Category Archives: travel

by Joel | 3 June 2013 · 5:22 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: hagitoriya, ekiben daigaku

I learned two new Japanese idioms related to transport in Delayed Departures, Overdue Arrivals: Industrial Familialism and the Japanese National Railways, by Paul H. Noguchi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1990), on pp. 41 and 46-47, respectively:

Hagitoriya 剝ぎ取り屋 ‘peeling-taking-doer’
or hagashiya 剥がし屋 ‘causing.to.peel-doer’

Commuter culture is a common feature among all transportation systems. However, the JNR worker had to contend with the intensity of this culture in Japan more than his Western counterpart. Twice a day the major urban centers in Japan become transportation madhouses which pale the images of New York’s Grand Central Station. Commuters have acclimated themselves to a high tolerance for discomfort in an over-crowded mass transportation system and have devised complex strategies for coping with these stressful conditions. They have learned the technique of sleeping while standing as well as the best way to fold and read a newspaper to minimize the use of space….

A direct result of this overcrowding on commuter trains was the creation of a specialized occupation, the oshiya ([推し屋] pusher), whose job it is to make sure the commuter is safely shoved into the railroad car before the doors are closed. The counterpart of the oshiya is the hagitoriya [剝ぎ取り屋 ‘peeling.off-taking-doer’, or hagashiya 剥がし屋 ‘causing.to.peel-doer’], or the one who pulls out passengers who insist on boarding an already overcrowded train so it can depart. Some of these trains carry more than than 200 percent of their rated capacity.

Ekiben daigaku 駅弁大学 ‘station-boxlunch-college’

Another part of the culture complex of the railways in Japan is the various box lunches (ekibentō) sold at many stations. For some older Japanese they are symbolic of railroad transportation itself. The box lunch sold at any particular station is distinctive to that station, and some have achieved considerable fame throughout the country…. These box lunches have persisted into modern times; even on the bullet train one can purchase a bentō as the train passes through a geographical region famous for a particular kind of box lunch…. A number of idioms built around ekiben have crept into the Japanese language. For example, in the postwar period after higher education was made more available to the Japanese masses, the nation witnessed a phenomenal growth in the number of colleges and universities under the new educational system. Obviously, these were not of the same calibre as the prestigious national universities and the selective private colleges. As station box lunches could be found almost anywhere, so, too, could these fourth-rate institutions be discovered throughout Japan. Hence they were labeled ekiben daigaku (station box lunch colleges).

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by Joel | 11 May 2013 · 1:56 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Chuckatuck, Nottoway

During my recent trip to see relatives in southeastern Virginia, I got curious about some of the Native American placenames and the languages they came from. Eventually I came across a very comprehensive article in Wikipedia on Native American tribes in Virginia (whose main contributors have the usernames Til Eulenspiegel, Parkwells, and—early on—Sarah1607). In it, I found that those tribes include not just descendents of Algonquian speakers (like the Powhatan Confederacy), but also a few far outliers who once spoke Iroquian and Siouan languages. The area I was visiting was where the three language types once met.

The village of Chuckatuck is now a borough of the city of Suffolk (the “World’s Largest Peanut Market” and home of WLPM-AM), formed out of what used to be called Nansemond County. As an English colony, Chuckatuck dates back to 1635. Chuckatuck Parish church (now St. John’s Episcopal Church) was established in 1642, and George Fox himself established Chuckatuck Friends Meeting in 1672. (Some of my ancestors show up in Chuckatuck Monthly Meeting records, but there is no longer a Friends Meeting there, as I discovered on this visit.) A Chuckatuck grist mill operated continuously from 1676 to 1972.

Despite being a tiny riverport and crossroads town, it has its own Greater Chuckatuck Historical Foundation, and Chuckatuck Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. According to the Foundation’s website, the village name comes from Chuckatuck Creek, “or Crooked Creek as the Indians called it” (a tributary of the James River). Those Indians must have been Algonquian-speaking members of the Nansemond tribe. The Virginia Algonquian language is also known as Powhatan, and was the source of such English words as hickory, hominy, opossum, persimmon, and (corn)pone.

