Monkey on the Lam and Lack of Sleep

Did I mention the lack of sleep?!

I haven’t posted in a long time because it actually turns out, and this may surprise you, that (I’m pretty sure no one has ever mentioned this before) being first time parents (are you ready for the big reveal?) is ACTUALLY really difficult and time consuming. I know, right? Who would have thought! So in lieu of an actual post here is a collection of random things that have happened lately. As you read please imagine the screen covered in small finger prints in shades of egg, banana and ketchup. Otherwise it won’t match the rest of my décor.

Two weeks ago the biggest news in my town was a wild boar wandering into the more fashionable of our two shopping malls and running amok. Tiger asked me of the boar had been male or female. I responded that it was probably a young male if it was wandering around by itself. “I think it was female” he replied. When I inquired why, he responded “Because it wanted to go shopping!” So many gender stereo-types already at such a young age (T.T) At the time, I thought “wow, you really know you live in the country-side when a wild boar is the main topic of conversation”. Little did I know that a major story would break the following week that captured the attention of the entire prefecture: A monkey went missing from the mountain where he usually lives! His name is Benz and he is 35, which is about 100 in human years, so grave concerns are held for his well-being. Tiger’s school made a special announcement to all students and a huge effort has been made to locate Benz. The husband and I, clearly not being locals, immediately thought of the Colbert Report:

We are now in week two of the Benz saga and having spent a long time in a hospital waiting room yesterday I can confirm that the TV news is still playing hourly updates on the situation. Additional search party recruits have been brought in. There are several tribes of monkeys on the mountain and Benz was originally the leader of the B tribe, but after a torrid affair with the head female of C tribe he defected and became leader of the C monkeys. Speculation is running rife that he may have tried to return to the B monkeys and been rejected, or possibly had another extra-tribe affair and been caught out by the unforgiving C tribe females. I am not making any of this up. Seriously. This has been a huge story down here. 

The World According to Tiger:

On our first full day with him we went to the pool. He was pretty scared and wanted to know if there were sharks. I said no, just humans. Then my JUST-turned-8 son came out with this gem: “Some humans are sharks.“ Deep kid, very deep.

Two days later we took a train to an amusement park. It was a short walk from the train station. Tiger is not a big fan of walking, but is a huge fan of whingeing.

Tiger: The amusement park is really faaaaar.
Me: Not at all, it’s near!

After a few seconds of pouting he puts on a cute voice and asks

Tiger: Why is the ferris wheel the same size as my thumb?

Feeling happy at the change of subject I put on my best friendly teacher voice and say

Me: That’s because, you know, things look smaller than they actually are when they're far away.
Tiger: Aha! Far! You just said it was far away!

Damn it (>_<)

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When "Baby Girl" Grows Up

I inherited many things from my father, including insomnia. One summer night when I was four years old and everyone else was sleeping, I heard my father going outside for a walk. I climbed out of my bedroom window and asked if I could go with him. It was warm and the stars were shining brightly. We talked about all sorts of things; rare one-on-one time for a child who is one of five. When I rode on his shoulders I felt so tall I could almost touch the stars. His beard tickled when he kissed me and I giggled uncontrollably. I felt so safe with him, so protected and loved and invincible. I was four years old, and I remember every detail, the smell of newly cut grass and the sound of crickets. I was a four year old girl and my daddy was everything to me.

She has a right to that hug

Veronica Brown is about to turn four years old. She will remember her daddy. She will remember the way his arms feel hugging her tight and the special words he uses when he kisses her goodnight. She does not remember the Capobiancos. She will know them only as the people who took her father away. And in just a few short years, maybe only four or five, she will google her own name and find that the Capobiancos did everything they could to have her father sent to prison for fighting to be with her. What will they tell her? How can they possibly try to justify this to her?

Adoption is a wonderful solution for children who are in need of families. Adoption is not a wonderful solution to get pay-back against an ex by cutting him off from his child. Adoption is not an arrangement to be entered into as a financial transaction. Adoption of a child with a loving extended family fighting for her custody is human trafficking. Removing a child from her father, sister and grandparents because a contract and financial transaction take precedence over what is clearly in her best interests is inconceivable.

She is not an item to be bought and sold. She is a person. She will remember her daddy. She will remember the moment he was ripped away from her.

Further reading at
http://keepveronicahome.com/index.php/fact-check
http://www.thelostdaughters.com/2013/07/with-sad-hearts-lost-daughters-welcome.html
https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/08/13/sold-oklahoma-second-indian-infant-adopted-south-carolina-150856
https://www.facebook.com/StandingOurGroundForVeronicaBrown?fref=ts

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Picture Books About Adoption That Don't Focus on Parents' Desires

(This is the last post for a while, we're about to become a family of three and that's going to need all of my attention! I'll be back, just not for a few weeks. Be good while I'm gone.)

