Gaijin bachelor cuisine part 1: Miso! (with pictures ofc!)

oh mosburger, where would i be without you? well certainly "gourmet" burger places exist in the states, but not like this one, oh no, not like mosburger. mosburger is exclusive to Japan. seriously, you can get busted at customs if you try to smuggle it out, if people outside Japan knew about this place..............

and i know the picture doesn't do it justice, but mosburger is really fucking good and i'm a fan, is basically all i'm trying to say here. xpensive though, which is why, in an effort to conserve cash and lose a few kilos, this kind of thing should be an occasional treat. eating in is much cheaperrrrrrrrr OH SHIT NO ITS NOT

man, i dont know why i kept thinking that groceries are cheap in Japan. nothing's cheap here! i so should've known! i'm just trying to think of what gave me that impression in the 1st place, maybe there's an awesome store or something i cant remember? INB4 "100 yen shops dude" NO!!! 100 yen shops sell junk food! of course they do sell it for just 100 yen, nothing wrong with that...

NO! i deserve the best and you all know it.

now when you don't really know how to cook anything properly, and even if you did all you have to work with is a pot, and you live alone, you might be thinking that your options are limited to those ramen packets, milk and cereal, sandwhiches and instant coffee. that's what i thought anyway, until today.

after M. San helped me with some official stuff I never would've been able to do on my own, like applying for the Gaijin card (the ARC), and opening my post office account (in Japan you deposit your money at the post office!), we both decided that it was time for me to lose the training wheels, and try to be self-sufficient. yep, i'm now an independent man in Japan (i hope), thx to M. San. but before sending me on my way, she kindly showed me a couple of things at the grocery that 'even you can do.' (me) of course i could only remember 1 a couple hours later. maybe i lost the training wheels too quick like? maybe maybe not, because i've graduated from making my award winning "cereal in a bowl with milk in it" to making miso soup, kinda.

warning warning: you will most likely find this uninteresting



now even in the states you can buy packets of miso soup, complete with tofu and seaweed and all that shit. well FUCK THAT i say, when you can make things more complicated and difficult for yourself, do it, that's always been my motto.

wait what? no, thats not my motto at all nevermind the fact that i dont even have one. i totally would buy those packets of soup if they sold them more than one at a time and each one made more than 1 serving. but you have more options for making your miso here in Japan, up to and including making all the broth and stuff from scratch but hey lets not go bonkers here, if it takes more than 20 minutes to make i'm not interested, and neither should you...be. interested in that. SO...



you need a box of miso...paste? goop? idk what this shit is. just buy it, it looks brown. bonus points if you can't read the box. ~~200 yen. now boil some water!



hey look, something i can read! this is dashi. ~~200 yen for a packet of 10, which brings us up to $4 total. now, i have no fucking idea what dashi is exactly, but i know that i need it. well, M. San said i need it or else the soup will taste like hell, and she hadn't lead me astray before so...



in it goes! hard to make out the details in that pic, but this stuff looks and smells like fish food, the pellets kind. i think she said you're supposed to add this stuff bit by bit, until you've got the kind of taste you want but FUCK IT! i'm a maverick! just toss that whole fucker in there



now scoop up some of your miso goop and toss it in, you want to add somewhere between one scoop and a shitload of scoops, but i dont know, because i dont own any kind of measuring device.



now stir all this shit up with your amusingly long chopsticks. seriously these are foot and a half long chopsticks. finally, it's time to taste test your soup. did you fuck it up? chances are you did, especially if you were following these instructions. but listen! that's not important. what's important is that you end up with microwaveable leftovers. i think that's like the ultimate in lonely bachelor cooking, you go throught the effort to cook a pot of something once, and then you can eat twice, or maybe even 3 times if you dont have my kind of appetite. and when you do all this for 400 yen, taste doesn't even enter the picture now does it, gaijin guy? no, because you've just transitioned from "i'm spending an average of 1000 yen per day on food" to "i've been eating the same thing every night for 5 years for not as much money," which should be your goal. now let's give it a quick rundown with an out of 5 grading scale that i'm making up as i type

MISO SOUP
Ingredients: 2 minimum (plus boiling water)
Price: 400 Yen (can make it about 4 or 5 times probably)

easy to make? 5/5: it's easy!

