Sugar, Spice, and a Lack of Hot Sauce

I don’t like sweets. My mother brought us up without dessert, and I never developed a sweet tooth. I like savory food much more. Salty, spicy, and sour have always been my cup of tea over sweet.

The Japanese don’t agree, however. My host mother is never stingy with sweets after dinner, parading everything from fruit, to pudding, to chocolate before me, offering quantities of each until the volume of sweets rivals the volume of the meal I just consumed. I was forced to learn how to politely decline because eating so many sweets in one sitting is actually liable to make me sick. I also learned how to express my love for other tastes, since the beloved sweetness pervades even things I would normally think of as savory—seriously, everything from cocktails to burgers. I’ve had some success with finding things that are sour and savory, but the taste that eludes me most heavily is that of spice. While it IS possible to find spicy food in Japan, it is difficult, and more often than not when I receive a recommendation and try it out, the food is well seasoned but lacking any true hint of face-melting fire.

For those of you living in Tokyo, there is a delightful truly Mexican restaurant—and by that I mean you can get chimichanga and real hot sauce, not that it’s the true food of Mexico, but rather the Mexican food you know from the United States. Take the train to Harajuku station, proceed down the garish main street, and take a turn at Cute Cube, and walk down the dark alley until you see Chiles Mexican Grill and Cantina! There you will find an array of Mexican food that pleased even the skeptical Southern Californian we had with us. And if you’re looking for hot sauce, allow me to recommend their red habañero salsa. Whatever you want, salty, sour, hot, or even sweet, you can find it on this menu.

Which leads me to this week’s media tie in: real and diverse female characters that embody the full spectrum of humanity (tastes and all).

It’s true that in Japanese anime, there is usually a good representation of types of women. Sometimes these archetypes can be a little too strict, but more often than not I find that has to do with the quality of the anime as a whole rather than just the quality of the character representation. The reason so many different kinds of women show up in anime is simply this: there are more women included in the stories of anime and manga. When more women are included in a story, it allows for more diverse interpretations of them because no one woman is responsible for being the flagship representation of all womankind within the story. This too often is not the case with western media.

There have been two great examples of blockbuster movies recently that have broken this pattern. I speak, of course, of Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. These two films pass the Bechdel test with flying colors, and also featured two very real and diverse female characters. Unfortunately when I say “diverse” in this context I can’t refer to much diversity of race. The Force Awakens does manage to portray many women who are of differing race—if not species, because this is a galactic setting after all—amongst its extras and bit parts, but when I use the word “diverse” to describe Furiosa from Mad Max and Rey from Star Wars what I mean is that they are not characters that embody the stereotypical heroine of Hollywood. Since Rey and Furiosa are surrounded by other female characters, they are allowed to be more than one type of person: they are allowed to come from a damaged background, to be afraid, to be angry, to be rash, to make mistakes, to be hurt and everything else a normal human might experience during their life time—without it coming off as a generalization about all women. So when I say that Rey and Furiosa are “real” and “diverse” as characters, it is because they are human—and humans are not always stuck in one mood or type of behavior.

Furiosa is a child that was stolen from her family, a woman who lives in a society where her gender is forced to be breeders or nutritional providers, and a person with a disability who uses it to her advantage—did you see how useful and versatile that mechanical arm of hers was in the movie? In the face of all of these things, she has managed to secure a position that allows her to help other women escape from their lives as kept wives. But, although Furiosa is obviously a very powerful, skilled, and brave woman, there are moments when she is allowed to break down and mourn. Furiosa’s plan for getting her charges to safety is to return to her childhood home, known as “The Green” within the narrative. When they arrive at the place that used to be The Green, it is gone; used up and infertile. At this point in the narrative, Furiosa—understandably—grieves. Not only has her plan failed, but she has lost a home that she hoped to regain. And, because she is surrounded by other women, she is allowed to do this without it being because she is a woman. The other women do not mourn with her, making her show of emotion about the failure of her plan and the loss of her home rather than an emotional sensitivity that comes with having a vagina. The presence of more women makes her grief more powerful.

