The Hmong are a unique indigenous people who have populated southern China for at least 8000 years. Unfortunately, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, they were targeted by the Qing Dynasty for extermination. This prompted most of them to migrate to other countries in southeast Asia: mainly Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand.
Masumi and I first encountered the Hmong in northern Vietnam in 2010. Here I am being greeted by them at the train station in Sapa, not far from the Chinese border.
More recently, on our return trip to Thailand — we were last there in December 2019, right before Covid shut down the world for travel — we visited a Hmong Village near Chiang Mai.
This is a real, functioning village. At the same time, it has been made “tourist friendly”, to encourage travelers to visit, learn about Hmong culture and crafts, and hopefully inject some money into their struggling community. It’s not easy for non-indigenous people to survive in Thailand. There are no factories or fast food restaurants to provide employment. All income for the town is generated within the closed, internal economic environment of the town.
There are some beautiful areas in the village, but most of it consists of bare-bone shops and rather shoddy residences, far from what could be called luxurious.
Let’s start with the gardens.
The town looked fairly typical of this part of the world. Lots of corrugated iron; crafts, clothing and jewelry shops; populated with friendly people and cute kids.
There was even a very modest Hmong museum.
Now, those who’ve been following my writings here know that one of Masumi’s and my favorite things is to dress up in traditional costumes for the various and exotic locations and cultures we’ve encountered in our travels. We were in luck! The Hmong Village afforded just such a diversion. We frolicked around in one of the gardens for an hour, dressed as Hmong!
Without a doubt, that was the highlight of our visit!
Masumi and I love to travel and have been many places around the world. To name them: Germany, Netherlands, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Russia, Estonia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, USA, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Hong Kong, and South Korea. And of course, we’ve gone from one end of Japan to the other, Hokkaido to Okinawa and much in between.
But for four years, until this summer, we couldn’t travel internationally. Covid lockdowns and related travel obstacles put our wanderlust on hold. Our last trip was to Chiang Mai, Thailand, end of December 2019/beginning of January 2020. Now, with the fear porn of the “pandemic” at least temporarily suspended — I say that because I see their ramping it up again now targeting a return of many Covid restrictions in October — we boarded a plane late July and returned to Chiang Mai, I guess to pick up where we left off.
The trip was only eight days but it was action-packed and full of pleasant surprises. Maybe it was the rebound of being “let out of the cage” that created the perfect mindset, or maybe it truly was spectacular. Whatever the case, we both agreed that this was one of our best vacations ever!
To get things off to a unique start, the day after we arrived, we went to a Thai cooking school. We really lucked out and got the best instructor/stand-up comedian of the lot. That’s our class in the photo at the top and our instructor is the lady with the yellow apron bottom left. A lot was packed into six hours of hands-on learning the secrets of Thailand’s exotic, delicious, if sometimes way-too-spicy cuisine.
The school van picked us up at our guest house early in the morning. First stop: a local market to . . . well, I guess to shop.
Next we arrived at the school, and Masumi immediately made a new friend.
Our next stop was the garden, where they grew herbs and spices, mushrooms and marijuana. Yes, marijuana, which any user will tell you makes everything taste great! This is interesting. Since we last visited Thailand, marijuana has been legalized and we saw dispensaries all over the city. They’re in such abundance, they may eventually surpass massage parlors in ubiquity. Now I assume these new enterprises are meant to service the thousands of tourists, as well as local stoners. What was truly astonishing is that in eight days, glancing in the shop windows as we strolled by, I never saw a single customer in these shiny new stores. Not one! Not sure what to think, other than there are going to be a lot of these ganja shops filing for bankruptcy in the very near future.
Anyway, back to the herb and spice garden. Our teacher took us on a tour, we pinched various spice plants, rolled their leaves between our thumb and fingers, smelled them, occasionally tasted them. Not much else to say about it. I guess it was a bit of an epiphany for yours truly that herbs did not magically appear on the shelf of a supermarket in bottles with fancy labels on them, stamped with an expiration date.
Now it was time to get down to business. I’ll spare you the minute details. Suffice it to say that Masumi was a model student, but I was designated class clown for my ability to mangle simple, easily-comprehended directions, managing to do just the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time. Nevertheless, somehow, by the grace of the food gods, perhaps purely by accident, I produced some rather delicious cuisine . . . if I can claim some bragging rights here.
