Welcome to another edition of the Deskwarming Diaries, where an ALT learns something new everyday at lunch in exchange for English-language facts. Today’s post features Pocky, wild plants you can eat, and the subtleties of English. Let’s jump in!
Today’s Lunch
Today’s konbini trip resulted in super unsweetened green tea, a katsu sandwich, and ChocoMint Pocky; I was especially excited for the Pocky! As you may or may not already know, Japan is crazy into seasonal things. For example, the sakura-flavored drinks at Starbucks that are available for only a week or two out of the year, or how corn is only readily available at my grocery store during summer when it’s harvested (late July — August-ish). That could, of course, just be because I live way out in the boonies, but I get excited when I see corn because I can’t normally get it fresh! Chocolate-mint is no exception to this seasonality, and it’s only available during spring and summer. Gotta stock up!
山菜 — Sansai
Yesterday during lunch, we talked about sansai (lit. ‘mountain vegetables’), which are edible plants you can find out in the wild. In fact, that’s the only place to find them, because they aren’t grown commercially. Because Nagano is so mountainous and wild, sansai dishes are very common at Japanese inns; they’ve even appeared in my school’s lunch! Picking sansai is so popular here that it is not unusual at all to see cars parked along the side of the road next to a forest, with people hunched over in the woods digging for veges. There are even sansai-picking tours available, like this one (which I really want to go on now)!
During lunch, though, I heard about a sansai I’d never heard of before — アケビ (akebi). My teachers said they used to find it as kids in the woods, and their descriptions were really weird. They said it’s a purple fruit with white flesh on the inside, lots of seeds, and it tastes odd. I had no kind of image in my head for this, nothing to compare it to. So I looked it up! In English, this plant is called chocolate-vine (click for images on Google). It’s native to Japan, Korea, and China, but apparently grows invasively in the American southeast — why haven’t I seen this plant before?!
As for why it’s called ‘chocolate-vine,’ apparently the flowers faintly smell of it. When I looked at the pictures I thought it was because the fruit kinda vaguely looks like a cacao pod…
Subtleties of English
After talking a bit about how some TV show titles are different in America vs. Japan, we transitioned to how subtitles aren’t always accurate. Take Naruto for example. I was watching it on Netflix recently and eventually stopped because I couldn’t stand the subtitles. I could understand the Japanese and the way they had subtitled it seemed roundabout and at times, inaccurate. They also included his stupid English catchphrase “Believe it!” in the subs which made me think they just used the English dub dialogue as the subs to save time. Ugh.
MOVING ON. One of my teachers mentioned that he has been pretty impressed with President Trump lately because he is pretty good at speaking. Come to find out, the Japanese subtitles are inaccurate. Apparently they are translating his words into a more polite register to match what a Japanese person would say in the same situation. They were shocked to hear that the way he speaks in English is not exactly eloquent.
So, we compared the way he speaks to President Obama. Where Obama spoke slowly, eloquently, and enunciated his words, Trump often mumbles, will stop and change topic mid-sentence, and doesn’t speak very descriptively (‘very good,’ ‘the best,’ ‘bigly’). My teachers were quite surprised to hear this opinion, and they could tell the difference when my co-ALT gave examples of both. They said they’d never thought to listen for those things before, and they found it really interesting. Oh the things you can learn, just from listening! You don’t even have to fully understand what someone is saying to see differences in how people speak.
Until next time!
