Places to go to next time

Travel back was uneventful and smooth (but long). We arrived home after a four hour lay-over in Seattle from Narita before arriving in Atlanta. We are already planning how and when we can go back! There was always some place new to see and explore in Tokyo, and we're already dreaming of sushi, thick slices of fresh bread, and coffee espresso cakes!

Here are some places we'd like to go back and find.

Omotesando Koffee — espresso in a klassic setting is a favorite of Heidi Swanson, a vegetarian blogger from San Francisco. The location is superb- near Omotesando Hills, an elegant designer shopping mall, and Harajuku, Tokyo's Champs-de-ly-see. It's also a nice walk from our apartment near the Aoyama Cemetery.

The Japan Times also wrote about Omotesando Koffee and their Baked Custards which are known for their distinctive cuboid shape. The coffee shop's lease may end this year, but it seems like the owner envisions other locations and may be able to extend on the lease anyways.          

An amazing summer in Tokyo

It's been an amazing summer in Tokyo. By living abroad and studying Japanese for an intensive four weeks, we have great insight to the Japanese language, culture, and food. We enjoyed being very busy with full class days every day of the week and then touring the museums and gardens. A favorite past time too was window-browsing the high fashion stores and admiring the beautiful food markets in the department store basements. We met many interesting people at our language school who were primarily European and Australian university students. Also, several adults attended for both business and personal interest in Japanese. Our teachers were highly qualified and excellent.

Genki JACs program

 

 Genki Japanese and Culture School, Tokyo

 

Yea! July 1-26, 2013

Yahoo! July 1-26, 2013

classmates

(German, French, Holland, Switzerland, and Boston)

classmates

(French, Holland, and Boston)



Japanese favorite flavors- green tea and red beans

Part of the fun in traveling is trying different food and tasting new flavors and combinations. The Japanese love green tea (matcha) and red bean (adzuki) flavors in everything. Green tea is a popular flavor for drinks: hot tea and cold bottled tea, sweetened, unsweetened, and even with milk. Starbucks (which is everywhere in Tokyo) serves several tea flavored drinks: roasted green tea latte (hojicha), jasmine orange tea latte, matcha tea latte, chai tea latte, green tea, and green tea frappuccino. Bread and pastries come in green tea flavors, which we can tell by the light green color. The green tea Kit Kat candy bar is delicious too.

Red beans are usually ground into a sweet paste and are a filling for steam buns, jelly candies, and glazed as whole beans on top of sweet soft rolls. Red beans are also served chopped up and mixed with rice as filling for sushi rolls and sushi triangles snacks (onigiri). Red beans are a favorite pairing with green tea flavored desserts, like green tea pudding parfait or ice cream with layers of red bean puree.

Popular Japanese flavors

Special Kit Kat

green-tea white chocolate flavored

Edo-Tokyo Museum

We explored the Edo-Tokyo Museum today after class and learned about the history of Tokyo (initially known as Edo) through the centuries from 1590 to 1964 when Tokyo hosted the Olympics. The museum building itself was impressive and resembled a modern torii or shrine entrance gate. Most of the explanations were in Japanese, but there was plenty to look at such as a replica of an old Kabuki (puppet) theater, models of the Edo Castle and a lord's mansion, and a town water well. There was one room that described how Japanese women traditionally gave birth, and another had displays of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the bombing raids of World War II.

We could climb into a man-carrier, sit on an adult tricycle, lift an old gold coin box, and ring a fire alarm. Fighting fires was a big deal during the 1700s where the towns were built of bamboo with buildings close together. Fire fighters had flags that they carried to sound the alarm. The interactive displays made it fun and easy way to spend the rainy afternoon. We got a better understanding of the art, disasters, culture, science, and even architecture of Tokyo.

 

Edo-Tokyo Museum

looking closely at a model of an Edo village

 

  village people- see the man's carrier?

 



ready for a lift in the full-sized man's carrier

 sounding the fire alarm

elaborate, colorful festival cart

riding the adult tricycle- showing the Western influence (1870s)

 

Edo-Tokyo Museum- exhibits on the top floors

 

 

 

 

The National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (MOMAT)

Today we went to the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), where we explored the largest collection of modern Japanese art. We have studied extensively Western-style paintings, but don't know much about Japanese art, so the museum was really interesting and a great exposure of the work by Japanese artists through the 1900s. The museum was well-designed in that the collection started on the 4th floor, starting with a "highlights" section of a handful of pieces that gave an idea of each period. Then we were led around each floor (3 total) starting from the earliest 1900s to the most contemporary works at the bottom. There were a handful of paintings by Western artists, like Klee, Kandisky, and Miro, that showed how their Impressionist and Cubism styles influenced the Japanese artists, such as Kishida Ryusei, Munakata Shiko, Kuroda Seiki, and Yokoyama Taikan. We always linger over the 1880s-1930s period with the beautiful Impressionist works and amusing Cubist pieces, but hurry through the more jarring works in the contemporary period.

After the museum, we crossed the street back in the Imperial Garden and then over into Ginza, the elegant boulevard shopping area, for some window browsing. We peeked into an 11-story (!) stationary shop full of origami paper, envelopes, cards, and fans. Noticing a bakery full of people, we popped in and bought one of their famous Anpans, sweet buns made of sake yeast and filled with red bean paste. We later found out the store was Kimuraya Sohonten, the first Western bakery in Tokyo, opened in 1869.

Imperial Palace- East Garden

watch towers along the moat

crossing the moat

pleasant garden and pond

restored tea house

 

The National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo

(MOMAT)

 great collection of modern works by Japanese artists

 

Shopping at Ginza

waving fans- popular way to cool off for the Japanese



The Japanese language

We first learned about the structure of Japanese at the University of Florida before studying how to speak, write, and read Japanese at the language school here in Tokyo. By structure, we mean the basic linguistic components (subject, verb, object) found in every language, the morphology (the little bits that make up the bigger parts, like prefixes or verb endings), and the phonology (the sounds and how they're combined). Japanese sentence structure is subject-object-verb with particles that mark the grammatical function of words.

Here's an example of the subject-object-verb sentence structure:
Michiko-san wa sushi-o tabe-mas. Michiko eats sushi.

The wa marks the subject (Michiko-san), o the object (sushi), and mas is the present tense verb conjugation for the verb taberu (to eat). 

Also different than English, Japanese adjectives are conjugated, changing in the present/past and whether positive/negative.

Most famously, Japanese has a complex system of honorifics with verb forms and vocabulary that change depending on the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and the persons mentioned. Pronouncing Japanese is easy actually because the vowels are pure and the syllables are mostly CV (consonant-vowel) structure.

Learning the language has helped us to understand the structure better... but a linguist doesn't need to learn every language before understanding how it works.

(image means Nihongo or Japanese)

Greetings and Bowing

The Japanese greet each other with bowing, which also is used for showing respect, gratitude, and apologies. The bow can range from a head nod to a 45 degree or lower bow to indicate deep respect. Even the traffic crossing guards give us a bow while we pass by!

The Japanese do no like physical contact and reserve handshaking for business situations. Greeting with hugs and kisses European-style or couples holding hands are unacceptable. Any child punishment is reserved for the home, as the children seem to behave beautifully in public.

Verbal expressions range in formality with ohayoo used between friends and family and ohayoo gozimasu used for less intimate acquaintances, similarly with arigatoo and arigatoo goziamasu. For good-bye, there are several expressions depending on how long you will be separted. Sayoonara indicates that the speaker will not see the person addressed to before she "turns a page in her life"; or until the next day or until fate brings them together. We do not hear sayoonara often, as it is mainly for school children saying goodbye to their teachers for the day.