The final phase of our instruction, though it actually seemed out of order, was the preparation of pepper, both green and red, which seem to find their way into the preponderance of cuisine in this unique and colorful country. I mean hot pepper, not ordinary pepper. Use of this caustic substance is fairly common in the East. In South Korea, they serve dishes which could start a forest fire in Antarctica. India is another country that comes to mind when I think of pepper, and its wicked step-sister, curry. We learned how to grind into a lethal paste this venomous herb, which I think it God’s way of giving us a preview of Hell.
I was able to capture briefly how funny, energetic, enthusiastic, and entertaining our teacher was for this entire educational experience. Here it is. What a hoot!
Our teacher was pure delight!
So there you have it. An unforgettable six hours learning to make inedible food — just kidding! Our final dishes weren’t that spicy. At least we didn’t have to call an ambulance.
Without wanting to sound like a broken record, living in an agricultural region — and this could be anywhere in the world — is still an adventure for me, with fresh epiphanies and surprises a regular occurrence. Watching the cycle of plant, grow, harvest puts life on a unique timeline. I love it!
We live in the middle of farm fields. Most of what is being grown appears to be rice and soybeans, which are called kuromame [ 黒豆 ] i.e. black beans. Tambasasayama is famous across Japan for its black beans and the streets are packed with tourists at harvest time.
Little did I know that Hyogo Prefecture — the equivalent to a state or province — is among the top producers in a host of other agricultural products. As you can see from the mapping above, the abundance is astonishing. For the record, these are at the top of the list for all of Japan:
#1 Crab #1 Black Soybeans #1 Sake Rice #1 Shirasu, Ikanago #2 Onions #2 Red Beans #2 Seaweed Paper #2 Octopus
I’m really curious. So after I tell my tale, I expect some feedback from folks in other parts of the world, especially the U.S.
Very recently I had a relapse. It was a recurrence of something that first happened back in January 2020, when Masumi and I were in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It’s a sore throat from Hell!
The first time it happened, I thought for sure I had throat cancer. A huge lump made it almost impossible to swallow. Incredible pain. I can’t begin to describe what it felt like when the spicy Thai food hit the back of my throat. Think blowtorch and go from there. At least twice, I nearly passed out from the pain.
I didn’t say anything until I got back. We were guests of a very hospitable couple and I didn’t want to worry anyone or spoil the fun.
But the day after our plane landed here, I went to a throat specialist.
It wasn’t cancer. It was a TONSIL! At least part of a tonsil. Infected, inflamed, raising hell.
Now when I grew up, everyone had their tonsils removed at an early age. Standard procedure. I think I was four or five. Anyway, whoever removed mine must have been looking at the nurse across from him because he missed a big chunk. It’s still attached to the wall of my throat, ready to make trouble whenever a cantankerous virus or bacteria enters the scene.
The doctor I saw here was a genius! He diagnosed the problem and prescribed a cocktail of five drugs. I was already mending the next day. If five days, it was as if nothing had ever happened.
I had a recurrence a couple months ago. Same drug combination. Same immediate results.
Last week, I went through the same routine. Now we’re wondering if I should have the partial tonsil removed. We’ll decide next month. Ironically, Masumi and I are going back to Chiang Mai end of this month. We miss the elephants, hillside tribe people, and the night markets. We’re even taking a Thai cooking course this time around. So we’ll wait until we return before thinking about surgery.
Anyway . . . here’s my question. At the top of this article is a photo of the “drug cocktail,” a 5-day regimen combining powerful, latest generation antibiotics, an anti-inflammatory, a pain killer, and an ulcer-preventative (the anti-inflammatory drug and pain killer can be rough on the lining of the stomach). So there were FIVE drugs in all.
My cost was 480 yen for the entire package. That’s $3.47 USD.
I’m really curious. What would this cost say in the U.S. or Canada?
By the way, the bill for the doctor was even less expensive. 340 yen = $2.46.
So what is it? Socialism? Not really. It’s just a system strictly regulated by the government, which puts people before profits, which values the health of the population over the value of corporate holdings or stocks. Should it be any other way?
I’m trying to remember what adventures I had in America typically on a Sunday. It was so long ago, and involved so many different places, it’s hard to sum it up. I know in Portland, a day off usually involved riding my bike. If there was something going on downtown — street fair, art exhibit, parade — I’d drop by. I know that visiting Saturday Market, which stretched over into Sunday, was part of my routine. In the 80s and 90s when I was living in Los Angeles, I would often go to Venice Beach to look at the weirdos, roller skate, just stroll and people watch.
Just another day on Venice Beach in Los Angeles.
Whatever I did, it was nothing like what I do now here in Japan. This past Sunday was pretty typical. So here’s how it went.