The presence of other women also allows the partnership that Max and Furiosa develop to be devoid of the gender dichotomy of which gender is superior at something. There is a moment when a target must be hit for the group’s escape to The Green to continue. There are only three bullets left for the gun that can make this shot. Max shoots two of these bullets and misses both times. Furiosa carefully approaches him but says nothing. She extends her hand, and Max gives her the gun. Furiosa then lines up the shot, using Max’s shoulder as a stand, says “Don’t breathe,” and shoots. She hits the target. Now, if Furiosa had been the only female character in this story, the power of this scene would have been polluted with gender politics. Since she was not, the scene represented instead the level of trust Max now has in Furiosa and how skilled Furiosa as an individual is.

Rey is afforded the same freedoms as Furiosa due to the presence of key characters like Maz, General Leia, and Captain Phasma— not to mention the female storm troopers, spies, and resistance personnel. Rey also breaks new ground for her franchise.

Although the original screenplay for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi included Leia becoming a Jedi too, Carrie Fisher was too physically dependent on cocaine at the time. Because she was physically unable to fulfill the role, Star Wars fans had to wait until The Force Awakens to see a main female character become a Jedi—and Rey isn’t quite all the way there yet canonically, but it would be silly of Disney to keep her out of the Jedi club now, considering her evident connection with the Force and the way she took down Kylo Ren in that lightsaber fight.

What was great about Rey’s freedom as a character was her relationship to the Force and all things Jedi and Rebellion. With Maz and Leia being the biggest patrons for the Force, the Rebellion, and the lightsaber itself within the narrative, Rey was free to have the possible return of her family matter more to her than getting involved in a galactic war or even flying away with Han Solo without it meaning that women weren’t meant for the Force. She cared for her family, she was afraid of the lightsaber, she lost to Kylo Ren the first time he encountered her in the woods… And then she was put in a stressful situation that forced her to utilize her connection to the Force and become comfortable with it. And none of her reactions could possibly be construed as motivated by her gender.

Just goes to show that the more flavors you have available, the more freely everyone can behave. Now pass the kimchi, please.

Oyakodon: Today I am Thankful for my Family

November is coming to an end, and I'm thinking about Thanksgiving. Of course, making a turkey dinner in Japan is a little difficult, but there is a dish that seems to convey the idea of family and makes a meal of itself. Oyakodon (親子丼) or, in English, “parent and child donburi” is a dish that uses both chicken meat and eggs. The use of both chicken and eggs together is where this dish pulls its name from. Some of my western friends thought this was creepy, but I thought it was rather sweet. It reminded me of all the family—both that of blood and that of heart—I have back home that I'll be missing this year.

Here's the way I made oyakodon with my host mother, Motoko Okada:

Ingredients:  4 onions, 3 carrots, 3 small green peppers, 1 small chicken, 5 eggs.

1. Julienne and sauté all veggies (in order of appearance). Add sake, some chicken stock (dried) and a bunch of water and simmer for a bit.
2. Marinate chicken with ginger, onions, garlic, salt, and sugar for a nice taste. Best if done the night before.
3. Remove chicken from marinade and grill.
4. Mix eggs and cook separately.
5. Once everything is cooked to taste, lay ingredients over a bed of rice and serve.

Here’s another recipe too, if you find my hurried notes too inexact.

It felt right to make this with a maternal figure during this time since it’s still Thanksgiving in my silly American heart even if the people in Tokyo aren’t celebrating it. But it got me thinking… How often do we see healthy familial relationships in media? Can you count the number of them you’ve seen in the last week? Are you only using one hand? Yeah…

When I first heard the name oyakodon and was told what it meant, it actually immediately reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from Fire Emblem: Awakening.

