The Wayfarer Blog

Japundit has an interesting post about how the Japanese are not satisfied with only one word for rice. There are many ways to say rice in Japanese, including several not mentioned in the article.

I remember once at my high school, the teacher was translating something involving “rice” from English to Japanese, and he translated it as gohan, (ご飯), which is cooked rice that you eat, instead of kome, (米), which is uncooked rice. Since I have to pretend that I don’t know Japanese, even though the students know I do, I had to wait until after the lesson to correct him. The students didn’t get the correct information, but his delicate “face” was preserved.

(Just another case of how blindly following a set of arbitrary rules is rather idiotic and counterproductive at times, but I digress…)

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Wow! Snow…? I woke up this morning to a surprise snow storm. Or maybe it was just a surpise to me…To be fair, I hadn’t heard the weather forecast, so maybe everyone else knew about it. But I doubt it, because I think I would have heard about it from someone.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me this morning, when the snow was fresh on the streets. I took a few pictures later in the afternoon on the way to the store, but by that time, the streets were mostly cleared–except for a slushy mess that could be pretty slick by tomorrow morning. (Luckily, I’m off in the morning!)

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I’ve been passing it for a long time, but I’d never gone in. It isn’t that I didn’t want to; just that I never seemed to find the time. But yesterday I finally had coffee in a quant little coffee shop in Mitaka.

There are no shortage of coffee shops in Tokyo; we have more than our fair share of all the Seattle greats: Starbucks, Tully’s, and Seattle’s Best. We also have a lot of great Japanese ones, like Doutor and Excelsior Cafe. But this is a small one, and the atmosphere is completely different from a chain. The customers and the staff seemed to know each other. I felt like I was entering a community of people who seemed to know each other. It was nice.

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