I wanted to buy our son, who will henceforth be referred to  as Tiger*, some picture books about adoption. He is a little too old for most of the picture books on the market, but he doesn't have the language skills for books aimed at his age group. I want him to have something visual not to "help him understand" (he is old enough to know exactly what is happening) but to show him that families like ours are common enough to feature in multiple books. I want him to know that he isn't the only child who looks different from his parents, and if he brings friends home I hope they will flip open the books and see the same thing.

When I began looking for books, I was surprised and honestly a bit upset to see how many titles of books purportedly for adopted children take the adoptive parents' perspective. I haven't read these books, but the titles alone ensure that I'm not buying them. My son isn't a present, he is a person. God didn't give him to me and his loss of his first family and everything he has suffered subsequently was NOT in response to my wish. My wish is that no child is ever in the situation of needing to be adopted by strangers. I wanted books that focus on the child's feelings and experiences, not the parents' loneliness or wishes for a child. One book, "A Blessing From Above", features a bird who gives her chick to a kangaroo because she "knew her nest was not big enough for all her chicks", perpetuating the deeply vile idea that those irresponsibly fertile poor people really ought to hand their babies over to wealthier families, because money = love. Just no. I'm one of five children who grew up in an intermittently welfare dependent household. Quite glad my parents didn't "choose a better life" for me thank you very much.

So what did I end up getting? Unfortunately I couldn't find any books I liked that featured people not animals (I think there are some issues with the way animal adoption stories are often inter-species,
but as an academic I am prone to over analysis I guess), but I did find some child-focused stories.

Here's what we bought:

My favourite is "All Bears Need Love". In the story a polar bear takes care of a brown bear who arrives at the zoo. The other animals raise objections and the polar bear responds to each:

The anteater sniffed. "No one will believe he's yours."
"He will know," said Mama Polar Bear. "That's what's important."

I love picture books where the illustrations contain additional story elements that aren't in the text. In "All Bears Need Love", the background shows the baby bear happily playing with the other baby animals while their parents are in the foreground talking and worrying about 'difference'.

"Rosie's Family" is actually a close contender for favourite and in terms of content the detail makes it the most age-appropriate for an elementary school aged child. The only reason I'm putting it second is that there isn't any kind of story. It's just Rosie talking about her family and her experiences, so I can't see us reading it for fun more than once. It's the only book I found that uses animals of the same species but different breeds (Rosie is a beagle adopted by schnauzers). It also shows a family with both adopted and biological children. The content is fantastic and obviously intended to prompt conversations between parents and children. Rosie talks about feeling angry with her adoptive parents sometimes, and wondering about her birth parents, and missing the place she was "before". These are important and normal feelings that are denied by gratitude-enforcing meta-narratives like "God gave you to us". 

"A Mother for Choco" is another sweet story that starts with a baby bird trying to find his mother by searching for animals with the same physical characteristics (the giraffe is yellow like him but doesn't have wings, the penguin has wings but doesn't have his cheeks etc) but eventually decides that what Mrs. Bear does makes her his mother, even if she doesn't look the same.

"Zachary's New Home" have my favourite illustrations (line drawings, but beautiful and subtly expressive rather than big bold block colours and cartoonish styling). It details Zachary's removal from his first family by a social worker and time in a foster home before his adoption. It's the only book I found where the protagonist has a clear memory of his biological parents and of losing them. The story is sensitive to Zachary having both happy and unhappy memories about life in his first home and a desire to return there. It also covers testing behaviours that strain the relationship between Zachary and his adoptive parents, and Zachary's feelings of rejection and self-blame about losing his first parents. There's a lot of emotional work tucked into a short story. Although not all the specifics are a good match for us, I like the matter-of-fact approach to difficult feelings and events in the book and the focus on Zachary not the adults in the story.

If you have any books to recommend, do please leave a comment! But I won't be replying to comments for a while.

*大翔 (Taiga, pronounced Tiger) is a commonish name around here and we thought it would be a funny 'bilingual' name so while we were waiting we called our son Tiger~ you can't spend a year (or longer) talking about "the child" and statistically he was probably going to be a boy, so Tiger he was until we got a match and a real name. I think it's pretty common for adoptive parents to have a pre-placement name. My eldest niece was Noodles. Anyway, I'm obviously not going to use my son's real name here so he is going to remain Tiger.