Those of you familiar with the Fire Emblem series will remember the support system of the previous games that allowed you to build relationships between your army’s units. But in Awakening, the support system also allows the player to meet the offspring that result from the romantic support links. These children travel back to a time before their parents have conceived them in order to prevent the tragic events of the future they come from—in which most of their parents have died and the world has been overrun by darkness and chaos due to the Fell Dragon Grima—in order to attempt to save their parents and to build a future in which they can all live happily together. When Chrom, the main character of Awakening, meets his daughter Lucina and hears her story, he reacts not as a soldier or as the Exalt, leader of the country of Ylisse, but as a father—and it is so much more emotionally powerful than any declaration of war he could have made on Grima.

Those of you less familiar with niche JRPGs will remember The Incredibles. Part superhero movie and part family romcom, each member of the Parr family has a pretty “incredible” power; Dash has enough speed to allow him to play as many pranks as a young boy could think of; Violet’s invisibility and force fields allow her to admire the world of high school without ever having to worry about stepping foot in it; their mother Helen’s ability to stretch makes her more than flexible when it comes to balancing house work, her third baby, and the rest of her family; and Bob’s colossal strength should be more than any father could ever need in order to protect his family. In a way, these powers reflect the things we as normal viewers might stereotypically wish we had in our everyday lives. Wouldn’t it be great to be fast enough to get away with pranks? To not have to worry about what might happen to you going out on a Saturday night regardless of what you were wearing? To be able to stretch far enough that you could be in three places at once? To be strong enough to protect everyone you loved?

But the point that is very quickly made is that no matter how incredible someone is, no one is ever strong alone. From the beginning of the movie, Mr. Incredible starts losing to the machine that Syndrome made. It’s not until the entire family starts working together that they’re able to defeat both the robot and Syndrome. The toll it takes on Mr. Incredible when he thinks his family has died is also indicative of how important familial bonds are to us. The Incredibles really drives home how much of a superpower familial love is.

Now, those are conventional families portrayed by media. When it comes to less traditional forms of family, Steven Universe and Gravity Falls have it made.

Steven  of Steven Universe is the offspring of Greg, a human, and Rose Quartz, a sentient alien rock called a Gem that we would typically gender as female on sight. Because of his dual lineage, Steven has a very interesting familial structure. His mother gave up her physical form so he could be born. Steven lives not with his father (although his father does run a car wash nearby) but with Pearl, Garnet, and Amethyst—all of whom are also Gems—as one of the team members of the Crystal Gems. It was decided this would be the best living situation for Steven because only other Gems could possibly hope to teach him to control his own Gem powers.

When the series starts, the viewer knows very little about Gems. As the series continues, we learn that they come from all sorts of situations and backgrounds, and that the Gems Steven’s mother led to earth are considered radical in their ways of doing and thinking by “homeworld” Gems. We learn that Amethyst was artificially made, that Pearl would be restricted to servitude instead of being allowed to engineer, create, and fight the way she does as a Crystal Gem team member, and that Garnet—who is made up of two other Gems that are in love—wouldn’t be allowed to exist as a fusion of these Gems. Steven’s family is full of diversity. It is the acceptance, communication, and love the characters exhibit in every episode that keeps it going and allows them to fight off homeworld Gems still hoping to invade and colonize the Earth.

Gravity Falls is a show that balances relationships between blood family members and non-blood family members more brilliantly than any other piece of media I’ve ever seen. 

The series centers around a pair of fraternal twins, Dipper and Mabel, who get shipped up to their Grunkle (that’s Great Uncle turned into one word for the purposes of a joke in the series) Stan’s tourist trap The Mystery Shack in Gravity Falls, Oregon for the summer. Once there they meet Soos, the handy man of the shack, and Wendy, one of the gift store attendants. The only people related by blood are Stan, Dipper, and Mabel, but when the apocalypse happens in Gravity Falls as the series finale, and Dipper, Soos, and Wendy break into the Mabel’s dream prison to save her, they are referred to as “The Pines Family” by their adversaries.