easy to fuck up? 3/5: mine smelled like really salty vodka for some reason

is it good? 3/5 maybe? idk. how much do you like miso? you know you could just add in whatever kind of extra stuff to this that you want...if you're made of money maybe

OH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT did i just write a whole post about boiling water? someone needs to turn off my internets

--GAIJIN that writes this
signatures go here

arm the photon torpedoes

unnecessary picture is unnecessary
one of the things most people seem to know about japan is that theres alot of people on a series of smallish islands, hence, it can be a bit cramped, especially when it comes to how much space is available for your apartment. well this is certainly true in Tokyo, where awesome people are able to take a shower and fry an egg AT THE SAME TIME :0 it doesn't seem to be the same case out here in the sticks, which is where i am, more or less.

I've believed for a long time that if you always set your expectations low, you'll be pleasantly surprised more often than not, hopefully that makes some sense. on the way to the apartment, i was expecting either an old, shitty apartment, a hilariously small apartment, or some combination of the 2. after all, who the fuck am i and why should anyone go to the trouble of getting me a nice place? i pretty much based this assumption on 2 things--#1, my apartment, and my co-workers apartments in Korea were shitholes (and they rented for about 100,000KRW/month i believe, which would be why our rent was comped by the company). #2, everyone who has ever blogged about living in Japan, and the discovery channel, says Japanese apartments are small. perhaps comically small

i was really starting to wonder what kind of place i was gonna get stuck in as M. San drove us down those awful narrow streets with death ditches on the sides, past a shrine and a bunch of fruit fields. orchards maybe. imagine my surprise when, after heading up to the 2nd floor of "Leo Palace" (who's Leo?), it wasn't a depression-inducing shithole the size of a phone booth. in fact ITS ACTUALLY PRETTY NICE, and new. i even have the luxury of some extra space where i'm like, 'wonder what i could do with this space?' that's not what most EFL teachers are saying in this country, i reckon. hell, there was even enough space for them to put the toilet in a seperate room from the shower/bath, which was traditionally important to Japanese. one activity's dirty, the other isn't, can you guess which one is which though, is the question. so i could say i have a toilet room and a shower room, but i think i'll just prefer to say i live in a 2 bathroom apartment. 2 bathrooms



oh and btw guys? i have one of those Japanese super-toilets, not one of those squatter things. these things come equipped with a seat-warmer, power deoderizer, and a bidet, but i haven't plugged it in yet, because with great luxury comes great utility bills i'm guessing, although i'm definitely plugging this thing in during the winter. i used to think that, as far as houses went, double doors (in my mind) were the biggest sign of wealth and success, but now i know its a toilet with a control center, which you can see above. 5000 bonus points because it looks like its from star trek, so you can shout 'arm the photon torpedoes!' or something similarly stupid while you're making turd islands (shoutouts to turd island, if you dont know who they are, dont let it keep you up at night)

quick tangent here, is it possible for me to be retroactively pissed off about the shoddy state of my apartment in korea? can i do that? i wanna do that.

i think one of the biggest complaints (about apts.) from my compatriots in korea was no air conditioner or heater. well not only do i have both, i have an Ion sprayer or something. according to M. San i'm supposed to turn it on when i 'want to feel good.' doesn't that mean it should always be on?


blue radiation in blurry motion

now if you're dumb, you're probly all like "so you have to sleep on the floor in japan right? derp." NO



you know how you always stash things under your bed? well Japan decided to make that into storage space, because thats efficiency! I can also use it to hide from werewolves, so it's sort of a panic room, basically.

now, i guess i should apologize for bragging about this place so much. after all, i know at least a couple ppl who might possibly be reading this are still in the ROK. i guess i just wrote all this stuff so that there would be something to accompany this series of pictures that wouldn't be even remotely interesting otherwise. well no place is perfect. my rent isn't comped here and it's really expensive for 1 dude. and this place is really out of the way down those mind bogglingly small streets that really stress me out, the staircase is a deathtrap for drunk people (which i will occasionally be), and there's apparently a yakuza living here. also: werewolves. but i hope that, no matter where you're reading from, you can good naturedly share in my joy about my video intercom, and the almost endless potential it presents for fun at someone else's expense