Nottoway Parish was the original name of Southampton County, Virginia. It was named after the Nottoway River, which was in turn named for the Nottoway Indians who lived along it. The name Nottoway appears to come from an Algonquian word for peoples who were not Algonquian speakers. The same name shows up elsewhere in two counties named Nottoway in North Carolina and Louisiana, streets named Nodaway in Iowa and Missouri, and Nadoway Point in Michigan, where it faces Iroquois Island in Whitefish Bay, Lake Superior. The wide-ranging Algonquians had many foreigners in their midst.

We know the Nottoway used to speak an Iroquian language because someone collected a wordlist in 1820 from one of the last elderly speakers and sent it to Thomas Jefferson, who shared it with Peter DuPonceau, one of the earliest experts in the indigenous languages of North America. A few more words were added to the list, but they are the only trace we have left of the language. Nevertheless, they suffice to show that Nottoway was closely related to Tuscarora, which is much better documented but now highly endangered.

Two other groups of Northern Iroquian speakers lived in the area. The Meherrin Nation once lived along the Meherrin River in Virginia, but migrated south to North Carolina during the early 1700s. They signed several treaties with the colony and are now one of the eight indigenous nations officially recognized by the state of North Carolina.

The Tuscarora people once lived around the Roanoke, Neuse, and Tar Rivers in North Carolina, but began migrating north after the Tuscarora War of 1711-1713. Those who reached New York became the sixth nation of the Iroquois who are nationally recognized in Canada and the U.S. But other descendants of the Tuscarora have remained in North Carolina, and some have moved to Oklahoma.

Of the eleven tribes recognized by the State of Virginia, only three groups are not of Algonquian heritage. The Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia, Inc. and the Choreonhaka (Nottoway) Indian Tribe of Southampton County both descend from people who once spoke the same Iroquoian language.

The third group claims descent from speakers of Eastern Siouan languages (also known as Catawban). The Monacan Indian Nation gets its name from one of two historic tribes, the Monacan and Manahoac (or Mahock), who once lived in Piedmont Virginia and spoke languages (now extinct) closely related to Tutelo. The Tutelo fled north in 1740 and were adopted by the Iroquoian Cayuga in 1753. The ethnologist Horatio Hale, working among the Cayuga in Ontario, was the first to discover that the Tutelo language from Virginia belonged to the Siouan family. (He was also the first to identify the Cherokee language as Iroquoian.) So the Siouan language family once extended as far east as Virginia and the Carolinas and as far south as Biloxi, Mississippi.

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by Joel | 6 May 2013 · 8:20 pm

Four Notable Slaves and Two Generals

While visiting ancestral haunts and a few more famous historic sites in Southampton County, Virginia, in April, we pulled the car over in front of the Rebecca Vaughan house in Courtland and I got out to take a photo of it. Soon I heard a lady’s voice behind me asking, “What do you think?”

She turned out to be the head of the Southampton County Historical Society, which runs a museum in another historic site I had photographed near what used to be called Jerusalem Courthouse, when the county seat had been called Jerusalem. Perhaps she had followed us from there, because she followed us into Heritage Lane, where the Vaughan house sits, and back out when we stopped to take a photo.

The house is still being restored and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places because it was the last house in which anyone had been killed during the Southampton Insurrection of 1831, more commonly known as Nat Turner’s Rebellion. (I read William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner not long after it first appeared in 1967, the year I moved in with my uncle in Southampton County after finishing high school—in fact most of my childhood—in Japan.)

We two history buffs had a long and enthusiastic conversation that might have gone on even longer if it hadn’t been getting close to supper time. She named four famous slaves born in Southampton County.

1. Nat Turner (1800-1831), who led the slave rebellion in 1831.

2. Dred Scott (1795-1858), who left the County not long after his birth and died shortly after the landmark Dred Scott Decision in 1857.

3. Anthony Gardiner (1820-1885), whose family emigrated to Liberia in 1831, and who went on to become Liberia’s 1st attorney general (1848-1865), 7th vice president (1872-1876), and 9th president (1878-1883).