And that description is not inaccurate. Series creator, Alex Hirsch, recently discussed a couple of the relationships between the characters on The B Movies Podcast, saying how he really made it a point to fill relationships that are usually fraught with tension with love instead. This is evident in key relationships, such as the twins themselves and the father and son type relationship Soos and Stan have as well.

It also seems to fit, because no matter what happens in the show, Dipper, Mabel, Stan, Soos, and Wendy always get through it together.

And if that’s not enough to convince you how powerful and important the portrayal of warm, loving familial relationships is, refresh yourself with this scene from Lilo and Stitch:

Happy Thanksgiving, wherever you are, whatever you celebrate, whatever language you speak. I hope your loved ones are near and that you can see them today, because life is heavy and life is hard and it’s so much lighter when they’re there to help you through it. May you find many a loving portrayal of family in your media and in your living room this coming holiday season.

Pumpkins: Soup, Salad, and Ale

The month of Halloween is upon us, and all I have on my mind is pumpkins. However, the standard carving pumpkin is really a thing of myth here in Japan, despite the heavy party decorations. The only pumpkin my host family says is common in Japan is this little guy:

Meet kabocha, the little salad pumpkin of many edible uses. Eaten sliced and raw in salads, cooked and mashed into a savory-sweet paste, and even sliced and dipped in a light battering of tempura, these salad pumpkins, while delicious are NOT the sort of pumpkins I am used to eating—perhaps because it isn’t actually called a pumpkin in the United States. In the US, this little variant is actually called “kabocha squash,” which, when translated will redundantly read as “pumpkin squash.” There do seem to be a variety of recipes for the “kabocha squash” though:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/kbrat89/what-the-hell-is-this-and-how-do-i-eat-it-f4yb#.cc6Rlkw22

You’ll notice that the paste I mentioned is on here, if not the raw and sliced option—but you’ll also notice quite a few more recipes than the ones I’ve encountered in Japanese cuisine.

In episode twenty one of Ouran High School Host Club, entitled "Until the Day it Becomes a Pumpkin!" or "Itsuka Kabocha ni naru Hi made" (いつかカボチャになる日まで), pumpkins are a bit of a versatile metaphor, highlighting just how shallow the symbolism of Jack O’ Lanterns and Halloween are in Japan. The title of the episode doesn’t refer to a Jack O’ Lantern, but to the carriage of Cinderella. It’s a complex metaphor for a situation that cannot last, and one that the show uses because of its connection to pumpkins and Jack O’ Lanterns.

Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage

The Jack O’ Lantern used as the symbolic pumpkin the carriage will turn back into

The difference between Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage and a Halloween Jack O’Lantern is not one that the show seems phased by in the least, however. This is because Jack O’ Lanterns are purely for decoration in Japan. There is no pumpkin carving to be done with your family, no trick or treating to be done, no need to dress up to avoid being pranked by ethereal beings that can only come into our world on Halloween night. Instead, Halloween is an excuse to scare your friends, test your courage, and dress up as your favorite anime character. And kabocha? That’s an everyday thing.

As for how we eat pumpkins in America… Oh, where to start? The pie, the spice lattes, the salted seeds, the soup? A few friends and I have a tradition of making pumpkin soup and also doing some pumpkin carving around Halloween. Of course, the pumpkins made for eating and the pumpkins made for carving are of completely different varieties! The gourds one enjoys putting faces on are good for little else than their lightly salted seeds, although apparently there is one type of pumpkin called a Baby Pam Sugar Pie pumpkin that is good for both carving and eating. For the most extensive list of pumpkin and winter squash varieties I’ve found yet, please click here—although you will be amused to notice that kabocha won’t be found on either list, perhaps because the author of this list was as unsure about which side of the list to put this gourd on as the rest of the US. The pumpkin my friends and I used for our soup last year was a Cinderella pumpkin.

