in fancy clothes and go out for a nice dinner, only old school Japanese style. Mine was a gift from my host family when I studied abroad in Fukuoka back in '07 that I think is particularly awesome. Most guys stick to monochromatic designs, which I think are a bit boring. I didn't have a tripod to work with when shooting the fireworks, so it was a little tough, but I managed to get a few decent shots. Enjoy!

Blog Birthday

Today marks exactly one year since I started this blog. Though I still don't think of it as a particularly impressive blog by any means, it has been viewed over 2,000 times by people from 39 countries during that time. Kind of crazy...

Looking back at my first post, it's obvious a lot has changed since I started. For one, the picture I used is so poor it borders on offensive. These days, a shot like that would be deleted before it even got uploaded onto my computer. At the time, I routinely got off work by 7 or 8-ish most days, so I had plenty of time to spend putting together dinner. Obviously work has gotten busier and now getting out of the office before 8pm is a fairly rare event, which has contributed to the significant decline in the number of posts here. I also spend most of my weekends out and about with Yuki, meaning less time gets dedicated to putting together Saturday and Sunday night dinners.

But, if I'm really honest, those are mostly just excuses. I reread that first post and realized the root of the problem is not all that far from what I described as cause of failure for my first blogging attempt: the feeling that every post has to be something epic. I have put together a few posts that I think are outstanding (usually travel related), but it really is unreasonable to expect every entry to be of that caliber. Not every meal is a classic and not every weekend is full of some fabulous adventure. Sometimes you just have to work with what you've got. Jake and Mike's friend Brian, who I met when we all climbed Mt. Fuji together, recently started trying to post a single picture every day on his blog. While I obviously am not about to try to do the same thing with my food, I really like the idea that not everything you do will be a masterpiece, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth sharing.

To be honest, it's been a while since anything particularly impressive has come out of my kitchen. It's ridiculously hot in Japan this summer and I'm still looking for good summertime recipes to help get through it. With a lack of ideas at the moment, I cooked two very ordinary dinners this weekend. The first, General Tso's Chicken, is a dish I've tried on numerous occasions but have never been able to get quite right. To me, it should be sweet and spicy, with a strong kick from the vinegar as well. In Ann Arbor, I loved to get it from Panda House in their lunch special. I know it's hardly authentic Chinese food, but's it's just so freaking good. My rendition once again fell short, I think mostly due to an overuse of soy sauce and a fear of using too much vinegar.


The second dinner was Kung Pao Shrimp, which also failed to impress. Normally, when I want my food to be good and spicy (which is most of the time), I use a generous dose of red chili sauce. This recipe called for 10 dried chilies to provide the heat instead, and for some reason I decided to do as told. I don't know why I thought it would work: cooking dried chilies in oil is essential a very basic way of making chili oil, which I never find to be particularly spicy anyways. The failure of the chilies to make things interesting meant that the sauce was essentially a poorly constructed teriyaki sauce. That's not to say it was bad, but nobody is gonna get patted on the back over this one...


I've got a couple of other recent meals that need writing about in the pipeline, so hopefully it won't be too long until my next post. Thanks to all who have followed this blog for the past year and I hope you continue to enjoy it in the coming year as well!

Rising to the Top

No food again this time, but still an event I feel is definitely worth mentioning. This past weekend, a bunch of Michigan kids from the Tokyo area met up with Jake, another friend from Michigan who has been teaching English in central Japan, and a bunch of his buddies to take on one of Japan's greatest challenges: climbing Mt. Fuji.


The timing for the trip, being right at the heart of the Japanese rainy season, left a lot up to fate but we lucked out and were greeted with beautiful skies when we arrived. The Tokyo crew got to the meeting point a bit early, so we spent some time goofing around.

The girls were cute as usual, while us guys attempted to demonstrate the sexiest way to take oxygen.


My two usual partners in crime along with their key equipment for the climb: Yuki with the oxygen bottle and Mike with his camera!


Absolutely lucked out on the weather. Views from our starting point at the 5th Station, around 2,300 meters above sea-level



We set out around 6pm, our spirits high. The path we were taking went up the south-east side of the mountain, meaning we only caught bits of the sun setting around the side of the mountain. We still got some great shots, but it must have been amazing on the west side!




It's a 9-10hr climb to the top including breaks and we planned to do it without stopping to sleep. Most of the climb isn't terribly difficult terrain, though there are stretches where you do need to use your hands to help climb up the rocks. In fact, it wasn't until around the 8th station, at an altitude of 3,100 meters, that things got tough. And by tough I don't mean "difficult to climb"; the path was not that much different. What was really challenging was the cold. And the crowds. The temperature had dropped down to near freezing-levels and the wind was pretty ferocious. We hadn't counted on it getting that cold and most of us were somewhat under-dressed. To make things worse, the tour groups started coming out. Unlike us, the more common way to climb Mt. Fuji is to go 2/3 of the way up, sleep for a couple of hours in one of the lodges, and the finish off the climb in time for sunrise. As such, the path was almost empty as we made our way up, but in the earliest, coldest hours of the morning began getting bogged down by countless groups of climbers to the point where sometimes all you could do was stand and wait for the line to start moving. On top of that, Yuki was struggling with the altitude and we would occasionally pull over for breaks to try to help her acclimate, but there wasn't much shelter from the wind, so all we could do was bundle up and hunker down as best possible. All in all, it made for a very long and very cold night.



