Sushi, Travel Plans, and Baseball

It's been a somewhat eventful past couple of days for me! On Wednesday class ends early so I went to the Conveyor Belt Sushi place that I went to a month or so ago. They are having a special sale this week so each plate was discounted from 105 to 90 Yen! The sushi was sooooo good. I have a new favorite- 焼とろサーモン, which is Yakitoro Salmon. It is very lightly cooked (can't even tell really) salmon on top of rice with some Daikon on top. Daikon is a big Japanese radish that I have grown very fond of. It's best when it's ground up and put on things as a kind of sauce. For dessert I ordered a Mango Yogurt Parfait which was EXCELLENT! It had ice cream, yogurt, mango sauce, frozen mango cubes, and corn flakes. To order something you press a little button at the top of the conveyor belt and you place your order similar to how you would at a drive through. Each table has a designated color, so your order comes around on the conveyor belt to you in a tray marked with your table color.

For dinner on Wednesday we had Kushikatsu (like in Osaka). It was delicious, of course. After dinner we watched a game show that I watch often, but never caught the name before. I believe it's called quiz parade. It's made up of all celebrities competing (as most game shows here are), and they do all kinds of different games centered around trivia. In today's show they started out with a Kanji (Japanese writing character) game. Before the show everyone takes a quiz, and the people with the lowest scores on the quiz have to read the questions for the other people to answer. The catch is that the questions have a lot of Kanji in them (as opposed to the easier writing systems of Hiragana and Katakana), and often the people who scored lowest on the quiz don't know the right reading of the Kanji. In other words, it's really hard for the people to answer the questions when they're being read wrong. In a way it's both comforting and discouraging to know that even a lot of Japanese people have trouble reading Kanji. For the next game the team had to try to get 6 people in a long jump rope at once. The jump rope would start and the first person would run in and get asked a question. If they got the answer right, they stayed and the next person would come in. If they got it wrong they had to run out of the rope. The idea was to get six people to answer their questions right and jump before someone hit the rope. Pretty interesting! The last game was just pretty basic buzzer-style trivia. Mrs. Yurikusa and I were laughing because 3 of the questions were something like 'What is this word in English?' and when they said the answers I didn't recognize the words at all. It was definitely Japanese-ified English.

Today after lunch I went to the travel agency at school with my friends and made reservations for our trip to Okinawa! Most of you probably haven't heard about this, but an alumni of Notre Dame generously donated money to the Japanese study abroad students so that we could travel somewhere we wouldn't have been able to go otherwise. I had really wanted to go to Okinawa, especially after my History prof. recommended it, because while it is part of Japan, it has a culture, feel, and even dialect all of its own. This trip wasn't going to be possible without the donation due to expensive flights, lodging, etc., but I am very excited to be able to go now! I'm planning to go during my Golden Week vacation at the end of April-beginning of May.

Tonight Japan took on China in the World Baseball Classic. Defending champions, Samurai Japan, shut out China 4-0. It's great listening to how excited everyone is when Ichiro comes up to bat. I guess they don't really get to see him play live very often!

Meg

Fact of the Day- Japanese TV is quite different from the US. Dramas are common, but mainly take place during the day. Sitcoms are completely nonexistent. At night it's almost always comedy shows/comedian game shows, and sometimes movies. A lot of shows center around comedians competing against each other, either in game shows or to see who is funniest. In one show I've seen often 6 random people are selected from the audience and are shown on camera at the bottom of the screen. The comedian has to perform a skit and get at least 4/6 people to smile in order to clear the round! Comedians are extremely popular in Japan and I've started to recognize many of the more popular ones.