In this shot you can see two Cinderella pumpkins and one standard carving pumpkin. Here’s what the pumpkin looked like when we were through with it:

At this point, it seems the versatile use of pumpkins to celebrate Halloween really must be an American custom. But perhaps our Halloween customs surrounding this specific gourd are just as appropriated as Japan’s are? After all, our version of Halloween was built up from the Celtic festival of Samhain, which was held on October 31^st. During this night, it was believed that the dead would return to the land of the living and walk the earth for one night. It was also a time in which faeries and spirits could easily transcend the barriers between their worlds and ours. It’s also where the earliest form of trick-or-treating may have developed, in the form of “mumming” or “guising” in which people would dress up as faeries and spirits and make a nuisance of themselves until placated by food and drink.

Aside from the faeries and the mumming, Samhain isn’t dissimilar to the Mexican Day of the Dead, which is celebrated on November 2^nd. In both of these festivals, it was customary to remember deceased loved ones and make offerings of food, drink, and other worldly items like flowers and trinkets. It’s a little more difficult to find media that represents these particular holidays in America and Japan but two very good examples are Folklore and The Book of Life.

Ellen talking to Scarecrow, whom one can identify as both ghost and faerie

Folklore was released in 2007 and is a Japanese Role Playing Game that sets itself in the island town of Doolin, Ireland. The game is essentially a murder mystery in which you must converse with the dead in order to finally lay the mystery of the town to rest. Ellen and Keats, the main characters of the game, gain their ability to enter the land of the dead and investigate the mystery during the festival of Samhain—and the Japanese development team must have done their research on the festival, because the Western influences in this game are apparent. I actually didn’t know the game had been produced in Japan until the credits were rolling and J-pop was playing instead of some Western or Celtic theme music. The food used as offerings during Samhain isn’t really covered, but there is a pub on the island where you can sometimes converse with ghosts.

Manolo as a child with his family, both living and deceased, on the Day of the Dead

The Book of Life is an American movie that came out in 2014 and was created by Mexican animator, writer, and director Jorge R. Gutiérrez. The story’s events center heavily around the Day of the Dead, following the young Manolo’s journey through death and rebirth after being tricked into letting a deity kill him. The movie deals heavily with themes such as familial ties, remembering those who have passed on, and whether it’s ever alright to kill or forget anyone. The only food we really see in the movie is the bread that is offered to the deceased on the Day of the Dead, but if you ever saw the film The Halloween Tree you know all about the candy skulls that are also available on this day. Both movies are completely devoid of pumpkins, however.

Which leads us to one conclusion!: The pumpkins are completely and utterly American.

Which, when you think about it, does make a modicum of sense. Pumpkins flourish in the Americas, especially in the area we now know as the United States. There is some hearsay that the first Jack O’ Lanterns were made out of turnips and potatoes by the Celts for Samhain, and that the traditional Jack O’ Lantern we’re familiar with today is a result of what happened when those people immigrated to Plymouth and found a better vegetable for carving—but even if this was the case, that would still make the traditional Jack O’ Lantern American. Growing pumpkins so well also explains why we’re so good at cooking pumpkins in America. So go grab yourself a Cinderella or Fairytale pumpkin and make yourself some of this delicious soup. It’s quick, easy, and sure to keep you and your friends warm on All Hallows’ Eve while watching your favorite spooky flick.

Oh, and I haven’t had a chance to try this one yet, but if you’re inclined to brew your own beer (or know someone who does), you might enjoy this Pumpkin Ale recipe. There’s a rumor that the Pilgrims made pumpkin beer out of persimmons, hops, maple sugar, and pumpkin. It sounds lovely, but I can’t find a recipe for it. Stick to the one I did find, or play with the rumored ingredients. Either way, let me know how it turns out. I’m looking at you, Portland!