Oyakodon and days of the week

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Oyakodon (親子丼) is a simple dish, consisting of chicken, eggs, green onions, rice, and such like. The reason why I mention it isn't that it has some amazing flavor that we westerners shouldn't live without, but rather because of its name.

The first character in the word oyakodon is oya (親), meaning "parent". The second is ko (子), meaning "child". The last is don (丼), meaning something like "bowl". So,  oyakodon is the "parent and child bowl", because we eat the parent (the chicken) and the child (the egg) in the same bowl. Horrible, right?

Anyway, moving on, I now use my laptop and iPod entirely in Japanese. No, I really can't make sense out of most of the text, but I am slowly learning useful new words, such as 時計 for "clock" and 天気 for "weather", through forced immersion. The most immediately useful thing that I have learned this way, though, is the days of the week:

• 日曜日 (nichiyoubi) - sun day 
• 月曜日 (getsuyoubi) - moon day
• 火曜日 (kayoubi) - Mars day or fire day
• 水曜日 (suiyoubi) - Mercury day or water day
• 木曜日 (mokuyoubi) - Jupiter day or wood day
• 金曜日 (kin'youbi) - Venus day or metal day
• 土曜日 (doyoubi) - Saturn day or earth day 

It's worth noting that their weekday names are very similar to ours. Our first day is "Sunday", which is followed by "Monday", and our last day is "Saturday". This is no mistake — it would seem that the practice of naming days of the week after the visible planets was borrowed by China and Rome from Mesopotamia and Egypt, and then eventually was delivered in whole to Japan and in part to us. For comparison, here are the Latin day names:

Dies solis - "Sun day"
Dies lunae - "Moon day"
Dies martis - "Mars day"
Dies mercurii - "Mercury day"
Dies iovis - "Jupiter day"
DIes veneris - "Venus day"
Dies saturni - "Saturn day"


Well, I'd better stop here. I am about to fall asleep on the keyboard! I really need to do this earlier in the day.


First image retrieved from AllAbout.co.jp.
Second image is my own

Happy Halloween!

Trick-or-treating, when you think about it, is a rather elaborate custom. It somehow became mutually understood that anyone with their porch lights on during the evening of October 31st should have candy on hand to give to droves of children wearing all manner of disguises.

While Halloween is gaining popularity in Japan, trick-or-treating isn't terribly common yet. Although this post from Japan-Guide is rather old (it's from 2004), I found it interesting:

"I think the U.S. is about the only country that is so big in Trick or Treating, if that's what you're asking. 

But the existance of this custom is now quite well-known in Japan, except that as mentioned, not many people actually do it.

Halloween in Japan has more young adults enjoying costume parties than kids knocking on doors. Rarely, some expat districts have Trick or Treating events though, and in recent years, the orange color pumkins have become more available at a lot of markets.

Since I moved out of our apartment building and in to our house last year, I've been putting Jack-o-Lanterns outside our door with a notice saying that people are welcome to come for candy on the evening of Oct. 31.

Last year, the girl accross the street brought a bunch of 10 year olds. They all were in their normal clothes, but one of them said, "Hey, I might wear a costume next year." This year so far, I had a Cinderella, two Scary Movie boys, and the girl accross the street acompanied by her big brother. No one has yet yelled "Trick or Treat" though.

Right now it's 5:30pm on the 31st here in Japan. Let's see how many more I'll get. Oh, I just had a pumpkin mask and an animal ring my door!"

— by Uco 

I think that post leaves little for me to say about Halloween in Japan, except to repeat that it is certainly becoming more popular year-by-year. So, with that out of the way, let's look at something somewhat related to the topic at hand: Japanese candy.

From green tea Kit-Kat bars to lemon-milk flavored sticks, Japan definitely has a unique (but not altogether bad) taste when it comes to confectioneries. But, rather than ramble on and pretend to be an expert on the subject (read: because I don't know what I'm talking about, and I wish I were in bed right now), how about I just show you. To see more, visit KidCrave, which is where I got these images:

First image retrieved from AsianOffbeat.
All subsequent images retrieved from KidCrave.

Japanese at a Glance

Fortunately, I don't have to start completely from scratch to learn Japanese. I had studied it a little in years past, and have picked it up again not long ago.

On the other hand, though, I still have a long uphill climb ahead of me. While I may have memorized the mess of symbols (called kana) that you see to the right, I still have to learn kanji, which are not only much more complicated, but also much more numerous. It is recommended to learn at least 1,945 kanji in particular, but there are far more than these alone!

And, of course, learning the symbols does not constitute learning Japanese. While I might have a basic understanding of some of the simplest concepts in the language, there is still a lot left to learn. Even if I drill every vocabulary item into my head, speaking Japanese isn't as simple as thinking an English thought and replacing each word with its Japanese equivalent. I don't think it would be expedient to explain this sentiment in detail just yet, but it is actually best to avoid English thought altogether when learning a foreign language.

The grammar is naturally much different from English. A few of the most conspicuous differences are that most words don't have a plural form, and that "am", "is", and "are" are all translated as the same word. Add to this, there is no real future tense (or, as Tae Kim would have it, there is no real present tense), but rather a non-past tense that covers both the present and the future.


Well, I think that has been enough ado over nothing. Let's close up this entry with a great J-Pop song which was shown me by Gon-san at Lang-8. Following is どんなときも (donna toki mo) by Noriyuki Makihara. Now, I have studying to do (ーー;)

First image retrieved from Musings of a Creative Slacker.
Second image retrieved from Joe Park's JLPT Page.