40

I turned forty today. My beard is visibly graying. My next pair of glasses will be bifocals. The top of my head has better use for sunscreen than for a comb. I am officially no longer "young" or "promising" for anything. Any year now, I may have to decide what I want to do when I grow up.

On the other hand, at 40 half my life still lies ahead of me - two-thirds, if you count just your adult life. That's statistically speaking of course; I could live to a hundred, or I could get run over by a bus tomorrow. Thirty, forty years of adulthood is a long time. It takes less than ten years to go from novice to proficient in most fields; in forty years you could have another two full careers.

The 40th birthday seems to create a lot of anxiety in many people; I don't really see why. Much worse, for me, was 25. That's when you're irrevocably an adult with adult responsibilities and expectations piling up. That's when you're expected to "go out in the world", "make your mark", "be all that you can be" and so on. You're supposed to build your career, start a family, become famous, become rich, seize the day...

"Be all that you can be" - well, by 40 you know what "you can be". You know what you'll be able to achieve and what you will not. Nobody expects you to do more than muddle through life, experience piling up and body gently falling apart. Which is great. With the pressure to succeed gone you're free to make you and your family happy instead. Do things because they're interesting, not because they benefit your career or your social status. And if you do decide to embark on something new you can do it quietly, with little fuss, and without expectations weighing you down.

No, 40 is not a problem. If anything this is the best time of my life so far. I have an interesting (if temporary) project to work on, fun hobbies, friends and acquaintances dotted around the world, and I'm happily married to a woman I love to distraction. I may finally be getting the hang of this whole "life" thing. I'll take 40 over 25 anytime.

Anyway, on our birthdays we always treat each other to dinner, preferably somewhere we would not normally go. Somewhere too expensive, too far away or too special for us to go on a normal weekend. On my birthday last year we had Kobe steak, and on Ritsuko's birthday we had traditional French cuisine. This year we ate dinner at "Rote Rose", a German restaurant and wine importer in Kobe.

Restaurant Rote Rose, Kobe.

The menu is very German, of course, with a fairly extensive wine list but only one beer (Löwenbräu). Ritsuko had today's fish and I had eisbein with sauerkraut. It was very good; the meat was savoury and very tender and the fat was not runny or bland. I have to say, though, that I'm no longer used to this kind of food; it was all I could do to finish the plate. Good food overall, if perhaps a bit overpriced. Not a restaurant for a beer lover but if you like German wines this seems a very good place to go.

Campaign Money - the Neverending Story

Japan's Finance minister Yosano seems to have been accepting donations from a dummy front set up to pay politicians for more than twenty years. He may possibly have acted illegally in accepting the money, though my guess is he didn't. Maybe he knew the source was dubious, but probably he did not. It hardly matters.

The elections are a couple of months away and as finance minister he's one of the most high-profile members of the cabinet. This is not a good time for the Aso government to remind everyone of the low-grade sleaze and shady deals that has become a hallmark of the LDP era. It's perhaps especially inconvenient that it's the minister of finance, who is supposed to be the man of the hour in this economic crisis. A bit difficult to send him out to calm the electorate if the journalists keep bringing up suspect campaign donations.

Also of note: The monthly Japan blog matsuri is up, with the theme of Living on a budget in Japan. Plenty of good entries there.

Umeboshi

We're making umeboshi this year in addition to the umeshū I wrote about earlier. Umeboshi are sour pickled Japanese plums; chewy but soft, sour but savoury. They're very popular and you can find multiple brands in any store. You eat them as a topping on rice, as an onigiri filling, or just straight up. A favourite of mine is to chop up one or two umeboshi, mix the pulp with a bit of soy sauce and use the resulting paste as a flavouring or dip for gyouza.

The process is a little more involved than making umeshū. The name means "dried plums", and drying them is one step along the way. What we'll do first is to pickle the plums in brine for a month or so. Then we'll sun-dry them for a few days and finally return them into the brine again. This creates the soft chewiness and very thick, succulent, savoury taste that is the hallmark of good umeboshi. There's several varieties including plain, shiso-leaf flavoured (it gives them a characteristic taste and strong red colour), and honey-flavoured. We're making all of those this year.