4. John Brown (c. 1810-1876), who escaped to England in 1850, where he dictated his life story to the president of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which published it under the title, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England (1855). (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had appeared in 1852.)

I hadn’t heard of the last two men, but I had heard of the two Civil War generals she next told me about.

General George H. Thomas (1816-1870) born in Newsom’s Depot, Southampton County, acquired several epithets from his leadership during the Civil War: “Rock of Chickamauga,” “Sledge of Nashville,” and “Slow Trot Thomas.” Until very late in the War, the Union troops never crossed the Blackwater River to invade Southampton County, and my interlocutor suggested that Gen. Thomas may have had something to do with that. (I doubt it, for two reasons: he commanded the Army of the Cumberland in the Western Theater; and Gen. Ulysses Grant held him in low esteem.)

General William Mahone (1826-1895) once lived in Mahone’s Tavern, just across from Jerusalem Courthouse. Trained as a civil engineer at Virginia Military Institute (class of 1847), he was hired to build the railroad between Norfolk and Petersburg. (His wife, Otelia Butler of Smithfield, is credited with naming several of the stations.) During the War, he distinguished himself at the Battle of the Crater during the Siege of Petersburg. He had worked as a teacher before becoming a railroad executive, and after the War joined the biracial Readjuster Party. He was a strong proponent of education for freedmen and free blacks and helped found Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute in 1882 (now Virginia State University), the first fully state-supported four-year institution of higher learning for black Americans in the United States.

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by Joel | 7 April 2013 · 1:06 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Kitchi Gammi, Nahgahchiwanong Adaawewigamig

While visiting family in Minneapolis over Spring Break, we made a long day trip up to Duluth and back. One of the architects (Oliver G. Traphagen) who designed many of Duluth’s finest buildings during its boom years in the 1880s and 1890s came to booming Honolulu in 1898, where he designed many more notable buildings, including both heavy stone (Richardsonian Romanesque) buildings and the graceful Moana Hotel, the first hotel on Waikiki Beach. The last Honolulu building Traphagen designed before he moved to Alameda, California, in 1907 (to help rebuild after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) was the Punahou School president’s home.

Kitchi Gammi – Another far more famous architect who left his mark on Duluth and Honolulu, as well as San Diego, New York City, and many other cities, was Bertram Goodhue. In Duluth, he designed the Kitchi Gammi Club (1912) and the nearby Hartley Building (1914) on E. Superior Street along the lake shore.

The club name, Kitchi Gammi (15,700 ghits), of course, comes from the Chippewa/Ojibwe name for Lake Superior, gichigami (13,300 ghits) ‘large lake’, which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow spelled Gitche Gumee (98,300 ghits) and translated ‘Big-Sea-Water’ in “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855). Gordon Lightfoot used Longfellow’s spelling in the lyrics to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (1976).

The name Hiawatha comes from a legendary Iroquois hero, and the name of his lover Minnehaha means ‘waterfall’ in Dakota, a Siouan language. Neither name is from Ojibwe, or even the Algonquian language family. The minne- that occurs in so many Minnesota place names comes from the Dakota root for ‘water’, mní-, which has the same shape in the closely related Lakota language farther west, according to the New Lakota Dictionary Online. The Rum River, which empties into the Mississippi just above Minneapolis, also gets its name from a mistranslation of the Dakota name for Spirit/Mystic River (Wakpa waḳaŋ lit. ‘River spirit’; cf. Waḳaŋ Taŋka ‘Great Spirit’).

Nahgahchiwanong Adaawewigamig – On the way back from Duluth, we detoured through Cloquet, Minnesota, to see the R. W. Lindholm Service Station designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1958 and now on the National Register of Historic Places. Then we stopped for a snack at Carmen’s Restaurant just across the street from a convenience store and gas station emblazoned with the words Nahgahchiwanong Adaawewigamig and the logo of the Fond du Lac Reservation.

