Shangri-La Diet

I am greatly indebted to a man named Seth Roberts. I imagine that in time, the world will be as well.

Over the last 20 months I have lost 61 pounds. The easiest of those were the last 13 pounds, which were shed using the Shangri-La Diet. Before that, I was just not eating. Painful, but possible.

Now I don’t feel the need to eat. And my body accepted this non-desire as truth, and now I am 13 pounds less than before I started, with virtually no inconvenience. This is because every other morning after waking, I swallow 2-3 tablespoons of Extra Light Olive Oil and wait one hour without ingesting something with flavor, toothpaste or coffee for example.

This meets the only requirement of the diet: one hour with no flavor, ingest flavorless calories, one hour with no flavor. Breaking up dosages doesn’t matter and neither does time of day. See the website here.

Dr. Roberts has concluded that the body’s set point weight is regulated by calorie-flavor association; and that a high association (high calorie, high flavor) raises the set point to make us store energy, and that a low association (high calorie, no flavor) lowers the set point, causing us to reserve energy, or not eat. This is based on rat trials and theories about caveman lifestyle.

I only eat a normal-sized lunch and a small dinner. I no longer have unstoppable cravings for anything, chocolate or pizza for example. Some people have suggested that this effect that oil has on one’s body is a placebo, but to call this a placebo is laughable in my opinion. The weight I lost before SLD was extremely painful regardless of what I convinced myself of while ingesting any foods or liquids. My appetite is too strong to be negated by placebo.

And because I’m a punk, I don’t even own the book yet. (it’s in the mail as of yesterday…)

Funny and revolutionary what a little oil can do.

This is garbage

Throwing away trash in Japan is a major pain in the ass. Because a population roughly half the size of the U.S. is crammed onto an island the size of California, there isn’t a lot of room for waste. They take trash collection very seriously.

Pinned up on my fridge is a giant poster explaining how to throw out my trash.

Burnable garbage (food, paper, various plastics, fabrics, wood, etc.) must be placed in special city-designated bags purchasable at the grocery store and are picked up MWF. Non-burnable garbage (small appliances, dishes, small electronic equipment, makeup containers, etc.) is picked up the 2nd Tuesday of each month in designated bags. Aluminum cans, metal appliances or electronic goods, bottle glass, batteries, and PET plastic (drink) bottles can be placed in any bag and are picked up ONLY the last Thursday of each month. (!!) Cardboard must be flattened and is picked up the 2nd Thursday of each month. “Large garbage” (futons, furniture, bikes, computers, etc.) must be scheduled by appointment for pickup on the 2nd and 4th Friday. Hazardous items (needles, gas cans) must be dealt with at a specialty store and may not be thrown away. Household items should be recycled at local shops when possible.

*Phew*

The fact that I can only throw out my bottles, cans, or glass one day a month is somehow due to the fact that I live in the country; for example in Tokyo these items are collected every week on the 2 days opposite to burnable trash collection.

This is the shrine two blocks from my house where I must leave this special bottles-and-cans offering on the last Thursday of every month at 7 a.m.

Suffice to say, I currently have an outside storage closet containing my bicycle and 12 months worth of bottles, cans, and glass. In fact the trek to take this photo was the first time I’ve been to that shrine since its location was first explained to me. Take that God of Trash.

If you don’t throw out your trash properly, they have ways of making you do it aside from just refusing to pick it up, causing the neighborhood to try to determine whose garbage has been left there for days on end and then reprimanding the offender (peer pressure works amazingly well here).

One time on a sensational news program they talked about how foreigners don’t throw out their trash properly. They found some poor Chinese couple who had thrown out some nonburnable items into a burnable bag and hunted them down on camera, brought them to the trash and proceeded to open the bag, showing them how wrong they were, complete with faces censored, camera zooms on the bag, and menacing music. Damn those foreigners.

Of course it doesn’t help that these instructions which are barely decipherable by the country’s own citizens, are usually only available written in Japanese. Of course I can read these instructions because I can read Japanese.

Garbage instructions are written in Japanese with no English, but then sometimes you’ll see random hilarious signs written only in English with no Japanese, like “No dancing”, “Please pick up after yourself” or “Please don’t try on earrings.” Tourists in Japan do some interesting things, let me tell you. Some may even be teaching English…

A Week

On Monday I had the first of 2 going away parties for my British neighbor and good friend, Sam. I wore a yukata for the first time.

On Tuesday morning I was woken up by a level 3 earthquake, the strongest I have felt thus far. It scared me to imagine having to throw myself over my double bass to protect it from something.

