Halloween in Japan 2013 Progress Report #1: Food

One of my favorite things about Japan is how it assimilates foreign culture without imitating it. Take, for example, my favorite holiday - Halloween. We first started seeing the earliest glimmerings of it's presence here 20 years ago. Now it's becoming firmly positioned in the Japanese pop-holiday pantheon. But in the same way England and North America have their own ways of expressing it, so does Japan and it's about as similar the the American Halloween as is Mexico's Dia De Los Muertos.

This year, we're seeing two new sweets in the stores. This one is an apple pie that looks like a jack-o-lantern. Light, flaky crust and cinnamon-sweet apple filling.

...and this is a steamed pumpkin cake.

It has the consistency of sponge cake, but with a Japanese Kabocha "pumpkin," a variety of Asian squash. Very tasty.

I'm looking forward to what other confections Japan comes up with in the Halloweens to come.

Very Bad Neighbors

Man, talk about bad-to-worse.

We live and work in a walk-up above what use to be a ramen shop. It was a nice shop and we got along well with the family that ran the shop. About as bad as it got was in the mornings when we'd open the windows and catch a waft of the greasy, boiling pork stock. But it wasn't so strong. About like having a neighbor cooking.

Then they closed shop and moved out.

We went a year or so with a dark, cold, empty space under us. That made winters colder and I worried about it attracting crime or the landlord bulldozing the entire building.

Finally someone moved in; a couple of Nepali guys with the intention of opening an Indian curry restaurant. Initially that seemed great. More foreigners and Indian food a stair-way away.

What I didn't count on were foreigners and Indian food.

The Japanese put courtesy as a top priority at all times. They always start by asking themselves, "will this bother or inconvenience anyone?" Foreigners who learn to play like this do well locally. But most foreigners have no interest in this protocol.

Now we have people downstairs who might as well be Americans,  they're so inconsiderate.

• They play loud Indian music all night. 
• They block our entrance with delivery trucks.
• They throw trash in our garden and make a general mess of the area.
• They do noisy construction without regards to the acceptable construction hours.
• Unorthodox use of their plumbing has a sickening septic smell backing up through our kitchen sink regularly.
• They have completely filled up our "half" of the landing downstairs with garbage and junk to where we can't even get our bikes in and out. When we ask them to give us a little space, they just move things around.

The landlord could care less.

But the worst of it is the smell. It's really putting me off my love of curry. Our house is inundated with the reek of curry spices and garlic 24 hours a day. Even with the windows closed, it seeps up through the floors. Some days you can even SEE it as a yellow haze in the air. Our eyes burn and we have to run air filters all the time. There's nowhere to hang out our laundry that it won't come out smelling like curry.

I don't think they're mean. They're just inconsiderate. And I don't think I'm being bigoted by suggesting that it's cultural because my own American culture isn't in real practice one bit more considerate, as much as we Americans might like to think otherwise. We like to think we're so considerate, but growing up in Texas I met very few people who demonstrated such values. I must be turning Japanese.