Typhoons and Water and Guests, Oh My!

It's Sunday late morning here. I've been available at 8am to give the pastor the key so that he could get into the office building to make copies of the bulletin, attended the 10 am service and then talked a little with a friend who stopped by after. I just made a pot of chai tea so I could have chai latte while I type, and I have the Osenbei, rice crackers open at my elbow. Until my guest arrives late this evening I'm pretty much free.


This past week was pretty busy with guests and a typhoon and guests because of the typhoon, the return of the Field Director's wife who has been in Germany for several months helping take care of her frail mother and dad, giving her siblings a bit of an easier time. The typhoon was very similar to some hurricanes I've been near. The center travelled south to northeast a bit inland from here, so we got lots of wind and rain. They shut the trains down sometime during evening rush hour and started them back up sometime after 10.30. So the Business Manager and the new Accounts Clerk couldn't go home and asked to stay over. Another friend was stuck at Tokyo station wanting to go to Osaka, so when she could get here and not there, she asked for a room. We had a team of Americans here (3 men, 3 women, all middle age or older) who had been in Sendai helping with the relief work and had a few days before going home to California. One of their churches in the US had the secretary call me when they heard on the news that there was a typhoon coming to Tokyo. She was unconcerned that the time difference meant she had rung my telephone at 5.40 am.


One of our friends who pastors a church in Tokyo had scheduled to use our auditorium and another area all day on Friday for a kind of church retreat. They also wanted to baptize three people which meant I had to find out how to fill up the baptistery which is under the platform on the far end of the auditorium. Fortunately our pastor who has used it several times was able to consult with us on the method. The major glitches were that the hot water heating system has an automatic shutoff after running for between 45 minutes and an hour. It takes three hours to fill the baptistery - it's a lot bigger than it needs to be, but that's how it got built. So you have to be rather alert when filling it to get enough hot water. The pastor doing the baptism was sure I didn't have a clue how to do it, he wasn't far wrong, so he came out Thursday afternoon and filled the baptistery about a third of the way up then asked me to fill it up the rest of the way on Friday morning. when it was done, he pulled out a thermometer like you use to see how hot the ofuro water is before your bath. He was happily surprised that it was 32 degrees C.


This next week we get busy again with the Home Council's autumn meeting on Tuesday. Some of their members and those giving reports live far enough away that they have asked to stay overnight. We have several people here for a few days before they fly to their home countries for their Home Assignments. We also have people here visiting with an eye to seeing if this might be where they'd like to work. The first week of October is the autumn Field Council meeting which sees representative members from all over the northern part of Honshu and Hokkaido here for several days.


After that, around the middle of October, it looks like the pace might slow down a little for a while, or it may be that people are just now thinking they should write to make reservations.


I'd really like to go to Quilting Class this week. It got cancelled last week because of the typhoon. I need to get some kind of a project cut out or planned to take however. We'll see. I'd also like to go to the grocery store and fruit market. And, there's the ever present "stuff" that still needs to be gone through or to have a home found for it.

No, I didn't get lost, I've just been busy!

After two weeks of fairly constant Guest Home work I realized I hadn't done a blog post for nearly two weeks.  That's no way to keep the readership interested. The other part of that is I attended a new (to me) English Circle today and invited participants to take a look at my blog.  Well, who wants to see a two week old blog entry?

So, where was today's meeting? Narashino City. One of the IVIS members who I met some years ago on the bus trip to Yokohama, I believe, invited me to come to speak to this other group he belongs to in his home area. Their format is quite different. The speaker has an hour to fill and then after coffee break there is a Q and A time.  Since I had been asked on relatively short notice, and this was a new group, I drew on something I had already prepared and expanded it a bit.  I took my "To Everything There Is A Season" wall hanging and after giving a brief history of my travels to and from Japan over the last 12 years I told them about my "Japanese Memories." 

They were a lovely responsive group and took the lesson on the proper pronunciation of the word "Quilt" in good stride. They also stayed with me in my explanation of the block I call "My Japanese Family Name" and made the jump from Andoh to Andoh san to Anderson eventually.

I will admit I was apprehensive, but I ended up having a really good time.

Thank you for inviting me, Narashino City English Circle!

Sanma Season

My friend Sachiko san came by after church today. I hadn't seen her for a month.  Usually on Sundays she brings one or more of the grocery store ads from the newspaper.  I have never had any success in getting the ads delivered with my Daily Yomiyuri Newspaper. It's in English you see and it is presumed that people who receive it wouldn't be able to use the Japanese ads for the local stores.  I learned to read pictures early on and some hiragana and a kanji here and there, so I quite like looking at the store ads, as I do at home.

So today's ad featured fresh Sanma.  These are a kind of fish that is very economical and only available this time of year. Sachiko described how she cooks them and how she dresses them and assured me that they are "Oishii". So, we walked to the area around Ichikawa Station and visited several different places.  Most stores had whole Sanma in a container on ice and bags available so you can put as many as you like in the bag.  They were priced per fish. There were also some pre-packaged and some of those had already been cleaned and were headless and gutless. These appealed to me.  After we made the rounds we returned to Y's Mart. and discovered that their price had been reduced while we were away! 88 yen each and some of them were the cleaned ones.  I bought two.These were for the grill, which is like a small broiler and is part of most of the gas cookers in Japanese kitchens. Here is a picture of them ready to go in:

They just took a few minutes on each side.  Note the cuts in the skin. I asked Sachiko san if they were usually split for cooking and she said that she makes cuts in the skin like her mother did.  She merely smiled at me when I said that my mother never cooked Sanma.

Had I been a bit more on the ball I would have added something a bit more colorful to this meal. But it was tasty enough all right.  The fish is mild flavored and comes off the bone easily. The rice is half white rice, half brown rice with rolled barley and a package of a mixture of 14 seeds and beans that adds a bit more nutrition and fiber. 

The salad was a mixture of lettuce and sliced hakusai (Napa Cabbage) with a peeled Nashi.  These are also in season at the moment.  Sometimes they are seen in Florida stores and called something like Asian Pears. On the way to America they lose a lot of their flavor and juiciness. Ichikawa City is the Nashi Capitol of Japan, and as we had a rather reasonable growing season for them this year, they are both plentiful and economically priced in the stores. Nashi for the uninitiated have a yellow roughish skin and when cut open resemble an apple or a pear. The fruit is quite crisp and very very juicy. They are quite refreshing in the hot weather. 

So, that was my dinner tonight. What did you have?