Alpha Tomamu and Anniversaries

Better late than never...

How was your weekend?

Ours at Alpha Tomamu was a fit of fantasy thanks to our over-generous Japanese teacher friends springing to put Heather and I up in that mad suite with the jacuzzi and the sauna and the three rooms.

This is Otaru

The city of Otaru is only an hour bus ride away from my town of Furubira, and in February they host a week-long snow lantern festival. Here are some no-bullshit photos of it.

This is Niseko

I tend to take a lot of pictures and sandwich them into blog posts. I thought the pictures might benefit from a little less distraction and a little more in the way of concrete context.

So, here are some views of and from Hirafu in Niseko. It's the main ski resort on Mount Niseko An'nupuri, and it's one of the best places from which to stare at neighbouring Mount Yotei.

Ai Ryori II

My new supervisor (left) cooking with my old supervisor (right)

Another Valentine's Day, another RABURABU Man's cooking class with the Furubira townies. Last year we made Gomaae, one of my favourites, and this year we made Bibimbap, which isn't, strictly-speaking, Japanese, but it is FREAKING DELICIOUS, so I didn't mind.

2011 HAJET Sapporo-Niseko 雪祭り Tour

In February of 2010, I was voluntold onto the HAJET (Hokkaido Association for Japanese Exchange Teachers) Prefectural Council in the role of Social Coordinator. At the time, I wasn't sure what to expect for I largely saw the HAJET organization as little more than a group of people interested in setting up parties for Hokkaido ALTs.

Wild Things in The Woods

Nightboarding over at Hirafu, after we'd finished giving our Snow Festival/Yuki Matsuri Tour snowboard lessons, Mark--in his fox suit--takes us down through the trees just between runs.

We must seem some wondrous wild things in the woods to the casual observer: galumphing down through the powder in our furry suits. Fox and Pikachu, Gizmo and Marimokori with the occasional flashes of metal and fiberglass at our feet. We must look like animist spirits scared to leave the safety of the trees as we only ever break from them briefly before barreling back into them.
Down through mist and snow.
Down the paths only Wild Things know.

なっとう

Natto.

A solid cornerstone of any foreigner's Japanese experience.

It is also the Japanese kryptonite to invincible Gaijin everywhere. All of their blonde-haired, blue-eyed, booming-voiced sexy might reduced to nothing in the face of four words:

“Can you eat natto?”

Posed by a Japanese national who you’d previously considered your friend; posed with a vague smile on his face and a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

While you, the uninformed foreigner, still try to hang on to your exotic power, ignorant to what’s about to be sprung on you.

Fermented soy beans.
Sickly beige and chilled into a solid mass.
The Japanese’ll serve it to you with hot sauce or mustard or soy sauce or kimchi.
If you’re truly unlucky, they’ll serve it to you with raw egg.

The pungent odor of gym socks will waft over you, and you’ll have to hold back the urge to gag. You’ll gird your loins and tell yourself that there’s no way that anything could actually taste that bad.

And you’ll be right. The danger of natto is not in the taste. The danger of natto is in the smell and the look of it; the slip-slimy consistency of the mucous-like liquid that holds it all together and trails out streamers like feathery silly putty as you stretch your first mouthful away from the mass of it.

And that is only if you can get the slide-y natto to stay on your hashi, which is as much of a challenge as overcoming the smell of it. Woe betide those who had the misfortune of being served natto mixed with raw egg and the consistencies of the two seem to synergize when combined, creating something so much slimier than the sum of its parts: a slippery slurry that you can only ever hope to eat with hashi if you combine it with rice to lend it a bit more substance.

But if you’re lucky to be eating it straight, or with some of the stink of it masked with mustard or hot sauce, as you celebrate your victory over consistency and triumphantly bring the tenuous hashi-full of it to your mouth, you feel streamers of slime settle sickly across your chin. Looking down, you realize that they’re not only resting wetly on your chin but are running like long life lines back down into the styrofoam package of natto on the table before you.

ネーバ　ネーバ

neba-neba. The unique Japanese expression for describing the slime-y, wet-web-like consistency of natto and one of my favourite random Japanese terms.

Those same slime-y strands are also now linking your hashi in your outstretched hand back to your mouth, and out of necessity you learn the action that all Japanese practice from birth: the fervent tornado spinning of your hashi hand through the natto strands to wind them up and free your face and your hand from the hair-thin umbilicals hanging down from them.

neba-neba.

Whatever you do when eating natto, it should never be eaten with anything else. The slime that comes off the fermented beans in natto is an parasitic, virulent thing that may just possess the vaguest inklings of sentience. Should you introduce natto-slime-covered hashi to any other sauce or liquid, the slime will spawn and multiply, and perfectly fluid sauces will quickly begin to manifest the same viscous, mucous trailers that natto has. And each further food you introduce this contaminated sample to will take them on, too. No matter how far the slime moves from its parent beans, it never seems to dissipate—seeming instead to only grow more powerful by the introduction of fresh liquid.

In the end, I’m convinced that eating natto comes down to a determination to succeed in a war of wills rather than a gastronomical motivation towards deliciousness. The only foreigners who eat natto are those with something to prove: the ones who, when that gleam comes into a Japanese friend’s eyes, and a sly grin creeps across his face, relish the ensuing crestfallen slump when they are able to proclaim “はい！なとがだいすきです！”

And then there’s folks like me, who got told once that natto was good for you, and in a draconian adherence to hearsay and folk wisdom that might just border on the alchemical, have decided to eat the stuff for breakfast every day.