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Budget Vegetarian in Japan: August Edition

Previous Editions of Budget Vegetarian in Japan:
June

Summer is here for real now, with scorching sun, temperatures in the mid-30s and cicadas trying to send you deaf everywhere you go. I'm craving cold, fresh, crispy food that doesn't require much stove time. I apologize as always for the photos. I am not cut out for food photography...

In season this month we have: Capsicum (bell-peppers in American), cucumber, okra, bok choy and other leafy vegetables, and 新しょうが new ginger (no need to peel because the skin is so thin and mild enough to eat raw~ I munched on some like a carrot while cooking today).

Tofu and Herb Cream Cheese

Adapted slightly from Recipes of Japanese Cooking, replacing the gelatin with agar*.
Wrap 1/2 a block of silken tofu in kitchen paper, microwave for 1 minute then wring dry either in robust kitchen paper or a cloth.

Microwave 100g of cream cheese for 30 seconds. Mix with 1/4 of a red onion, finely diced, chives to taste and green herbs to taste.

The agar needs to be dissolved in boiling water, this is just to show you the ingredients

The recipe says three sprigs of Italian parsley but I used about 1/2 cup of basil and Italian parsley combined (what I happened to have in the garden). Stir through a little salt, sugar and the agar, and chill for two hours in molds.

These quantities made four muffin-liner sized cheeses

Savoury Tofu Jelly

Also adapted from Recipes of Japanese Cooking.
I used the remaining half of my silken tofu, cubed, with a small quantity of diced mixed-colour capsicum as the filling. Coloured capsicums are often quite expensive but I got a good deal on these, 30% off!

For the jelly itself , bring 1 2/3 C of stock to the boil, remove from heat and add soy sauce, mirin and cooking sake to taste (I used 2 Tbsp soy sauce and 1 each of the others). Mix through the agar and pour over the fillings. Set in the fridge for at least two hours and garnish with the chives left over from your cream cheese.

Cucumber Three Ways

1. Spicy Yuzu and Daikon Cucumber Salad

Cut new ginger into sticks and flash-fry in very hot olive oil until crisp. If you cook it too long it will become chewing not crispy. Very finely slice a your cucumber and daikon and add the ginger and frying oil when cool.

Use any tangy dressing and toss through with an equal quantity of lemon or other citrus juice. I used this spicy green-pepper yuzu dressing and it matched wonderfully with the sharpness of the daikon.

2. Fresh, Simple Cucumber Salad

On the left, the one on the right is #3

Shred cucumber and mix through some garlic, lemon juice, black pepper and a tiny whisper of olive oil. That's it. 

3. Chili-Fried Cucumber

Growing up I ate cucumber in salads and sandwiches. It was never cooked and never eaten hot. Not so in Japan. This tasty dish is just cucumber fried with salt, sesame oil, garlic and some dried chili~ simple but tasty.

Take care when frying because the high water content of the cucumber makes for lots of spattering. You can eat it hot or let it cool.

Noodle-Stuffed Grilled ピーマン

Cellophane noodles are super cheap, easy and perfect for summer.

Just soak for a few minutes in hot water and it is ready to use

How massive is this eggplant? It's as long as my arm!!

Cost about a dollar

I fried some eggplant with  油揚げ tofu skins that came cheaply in a big bag and added some really good texture contrast with a bit of left-over red capsicum and grated ginger and garlic in sesame oil.

After browning the eggplant I added some kombu dashi, soy sauce and the noodles. Once the stock had been absorbed/evaporated I stuffed the mixture into some crispy Japanese green capsicums

and grilled them until the skin burned. I chilled them in the fridge for a few hours and the flavours matured as they cooled (be careful not to over-season because it will taste much saltier cold than hot).

Mint Ice-Tea

I have an abundance of mint in the garden so I thought I'd have a bash at a minty spin on iced tea.

I ran a cup of fresh mint through the food processor with 3/4 C coarse brown sugar and dissolved the resulting mix into 3/4 C of boiling water.

I made about 8 C of tea using four regular tea bags and 4 Earl Grey. Once it was cool I mixed through the sugar syrup and 1/4 C of lemon juice. It was delicious but I want to try it again with orange juice to compliment the Early Grey. I didn't strain the mint leave out because I'm happy to, as my husband puts it, "eat twigs and leaves", but if I were making it for guests I would strain the syrup before adding it to the tea.

*Agar is called かんてん （寒天） and is available from most supermarkets quite cheaply. Read about how to prepare it at here.

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. That means if you click then buy the item I get a small commission. It does not mean that I am being paid to promote a particular product or opinion. I will only include affiliate links that are directly related to the subject of a post. If you want to know why I have begun including affiliate links you can read about it here.