I asked a young man who worked there whether he spoke Chippewa/Ojibwe. He said he spoke some, and translated the name for me as “where the water ends”—the same meaning the Voyageurs rendered into Fond du Lac in French. The Chippewa/Ojibwe name for Fond du Lac is now spelled Nagaajiwanaang, and adaawewigamig just means ‘store, shop’. Ojibwe speakers tend to create neologisms rather than borrow directly from French or English. By the way, the Chippewa/Ojibwe name for the St. Louis River, which empties into Lake Superior at Fond du Lac, is called gichigami-ziibi ‘Great-lake River’, the same ziibi that shows up in the various names for stretches of the Mississippi River, including gichi-ziibi and misi-ziibi in Ojibwe, both of which can translate into ‘Great/Big River’.

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by Joel | 11 November 2012 · 3:19 pm

Columbus as Portuguese Wannabe

From Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, by Matthew Restall (Oxford, 2004), Kindle Loc. 348-399:

Columbus had profound Portuguese connections. Although he was Genoese and the sponsor of his voyages across the Atlantic was Queen Isabella of Castile, Columbus spent much of his life from the 1470s on in Portugal. In the late 1470s he married the daughter of a Portuguese Atlantic colonist, and he repeatedly sought royal Portuguese patronage before and after first approaching the Castilian monarch….

This context is so important because it is by looking at Portugal before and during Columbus’s years there that one can see the degree to which the transplanted Genoese navigator had neither a a unique plan nor a unique vision nor a unique pattern of previous experience. Many others created and contributed to the expansion process of which Columbus became a part. Beginning 200 years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, southern European shipping broke out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic. The Vivaldi brothers, most notably, set off from Genoa in 1291 on what turned out to be a one-way voyage west across the Atlantic. Then, in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries a new zone of navigation was created that was bordered by the Azores in the north, the Canary Islands in the south, and the Iberian-African coasts in the east.

Finally, from the 1420s on, a further stretch of exploration and navigation into the mid- and west Atlantic was created and charted. In the 1450s and 1460s, Flores, Corvo, the Cape Verde Islands, and the islands of the Gulf of Guinea were explored. The Madeiras and Canaries were settled and turned into sugar-plantation colonies and by 1478 the former was the largest sugar producer in the Western world. Maps of the time show how important and extensive was the discovery of Atlantic space; speculation about the lands and features of the ocean was the most noteworthy feature of fifteenth-century cartography.

Although men from Italian city-states were involved from the start, and Castilians increasingly participated in the process (especially, from the late-fourteenth century on, in hostile competition for control of the Canaries), it was Portugal that dominated this expansion. Italian navigators were systematically and most effectively co-opted by the Portuguese monarchy (later joined by the Flemish), permitting the new Portuguese empire to control Atlantic settlement (except for the Canaries) and the agenda of expansion….

Columbus tried to become part of this process with growing desperation in the 1480s and 1490s. He failed for so long because he lacked the connections and persuasive ideas of other navigators. Even after he succeeded in crossing the Atlantic and returning, the extent of his success was questioned and questionable within the context of the time. The islands he had found (in the Caribbean) fell within the zone assigned to the Portuguese by the 1486 papal bull. And although in 1494 the papacy brokered a Portuguese-Castilian treaty that redefined these zones, it became increasingly apparent during the 1490s that Columbus had not found the much-sought sea route to the East Indies—but had been lying about it to Queen Isabella. Then, in 1499, Vasco da Gama returned from his successful voyage around the Cape and it became clear that the Portuguese had won the competition after all.

Columbus’s career was irreversibly damaged. His claim to have found islands off the coast of Asia, and thus the coveted sea route to that continent, rang hollow in the face of mounting evidence that these were new lands entirely. Columbus seemed to be lying for the sake of his contractual rewards. Perceiving the extent of his failure and his duplicity, the Castilian crown dispatched an agent to the Caribbean to arrest Columbus and bring him back to Spain in chains. Although he was later permitted to cross the Atlantic, he was forbidden to revisit the Caribbean and was stripped of the titles of Admiral and Viceroy of the Indies—titles he had fought to be included in his original contract and arguably the chief goal of his career. Meanwhile, those titles were conferred by the Portuguese crown upon da Gama.