Masumi found a park not that far from us — about an hour drive — which she had never been to. It consisted of 1000s of lavender plants. She also found a very unique restaurant nearby, a Persian restaurant. I have to say this came as quite a surprise, though it really shouldn’t have. Of course, you expect big cities to have a wide selection of international cuisine and our area is about as rural as it gets. Even so, we have a French restaurant right in Tambasasayama that is world-class, and our favorite Thai restaurant is similarly situated in a relatively tiny rural village about an hour-and-a-half away. I’ve not had a lot of Middle Eastern food, and certainly don’t ever recall eating Iranian. I was definitely looking forward to the adventure!
However, before we made it to lunch, as we were driving a curvy country road, Masumi spotted a truly spectacular Shinto Shrine. What made it such a breathtaking site was that it was tucked in the midst of majestic, 1000-year-old trees that reminded me of being among the redwood trees in California. I’ve been to many shrines. The setting of this one took my breath away. We had to explore!
Okay . . . we finally made it to the Persian restaurant. It had a very interesting genesis. Japanese wife discovers husband is cheating on her. They divorce. She looks online and meets a man living in Iran. She visits him and his family in Iran. They hit it off. They get married and return to Japan. (And they say Japanese people are timid and unadventurous?) They start a Persian restaurant. He cooks. She serves and collects the money. Now if that isn’t a truly charming, fairytale romance, I don’t know what is.
The bonus was that the food was not only authentic, it was extremely delicious!
Bellies full, smiles all around, we headed to the Lavender Park.
I’ll be honest. I’m not very fond of lavender. It’s not my favorite fragrance by a long shot. In fact, for me it generates images of old ladies with hairnets and orthopedic shoes. Not quite sure why. Bad childhood experience?
Even so, the park was phenomenal to visit. Lots of lavender for sure. And since it was high up on the side of a mountain, we had a wonderful view of a small town situated in the valley below and the terraced rice farms which surrounded it. The sun was extremely intense. I’m sure glad I had my new straw hat with me.
So there you have it, a typical Sunday here in Japan . . . which will likely never be repeated.
Because it’s about improvising and just seeing what’s out there. And of course having fun!
When Americans need to eat on the fly, they grab a hamburger.
When Japanese need to eat on the fly, they grab a rice ball.
The basic rice ball — actually there are no fancy rice balls — costs around 98 yen [$0.68].
Hamburgers can of course be upgraded with an enormous array of options. In an upscale restaurant, they can be over $18.00, in that case with the hamburger experience significantly enhanced by having it delivered to your table — the one with a view of the city skyline — by a lovely waitress or handsome waiter, smiling ear-to-ear. Even at McDonald’s, a Double Bacon Quarter Pounder with cheese sets you back $6.99 [1005 yen]. The most basic hamburger at McDonald’s — meat and bun, no cheese — pictured above, is $1.59 [229 yen], almost 2 1/2 times what a rice ball costs.
Then again, you get a lot in an American hamburger that you don’t get in a Japanese rice ball. There’s the preservatives, the growth hormones, the antibiotics, the residues of pesticides and herbicides, the traces of antipsychotics, blood pressure modulators, sleep aids, cocaine, MDMA and other recreational drugs commonly found in the drinking water in the U.S., micro-plastics, maybe depleted uranium.
Both being fast foods, hamburgers and rice balls come ready to eat. Theoretically, you can start chomping them down as soon as you pay for them, right at the check-out counter. For certain, you can eat them in your car or even walking to your car.
Unwrapping them is slightly different. I’ve had friends back in the U.S. who actually don’t even bother unwrapping a McDonald’s hamburger. They eat the wrapping right along with the burger and say it tastes pretty much the same, nice and greasy.
Unwrapping the rice ball is a little more involved. Masumi patiently instructed me in what she calls the 1-2-3 method and with some practice, I managed to master it. Here it is . . .
Now as long as this went according to plan, the delicious rice ball is ready for consumption!
Every culture has its advantages and disadvantages. I really love a good hamburger but I was never convinced that McDonald’s hamburgers were actual food. A long long time ago, when I was a pimply 20-something musician, I confess to being hooked on Big Macs. I recall they tasted really good, especially sitting in a park listening to some other local band.
Nutritional advice was not so readily available back then, at least not to the dumb-downed public, of which I was a clueless member. The most profound meme — this was before the word ‘meme’ had even been invented — on eating was: ‘You are what you eat.’ Which was among the reasons I never ate truck tires or dog poop.
Now, everything you wanted to know and a lot you don’t want to know is available on the web. There are no excuses for the eating habits — and yes, they are habits — of people and countries.
I’m not going to preach. I’ll close by making a couple points . . .
