There is a new kind of café with an interesting concept in Japan. It is called an “Aiseki café”. Aiseki means “sharing a table” in Japanese, and in an Aiseki café customers share a table speed dating style. Every customer has to switch tables a few times every hour according to the café policy. The first one opened in June, 2015 in Kurume, Fukuoka, and another in August, 2015 in Ginza, Tokyo. There may be more, but these are what I found online. More Aiseki cafés are coming soon. There are Aiseki bars & Aiseki restaurants also.
In 1954, Toho Production Company made the first Godzilla movie, and since then Toho has made 28 more Godzilla films. As I mentioned in my Shin Godzilla post, Toho is now at work on a new Godzilla movie for summer 2016. Toho also opened the Toho Building (unofficially known as the “Godzilla Building”) in Tokyo in April, 2015. This building features a huge Godzilla and offers hotel rooms from which you can see Godzilla just outside your window. Although it has been more than 11 years since their last Godzilla movie, Toho is successfully drawing Japanese people’s attentions to Godzilla once again.
These amazing body paint art pieces are done by Chooo-san or Hikaru Cho. Some of them were done when she was only a college student 19 years old. Now she is 22 and has been on many TV shows and held many art exhibits in Japan. She says that she does not use any computer graphics, and her paintings are all done with acrylic paint only.
Parasyte is the title of a SF manga written by Hitoshi Iwaaki (岩明 均) (b. 1960) between 1988 and 1995. In this story parasites come to earth and start taking over the brains of humans. The story raises questions such as “Why do we exist?” “How should different species coexist?” “Is it right to kill other species?” and characters explore the meaning of our existence throughout the story. Although the manga version of Parasyte was very popular, the anime version was only made in 2014. It took almost 20 years because the production rights to Parasyte were bought by an American company, but they never made use of them. It took 15 years for these rights to expire. Anyway, the anime is awesome! I love it. I have watched it about 20 times. lol (There is also a live-action movie version, but personally I don’t recommend it.)
Japanese people say they have “autumn appetite.” It means that you feel hungrier in the fall than in any other season. This could be from the fact that many crops are harvested in the fall so that food is abundant then, and also the fact that people recover their appetites once the summer heat has ended and their bodies begin to prepare for the cold winter ahead. I have noticed that I have been putting up many food posts recently, but that must be quite normal for this season.
There are many Starbucks stores in Japan, and some of the items they sell are the same as the Starbucks in the U.S., but also you see different menu items. As I mentioned last month, chestnuts are very popular in Japan. (Please read Chestnuts & Mont Blanc for more details.) One item found in Japanese Starbucks at this time of year is “Roast Nutty Chestnut”, which sounds like a drinkable version of a Mont Blanc. Yummmm!
In Japan, Mont Blanc is a very popular cake made with chestnut paste. It came from Europe originally in 1933, but has since been modified to Japanese people’s taste. It is called Mont Blanc because it’s supposed to resemble the appearance of Mont Blanc in the Alps. A classic Mont Blanc cake is a cupcake with whipped cream & chestnut paste on top, but today there are many fashionable variations, too, such as a Mont Blanc pie, tart, Swiss roll, etc.
From September through October is the season to harvest chestnuts in Japan. While chestnuts are not particularly popular in the U.S., they are very popular in Japan. We have many different ways to prepare chestnuts. They can be simply roasted, mixed in with rice and cooked together, baked into either European style cakes or Japanese style sweets, etc.
The Rice harvest in Japan comes in the fall. Rice from the new crop (新米 or shinmai) is a bit different from rice harvested pervious year and stored (古米 or komai), although this does not mean that the new rice is necessarily better. New rice is stickier and softer though, and also looks whiter and shinier, so it is definitely more popular. If kept properly rice will remain good for more than a year, and some people actually prefer old rice over new. It depends on what you are making, some dishes taste better with older rice. The rice from two years ago is called kokomai (古古米), the rice from three years ago is kokokomai (古古古米), etc. For every year that passes, the name will have extra “ko”.
