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Living in Japan

We celebrated my birthday at the end of June. For the past few years we've taken our birthdays as an excuse to go out to eat somewhere. And this year, we went to a traditional Kyoto restaurant.

The restaurant - Takuma - is in an old building next to a small stream in the Gion district, though the interior is thouroughly modern Japanese. You sit at the counter watching the cooks (seemingly as many cooks as guests) prepare the dishes. The menu choices are easy, with today's menu or today's large menu as the only options, and with the actual contents decided the same morning. We opted for the normal menu, thinking - correctly as it turned out - that we'd not go away hungry.

Sashimi - the soy sauce for the sashimi is not the usual dip, but is whipped with egg white to make a light froth. To the right a shabushabu hotpot with hamo and vegetables, and a chili dipping sauce.

The food is Japanese in style, with numerous small dishes (ten, I believe we had) served in succession. But while the style was traditional Japanese, the execution was fully modern. The restaurant interior was likewise traditional in style, but in a fully modern interpretation. All dishes were very good, of course, but a few really stood out for me. One was the sashimi (sliced raw fish) which underscored that yes, there really is a difference between fish and fish, served not with soy sauce to dip in, but soy sauce-based egg-white foam. Another was the shabushabu hot pot, which you - as always - cook yourself at the table, but where the fish (hamo) and vegetables were a perfect match to the chili dipping sauce.

A small detail - which I'm sure was well planned - was that each dish is small and light, so you stay hungry all through the meal. But with the next-to-last dish you got a small bowl of rice with mackerel - just a small bowl, mind - and with that you were suddenly full, making the dessert plate with a spoonful of créme brule and a few pieces of fruit something you could leisurely linger over.

As both of my regular readers have noticed, the server - and this blog - has had a bit of downtime for a while.

Overall it has worked pretty well to have the blog on this server. However, for some time I've wanted to redo this setup and add some things (like a real comment system, and some more interactive stuff), and the current setup just isn't very well suited to it. And as the past weeks have illustrated, it's sometimes a bit impractical to be on a different continent from your server as well.

So I'm starting to look for someplace else to host this blog (and other things). Since I am a geek, my first choice would naturally be to get a static IP address and a domain name for home, either IPv4 or IPv6 would be just fine. I'm going to check with NTT, the fiber provider we have here, but I suspect it may be too expensive.

The second choice would be a good web hosting provider. My ideal criteria are simple: Japanese provider, Linux account with 1000 yen monthy cost, can install any code, and no bandwidth or storage limits. In the real world that's not possible of course. So what is important for me is to be decently inexpensive, to have a sane bandwidth policy (no hitting me with some ridiculous charge or shutting down the account if I would happen to go over the limit once), and offer a good, comprehensive set of software like Ruby on Rails (with Typo either installed or allowing me to install it myself), MySQL/PostgreSQL, SSH access... I greatly prefer the provider to be based in Japan, though I can accept a provider in Sweden as well (possibly in the rest of Europe if the package is otherwise compelling enough). Those are the countries to where I have a connection; anything else just tends to get complicated.

Any tips or thoughts about it are very welcome.

I have had opportunity to practice the art of unintentionally breaking things lately, and have found two interesting ways of doing so.

If you want to break things with panache, may I recommend going to the café on the second floor of Daimaru department store in Namba together with your girlfriend. The café is on a second-floor balcony overlooking the first floor makeup department, with a wide, low stone balustrade as the only barrier. What you do is sit down at a table right next to the balustrade and order cake and ice coffee. The coffee comes in a large wine glass, and you'll also get a tall glass with ice water on the side. If, as you talk animatedly with your companion, you should suddenly get the impression that your coffee is about to spill, please quickly reach out to grab it.

Now here's the trick: as you reach for the glass, make sure you hit your hand on the cake plate. Go ahead, hit it good and hard. The plate will shoot forward to hit both the coffee glass and the water glass with quite some force, and send them both flying onto the stone balustrade where they will shatter with a most satisfyingly loud crash, accompanied by a picturesque cascade of glass and ice, coffee and water, some of which undoubtedly will go over the edge and splash down onto the makeup booths on the floor below.

As Daimaru is a higher-end establishment, the personel will not bat a perfectly made up eyelash, but quickly and professionally dry, clean and otherwise remove all evidence of the incident, perhaps alert to the possibility of an elderly lady appearing from below to inquire as to why her hair is suddenly damp and having a distinct air of eau de Arabica.

The second way of breaking things is perhaps not as exciting, lacking the performance-art element of the previous method, but does offer a glimpse into the intersection of long forgotten high-school physics and the everyday world of Japanese food preparation.

We have been making umeshu the past couple of years, and this year we thought we'd branch out into making umeboshi, sour pickled Japanese plums, as well. Unlike umeshu, the containers used for umeboshi need to be very well cleaned, preferably with boiling hot water, to avoid mold. So we had a large glass jar (about 8 liters) to clean and a smaller jar we'd use as a weight on the plums.

Now, boiling a lot of water just to pour into and over the jars takes quite a bit of time. So once I'd poured the hot water into the big glass jar, I got the idea that I could just dunk the small jar into the hot water in the big one, saving me from boiling another pot. The smaller jar was not that much smaller than the big one but would fit.

So I dunk it in, the smaller jar sort of tips over diagonally so it nestles under the top lip of the big jar (the mouth of the big jar is a bit smaller than the jar itself) and promptly jams between the lip on the top and the bottom and side of the large jar. Where it is stuck - really stuck. I realized just too late what happened: the smaller jar just fits diagonally in the large jar when the large jar is already heated by the boiling hot water (and thus expands) and the small jar, made from thick glass, is still cool. But the water quickly heated the small jar, making it expand as well, jamming it tightly.

It was quickly apparent that the large jar was in real danger of breaking from the pressure - it was made from fairly thin glass - and also apparent that the only way to get the small jar out was to somehow cool it down. So I quickly poured out the hot water, but I had no more than started to fill the small jar with cold water when the large jar broke into several pieces with a sharp, intense crack. Just as well, I think; I'm not sure how much we could have trusted the jar after being that stressed anyhow.

I hope this little guide to breaking things has been useful. If you ever find yourself with the need to have something broken - fragile and valuable especially - I am always available.

It's midsummer again. And I've just realized it's now my fourth year without celebrating it in any way. Not so much as a slice of vinegared herring on the horizon for me, to say nothing of Matjesherring with sour cream and potatoes, or wormwood and elder-flavoured vodka. Christmas I can happily do without; the New Year is celebrated far more enthusiastically here; most other holidays are pretty much non-events for me. But a long dim Midsummer evening with friends, food, and the smells of summer - that's something I miss.

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