First, the most delicious rice ball doesn’t come close to tasting as good as the most delicious hamburger. That’s just a reality.
Here’s another reality, a statistical reality.
The life expectancy in the U.S. is 76.1 and falling. The life expectancy in Japan is 85.0 and rising.
Conclusion: Choose what you eat as if your life depended on it.
Octopuses are weird! Octopuses are creepy! The way they look. The way they move, slithering about frantically with those tentacles going in every direction, yet so frighteningly coordinated they promise to wrap up your head or face or limbs with slimy ropes, covered with suction cups ready to attach themselves in a slimy sucking unbreakable grip, then god knows what!
For some reason just hearing them mentioned, I used to immediately visualize giant octopuses enveloping ships and submarines, crushing them and drowning everyone aboard. I know that was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Captain Nemo in a life-or-death struggle not with an octopus, but a giant squid. Whatever! Big ugly sea creature. Tentacles. Bad attitude. It’s all the same to me.
Understandably . . .
For at least six decades of my life, I never once thought about eating an octopus, or any part of one. I put them right in there with rats, earthworms, cockroaches, garden slugs, slime mold, the beating heart of another human, in the I’d-rather-starve-to-death folder.
But something completely unexpected then happened. I’m not sure of the exact date but it was sometime in 2008. What I do know for sure is that I tried octopus and loved it! Masumi took me to the 道頓堀 district in Osaka — literally octopus central here in the Land of the Rising Sun — famous for takoyaki [蛸焼] and other octopus treats. It was the early days of our dating, so I was completely taken with her and all she was teaching me about Japan, the cuisine and the culture. Next thing I know I was eating the weird, creepy creature, and I WAS HOOKED.
Years later, I had some friends visit Masumi and I from America, I was preparing dinner, and just as a courtesy I thought I should ask: “Are you guys okay with me putting octopus on your salad?” I’ll never forget their look! They did their best to hide it, but it was somewhere between or a combination of horror, disbelief, revulsion, and fight-or-flight. I was amused. Because I did and still do remember my initial reactions when somehow confronted with the prospect.
How things change!
I can honestly say that octopus is among my Top 20 favorite Japanese edibles. It’s comfortably in my Top 50 all-time favorite foods from across the entire globe, which includes such diverse items as T-bone steak, cookie dough ice cream, pizza, BLT and grilled cheese sandwiches, hot fudge sundaes, French onion soup, cheese enchiladas, licorice, seaweed and sea salt potato chips, butter pecan ice cream and coca-cola floats, bacon-avocado cheeseburgers, yellowtail sashimi, Korean barbecue, Chinese hot-and-sour soup . . . you get the idea.
Traveling the world and living full-time in a country as different from America as Japan surely is, has taught me to be very open-minded. Still . . . don’t ask me to eat fried grasshoppers or the beating heart of another human being. I have to draw the line somewhere.
The excitement never stops here is the Japanese countryside.
A few months ago, we planted potatoes. This weekend we harvested them!
I still regard this whole experience as something of a miracle.
Of course, growing up in Detroit, Michigan — which at the time was the automobile capital of the known universe — I was very familiar with plants. There was the Dodge truck PLANT over on Mound Avenue. There was the auto assembly PLANT in Sterling Heights. My whole town was full of and surrounded by such plants. From age 14 through high school, I worked as an assistant shipping clerk for an automation machinery company which sold their product internationally. We shipped 150-200 foot-long machines which machined everything from cylinder heads to crankcases to intake manifolds, by sea and land to automotive manufacturing plants in Germany, England, Argentina, Australia and so on. Some of our behemoth product lines were even painted green, I guess to go with the wallpaper in the gigantic factories which would house them. True, I had heard of this thing called a “farm” but thought it had something to do with cultivating baseball players for the major leagues. Not really curious enough to give it much thought, I assumed that since people needed food, it just somehow showed up at the supermarket. The idea that edible plants had to be planted, which would then holistically and organically grow into something useful and hopefully delicious, was never on my radar.
Okay . . . enough about my pitiful agricultural ignorance.
It’s never too late to learn unless you’re dead. Since I’m still alive and minimally sentient, I have embraced the whole gardening thing with random relish and earthy delight.
But enough talk. Feast your hungry eyes on our potato harvest. While you do that, I’ll be surfing the internet for potato recipes. Because yes . . . we’ve got a lot of potatoes!
You’ve heard the expression, “The world is an oyster.” It’s attributed to Shakespeare, from The Merry Wives of Windsor. I have to come clean. I never bought into that. In fact, for some reason lately I’m leaning toward: “The world is a potato.” Which puts a whole new spin on global warming, wouldn’t you say?