The fact that it was Columbus’s voyages, not da Gama’s, that would lead to the changing of world history was not to the Genoese’s credit. His discoveries were an accidental geographical byproduct of Portuguese expansion two centuries old, of Portuguese-Castilian competition for Atlantic control a century old, and of Portuguese-Castilian competition for a sea route to India older than Columbus himself. Furthermore, had Columbus not reached the Americas, any one of numerous other navigators would have done so within a decade. Most obviously, the Portuguese Pedro Álvares Cabral explored the Brazilian coast in 1500, likewise arriving there in an attempt to reach Asia (by rounding the Cape).

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Filed under Africa, Brazil, Caribbean, Latin America, migration, Portugal, scholarship, Spain, travel

by Joel | 10 September 2011 · 2:56 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Menbei, Yuzusco, Hakugei

While we were shopping for light, comestible omiyage (souvenirs) to bring back from Japan this summer, we came across three products of linguistic as well as gustatory interest.

Menbei < mentai senbei – Korea is the source of one well-known item of Hakata (Fukuoka) cuisine, 辛子明太子 karashi mentaiko ‘spicy cod/pollock roe’. The name mentai apparently derives from Korean 명태 myeongtae ‘Alaskan pollock’. Its genus (Theragra) is different from that of the Atlantic pollock (Pollachius), but both fall within the highly prolific family Gadidae (< Gadus ‘cod’) ‘cod, haddock, pollock, whiting’. We bought a few boxes of spicy mentai-flavored rice crackers to share with our colleagues at work. Their pungent aroma caused some comment.

Yuzusco < yuzu ‘citrus’ + (~~taba~~)sco – The fresh taste of yuzu (柚子) is very popular in Japanese cuisine and is used to flavor many different things: from savory chawanmushi to sweet honey, bitter tea, vinegar, wine, and even bath oil. We brought back some tiny jars of yuzu pepper paste and two hot sauces marketed as under the brand names Yuzusco and Shogasco (< shouga ‘ginger’ + -sco). I’m not sure if the makers of Tabasco have licensed just the last three letters of their registered trademark, but they apparently encourage co-branding. Nor am I sure where these products rank on the Scoville scale of spicyness.

Hakugei ‘White Whale’ – At a duty-free shop at Fukuoka Airport, we got a sampler of five small bottles of shochu, a longtime Satsuma (Kagoshima) specialty. (The cashier unboxed them and put them in little transparent baggies so we could take them through security!) They included 麦わら帽子 Mugiwara Boushi ‘barley-straw hat’, made from barley; two types of Satsuma 白波 Shiranami ‘white wave’ made from sweet potato (my favorite) with dark and light molds; 白鯨 Hakugei ‘white whale’, made from white rice; and 蕎麦蔵 Sobagura ‘buckwheat granary’, made from buckwheat. Shiranami is perhaps the most famous brand name of Satsuma shochu, but the other brand names were well chosen to reflect their ingredients. As one might expect, Hakugei tasted the most like sake. I prefer sweet potato shochu myself.

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by Joel | 4 September 2011 · 4:31 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Dorui, Kangou, Funkyuubo, Fujo

The first tourist site we visited on our most recent trip to Japan was Yoshinogari Historical Park in Saga Prefecture, on a stretch of open countryside that turned up lots of artifacts from the Yayoi-period (roughly 300 B.C. to A.D. 300), including many large burial jars, when developers began to prepare the ground for a large shopping center. The site was then turned into an historical park featuring “one of Japan’s largest moat-encircled villages and ancient ruins.” In fact, another pair of visitors we met there were from Perth, Australia, a mother and her daughter who had won a national essay contest by presenting the case for Yoshinogari to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The signs describing the major features of the park were quadrilingual—in Japanese, English, Korean, and Chinese (simplified characters)—and one of the guides we met was a young lady from Dalian, China, who spoke some English and Russian in addition to Chinese and Japanese. (She was eager to practice her English, which was full of reading pronunciations.) Thanks to the helpful furigana on those signs, I learned a few new Japanese words and readings that were not even in my old Canon Wordtank G55 electronic dictionary. Here’s a sample.