Tuesday night was a school drinking party held at a hot spring. Lots of great food and games followed by a naked dip in the hot spring with the other teachers, but I and a few others couldn’t drink because we had to drive home.

Drunk driving laws in Japan are far harsher than in the U.S. and it is very socially unacceptable. I could have drank, called Daiko [代行], which is a service where two men come in a cab, and one man drives you home while the other follows in the cab behind your car, but my home is quite far from the party’s location and it would have been expensive.

On Wednesday I had my usual 7:30am-9:30pm day including adult English Coversation in the evening, and there was another going away party for my friend Sam. I surprised myself by crying, after realizing he was really leaving. I really depended on him as my fellow English teaching friend, and I hadn’t realized it until then.

Thursday morning was my driving test, which had been postponed because of the earthquake last week. I failed it.

I took the test with a Russian woman at the same time who also failed it. When the tester told her she failed because she drove too fast, which she did, she flew into a rage and screamed at him in Russian, because she didn’t know English or Japanese. Typical foreigner, unfortunately.

On Friday I was asked to help interpret for a group of foreigners who were going to a coppersmith’s studio to make plates. I was there as a helper rather than as a hired interpretor per se. It went quite well and the coppersmith family gave me 3 bottles of coffee and 3000 yen (~$25). The family was very charming.

On Saturday I went to the hot spring near my home to relax. When I was in the outdoor bath, a young girl walked up and sat down right next to me and stared point blank. When I said to her “What?” she continued to stare with no change, while her mother said “sumimasen [sorry]” over and over. It was the very first time something like that had happened, because usually mothers will try to stop kids from staring at me by pulling them or calling them over. I went inside to the other baths, fuming.

In an attempt to really relax, I stopped at an Italian restaurant overlooking the ocean and the rice fields which was lovely and delicious, the first of its kind I have seen.

On Saturday night I went to the jazz bar where I might play in Sanjo with my friend. My friend, the guitarist from before, and I then went to a second bar that was straight out of an American hipster’s wet dream.

Among the bizarre photographs pinned up in the bathroom, there was a postcard of Andy Warhol kissing John Lennon on the cheek.

The bartender and I chatted, and I didn’t need to ask him to repeat himself over the din of the bar. He also didn’t comment on my Japanese, but rather talked to me like a normal person. Perhaps my Japanese has gotten better recently.

Culturally Confused

Today at the shrine, I had a cocktail sand. What do you think “sand” might be short for?

Yet another day went by in which I was called “weird foreigner [hen-na gaijin]” about a dozen times. This time it was at the town summer festival in which I played taiko. I really hate festivals because I unwillingly become one of the attractions to the children, who, when noticing my hair or skin whisper “ah, gaijin-san [Ms. Foreigner]” in surprise behind me.

There are many days like today when, because I can speak Japanese and eat Japanese food, I get called “weird foreigner.” This time it was mostly used by my taiko members, occasionally when introducing me, occasionally when laughing at the people who stared at me when we walked through the festival. I know I live in rural Japan, but sometimes it gets to me.

It especially gets to me because I feel like a foreigner in the country of which I am a citizen. I don’t feel at home in America for a number of reasons. One of these reasons is the fact that The President sent young, impressionable members of my generation to die.

I remember quite well what I was like at 18 years old, and I wasn’t very with it. I could barely take care of myself, let alone hold a gun and be instructed to kill someone. But that is what America has done. And we continue to read about 18 year-olds dying in this “war” that is the most non-partisan thing we have going politically, because no party agrees with it.

When I was in college one of my roommates called me “culturally confused” as a joke, but it has probably been the best way to describe me since I was a child.

From the day I horrified my friend by calling her “gay” in the hallway in high school to describe her chipper mood, to the day I was laughed down by my family for opposing my grandfather’s verbal degradation of blacks, to the day I made one of my junior high history classes erupt into laughter by describing a picture of the naked sculpture “David” as ‘beautiful’, I have never ceased to feel this way.

This is the way I live out my day, wherever I call “home.”

Thus I am culturally confused.

I am the Catfish

Recently my luck has been really good. I’ve won 4 food lotteries in the last month, by pulling tickets out of a box at 7-11 and an ice cream shop.

I’ve also managed to avoid yet another Niigata earthquake this year, again because I was in Tokyo, and this time the quake was really big and luckily didn’t collapse my house likes it did my friend’s in Kashiwazaki. My boyfriend calls me a catfish [namazu/鯰 ] because catfish sense earthquakes and flee, according to Japanese.