Ume soaking in water, with air bubbles forming on the surface.

The basic recipe is 1kg plums, 150g salt¹ and a little bit of clear distilled alcohol (white liquor, vodka or something like that). Clean the plums well, then soak them in water for a few hours. Meanwhile, use some of the alcohol to carefully rinse the glass jar and lid. One of the few problems that can crop up is mold and we want to prevent that if possible.

One jar, after three days. It was
completely full at first.

When the plums are done soaking, put them in the jar. Ideally there should be just enough to completely fill up the jar. Be careful that you don't damage the skin of the fruit. Add the salt, then pour about 50cc of the alcohol over the salt so it partially dissolves and dribbles down through the jar. Don't worry if there's salt left at the top. You can interleave the fruit with the salt if you want but it's not necessary. Many people use weights to press the plums down but it's not needed - the ume are heavy enough to sink on their own - so we don't bother with it.

Now we wait. The salt will start drawing out liquid from the plums, and pretty soon there'll be a pool of brine at the bottom. In time the liquid level rises and the plums shrink. You can carefully turn the jar over about twice a day for the first couple of days if you want to make sure the salt dissolves and all the plums get soaked in the liquid. Be careful that you don't damage them, though; they're getting pretty soft. After three days or so the fruit should be completely submerged.

 

The shiso has just been
added and the colour is
already spreading.

Shiso leaves. This is enough for 2-3 kg ume.

If you're making umeboshi with shiso, the shiso leaves go in after 3-10 days, depending on the recipe - basically, you can add it at any time after the ume is covered in the brine. You can get prepared leaves if you want, or buy a bagful of fresh ones. The preparation is really easy: Take a big bowl of leaves, sprinkle about two tablespoons of salt over them, and start rubbing the salt into the leaves with your hands. They'll soften, shrink and release a lot of red liquid almost immediately. After a couple of minutes that big heap is reduced to red water and a lump of soggy leaves. Add the lump of leaves to the jar.


This is as far as we'll get for now. The ume are quietly pickling in their sour, salty brine for the next six weeks or so. We'll take the next step around the Obon holiday in early August and dry the plums in the strong summer sun.

 


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#1 Recipes are typically 12-18% salt by weight. That's a lot of salt. Most of it ends up in the brine, not the plums though, and you don't eat more than one or two plums at one time so it's OK. Don't skimp on the salt; it prevents mould.

Zotero Lawsuit

A bit late on this: I wrote a good long while ago about Zotero, an open source reference management tool, and how Thomson Reuters, makers of EndNote, the most widely used (or at least most heavily advertised) such tool was suing GMU, where Zotero is developed, in court. Their grievance was that Zotero included a filter to convert citation format definitions from the EndNote file format and they claimed this was a copyright violation. This was a preposterous lawsuit, made even more so as these format definition files weren't even created by Thomson Reuters at all but by their users.

This lawsuit finally reached the court a couple of weeks ago, and the court promptly threw the whole thing out.

I use Zotero myself nowadays, and while it's far from perfect (the user interface is rather frustrating on a small screen), it is certainly good enough for real-world use. If you need a citation manager I advice you to take a good look at Zotero or other alternatives before locking your own citation and bibliography data up in EndNote. Thomson Reuters have after all shown that they're willing to go to court to prevent you from leaving them once they got you.

Midsummer

Today is Midsummer in Sweden. The actual summer solstice is on Sunday, but the celebration is on the Friday closest to the solstice. It's for practical reasons - nobody wants to have to go to work the next day if they can at all avoid it. No celebration for us here in Osaka - just as well; I'm still embarrassed from getting far too drunk last year - but we did have a vaguely north-European dinner tonight, with German sausages, smoked salmon, goat-cheese toast and mashed potatoes with dill.

Happy Midsummer, wherever you are!