I'm not sure I've ever felt such a base instinctive drive to just survive, which was a bit scary. In many ways, I think it was more demanding emotionally than physically. Nonetheless, our whole group made it to the top and were greeted by a pretty spectacular sunrise.



Personally, the hardest part of the whole thing was getting back down. Make no mistake, it is not an easy climb to the top, but going down takes everything you've done to that point and compounds it. There is a separate path to the bottom which is pretty much a continuous zigzag of loose dirt and stones. I suppose if you were on your own and took more time to rest at the top, you could slalom down it pretty quickly, but after an exhausting all-nighter, it was slow going and absolutely devastating on the knees. To make things worse, every time you get to a ledge with a good vantage down the slope, the zigzag just appears to go on forever. When you get to the point where you had previously thought it was going to end and look down, it just keeps going. Despite the cold and the wind, I never once felt like giving up during the climb, but on the way back down I couldn't stop wishing there was some sort of white flag I could wave and bring it all to an end. It was awful.

We finally reached the bottom around 10am. We were battered and exhaust, but we had conquered Mt. Fuji. I was especially proud of Yuki, who really had a hard time dealing with the high altitude, but fought all the way to the end.

There is a saying that "One who never climbs Mt. Fuji is a fool. One who climbs it twice is twice the fool". I couldn't agree more. By the time we were done it was like going to hell and back, but we also witnessed some amazing views that you simply cannot find anywhere else in Japan. Anyone spending a significant amount of time in Japan owes it to themselves to do it, but once is plenty enough.

It's Been A While...

It's been nearly two months since I wrote anything here and it would be completely understandable if everyone had thought I'd abandoned blogging. But I've got some very good excuses (which I'll get to in just a moment) and have no intentions of making a habit of this. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and set the very modest goal of 2 posts a month over the summer. That's doable, right? I'll try to keep the focus on food, particularly things I cook rather than places I eat, but there will be some exceptions. Starting off with one such exception hardly sets a good precedent, but this is a post that has to be written.

May was a busy month at work and I rarely left the office before 10pm, so there was not a ton of great cooking going on in my kitchen, much less photographing and writing about it. Then came June, and with it the World Cup. Oh how I love the World Cup! Soccer games every day! Broadcast live on TV! The fact that you have to wait four years for it only makes it that much more awesome. And, for once, the crazy time difference has worked out great. The first match of the day starts at 8:30pm Tokyo time and the second at 11pm. Work calmed down a bit, which meant I could usually get out of the office somewhere around 8-9pm. It takes me a little less than an hour to get home from the office, but kickass Japanese technology means I was able to watch the first half on my phone while I rode the train. Cook dinner between games, shower at half time, go to bed at 1am. Pretty awesome way to spend your evenings...

So clearly soccer has been cutting into my food time, but that's not the real reason I haven't written anything. In fact, most of my best cooking happens on the weekends anyways. What really has kept me from writing is these hooligans:


Almost half a year after I last saw them back in Michigan, my oh-so-awesome family made their way thousands of miles to come hang out with me in Japan for a bit. Dad had two conferences in Kyoto he was attending, so they spent the weekdays down there checking out temples and old Japanese-y stuff, then came to Tokyo to spend the weekends with me. The first weekend was just the parents, then the whole family the next weekend, finished off by just Ali for the third.

We cruised all over Tokyo, seeing the sights, taking in the atmosphere and, of course, eating lots of good food. They were real troopers about it, especially considering how much more walking is involved in day-to-day life here compared to in the US, and were game for anything I suggested. If it looked interesting, we tried it. If it looked tasty, we ate it. We blew through a ton of money (I won't say how much, but when I looked at my bank statement afterwords, I couldn't tell that my paycheck had been deposited). But you know what: I wouldn't hesitate to do it all over again tomorrow if I could. In fact, I'd jump at the chance. They traveled half way around the world just to see me. How cool is that. It's an amazing feeling to know you are that loved.

Originally, I'd planned to write about everywhere we went and all the things we did, but it this post would just be ridiculously long. Instead, I'll stick to some of my favorite pictures with brief captions. If you want the details, you'll just have to ask them!

Touristy stuff: 43rd floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Building and the Imperial Palace

Up unnaturally early to go see the Tsukiji fish market in action

Left: Getting used to the efficient madness that is Tokyo's public transportation
Right: There are much better temples and shrines in Kyoto than in Tokyo, so we kept them to a minimum, but Meiji Shrine is worth a look


Left: Some things in Japan are just weird. Like claw machines with bloody human-devouring teddy bears.
Right: My coworkers seemed to think that it was weird that I would take my family anywhere but the fancy shiny parts of town, but to me back alley dives are as much a part of Tokyo as the neon lights of Shinjuku or the posh streets of Ginza

I hauled them all the way out to the neighborhood I live in, Kameari, which is famous as the setting of the popular Japanese comic book "Kochira Kameari".