I want to send some love to the wonderful fans of LIVE FROM JAPAN!
First, I thank all of you for the enormous outpouring of praise for my book. All 5-star reviews at Barnes & Noble. Fifteen 5-star reviews at Amazon. More satisfying than charts and book sales is knowing that people truly enjoyed the book. That’s the main and certainly most important reason for writing it in the first place.
Beyond my heartfelt gratitude, I want to remind everyone who has an interest in learning about the “real Japan”, that my sharing my unique life and experiences did not end with writing LIVE FROM JAPAN!
Since it was published in February 2021, I’ve continued to write articles and post them here at this website. Like the book, it’s a mixed bag of anecdotes about both life in my traditional rural town, and stories of travel and news from other parts of Japan.
I’ll make this very easy. Here is a list of all the articles to date, starting with the most recent:
Chiang Mai, Thailand: Cooking School
Masumi and I love to travel and have been many places around the world. To name them: Germany, Netherlands, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Russia, Estonia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, USA, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Hong Kong, and South Korea. And of course, we’ve gone from one end of Japan to the other, Hokkaido to Okinawa and much in between.
But for four years, until this summer, we couldn’t travel internationally. Covid lockdowns and related travel obstacles put our wanderlust on hold. Our last trip was to Chiang Mai, Thailand, end of December 2019/beginning of January 2020. Now, with the fear porn of the “pandemic” at least temporarily suspended — I say that because I see their ramping it up again now targeting a return of many Covid restrictions in October — we boarded a plane late July and returned to Chiang Mai, I guess to pick up where we left off.
The trip was only eight days but it was action-packed and full of pleasant surprises. Maybe it was the rebound of being “let out of the cage” that created the perfect mindset, or maybe it truly was spectacular. Whatever the case, we both agreed that this was one of our best vacations ever!
To get things off to a unique start, the day after we arrived, we went to a Thai cooking school. We really lucked out and got the best instructor/stand-up comedian of the lot. That’s our class in the photo at the top and our instructor is the lady with the yellow apron bottom left. A lot was packed into six hours of hands-on learning the secrets of Thailand’s exotic, delicious, if sometimes way-too-spicy cuisine.
The school van picked us up at our guest house early in the morning. First stop: a local market to . . . well, I guess to shop.
Next we arrived at the school, and Masumi immediately made a new friend.
Our next stop was the garden, where they grew herbs and spices, mushrooms and marijuana. Yes, marijuana, which any user will tell you makes everything taste great! This is interesting. Since we last visited Thailand, marijuana has been legalized and we saw dispensaries all over the city. They’re in such abundance, they may eventually surpass massage parlors in ubiquity. Now I assume these new enterprises are meant to service the thousands of tourists, as well as local stoners. What was truly astonishing is that in eight days, glancing in the shop windows as we strolled by, I never saw a single customer in these shiny new stores. Not one! Not sure what to think, other than there are going to be a lot of these ganja shops filing for bankruptcy in the very near future.
Anyway, back to the herb and spice garden. Our teacher took us on a tour, we pinched various spice plants, rolled their leaves between our thumb and fingers, smelled them, occasionally tasted them. Not much else to say about it. I guess it was a bit of an epiphany for yours truly that herbs did not magically appear on the shelf of a supermarket in bottles with fancy labels on them, stamped with an expiration date.
Now it was time to get down to business. I’ll spare you the minute details. Suffice it to say that Masumi was a model student, but I was designated class clown for my ability to mangle simple, easily-comprehended directions, managing to do just the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time. Nevertheless, somehow, by the grace of the food gods, perhaps purely by accident, I produced some rather delicious cuisine . . . if I can claim some bragging rights here.
The final phase of our instruction, though it actually seemed out of order, was the preparation of pepper, both green and red, which seem to find their way into the preponderance of cuisine in this unique and colorful country. I mean hot pepper, not ordinary pepper. Use of this caustic substance is fairly common in the East. In South Korea, they serve dishes which could start a forest fire in Antarctica. India is another country that comes to mind when I think of pepper, and its wicked step-sister, curry. We learned how to grind into a lethal paste this venomous herb, which I think it God’s way of giving us a preview of Hell.
I was able to capture briefly how funny, energetic, enthusiastic, and entertaining our teacher was for this entire educational experience. Here it is. What a hoot!
So there you have it. An unforgettable six hours learning to make inedible food — just kidding! Our final dishes weren’t that spicy. At least we didn’t have to call an ambulance.