if someone rings my doorbell, i'm prompted by a red flashing light to push a big button with the Hanasu (talk) kanji, and i'll then be able to see on the screen who DARED to ring MY doorbell, and they can't see me, which means i could say all kinds of stuff just to watch the look on their face! to me, that sounds even more satisfying than answering my door half-naked, tattoos showing, in korea. the elderly women passing out fliers for church knew to avoid #510 after a couple incidents of that. undoubtedly though, the best part of this intercom is that when i go to hit the big flashing button, i can yell 'ONSCREEN' just like in star trek (again with that). except unlike star trek, when the image comes onscreen i'm not talking to some friendly vulcans....



it's just another person who read my novel. leave me alone people! (special thanks to the neighbor who wanted me to move my car out of the wrong spot)

for the next couple days, there should be a poll at the bottom of this blog. turns out i dont have to go to work for a whole week (!!!), so instead of staying in for the whole time, i actually have time to make a short little trip, question is, where should i go. and the poll will have little to no bearing on that, i'm just trying to decide for myself.

--guy who writes this
signatures go here

moving blocks

Is that dog in the picture...angry about the coffee? happy? i dont' think we'll ever know

Well I made it to my assignment, took a look around the "city" and have gotten somewhat settled in i guess, i know where the family mart is, the grocery store, and have an idea where the bar is. still don't know how to get to work exactly, but i'll figure out these little details as i go, after all school is still out here! i'm getting the impression i might not even start working till next week.

haven't made any friends here yet, although i kinda had a conversation in (mostly) english at the grocery store. If you've never been to japan before, you might not understand the fact that people really dont' say hi to strangers that often, especially if they're just passing on the street. at home, if you're passing by someone and you make eye contact, you might give a small nod and say 'hey', and they'd probly make respond somehow about half the time. but saying konnichiwa here just gets you a look really, it's not exactly what they do round these parts.

Not to say that i'm invisible though, that's for sure. whoever told me that Akita's don't bark was a liar, because the Akita that lives around here barks at me incessantly. no matter how much i improve my language, no matter how many japanese clothes i buy, i will always stand out, and stand out obviously, and i understood this b4 my first trip to nihon. i'm acutely aware of the looks i get while i'm walking around, and the giggles and bursts of japanese being thrown when i'm around. i'm sure a translation would be: 'is THAT american fashion? heeheeheeheeheehee' kids though, they're just so curious that they'll go ahead and stare, even follow me around a bit. the thing about kids is, i could turn around and go 'HELLOOOOOOOOOO' and they would probably find this hilarious...or run in terror, definitely one of the two. but all this talk about being followed and being watched just makes me sound paranoid doesn't it? i suppose i might turn out that way, and start hearing mocking japanese voices in my head or something if i had a different attitude about the whole thing. but i understand that, not knowing much japanese, it's hard to talk to me. that'll change. when i think i can hold down a conversation about whatever, i'll carry a big sign around with me: "YOU CAN TALK TO ME" of course, that might go over even worse. well i guess it might be ok, as long as i'm not naked and covered in blood or something when i do it.

once i get a good feel for this place, i'll know the right way to act around here. i mean, is this one of those places that's so small everyone knows what their local foreigner is buying at the grocery store? i don't think so...yet, although the fact that i bought $5,000 worth of pocky today (well worth it) might be gossipworthy. i think what's gonna make me the most obnoxious around here would be my DRIVING

b4 i get into this, i have to give some kudos to someone who will never read this, but it's well deserved regardless. the company i'm working for uses some english speaking consultants whose job is to help out the new hires when they get to their placement, show them around a bit, teach them how their high-tech japanese apartment works, etc. etc. until the person can be independent in japan. well in the case of my helper outer, this included going for a drive with me to the 100yen store. now can you imagine the kind of bravery it takes to get in a car with someone who tells you that they're clueless about driving on the left side of the road? and she didn't even scream once, even when there was an incident with left side/right side, so hats off to Mayumi ..........-San for being pro.