Yesterday I saw Dairakudakan [大駱駝艦] in Niigata City and yet again remembered why this Butoh (modern) dance company inspired me to finally get onto the plane and come to Japan.

The performance was completely freaking insane, vulgar, and beautiful. I want to play bass with them while they dance. I was fortunate to take some intro Butoh lessons and do some music/dance improvisation with Wakabayashi Jun, one of the principal male dancers of the company, when he taught for a year at the University of Michigan. I hope to meet with him again soon.

Butoh makes sense to me now that I have lived here for a year; I understand both the symbols of fear and paranoia of war and violence, and the destruction of social convention in physical movement and sound that permeates their works.

Please visit their English website.

Today was yet another drive practice to get my japanese driver’s license in frickin’ Niigata City which is an hour away. Only Americans have to take the drive test after our international permit has expired while the Brits sit back and laugh, getting away with just taking the written test, probably because the driving system is based on the British system.

The test is optimally performed by the test-taker with machine-like precision on a specialized track you have to pay $50/hour to practice on. Among the moves are keeping as close to the edge of the road as possible, checking right-left-left bicycle (behind diagonally) before turning, randomly speeding up to 40mph in certain places, and driving through a very narrow S-shaped and right-angle obstacle track. I have practiced it 3 hours and still feel shaky about taking the test this coming Tuesday. If I fall off the track on the obstacle portion or make too many tiny mistakes they fail me.

Anyway, I was in a really shitty mood after getting out of the practice, so I went to a nearby grocery that happens to have a very wide selection of things. As I was purchasing my can of Sapporo beer, I suddenly saw that familiar penis-shaped bottle beckoning to me from a distance.

Now, I do not usually drink soda, unless it is weird. Even better if it happens to be Ramune.

What do we have here?

WASABI RAMUNE

It was all downhill from there:

Ahh!!! Wasabi Ramune gave me hiccups!!

School Lunch

When I was in high school, I ate out of a vending machine for school lunch. Nearly everyday was a bag of Doritos, a beef stick, and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. I was one of many students who did this, in my case it was an effort to avoid eating hamburgers and mushy vegetables, and no one stopped me.

Japan has the highest number of vending machines per capita of any country; nearly all of them contain beverages, half of which are usually not sweetened. Yet, there are no vending machines in the schools.

This is school lunch in Japan:

It costs me 300 japanese yen (about $2.40). Today was noodles as opposed to the usual rice. According to this menu, this is what is in it: wheat noodles, pork, squid, deep-fried tofu, bracken sprout, cabbage, butterbur, mushroom, bamboo shoot, carrot, leek, cucumber, milk, ginger, flour, oil and starch. This appears to be an incomplete list however because they left out the sesame seed on the cucumbers and whatever they made the soup stock from. It had 886 calories. The side panel asks me to think about my summer menu and to make sure I don’t eat too much ice cream, eat breakfast, drink tea or milk when I’m thirsty instead of soda, eat plenty of colorful vegis, and get lots of protein.

Every month the contents of lunch, along with a guide to what it is made of and how your body will use it, is printed and distributed to classrooms. Starting from the time the students are in elementary school, they serve lunch to each other and eat in the classroom. (Students have their own classroom in Japan and the teachers move from room to room, as opposed to the reverse in the States.) The leftover food is weighed and the students are given awards for having the least leftover food. After lunch and recess, the students and teachers clean every inch of the school and thus there are no janitors, only groundskeepers for the gardens and trees.

Last month was “Meal Education Month” and the back of the menu asks us to consider some things.
1) Are you properly eating breakfast, lunch and dinner? Kids who don’t eat breakfast are increasing, but if you are hungry you will have no energy.
2) Are you eating a good balance of rice, vegetables, meat, and fish? All foods have different nutrition. If you eat a variety you won’t lose to sickness.
3) Are you doing some impossible diet? If you don’t eat properly your bones will be weak when you grow up.
4) Do you know about food safety? Be sure to honor the use by date on foods.
5) Do you know where your food was grown? 60% of your food is imported from other countries.
6) Are you leaving anything behind? Remember that your food was once a living creature and don’t forget its life or the lives of the people who raised it for you.
7) Have you eaten the traditional food of your area? The traditional food of your community has been passed from parent to child for a long time, and we want to continue to pass it on.

In elementary schools I have sometimes seen a giant poster with the kids names on it and a list of foods they hated next to it, stuff like tomatoes, onions. The poster was a checklist showing when they overcame their hatred of that food and could eat it. I have met virtually no picky eaters in this country, and that is one thing confusing to Japanese about English speakers, why they hate certain foods and won’t eat them.