土塁 dorui ‘earth fort, earthworks’ – The earliest forts in Japan apparently consisted of earthworks, palisades, and moats. The character 塁 ‘fort, rampart’ can be a synonym for 砦 toride ‘fort, stronghold, entrenchment’, but is now much more common in baseball, where it means ‘base’, as in 塁審 ruishin ‘base umpire’ or 塁打 ruida ‘base hit’.

環濠 kangou ‘ring trench‘ – The usual word for the ‘moat’ around Japanese castles is 堀 hori ‘ditch, canal’, related to the verb horu ‘to dig’. By itself, 濠 gou is better translated ‘trench’ (also ‘dugout, foxhole’), another product of digging. The character 環 kan ‘ring, circle, loop’ also occurs in 環境 kankyou ‘environment, circumstances’ (lit. ‘circle boundary’) and 環礁 kanshou ‘atoll’ (lit. ‘fringing sunken-rock’).

墳丘墓 funkyuubo ‘mound-hill-grave‘ – The common word for ‘grave’ is 墓 haka (Sino-Japanese bo) as in 墓石 boseki, hakaishi ‘tombstone’ or 墓堀 hakahori ‘grave digger’. A normal-sized grave mound is 墳墓 funbo ‘mound grave, tomb’, but a seriously hill-sized grave mound is 墳丘墓 funkyuubo (with 丘 ‘hill’, read oka in many placenames). Grave-mound building was carried to even greater extremes during the next major period of Japanese history, the Kofun 古墳 (‘old tomb’) period (c. 250–538).

巫女 fujo, miko ‘shaman, sorceress, shrine maiden’ – After immigration from the Korean peninsula began, but before Buddhism was established (during the 8th century), the chief spiritual practitioner in Japanese villages was a shaman, who was usually female, although the etymology of 神子 miko lit. ‘god-child’ is gender-neutral.

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by Joel | 28 August 2011 · 9:05 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Japanese Fish Names

During our recent travels to far-outlying corners of Japan we came across several local specialties that I had never heard of before. When I solicit the names for new dishes in Japanese, I often end up learning new fish names in English, just as I did long ago doing linguistic fieldwork in a coastal village in Papua New Guinea. Here is a sample of new fish we tried at izakaya last month.

Slender sprat sashimi

At the fine Umaya Restaurant beside JR Kumamoto Station, we ordered kibinago sashimi. After failing to find kibinago in my old Canon Wordtank G55 electronic dictionary, I asked the waitress if she could find out what to call it in English. She came back and showed me the gloss in her electronic dictionary, ‘silver-stripe round herring’. This slender sprat, Spratelloides gracilis, is often used as a bait fish, but also makes a very attractive dish of sashimi.

Mantis shrimp sashimi

On the way up from Kyushu, we stopped overnight at Shin-Yamaguchi, an old railway junction city (Ogōri) that was renamed and upgraded to a Shinkansen station but still proudly displays memorabilia from the old days. The owner of the izakaya we had dinner at was a train buff and the walls of our booth were covered with posters and photos of old steam locomotives. Among the novelties we ate there was shako sashimi, mantis shrimp (Squilla sp.) with ginger mustard sauce to counter the fishy taste. This creature I could find in my electronic dictionary, so I tortured the waitress with questions about old trains. We both recalled the days when the steam locomotive whistle would signal an upcoming tunnel, and we would quickly close the window so as not to get a faceful of soot. The next day we boarded the Super-Oki limited express bound for the Japan Sea coast and up the San’in Main Line.

Deep-fried dojo loach

After making a quick visit to Tottori’s famous sand dunes just in time for the sunset, our taxi driver called his contacts at Daizen, a busy new izakaya that he recommended when I asked where we could find a place that served local specialties. We ordered fried gobo chips, which are gaining popularity, and we ate two fish that were new to us.

Broiled rosy sea bass

One was loach, 泥鰌 dojou (lit. ‘mud-loach’) ‘dojo loach’, Misgurnus anguillicaudatus, also called ‘weatherloach’, a member of the carp order (Cypriniformes). The other was broiled nodoguro (lit. ‘black throat’) ‘rosy sea bass’, Doederleinia berycoides (also called 赤鯥 akamutsu ‘red gnomefish’) in the family Acropomatidae (lanternbellies, Jp. hotarujako ‘firefly fry’).

