We are not going to cook Christmas dinner this year.  Marty wasn’t able to get the day off work so we decided it would be easier to go out for a meal.  I cooked dinner the last couple of years and it was a challenge finding the ingredients I wanted.  This year we have a new one – I’m on a gluten-free diet.  There is a theory that eating gluten makes my thyroid disease worse.   I have a thyroid hormone that has not been improving with medication and it’s possible that changing my diet will help.  I’ve been gluten-free for a couple of months now and I’m certainly doing a lot better than I did this time last year.

Being gluten-free in Japan is not easy.  I never thought of wheat as an ingredient in Japanese cooking but it’s everywhere.  The main problem is that there is gluten in soy sauce.  There is even gluten in most tamari, though I have often heard it described as wheat-free soy sauce.   Eating out has become a challenge.  I can’t eat noodles, tempura, ton katsu, or yakitori. I have been avoiding my favourite French restaurant as the smell of the bread drives me mad.  I can still eat Indian food, but I really do miss pasta and pizza.

Bread is becoming very popular in Japan.  The coffee shop I study in on weekdays does not contain a single thing that I can eat.   I can bake my own things but I need to be careful about the flour I use.  Rice flour is naturally gluten-free but lots of the rice flour here has gluten added to it to make it easier to bake with. There are no gluten-free bread or pasta products in the local shops  I was told that that it is possible to buy bread made with rice flour but all the ones I have seen also contain wheat.  I have been able to find a few things online but they are expensive and since I do cook a lot of my own food I have just made other things.

I did order a couple of things from the UK and I am looking forward to trying my gluten free Christmas cake.   I also ordered a packet of gluten-free rolls, the type that you bake in the over, but they were horrible.  I was going to throw them out but I ground them up and made stuffing with them which wasn’t bad at all.  I should really try to make gluten-free shortbread for Christmas but I haven’t had the energy to do that.  It’s time consuming and I worry that I will spend ages fiddling with it only to find it tastes bad.  Maybe this year we’ll have gluten-free cupcakes instead as I know they taste good.

There is something odd that happens quite often in Japan.  A foreigner speaks one sentence in Japanese and they are immediately complimented for their skill at speaking Japanese.  This is usually said with great enthusiasm and sometimes with surprise.  It’s a hard thing to listen to because you can’t actually tell if someone is skilled at speaking a language based on one sentence.  My Japanese is also not very good so I feel strange when people tell me how skilled I am.  Today it happened after one word.

Marty was looking at a Galaxy Note at a Galaxy exhibition.  It was a largish room and we were the only people there who were not staff.  None of the staff wanted to speak to us.  The staff who were supposed to be monitoring our table were standing against the wall.  They were both trying to talk the other one into speaking to us and neither of them wanted to try speaking in English. Finally the woman approached us.  She spoke slowly and said, “konnichiwa”.  Marty responded with, “konnichiwa”.  She clapped her hands in excitement and told Marty that he was really good at speaking Japanese.  It was bizarre and we did our best not to laugh, but I assume her enthusiasm came from relief that we did not look blankly at her.  It’s good to know that Marty is skilled at saying “good day”.

Even though I have been living in Tokyo for just over six years I still see food in the supermarket that I don’t recognise.  The types of fruit you can buy change with the seasons and winter citrus season has arrived.  Today I could have bought a 4 kilo box of mikans. This may seem like an odd thing to comment on but fruit is very expensive in Japan.  The concept of buying so much of it at one time now seems like madness to me.  I did stop to admire it though and the other citrus fruits.  I have known about oranges, grapefruits, lemons, and limes, for most of my life but I did not know that so many other citrus fruits exist.

When I first moved I discovered yuzu, which tastes somewhere between a lemon and a lime and is excellent in dressings and with fish.  Last year I discovered dekopon which is a wonderful sweet orange-like fruit.  Today I saw something called a kabosu and another fruit called merogourudo.  The kabosu was small and a darkish green.  It looked like it might be bitter and since it cost about 200 円 ($2.40) I decided not to buy one.  But the merogourudo thing was fascinating.  It looked like a large mutant grapefruit.  It’s English name is Melogold Grapefruit and it’s the biggest grapefruit I have ever seen.  Reading about it online suggests it may turn out to be the sweetest one I have eaten.  It was 238 円 ($2.90) and seemed much better value than the tiny fruit.  I have not eaten it yet as I will have to wait until I feel hungry enough to tackle such a large grapefruit.