Umeshu

'Tis plum season and time for umeshū again, the sweet, savoury Japanese plum liquor. It's getting more and more popular in summer - sales are twice what they were ten years ago - and for good reason. It goes well chilled or on ice, and even better with a drop of lemon juice or mixed with apple cider (my favourite). Best of all, it's really easy and cheap¹ to make your own.

Ume, Japanese plums. These are sour and hard and nothing you'd want eat. Great for making a drink from.

There's nothing to it: put some sour plums in a large jar together with rock sugar and "white liquor" - flavourless alcohol, usually about 30-35%. Recipes typically call for around 1kg plums, 2l alcohol and 400-600g sugar. Wait six months² to a year, then drink. The plums themselves become soft and really savoury and make an excellent jam if you wait no longer than a year to take them out. If you start a jar now, you'll have your first taste right around New Year.

All you need: ume, rock sugar, some inexpensive alcohol (the good stuff is wasted on this) and a jar for it all. Mix. Wait. Drink.

Last year we made vodka-based and rum-based umeshū, just to see what'd it be like. A year later we can say that they're both good, though a little tart for our taste; we ended up adding a bit of sugar to them over the winter. We used the cheapest white rum we could find, and that may have been a mistake, as the rum flavours have almost disappeared. A dark rum may be more interesting.

Brandy Umeshū

So this year we're doing another experiment, and making a brandy-based version. Our recipe is very simple: 1kg green plums, 400g sugar and two bottles of cheap brandy. Unlike umeboshi that needs high-quality fruit, you can use tart, damaged and scarred plums for this. No need to waste money on the expensive stuff.

Clean the plums (wash them and remove the stem ends with a toothpick). Spend an hour taking a picture of all the ingredients while your wife patiently waits. Put them in a jar with the sugar and pour over the alcohol. Spend another two hours trying to take a decent shot of the jar without having it look too much like a specimen in a disreputable medical museum. put the jar in the closet for the next six months and call it a day. See, not difficult at all.

Ps. This is my entry to this month's Blog Matsuri and the theme is living on a budget in Japan³. ds.

 
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#1 OK, so cardboard-box umeshū is a bit cheaper, but that's not even made with whole plums, and we do get a whole jar of ume jam out of this too. If you compare with good-quality stuff, you do save some money making it yourself. If you have a local source of plums, or your own tree, it's really no contest. Besides, cheaper or not, making it yourself is more fun!

#2 It's drinkable after three months, but it really needs at least half a year to develop the flavour.

#3 Not budgety enough? Here's an easy tip: Don't shop. The shopping culture here is hysterical; there's a ridiculous amount of shops around. Half the country states shopping is their main hobby. This is frankly one of the less attractive aspects of this place - on beautiful, temperate spring weekends you'll find the beaches and riverbanks half deserted but the malls crammed with crowds.

If you want to save, don't get sucked in. You don't need those clothes or that eggtimer or DVD player or a box of Pocky or a new phone or a new strap for the phone or cleaning liquid for the strap or a sailor outfit for your dog or a designer bag in which to carry it all; you want it. There's a difference. Buy what you need, not what you want⁴ and you'll be surprised how much money you save.

#4 Cameras are naturally a completely different matter.

When Danger Strikes!

Nara has its first swine flu infection, and an email has gone out to everybody at my work with information and advice. Sensible enough. They send it out in Japanese as well as English, which is very appreciated by us non-Japanese. I just wish they had somebody do a quick check that the translation is hitting the right tone.

The passage I reacted to reads, in Japanese:

各位におかれましては、引き続き、下記の点にご留意いただき、適切な対応をお願いいたします。

Approximately translated as:

Everybody, please remember to take heed of the following points and take appropriate precautions.

The English email, however, said:

The University urges all the members to be alarmed about the following points and must respond to this matter with serious attention.

Which, frankly, is rather more panic-inducing that I believe the authors may have intended. To me "being alarmed" is appropriate when, say, Godzilla has eaten the lunch cafeteria and is approaching our building for dessert.

On the other hand, I'd not have read it with such rapt attention had the word "alarmed" not jumped out at me from the text.