Poached nibbler

At a small mamasan-without-papasan izakaya next to our hotel in Tsuruga, we tried mejina nitsuke ‘poached nibbler’. The Japanese name, 眼仁奈 mejina, applies to both the genus Girella and the subfamily Girellinae ‘nibblers’, members of the Kyphosidae (sea chub) family in the order Perciformes. We spent a long time talking with everyone else there: the very hospitable self-employed proprietor, who served as her own buyer, cook, and waitress (and single mother); a very talkative traveling digger and inspector of wells and tunnels; and three ladies from Shikoku on a hiking trip, one of whom had a daughter just back from Ethiopia with JICA.

Sea bass sashimi

Our second evening in Tsuruga we went to a much larger izakaya that had been too busy by the time we showed up the night before. There we had suzuki sashimi, which our waitress described as light and tasty when I asked what kind of fish it was. I hadn’t heard suzuki as a fish name, but in Japanese taxonomy, 鱸 suzuki ‘Japanese sea bass or sea perch‘ Lateolabrax japonicus seems to be the type species or genus for a whole suborder and order of bony fish, the equivalent of Perc- in Percoidei (スズキ亜目) and Perciformes (スズキ目).

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by Joel | 11 August 2011 · 7:17 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Tetchan, Mitchan, Noritetsu, Toritetsu

Last month Mr. & Mrs. Outlier made good use of our Japan Rail passes to visit several of the more far-outlying places on Japan’s extensive rail network. We flew in and out of Fukuoka, so we started with JR Kyushu, riding its brand new Shinkansen trains as well as some of the older express trains.

On the way up to Nagoya, we stopped for a night at Shin-Yamaguchi, the starting point for the Yamaguchi Line, which connects the Sanyō Main Line along the Inland Sea with the San’in Main Line along the Japan Sea. Originally called Ogōri, the old station dates from 1913 and now caters to railway nostalgists, among whom I would have to count myself.

The next day we rode the 1-driver, 2-car Super-Oki Limited Express as far as Tottori, famous for its sand dunes. The following day we continued on to Toyooka, where we had to change to the non-JR Kitakinki Tango Railway‘s Miyazu Line in order to cross off my bucket list Amanohashidate, the third of Japan’s three most famous scenic views. Then we hopped back on the KTR to its terminus at Nishi-Maizuru, back on the JR network. Then we rode the local-only JR Obama Line the rest of the way to Tsuruga, the terminus of one of Japan’s earliest railway lines (1882), connecting the port of Osaka to the Japan Sea and crossing Lake Biwa by ship between Ōtsu (‘Big Harbor’) and Nagahama (‘Long Beach’).

In a small railway museum that used to be the Tsuruga Port train station building, we encountered a Japanese railway buff of the first order, a young businessman who was spending holiday time riding trains and visiting railway museums. When I told him we had come from riding the new Kyushu Shinkansen, he told me JR Kyushu had won awards for their new bullet train designs. When I said we were headed for Nagoya, he recommended I visit the new JR SCMAGLEV and Railway Park there. Our paths crossed again when he came out of the Tsuruga City Museum as we were going in, and he and I exchanged a final wave as he was entering and I was leaving the Nagoya Shinkansen station.

It was in Nagoya that Mrs. Outlier learned several words used in Japanese to refer to train buffs. The Japanese word for ‘railroad’ is 鉄道 tetsudou lit. ‘iron-road’, and railroad enthusiasts can be somewhat mockingly referred to as 鉄ちゃん Tetchan ‘railies’ if male and 道ちゃん Mitchan ‘roadies’ if female. (The native Japanese pronunciation of 道 is michi ‘road’.) More neutral terms for them in Japanese are 乗り鉄 nori-tetsu ‘ride-rail’ for those who seek to ride particular trains, or 撮り鉄 tori-tetsu ‘take-rail’ for those who seek to take photographs of particular trains.

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by Joel | 15 July 2011 · 5:40 am