Yuki illustrates the difference between "Japan-size" and "America-size"

Lunch at a 100+ yr old soba restaurant. My mom's has a new favorite Japanese food. My dad still can't remember the word "soba" and just makes up his own version every time

Top: Ali, in front of the most ridiculous intersection in Tokyo, the Shibuya Scramble
Bottom: Watching the organized chaos

And finally, a few pictures to show what a cute couple my parents are

Seoul - Not Business As Usual

I've been meaning to go to Korea for a while now. It's just a two hour flight from Tokyo and tickets can sometimes be found for just a few hundred dollars, so it's doable even as just a long weekend. I'd been talking about going since late last summer but, for one reason or another, it just never seemed to happen.

Then, a couple weeks ago, the team at my company's Seoul office got asked to show some Japanese ideas to the biggest electronics company in Korea, so they asked my team in Tokyo to help. We had some great materials ready that would be perfect for them, but they were in Japanese, so I spent about a week and a half studying up on the subjects and translating them into English. It was ridiculously in depth stuff, covering technologies that are quite new and full of technical and scientific terms that even most of the Japanese guys didn't understand. There really was no way to translate it without honestly understanding the technology, so I spent hours and hours reading up on it. It got to the point where the only sources I had to check for proper wording often patents and research papers. During that time, the earliest I went home was 11pm, with several nights going until almost 2am. I missed a lot of meals. My eyes were shot from staring at the computer screen so long. But in the end, I got my reward.

The Seoul guys said they didn't know enough about the topic to give the presentation themselves, so they asked for the Tokyo team to handle it. We have a guy who has been an analyst for the electronics sector for over 20 years, many of them spent working in Western banks. He had prepared the bulk of the original Japanese-language presentations and understood the subject better than anybody. Moreover, he was confident in his English abilities and volunteered to do the presentation. Since, on top of being able to speak English, I'd spent so much time with the materials, it was decided that the two of us would go to Seoul together, with him doing the presentation and me providing support as needed. Unfortunately, things didn't go well at all in the end, which was a pretty disappointing result considering the amount of time and effort I'd put into it. Some of the ideas will still work well for other companies too so it isn't a total loss and we'll know what needs to be changed for next time.

The silver lining is that we lucked out like crazy on the timing, with the clients wanting us to come this past Friday. For a business trip to Seoul, you can usually make it a day trip. However, this time the appointment time was early enough that we'd be cutting it too close to fly in on the morning flight, so we got to fly in the day before. Thursday was a holiday in Japan, which meant I was able to take the morning flight and spend the afternoon exploring by myself. Normally, we would have caught the evening flight back to Tokyo but, being a Friday night, it was booked full, so we got to stay on until Saturday. Since it was the weekend anyways, I got to take the evening flight, giving me another half day of exploring. Actually, I'd pushed for more time there, but the company was stupid about it. See, this coming week is Golden Week in Japan, which means Monday-Wednesday are holidays. Logically, since the company was buying me a ticket back anyways, if I picked up my own expenses outside of the time needed for the business trip, there was no reason why I shouldn't be able to stay on longer. But, being a stupidly inflexible Japanese company, rules are rules and I had to come back once the work was done. They would not budge on this. Ridiculous.

That being said, I did get some free time in Seoul, so I won't complain too much. The trip was good and I got to check out a little bit of the city, though there is still much left to see some other time.

My first though upon arriving was "shit, I can't read a freakin thing here...". My second thought was "shit, I can't understand a damn thing these people are saying". Though the Koreans seem to generally have far better English skills than the Japanese, it was still a struggle to communicate. Next time I will try to find someone to show me around...

I don't have many pictures of the food I ate, as I was taken out by colleagues for most of my meals, but I got to eat some great Korean food. The first night, there was Korean barbecue with the top quality and super expensive black pork from Jeju Island. Apparently a few years ago there was a big crackdown on supposed black pork and genetics tests were actually used to confirm which restaurants were offering the genuine product and the restaurant we ate at was one of the few that were actually proven to have the good stuff. The second day, I had bulgogi for lunch at one of the most famous places in Seoul. I also ate other Korean staples like kimchi jjigae and sundubu jjigae, bright spicy Korean stews, as well as odds and ends at various street stalls.


I made a point of avoiding landmarks and tourist spots, focusing instead on a couple of the more lively markets and shopping districts. Both nights were spent with people from work and involved drinking countless bottles of soju. I saw several different night scenes, including ending the second night in what I can easily say is by far the shadiest place I have ever been in my life. All in all, I think I got to experience a pretty good variety of aspects of the city and will definitely back to see more.


As I said, I only got to see a small part of the city, so I'm in no position to pass judgment on it. But I will say this: they make some big promises. Whether they can keep them may be a different story...