Sometimes when we have no lunch because students have athletic events, the mentally handicapped students, known as wakaba [若葉/young leaf] class will make lunch for the staff with the help of their specialized teachers, usually rice balls, miso soup, and pickles.

I clearly remember the day we got vending machines in middle school because people were lined up outside of it for hours everyday, waiting to spend a dollar on a Coke.

It looks like the schools over here are not interested in teaching the children that food is a recreation.

MeatHope

There’s been an interesting story in the news lately about a company called MeatHope (what would my day be without you Engrish?) which is embroiled in a scandal over accusations they have mixed different organs of the cow and chicken meat into product which they labeled “beef”. In other words in Japan, if something says “beef” (literally labeled “cow meat”) on a package, even if it is an ingredient in frozen food, it must be 100% cow muscle.

Last weekend I saw a “sensational news” TV program that did a DNA test of products ranging from frozen lunches to raw ground beef that used the beef from MeatHope and meat from other companies. The DNA tests confirmed that all products labeled “beef”, with the exception of the products using MeatHope beef, were in fact 100% beef. The MeatHope products contained traces of chicken and “other”. They then did an on-air taste test with two people who had to guess which of three cooked hamburger patties was 100% beef. They both guessed correctly. The other two were ground cow organs, and ground organs with chicken added.

Shall we imagine for a second if this kind of rigorous awareness was applied to the beef consumed in America? McDonald’s would be bankrupt. I did a search on Google for “USDA beef regulations” and this was the first link that came up; according to this, eating “other” in America also may mean eating ground in bones. It sort of sheds some light on why US beef was banned in Japan, but then reallowed last year. Looks like alot of it is precaution against mad cow disease, as well as giving customers what they pay for.

Homestay

This year the 2nd graders at my junior high got a new English textbook. As I leafed through it, I found this gem on page 42:

The lesson introduces the grammer “must do” using a story about a student doing a homestay in America.

Text: Nana, Everyone in my host family is nice to me. But my host mother always gives me too much food. Do I have to eat everything? It’s too much for me. Teacher’s answer, You must tell your host mother. Say, “I’m sorry. It’s very good, but I can’t eat that much.” She’ll understand.

If you take a look at the photo next to the text, you can see that clearly this isn’t a plate of American food, at least not from anyone I know, as there are too many vegetables on it.

There were a number of things that I noticed when I returned to the US last week, and one of those was that over half of the commercials on TV were advertising junk food or drinks. I noticed it because on japanese basic cable, food or drink rarely makes it into commercials with the exception of occasional commercials for instant ramen, beer, and vitamin drinks. Despite this fact, food reigns big on japanese TV programs.

There are countless cooking shows, review shows where celebs and connoisseurs “restaurant-hop” to several different places and eat on camera with great affectation, programs showcasing the health benefits of japanese foods, food-eating contests, and even celebrity game shows in which being able to enjoy a high-end meal on camera is part of the stakes at risk.

And why aren’t they getting enormously fat from all this emphasis on food? Of course we could imagine that Americans’ bodies, in an attempt to kill us earlier than necessary, have evolved to develop a gene which makes us store more fat than is needed, even more so than our ancestors we descended from, thereby giving us more heart disease and diet related illness so that we can die sooner than anyone in the world, couldn’t we? But that would just be silly.

In my observation, the Japanese don’t gain tons of weight from copious amounts of food because the emphasis is in the right place. It is that the food be as fresh and as good tasting as possible, celebrating the flavor in it’s purest form. A hallmark of a good chef is not how good his sauce is, but how quickly the crab makes it from squirming to sushi. And unless they are celebrating or happen to be able to afford some massively lavish meal, it’s almost always in portions less than half the size of American ones.

After that long week of eating at my grandparents’ house and numerous restaurants my body was craving only one thing: fresh. So I decided to do myself a favor and mainly eat things as close to formerly growing as possible from now on, in shape and flavor. I have a feeling it will repay me in many ways. They don’t live to be 114 years old over here for no reason.

They take pennies seriously

Today I had a rehearsal with a jazz piano player at a popular bar in a town near me; it went really well and it looks like I’ll be playing a gig with him soon at his bar and possibly in Niigata City. Rehearsed with him and a guitarist friend of his.

The guitarist and I went to the local grocery store to get our parking tickets validated and when he paid for a bottle of water, a penny he intended to pay with rolled under the checkout counter. The checkout girl first got on her knees and tried to fish it out, but after several failed attempts, she moved the apparently unfixed counter and retrieved the penny to give to him. He was very grateful.