I’m not quite sure how the year manages to go by so quickly.  I’m sitting on the floor surrounded by Christmas cards and it seems like no time at all since I did this last year.  November was incredibly busy and flew by with Japanese lessons, TPF work, and  NaNoWriMo.   I was determined to complete NaNoWriMo this year and I somehow managed to write the required 50,000 words before midnight last night.

December is my favourite month as I love Christmas.  I have put up my little Christmas tree and finished about 50% of my Christmas shopping.  Christmas in Japan is always a little strange but it certainly isn’t boring.  Marty is working on Christmas Day, so we won’t be cooking at home, but we have made reservations to go out for roast turkey that night.

 

It looks like there will be no Mario Kart tournament in our apartment this afternoon.  The disk drive in our Wii is broken.  It makes a terrible noise, the sort of noise that sounds like CD death, so we have stopped using it.  I went online to buy a new one but was surprised that it’s more than twice the price in Japan compared to the UK.  A UK one is no good to me but the price differences did make me look into this a bit more.  It turns out that there is going to be a new Wii released before the end of the year, and it will be released in the UK before Japan.

It would be silly to buy one today.  I imagine that when the new one is released in December that the old one will come down in price.  The new one looks interesting but it’s not going to be possible to buy that in Japan when it is released as most stores have stopped taking pre-orders as they can’t meet demand.  Looks like I’ll be waiting a while before I get to play again.

 

Yesterday’s Japanese class introduced 75 new words.  I know this because I diligently typed them out last night in horror as I watched the list of words I’m supposed to know get longer and longer.  I don’t know how to learn this many new words and if I think too hard about it I panic and don’t believe it is possible. But I do appear to be retaining words.  Much as I dislike having tests on a Friday they are certainly showing me that I am remembering what I have been taught during the week.

The lessons can be boring.  One of my classmates was complaining to me about the speed of the classes as he would like things to move faster.  I wouldn’t.  It is true that it’s tedious listening to 15 people recite in turn the same sentence patterns over and over but this constant repetition does appear to be working.  Things that I used to find very hard in sentences, like selecting the correct particle, are not even things I think about any more.

The classes aren’t completely dull, after all we have a room full of people trying to learn to speak a language.  Between ridiculous role playing and making silly mistakes things can become fun.  My favourite mistake from yesterday was referring to my husband as my prisoner – the joys of lengthening a vowel by mistake.

 

 

Tests make me nervous.  I made a mistake during my test today in my haste to finish the horrible thing and to get rid of the nervous feeling.  I no longer feel nervous, now I just feel stupid.  Getting a question wrong because I don’t know the answer doesn’t bother me in quite the same way as actually knowing the answers and then writing them in the wrong spaces!  Hopefully I still pass.  I did forget how to spell a couple of words in Japanese and I need to come up with a better way to learn these.  I recognise the words when I see or hear them, but I don’t spend a lot of time writing in Japanese.  Typing is much easier as the computer helps by highlighting words if I make a mistake, or I will notice if the correct kanji aren’t available to me.  But typing doesn’t seem to be helping me improve my spelling.

I am getting braver in class.  I argued with my teacher for the first time today.  There was a question on my homework regarding the opening hours of the school, which I answered correctly.  It was marked wrong because the teacher actually wanted information on when I attended school, but that’s not what was asked.  It’s the first time I have tried arguing in Japanese and I wasn’t good at it, but I did get my homework remarked as the teacher did agree that there was nothing in the question about when I attended school and it really did just ask about the building.

I think I’m going to ignore Japanese tomorrow and start to study again on Sunday.