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A Flamin' Good Time

Kids throwing fire. Because, Japan.

Remember the ice festival I posted about? Turns out we do fire festivals well around here too. It's all very Game of Thrones .

I am happy to report that no children were injured this year, although there was "an incident" last year no one wants to talk about. One firework did shoot downwards instead of up, but it missed the kids.

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. That means if you click then buy the item I get a small commission. It does not mean that I am being paid to promote a particular product or opinion. I will only include affiliate links that are directly related to the subject of a post. If you want to know why I have begun including affiliate links you can read about it here.

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Japanese Drama... Gray's Anatomy Inspired?

  Recognize who is who? (Image Source Here)

OK, Resident: Story of Five Interns is very heavily Grey's Anatomy inspired. One would almost be tempted to say that it is a Japanised version. Resident has been out for a while now and it has been gradually moving further away from Gray's, but the first few episodes had some very familiar elements. I'm not bagging the show out by noting the similarities to Gray's by the way, I find inter-cultural re-makes fascinating.

Resident tells the story of five young doctors starting their surgical internship. The main character is trying to prove that she can make it as a doctor to her overbearing father, who is a successful doctor. She works with a tall and model-looking female resident (who uses a pink stethoscope), a severe but talented female resident, a fluffy-haired and accident prone male intern whose adoration she is oblivious to, and another male intern who is an abrasive and seemingly self-absorbed womanizer with hidden depths. The romantic interest is a divorced senior doctor with awe-inspiring hair. Early cases in the hospital include a patient who is swallowing magnets due to family problems and a teen-aged girl making herself ill trying to please her perfectionist and never satisfied mother. There's even an emergency in a stalled elevator.

Despite these similarities, there are some huge differences necessitated by the dissimilarity of the Japanese medical system and Japanese television's much more conservative attitude towards sex. One of the pleasures of watching inter-cultural interpretations is seeing what has been changed and what hasn't (Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, based on Macbeth, is fascinating in this regard). Although it has developed into much more soap-opera and less medical-drama, Grey's still places medicine and ethical conundrums pretty firmly in the center of each episode, while Resident is all about the emotional connections between the interns and the patients. There's little discussion of medicine and not many scenes featuring surgeries. The biggest thing that jumped out at me is the simplistic attitude to metal illness and emotional problems in the show. In one episode a man who has been allowing his wife to gradually kill him rather than confront her illness has his situation resolved by the residents handing him a pamphlet on mental illness. After being willing to die rather than confront his wife's situation, it seemed less than probable that he would come around so easily. I guess it was a good pamphlet. Then there was the teenaged girl who was repeatedly attempting suicide. All it took to "fix" her was a trip to the OR to see a dead car-crash victim's family crying. Problem solved. And the girl with the overbearing mother? The residents just told her mother to be nicer to her, and she felt bad for being mean and all was well.

Here are the opening sequences to Gray's and Resident in one video, for your enjoyment.

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In Which I Discover that I am an Imperialist Monkey

Researching for this post, it seems like this experiment never actually happened, FYI (Image Source Here)

 Have you ever heard about the experiment with the monkeys, ladder and bananas? Click the image to enlarge and read if you haven't. Although the specific details seem to be untrue, the story is based on published research about learned fearfulness (see Psychology Today). When I first read about the "experiment" I thought immediately about an exchange I had with my father when I was fifteen and had just started working as a kitchen hand. My dad went to use a wet dish cloth as a pot holder when taking a roasting tray out of the oven, and I told him not to. "Why not?" he asked. "I don't know" I said, "they told me at work never to do that." "I wonder why..." dad said, went ahead and did it, and got burned quite painfully. The dampness in the cloth turns into steam, apparently. My dad is like that, he wants to know how everything works. He'd be the monkey getting beaten up by everyone else. Actually, when he talks about his childhood, I think that's exactly what it was like. I remembered this story a while ago when reading This Japanese Life:

"Monkeys Eat Corn
Perhaps it’s a bad sign that after reading about monkeys, my mind wandered to my life as an expat. But a recent study, published in April in the journal Science (and a NY Times story here) made me think about social adaptation.
In the experiment, researchers dyed two batches of corn – one pink, one blue. For two groups of monkeys, the blue corn was soaked in a disgusting liquid, and the pink stuff was standard monkey corn. For the other groups of monkeys, they switched it.
So, two groups of monkeys grew accustomed to pink being inedible, two grew accustomed to blue being inedible. Soon enough, the monkeys only ate one color of corn (the delicious one).
Then the scientists stopped making the other color taste so bad. Once the monkeys got used to which color was good, they both ended up being the same. What happened was interesting: High-status monkeys never bothered eating the gross-colored corn, but low-status monkeys occasionally had to. And even though these low-status monkeys knew that the corn was identical to the good stuff (identical, now, aside from the color), they still favored the “good” color when they could get it. Meanwhile, babies who grew up watching mom eat one color of corn barely even registered that the other color of corn was even food. They’d shit in it.
Monkeys shitting in food have a lot in common with me, as an expat. I’m not always down on my life, of course, but anyone in one culture can get accustomed to interacting with certain things in certain ways. It’s a given: The institutions shape how we interact with them, and then that shapes how we interact with each other. Sometimes this institution is a school or job hunt, and sometimes it’s the people giving us corn.
But then the researchers did something really cool.  They took some monkeys and introduced them to the monkeys in other areas – areas where the opposite color of corn was “the good stuff.”

Wild Vervet monkeys, trained to eat only pink-dyed or blue-dyed corn and shun the other color, quickly began eating the disliked-color corn when they moved from a pink-preferred setting to a blue-is-best place, and vice versa.

These guys went in, looked around, and lost their old cultural identities. This is, at a literally primal level, a version of culture shock. Humans, lucky us, have a much more complicated set of adaptations to deal with. We don’t just want to eat some corn, we want our identities validated."

For anyone who lives in a culture not their own for any length of time, life becomes a balancing act between experiencing and respecting the host culture on the one hand while retaining a situated sense of self (and depending on your approach to ethics, trying to be culturally aware without succumbing to subjective morality). I've mentioned before the way cultural differences are often discussed in Japan on the one hand in completely trivial ways while on the other as completely uncrossable divide. People ask me if it's hard not wearing shoes in the house. They don't believe me when I say that many Australians have shoe-free houses and that I never wore shoes inside growing up. But even if I had... why would it be difficult to take off my shoes? (Slipper culture is another issue of course!) No-one ever asks if it's hard being casually insulted on a daily basis, because it doesn't occur to them that it's a cultural thing. But if I brought it up I imagine the response would be that I just didn't understand The Japanese Way ™. In fact, my supervisor at city hall asked me a while ago if I had any experiences of racism. He was very eager about it so I tried to think of an example that had been unpleasant for me but not so serious that it would turn into a 'thing'. So I told him about a function I had just attended for sports people who had represented our city at the prefectural tournament. I was there representing our naginata team and shared a table with representatives from various other sports. A man sitting opposite talked loudly about me all evening, despite the fact that I was speaking Japanese with everyone else and could clearly understand him. He didn't say anything bad, but it was a non-stop stream of: "I have to text my wife that I'm sitting opposite a 外人! She'll never believe it! Someone take a picture as proof. Oh look, the 外人 is eating some melon. Wow! It's eating melon with a fork! Gotta get a photo..." And yes, he literally took photographs of me eating while sitting opposite me at the table, without ever once speaking TO me. "Oh, but you have to understand that it's very exciting for Japanese people to see foreigners" my irrepressibly optimistic boss responded. "It's not discrimination or any bad thing!" And that is how it always is. You have to be understanding. You don't get to feel uncomfortable. You have to see the funny side of things when the fifth kid in a row asks your cup size during class and the teacher is obviously hoping that you'll answer. Anyway, back to the monkeys. Or rather, to me being a cultural imperialist.

At one of our many summer seminars for elementary school teachers we were broken into groups and told to play a card game with simple rules. That catch was that we weren't allowed to speak, and we were told that is was an exercise in non-verbal communication. After a minute some members were told to switch groups and keep playing. We did it a few times, and then the game ended and we were told the real purpose of the activity. If you're familiar with Barnga you'll have recognised it by now: each group is given slightly different rules, so when the players are shuffled around the group has to cope with players who have different expectations of how the game works. Some players will dominate their new group and enforce their original group's rules, some will go with the flow and assimilate into their new group's rules, and some will get confused or angry. It shouldn't come as a surprise if you know me or have been reading this blog for a while that I completely dominated every group I entered, ruthlessly enforcing "my" rules and quashing all opposition while all the while thinking what a great job I was doing of communicating non-verbally. Hearing the real purpose of the activity was an eye-opener. It wasn't news to me to discover that I am bossy and domineering, but it was a big shock to discover that I had gone through the whole exercise without ever once contemplating that perhaps the other players who were "doing it wrong" were actually playing with a different set of expectations. When it comes down to it, despite my desire not to be, I'm still one of the monkeys at the bottom of the ladder beating up the new guy without stopping to wonder why.

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