now anyone who's reading this (that would be like...5 people maybe? nah it's probly just mom) who've never driven on the left side of the road, here's a protip: don't ever do it, no matter where you travel to. it's a shitshow on wheels, at least it is here in this town in japan. the roads by my place are so narrow, that if i was driving in the states i'd see that road and say 'well obviously i'm not supposed to drive there.' there's a bunch of narrow roads where if a car is coming from the opposite way, somebody has to back up or get off the road (not even just pull over) or else no one will get anywhere. how do you decide who has to back up? i'm sure there's a whole system that i don't know. making matters worse is, in a lot of places on one side of the road is a kind of ditch thing



what do you reckon would happen if i drove too close to this and 'fell' in? would a team of amused but rather shocked onlookers be enough to help me push the car upright back onto the road? what if this happens at night? this kind of scenario has replaced the shadow people as the subject of my recurring nightmares.

here's the really annoying thing: i used to be a driving pro. b4 heading to the ROK i used to deliver pizzas, and in every country throughout the world, a pizza delivery driver is one step below a NASCAR racer. i could look at a parking spot and know right away whether i could fit in or not, knew when i could squeeze by something and when i couldn't, stuff like that. i had a kind of 6th sense for exactly how big the car was. now, not only do i not have a sense for how big the car is, i have to look at it and try to figure these things out from the right front seat, and let me tell you just that little change in perspective really flipped my shit. all of a sudden, instead of paying attention to my speed or looking for my turn, all my attention was focused on one of the most basic things a BEGINNER driver has to master; staying in the fucking lanes. i didn't pay any mind to oncoming traffic back home, but the first time i saw a car heading my way @ 40 km/h (not really that fast) i thought i was too far over to his side. so i tried to get a bit left and then i thought i had 2 tires on the shoulder. then add to this other complications like pedestrians, cyclists.....it gets ugly. next weekend i'm supposed to drive to training in the next town over, about 25km away I THINK I'LL USE THE TRAIN INSTEAD

but even as much as my first driving adventure stressed me out, i couldn't help but notice something which really stood out to me, something that made me chuckle in between my crying and shouting and swearing (M. San was a good sport about that)

there's 3 kinds of cars in this town, although i hesitate to call them cars, more like moving blocks. if you wanna drive in this town, apparently you're only allowed to have one of 3 designs of moving blocks. you can have whatever color you want (i have a blue block), but if you wannt something besides moving block A, B, or C, it's just not acceptable. take a look at this picture of my building's parking lot to see what i'm talking about.



not pictured: my license plate.
also not pictured: other kinds of moving blocks

my apartment's pretty nifty, think i might write up a real quick (hopefully) post about that tomorrow.

--guy who writes this
signatures go here

the unbonkers adventure

minna-san, konnichiwa and all that shit. fair warning here, long post incoming. one time, just one fucking time i'd like to be able to make my points in 500 or less, why is that so hard? edit: written in a jet-lagged state, read at your own risk

my flight to japan...made it to japan, which is a good thing because i enjoy being not dead. it's also a good thing because it was uncomfortable as hell on there, united is pretty damn cramped i guess? not cramped like the shitshow in the sky known as phillipine airlines, but still pretty bad. i think the best trans-pacific flight i ever had was asiana air maybe? i wonder if they fly to tokyo? but this is all irrelevant anyway isn't it? yeah. for context, i'm writing this post with jet lag in full effect. 3 question sentences in a row is not good writing imho tbh. when you've literally traveled to the other side of the world, the first week can be pretty hard on your brain, at least with me it takes about a week for the mental fog and fairly persistent fatigue to clear up. sometimes i cant even finish senten

being hungover this morning didn't help, by the way. i even got called on to demonstrate something today, but i didnt butcher it too badly so whatevs! was total misery in the morning though. lesson learned: i can't pull off those zany alcoholic hijinx i used to and still be effective the next day. not saying that i'm old or anything, i'm really not, but i've somehow managed to slow down, and i'm not sure how that that happened. must be lack of practice and no motivation. well fuck it.

