Yukidaruman, the word play character supporting snow removal in Sapporo

On Wednesday I had to give a presentation at a meeting regarding snow plowing and snow removal in Sapporo. We get 6 meters of snow every year in a city with 2 million citizens. This leads to huge problems, and the city spends 150 million dollars every year on keeping everything running during the snow season.

Another presenter mentioned that there is now a character called "ゆきだるマン" ("yukidaruman", a word play on "yukidaruma", snowman, and "man" as in "superman" or "batman"). He is used to inform people of what to do or not to do when it comes to snow in Sapporo (stop parking in the no parking zones, for instance).

The same presenter also mentioned that every night that they do remove snow in Sapporo they cover 5000 km in one night. They use about 1000 snow plowing/removing machines for this.

Waffle Day

I forgot to take photos before I was down to the last batter that was not enough to make a full waffle...

In Sweden we have "waffle day" every year on March 25. It is apparently a mishearing of "vårfrudagen" ("the day of our lady", which would be the mother of Christ) as "våffeldagen" ("waffle day"). It began as a Christian thing celebrating Maria getting pregnant, but since few people are religious anymore, it has been misunderstood as a day to eat waffles. And that is what it has become.

I have a waffle iron to make Swedish waffles (Japanese waffle irons cannot be used to make Swedish waffles since they are made for batter that will swell and Swedish waffles are not made using that) so I make waffles every waffle day. Sometimes friends show up and eat them with me, but this year I was all alone. It does not help that everyone (including me) always has to work in the evenings here.

Here is a short report but with a nicer photo from last year's Waffle Day in Sapporo. I also have a blog post with the recipe for Swedish waffles, which is one of my most frequently accessed blog posts.

Nikuman

Spring in Sweden Hills

Last Sunday I went out to Sweden Hills to make "nikuman" with some friends who live there. It was the first time I ever made nikuman, though I have eaten many. It is a steamed bread bun filled with meat or whatever you can come up with.

Dough, filling, and a pot for steaming

Dough stuffed with filling (the smooth ones are not made by me)

Steaming

You always have to have lots of dishes in Japan, so the nikuman were eaten with fried rice and noodles.

The end result

Me in a coupon magazine

In Sapporo there is a coupon magazine for food, entertainment, and hostess bars called "Susukino Tsuushin". Checking this month's issue, there is a guy who looks a lot like me on the page for our magic bar.

Me in the newspaper

Last Friday there was a newspaper article about our magic bar in the Hokkaido Shinbun newspaper. There are two photos, one of my colleague Tsubasa, and one of me wearing a shirt that says: "I am not Japanese" in English and Japanese. I am also holding a set of cards that have photos of me.

The text talks about our magic bar, how our owner came to open it, about doing magic in bars in general, etc. It also talks about Tsubasa because he is the youngest (21 years old now, 18 when he first joined our staff, I think) and about me since I am the weirdest (not Japanese).

About me it mentions that I make a lot of props myself and that I invent new magic trick presentations, wear strange clothes, and in general do a lot of original things... It mentions that I started doing magic to pass time since I do not have any friends (when you move to a new country, you start out with very few people you know around you; in my case 0).

I do not get this newspaper (or any newspaper, since newspaper Japanese contains too many words I have never seen (I learned Japanese by talking to my friends and I learned reading Japanese by reading e-mails from them, and apparently their e-mail vocabulary has very little overlap with newspaper Japanese)), but the same day a Facebook acquaintance posted a photo of the newspaper with the comment: "I found Jonas in the paper today!"

I re-shared the photo with the comment: "There is a guy who looks amazingly much like me in the paper today" in Japanese. In Japan, people usually do not get sarcasm or irony and my friends state that they do not understand that kind of things. Disproving this, several Japanese Facebook friends left comments like: "Indeed [he looks like you], and he even has the same bad fashion sense!", showing that not only do they understand irony, they can even be sarcastic themselves.

Ropossa and onomatopoeia

Apart from sword swallowing, mama also swallows huge balloons.

In Sapporo we have a "snack bar" called Ropossa ("Sapporo" read backwards in the Japanese alphabet). The "mama" there does magic every night, but she claims that her bar is not a magic bar and she also says she is not a magician. She is good at magic, though.

I went there on Thursday and had a good time. I ended up sitting next to a very old man who picked up magic as a hobby after retiring and who wanted to show me some magic. He had a very impressive cigarette trick. I showed him some magic too, and he seemed very happy.

