yakihito

All Look Same

I got 6 out of 18 on the All Look Same faces quiz. The average is 7.

How about you?

Hite Revisited

I posted a while ago about Hite, a Korean beer I bought in a plastic bottle. After the initial excitement and novelty of drinking beer from a plastic bottle has passed, I've decided that Hite should be called Shite. It's pasty and bland with a nasty, creeping aftertaste that refuses to leave your throat.

Does manage to stay bubbly in that bottle though.

Loose Change

This is how excited I am about my upcoming trip to Japan. I've dug through my drawers and found all the loose change left over from past trips, got it out, and counted it. And photographed it, of course.

I'm sitting pretty on 264 yen, or $2.47. I knew that the dollar was falling next to the yen but this is pretty damn low. That's 106.915 yen to the U.S. dollar. It's fine if you're working in Japan and earning yen but if you're transferring U.S. dollars into yen you're kinda screwed. I've heard that the exchange rate could drop as low as 95 yen to the dollar by the summer. If that happens, this same 264 yen will be worth, um, quite a bit less (I study language, not math).

Actually, in the time it took me to write this story the exchange rate fall even lower. Thanks, subprime mess!

Tea Gardens of the Bay Area: San Mateo

People often ask me, why Japan? Why have I decided on this specific country to be so in love with? My answer changes often, from culture to the people to temperament, but I also think it has something to do with familiarity. I grew up in the San Mateo area of California, an area with a decent-sized Japanese-American population and a bit of the culture as well. Specifically, I grew up going to the Japanese Tea Garden in San Mateo's Central Park, and that aesthetic may have helped shape my current interests.

I've been wanting to revisit the park for awhile and have decided to do it in the context of visits to other such parks in the San Francisco Bay Area. The other two that I know of are in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and Hakone Gardens in Saratoga. If anyone knows of any others, please let me know.

The San Mateo Japanese Tea Garden, or サンマテオ日本庭園, was established in 1966, just six years before I was born. It's in Central Park in downtown San Mateo, which is about 20 miles south of San Francisco. As I said, I grew up coming to this garden. I looked forward to it, in fact, and it was my favorite part of the park. I particularly liked running across the bridges and exploring the paths, which ended at stone pagodas and little shrines. When I finally made it to Japan in 2004, I couldn't help but compare its famous gardens with my own little childhood playground.

For the last 20 or so years, the San Mateo Japanese Tea Garden has been cared for by Sam Fukudome. I have to say, Fukudome's care is exceptional. I have visited the garden off and on over the years and it still looks absolutely splendid. In fact, according to the city of San Mateo's website,

The Journal of Japanese Gardening sponsored a survey asking Japanese garden specialists to rate the highest quality public Japanese gardens in North America. With over 300 in the United States and Canada, San Mateo’s Japanese Tea Garden ranked number 14 beating Hakone Gardens in Saratoga and San Francisco’s tea garden in Golden Gate Park.

About the only thing I missed was a place to buy tea, like in Golden Gate Park. But hey, pretty good for San Mateo.

Banking In Japan

One of the things I'll have to do when I get to Oita is open a bank account. I'll be in the city for a year so just keeping all my money in my Citibank account is out of the question. If I were staying in Tokyo it wouldn't be an issue—Citibank has branches in Tokyo and even Kyoto and Osaka. But Oita? Nope.

Of course, I can access my money from an ATM but the fees are crazy, something like 3% for foreign ATM transactions, plus the $1.50 for using a non-Citibank ATM. That's too much. I've also heard of opening a PayPal debit account and using a PayPal debit card at ATMs, but there's still a fee, and I'm not completely sold on Internet banking.

My main concern is getting my Citibank money to the new Japanese bank account. I can wire transfer the money but there's a $40 fee for that, and I'll have to make transfers at least twice, once per semester when financial funds are deposited in my account. If there's an emergency it could be more. (Although I suppose I could just tell financial aid to deposit directly into my Japanese bank account.) A friend recommended traveler's checks. Would a personal check drawn up in U.S. funds be accepted at a bank in Japan? If so, there'll probably be fees.

I'm sure I can get the money from one account to another, I just want to do it with the least amount of fees. Any suggestions from world travelers?

Oita Is Boring

Awhile back I posted that I was accepted to study for a year at Oita University as an exchange student from San Francisco State University. Recently I met up with an Oita student currently at SF State and he told me frankly that he thought Oita was boring. Sounds like it's pretty rural, despite the population of Oita city being somewhere around 400,000, and not much in the way of clubs and bars. But what he intended as a warning I choose to take as a challenge.

Pretty much anything related to Japan is interesting to me, whether that be photography, the language, or the countryside. I may get a little bored at times, but hell, I get bored in San Francisco.

Here's what I'm looking forward to seeing and doing in Oita:

Funai Castle Ruins: A Sengoku-era castle right in my city! Even if it is only "ruins" that's still cool.

Wild Monkeys: We have no wild monkeys in America. Ergo, I want to see wild monkeys. And right in the city!

Eat Local Food like tori-ten (tempura chicken) and fugu (blowfish), which they pronounce "fuku" in Oita.

And of course traveling, both around Kyushu and Asia.

Expect this site to change as I get closer to going in late March. Of course, I'll keep posting odd Japanese pop culture tidbits but I plan to have yakihito become my diary. Whether that's a good thing or not remains to be seen.

Plastic Beer

OK, so it's not about Japan but I've always wanted to post about this. It's a Korean beer called Hite (or "The Hite" as it says elsewhere) and the bottle is made of plastic! It's got a screw-on plastic top. It's the Hite Pitcher and has 1600ml of beer in it. And it's not all that terrible, actually. (Although I imagine it would be a lot better with some spicy kimchee.)

I just love that there's beer that comes in a plastic bottle. The store where I picked this up, Kukje in Daly City, also has O.B. in a plastic bottle but I'm afraid of O.B. because it sounds too much like "B.O." and someone told me once that it was nasty. Actually, I have yet to try a Korean alcoholic beverage that I really liked. A Korean-American friend told me not to look to formerly oppressed nations like Korea for good booze. Getting the job done is more important than taste. He also told me that Korea is the Ireland of Asia.

Damn, now I want kimchee.

Pants Off

Yes, Ma'am!

Year of the Rat

I am neither a cat person nor a dog person. You can keep your narcissistic felines and slobbery canines. I'll take a rat any day. Ever since childhood, I've had rats as pets and I absolutely adore them. Smart, curious, and affectionate, they make great pets. I often have dreams about talking rats who offer me guidance in life. I'm definitely a rat person.

I was born in 1972, the year of the rat by the Chinese zodiac. Makes sense, right? This rat person should be year of the rat. Yet, according to the lunar calendar, my February 1 birthday is two weeks shy of the new year. Year of the pig? How terrible. But in Japan, where they use the Gregorian calendar, I am firmly year of the rat. Thank god.

This year is my third go around (yes, I'm turning 36). It's also the year I go to Japan to study. I can't think of a better welcome than images of rats up at all the temples.

So, happy new year! お正月おめでとう！ネズミの年が来たのでうれしい。