I’m attempting to work in a coffee shop.  It would be really comfortable if not for the horrendous background music.  It also explains why everyone else who is working by themselves is wearing headphones.  My poor mind is spinning trying to cope with the awful jazz muzak, the announcements from outside the store, and the Herculean task of trying to memorize 100 new Japanese words.  I don’t know much about the etiquette of sitting in the one spot for hours.  I have been watching other people and there are some who have been sitting with one drink for over two hours.  My plan is to buy two drinks over a four hour period and hopefully that will be considered polite.

My hand is sore from trying to write as I am out of practice. When I write in English I have the handwriting of an aspiring doctor.   My Japanese handwriting is actually easier to read but it’s still not as good as it should be.  I have to hand write my Japanese homework, which is a pity as my I type Japanese so much faster than I write it

(I’ve just looked round to see who was wailing but it’s part of the music.  I wish I had developed the skill that allows me to ignore background music but that usually only happens when I’m reading something really interesting.)

So far this week we have been taught more than 100 new words and I worry that I won’t be able to retain those even with the repetition during class.  I’m incredibly impressed by the amount of grammar we have been taught without anyone mentioning the dreaded word.  I thought that not knowing the exact meaning of things would bother me but with so much to learn I don’t have to time to worry about that.  I was reciting a conversation dialogue to Marty today and he asked me how on earth we had been taught a particular complex form of the verb.  I just laughed.  We weren’t taught anything about verb forms, just how to say a particular thing in conversation.

There is going to be a test on Friday of everything we have been taught to date.  I’m not sure how that will go, but it will be interesting to see how much I am retaining.

I am just home from my third day of Japanese lessons.  It’s tiring and quite different from any class I have taken before.  All my other teachers spoke English and translated things into English.  But there is no English spoken in these classes.  Not only that, the first rule of the classroom is that you are not allowed to speak English in it.  (It’s Japan, as you can imagine there are lots of classroom rules.)  We were given one page of translated vocabulary at the start so that we would understand the classroom instructions given to us by the teacher, things like “please read” or “please say aloud”.  The textbooks are also only written in Japanese.

I found the concept of no English horrifying at first, but it’s actually quite interesting.  The lessons are incredibly structured as everything has to be built on what you just learnt.  There is a lot of miming and talking about things you can see, the sort of thing you might have to do it you were actually in Japan trying to interact.  Most of my conversations with people in Japan are about the physical world.  You want to buy something or go somewhere or you want to try on a dress.  Normally you don’t have conversations about the structure of a sentence, something that was very important in my previous lessons.  So important that I had to buy books on English grammar to try to work out what was meant when my teacher told me that something was an “indirect object marker” or that the verb was in “causative passive”.  I had to learn more English before I could learn Japanese!

There is no discussion of grammar in my new class as we don’t know the Japanese words to be able to describe that.  I don’t think there ever will be as I really can’t imagine my teacher miming “indirect object” or coming up with examples that make it obvious to the class that that is thing she is talking about.  Instead there are pictures of objects, acted out scenes on DVD, and miming.  We are learning grammar, but we are learning it without having endless discussions about particles and the correct one to use.  Instead there is repetition and conversation.   It’s stressful, as you have to role play and take part, and it is also boring as you hear the same things over and over again.

I was ranting to Marty last night about the conversations and how tired I was of hearing them.  Mind you, I was able to repeat every single one of the dialogues we had been using in class.  You have to concentrate on them as you know that you will be made act them out and you get to hear everyone else in the class do the same thing.  Boring or not I may actually have found a way to improve my ability to speak Japanese.

Tomorrow I begin a 3 month intensive Japanese course.  I’m not exactly looking forward to this.  I have thought about doing it before but my travel schedule has made it almost impossible.  This year, however, I have no plans to travel between now and New Year.  It’s been nearly two years since I attended a Japanese class and I have forgotten so much.  I had to attend a test on Saturday morning to determine which class I should enter.  It was not a pleasant experience. The first half was a written test which highlighted just how much I had forgotten.  I could read it, but I could not answer most of the questions.  The speaking part was an exercise in frustration.  Apart from one question I understood everything I was asked but I could barely form a coherent sentence in response.

The next few months are going to be challenging.