Tsubasa showing magic to the Ropossa people in our magic bar.

On Friday, the Ropossa mama showed up in our magic bar at 2 a.m., together with one of her regulars who I showed some magic to a while back. They seemed happy with my magic and the magic of the other magicians in our magic bar. I did some tricks that mama also does, and she was excited to see them from the spectator's position, she said.

On Saturday, my magician colleague Tsubasa went to Ropossa after his shift in our magic bar finished. He messaged me and said I should come too. Right then, we got a set of new customers in the magic bar, so I performed for them and had to stay a while longer, but at 3 a.m. I left and dropped by Ropossa on my way home. Mama likes surprising people, in any way possible. She for instance burns large amounts of "flash cotton" (this burns very quickly, like a small and not dangerous explosion) close to your face from behind. Tsubasa reacts very strongly and in funny ways to such things, so it was a lot of fun seeing these two interact.

Mama also finds it funny that the owner of our magic bar has a project where he tries to get me to "learn" Japanese expressions with the wrong meaning, so I will use them in inappropriate situations and people will laugh at me. I once told him that it is difficult to me to pick up or understand Japanese onomatopoeia, since they are often not listed in dictionaries. When they are listed, the explanations are not very detailed either, so "sakusaku" (used to describe the crunchiness of things like cookies) and "paripari" (the crunchiness of things like potato chips) would both be translated as "crunchy" (if listed at all). I said that I usually pick such expressions up from how people seem to use them, or by people telling me "paripari is for example potato chips".

A good way to learn Japanese onomatopoeia!

He now goes out of his way to use the wrong expressions when I am around, in the hope that I will think that is how you use these expressions. The Ropossa mama gave me a children's game where you have to grab a card with a drawing representing an onomatopoeic expression when that expression is read by the game leader. Whoever grabs the most (correct) cards quickest wins the game. It came with an answer key, so I can use this to learn the correct way to use such Japanese expresion.

Very Japanese restaurant

We had two weeks of having foreign guest professors here at our lab. This meant getting up really early in the morning and working really late in the evenings (you have to attend and give presentations during the days, and since you also have to get your normal work done you have to stay one extra working day in the lab after the visitors go home). It also meant working some Saturdays, since the guests were here during the weekend and if you are in Japan for the first time, why would you not want to spend all your time having meetings, right?

We also visited a very Japanese (and very expensive) restaurant with our guests. The staff all wear kimonos, you sit on the floor (tatami mats), the food comes in tiny sizes (but the number of dishes is huge so the total volume of food is good), and the decorations are very Japanese. We had a calligraphy drawing on the wall in the room for our group that was written by one of the Japanese Nobel laureates. We also had our own private bath (though no one bathed during dinner) and our own private tea ceremony room (!).

The food was of course excellent. It did include some very Japanese things such as deep fried fish sperm, which some of our foreign guests found a bit strange.

Our own private tea room!

I was told by our secretary the day before the late dinner that: "Your name is on the list for tomorrow at 19:00. Did you know that?", which I did not know. Neither she nor I knew what that list meant, either, but I cancelled all my private activities for the evening and prepared to stay at work. At around 15:00 of the day in question, my boss stopped by and asked: "You can join at 19:00, right?", and since I had cancelled all previous engagement I said yes and asked what was going to happen. I was pleasantly surprised by it being dinner (and not for instance a night session of work related presentations). Though it might have been nice to be asked somewhat earlier if I had time to do work related things until midnight (since my contract tells me I only get paid until 17:00).

Our own private bath.

Since it was a job function, the project turned out to pay for the food. Apparently, the project can only pay for food, not for drinks, so we had to pay for our drinks ourselves. Which I was informed of the day after the dinner, when my boss came to my desk and said: "So do you have 2500 yen for me?" The Japanese explanation was along the lines of "You pay for what you drink", but I am guessing we actually split the bill evenly between all of us (and the non-guests paying for the guests parts too) which is common in Japan, since I only had one glass of tea and I think even in an expensive restaurant they do not charge you 2500 yen for that, haha.

Menu printed on expensive Japanese paper

Paying only 2500 yen for enjoying a dinner as nice as this one is of course very cheap and I was quite happy to pay, but I was a bit surprised that no one told me about having to pay in advance. Perhaps they generally tell you that when they invite you/ask you if you have time to come, and since I was never asked that either this information never reached me?

Sashimi

Trout with miso

Beef steak (Japanese size)

Deep fried fish sperm

Crab eggs on rice

Cake