But not with raw egg.

That would be just weird.

I call this 'Bachan Brand natto. It's the best I've found, and it's all I eat.

Air holes in the top of the individual styrofoam packages so that the sentient slime doesn't suffocate.

What natto looks like in the package.

Soy sauce and hot mustard. The best way to go.

Dressed and ready for mixing.

Whipped up to the desired frothy consistency. I'm not sure why Japanese folks do this, but it seems to make it easier to catch larger blobs of natto with your hashi, and it does a little something to control the neba-neba. That being said, even when it's frothed up, you've still got to slurp the stuff like ramen noodles!

Abashiri Ice: The Second Coming

The first weekend in February, we took another road trip out to Abashiri since the drift ice situation had been so damn disappointing last year (I covered it in detail last year, likely out of frustration from not seeing it).

Fortunately this year was a little more ice-filled than last, and when we got out on our sunset icebreaker cruise, it was looking damn near like the north west passage out there:

As the drift ice may drive you to believe when it floats in close and chokes up the town's harbours, Abashiri can seem a pretty grim, pretty bleak place. Its second biggest attraction is a prison, which I'd like to believe says something about the tone of the town. When we passed through Abashiri in September on our Four Points Tour, we were certainly unable to find anything more exciting in the place (well, we hit the very nice Museum of the Northern Peoples for a second time, but that hardly makes up for the generous amounts of boring going on in town).

However, each time I've rolled up on the place for the past two Februaries, I've wound up having a blast. Last year we had a giant slumber party (for what else can you call it when you carpet the floor of a small-ish Japanese apartment with about 18 people) on the Friday night, and then an even giant-er blow out at Caroline's on the Saturday night. This year we caught some nepalese food for lunch, some blue beer on the sunset ice cruise at dusk, and then we crashed at June's again on Saturday night, and it was a night filled with hot wine, pizza, and excellence.

Set against that grim backdrop of ice and lowlands and sea, it really has got to be the people that make Abashiri so habitable.

This is Where I Live

Taken from my front door before heading out to work at about 7:54am

The currently vacant teacher house behind mine, belonging to the high school. Notice the kind of damage snow build-up can do along the side of the roof. Roundabout the same time as the previous.

An Odajima construction worker, working to clear the huge buildup of snow from my elementary school's roof on Friday. These guys were very securely tied off to shovels embedded in the snow further along the roof. I'm not sure how much good that would have done should one of them have gotten lost in the world of white ground and grey sky on that melty Friday.

All in a night's work. These are taken just over an hour apart on Tuesday night, out my back sliding door. I had been away all weekend, it had kept snowing, and I had to clear the build-up of snow that had avalanched down from my roof. What you see in the lower picture is the meter of solid snow that has accumulated since I had a guy in to remove all the snow from behind my house on January 19th, which I can't be bothered to dig out as the wood across the glass of the sliding door does a good enough job of holding it back. With the amount of snow that has been coming down this winter, I've had to dig out the back of my house for at least three hours every week: not because I actually use the back of my house but to make sure that the snow doesn't build up to the point where it blocks my heater exhaust, threatens to break my windows, and keeps aditional snow from sliding down off of the roof.

If, on an icy night, a boarder

Niki Skijo, Thursday, 5pm.

I've been fortunate out here in Japan to have some really awesome ALTs really close to where I live. Though I don't spend that much time with my closest ALT over in Yoichi, the next one down the road in Niki has come to be a good bud of mine. Perry often accompanies us on our mad adventures around the island. He's a very laid back dude from Edmonton who arrived in Japan at the same time as our JET group back in the summer of 2009, and he always seems to be game for pretty much anything...particularly when it involves snowboarding.

As Perry's fruit-growing town of Niki (know for its apples, mostly, but also its cherries) is only about an hour, at most, by bus from Furubira, I jumped on an invitation from Perry last week to come in for some night snowboarding at the tiny Niki skijo. In Hokkaido, pretty much any town with a hill near it has its very own ski hill. However, in cases like Furubira's, or neighbouring Bikuni's, many of the ski hills in the smaller towns no longer operate due to a lack of steady enough business to keep the lifts running. Fortunately Niki has managed to keep its skijo open while the rest of us have been shutting ours down.

Niki hasn't got much in the way of lifts (only a single, one-person chair), but the hill is planned out in such a way as to make maximum use of that one dinky lift. As a mid-winter warm spell had hit these parts on Wednesday and had driven the temperatures above freezing for the first time in what seems like months, all of the snow heaped about had started melting. This meant that, by the time Perry and I reached the hill on Thursday evening, the temperatures had dropped back down below zero and the surface conditions were pretty damn icy.

Fortunately, I managed not to fall flat on my ass where it counted, despite the runs at Niki being my first on my new Ride Revolt bindings (which I had to buy to replace the 10-11 year-old Burton bindings that had come with my 8000円 Charger board). I imagine that would have been significantly less fun than all of the hurtling down the hill we did on the slick surface. We were able to find a few pockets of powder...ish, but the warm temperatures had caused it all to go heavy, making turning in it a herculean task.

It was a really good night of boarding, even if the conditions weren't perfect. We were able to get in about three solid hours (which felt a lot longer), and it was enough to convince me to head back to Niki when the conditions are a little better.

The sun setting just as I arrived at Niki Skijo.

Same, as seen through rose-coloured goggles ;)

Perry on the littlest lift that could, above the icy, icy slope below.

2010 - 2011 Mountain Day 11