so anyway LET ME TOLD YOU SOMETHING about the title of this post. why is it an unbonkers adventure? i mean, just the fact of being in japan means the crazy fun times are neverending right? well it could just be a perspective thing, but i've been less than thrilled with the situation so far, and theres a couple reasons for that i think. jet lag on top of the pretty busy 8 or 9 hours of training each day have made training kind of rough, and being somewhat confined to this hotel (its a nice place btw) with about 150 other new hires is getting old. not that i dont like them but i dont like the sort of in transit temoporaary vibe here, i'd much rather settle into my tiny apaato for better or worse. and there are some peoples here i dont exactly care for. lets just say they wont be on my xmas card list. i should have anticipated it, but there's alot of 'personalities' here. i have respect for alot of them, even after talking briefly with ppl, i can see that most of the new hires here are rock solid. but then theres some others, ppl who won't shut up [ever], ppl who are so awkward it hurts you, ppl who insist on dominating every conversation, a couple shitty guys, a couple bitchy girls, and of course 1 or 2 otaku's [ppl who get a boner when you say the word japan]. the fact that we're here means that most of us have some otaku-ness in us, but i was honestly expecting alot more of the hardcore manga junkie, compulsive anime watcher, gamerlol pocky fiends than i've met here. thats kindofa dick thing to say though, and believe me, i'm not the greatest person on the planet (batman is) so i have no right to judge. let them be, right? they'll be out of my hair soon enough, cos i'm headed to my assignment tomorrow. ashita, if you prefer.

my roommate though, is a really chill australian [he's cool with smoking in the hotel room. believe me, that is a fucking luxury for us compared to the other smokers here] is good peoples. as much as i want to hang out with the japanese, learn the language and date a girl and integrate with the culture and blah blah blah, good people are good people and you can hang out with them even if its another gaijin, i dont respect the attitude that some gaijins have where they go to ridiculous effort to ignore other foreigners for whatever reason. when you meet someone cool, is it really that much fucking effort to at least swap emails and write once in awhile? i propose that no, it's not.

a lot of this frustration i'm expelling i think is coming from the fact that i'm not settled into my place yet, but after a few train rides tomorrow i'll be home, in a sense. sure this hotel has japanese TV and whatnot, but its not the kind of japanese experience i hopped on a plane for. i couldn't stop smilin while they were telling me about my travel itinerary for tomorrow, and looking at the body language around the room i could see the other people in my little section were feeling the same way

i was going to talk about the medical check we had to do, because i was amused at times, going through that process which was my first experience with japanese medical stuff. the nurse drawing my blood didn't have any snoopy band-aids for me, and goddamn did i ever have to rack my brain to think of how to ask her for one in japanese. there was a bunch of fog on my chest x-ray, so i pointed at it and asked if it was "tabako" but you know what it was? this guy didn't really speak english but he said it was 'gas, you know, poo poo gas.' well, if he knows that word, some english teacher somewhere was doing it right. i know what i want to talk about when i get to school. and on that note, i think my brain has officially frozen because i just cant think of anything clever to say about taking a blood pressure test or eye exam (which i had literally weeks before coming here).

so now its back to packing my bag while half-watching japanese tv. btw, i haven't seen any of the super fucked up tv shows yet, everything seems kinda regular. well fuck it, i would just turn those shows off anyway cos they're hella dumb.

--guy who writes this

signatures go here

japan threatdown: futakuchi-onna and her yokai buddies

THE PREPARATIONS FOR GOING TO JAPAN continue. because i'm an internationally renowned, highly respected paranormal investigator, it would be FOOLISH of me to travel to another country without researching the local paranormal creatures i will most definitely encounter, frequently. after all, i dont want to be remembered as "the guy who got careless," i'd really prefer to be remembered as "the guy who punched like 30 ghosts in the face, i watched him do it, it was sorta cool i guess."

for today's threatdown i was originally going to tell you about the savage asiatic black bear, the only bear ballsy enough to maul 4 people at a bus stop in an urban area. but theres something even more deadly than this bear: futakuchi-onna a.k.a. the woman with two mouths and boa constrictor hair or, more commonly, OH GOD WHAT IS THAT THING FUCK ME I CAN STILL SEE IT WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES

i guess if i come back from a class and see that someone ate my lunch, any of the ladies with demon mouths in the back of their heads are my number one suspects.

futakuchi (2 mouths) is actually the tip of the iceberg. the iceberg of despair, floating in the sea of doom (which can be a nice place to visit, depending entirely on when you go). there's a bunch of really cool ghosts and stuff in japan, collectively known as yokai.

ok i got distracted all week while trying to write this post. i was gonna give a rundown of the most interesting kindsa yokai i could find, but it took me too long. lets just summarize it thusly: 1.) nine-tailed fox, likes to possess womens so it can have sex with mans 2.) turtle-man that kills people by taking something from out your anus. See, the japanese like to exercise their imaginations when they come up with ghosts!!!

Anyways, as i said i got distracted during the week. there's alot of things to be taken care of, when you're leaving for a year. my bags are mostly packed now, and my japanese working vacation is literally hours away. assuming my flight doesnt crash, i'll be starting my more interesting life in japan starting monday (japan time ofc). its slowly starting to hit me, the fact that this is a place i've wanted to live in for years, and now i'm finally getting the chance to go there long term. well, lets hope that i dont fuck it all up, as i'm prone to doing, and return to cleveland trailing my torn tattered dreams behind me. and if i can make it work over there, well then, see you in a year cleveland. oh and if our plane goes down over the pacific, i guess the biggest regret of my life would be.......dying in a plane crash on the way to doing something cool. i hope those wont be my last words on the internet? WELL STAY TUNED AND WAIT FOR ANOTHER POST SOON OLOLO

--guy that writes this
signatures go here

japan threatdown: the terror of the countryside

so far, my preperations for going to Japan have consisted of loading my mp3 player with travelin music. back in 2008 (!!!) when i was leaving for korea to start my job there, i forgot to bring my mp3 player with me, a mistake that i don't care to repeat this time around. being without your music can be soul crushing, as i found out. although luckily for me, the jukebox at our preferred waegookin bar in incheon had a pretty decent selection of music. you might be wondering why i didnt buy an excellent and affordably priced korean mp3 player. shut up.

anyways i have been thinking alot about where i'm going, trying to imagine what life's gonna be like there. i dont want to say where i'm going exactly because i feel like with all the rampant spelling errors and blatant contempt of punctuaton in this blog never mind the content if an employer ever connected this internet garbage to me it would almost be the same thing as writing the boss a letter saying plox fire me nao with a little cartoon drawing of boobs at the top. i'm even erasing my name from every post today. all i wanna say is that i'm going to the mountains, somewhere on the tokyo side of the country. and believe me, that could be a loooooooooooottttt of places.

so i tried to think, what do i know about the japanese mountains? thats when i remembered something, something terrifying. i'm not even talking about suicide forest. its worse than that.

think about a hornet. k? do you have that mental image in your head? now make that hornet bigger by like 600 thousand times and you get this guy.

if you cant be fucked (yes i appreciate some aussie slang every now and then) to click that link then let me explain. biggest fucking hornet ever, was created by satan, eats other bees, kills about 657 thousand million people every year and has a stinger with neurotoxin. neurotoxin. neurotoxin. snakes have neurotoxin. this thing is like flying poison. IT KILLS MORE PEOPLE IN JAPAN THAN FUCKING BEARS, an animal whose sole purpose is destruction and can climb faster than it can run (nowhere is safe). and the hornet primarily lives in....the japanese mountains :0

i've often wondered why mosquitos don't pass on deadly viruses like HIV (btw i've never gotten a satisfactory answer to that question, so speak up if you know) and if they did, then they would probably be the most dangerous animal ever. these hornets, seeking to be the most dangerous animal ever, decided not to bother with contagious diseases and just fucking murder people.

i've been to a few places where people eat things that we here in america think are disgusting to eat. just as a quick example, would you rather snack on a.) potato chips or b.) lightly salted grasshoppers? well people in japan sometimes eat these hornets, obviously after they're done making sure that it's absolutely dead, and won't rise again, fly across the room and eat their baby's soul in a fit of hornet rage. now i would consider eating these hornets, if for no other reason than to demonstrate once and for all my superiority over the entire hornet race, perhaps theatrically standing on the table and holding one aloft betwixt my chopsticks like a flag, the message clearly being "your poisonous flying servants will never deter me from my mission, satan."

but when i think about it more, doing this would clearly anger the queen of the hornets, she-who-must-not-be-named. i cant rely on guns as a defence since they're illegal in japan, not to mention that the hornets are immune to bullets anyway. so i guess i'll need to keep my windows closed at night and keep a can of black flag insecticide within arms reach.

--some guy
signatures go here