Asia – Page 9 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

The original fortune cookie

This may shock you, but fortune cookies are not Chinese food, nor are they really Chinese-American food. They started out as a Japanese product, and were copied by Chinese-Americans in San Francisco decades ago to form the dessert staple of cheap Chinese restaurants across the US. (This was detailed in a New York Times article last year, and linked by Roy in a post which I somehow missed; I learned of it from watching the author of said article, Jennifer Lee, give this fascinating presentation on the evolution of Chinese food outside China.)

The predecessor of the Chinese-American fortune cookie is the tsujiura senbei, a cookie made of flour, sugar and miso which is sold at certain shrines. According to Wikipedia, it comes from the Hokuriku region. But after some Googling, I found out that these are still made and sold at the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, and since I was visiting the city anyway, I decided to track some down. Sure enough, they were being sold in a few shops near the shrine, including one shop where they were being hand-made by an old fellow with a cast iron machine (as per the NYT article, which I didn’t discover until later).

As you can see, it’s larger than a fortune cookie, and the fortune (omikuji, actually) is held by the cookie’s fold rather than inside the cookie itself. In fact, there’s another surprise inside the cookie:

Those are dried soybeans, which serve to give the cookie a pleasant rattle as you shake it around. Hence the alternative name suzu sembei or “bell cookie.” I’m sure this was intended to please a hard-of-hearing Shinto deity, or something like that, but to me it was just an interesting modification on the fortune cookie style I grew up with.

The actual fortune looks like this:

And I’m pretty sure that it’s funny when you add “in bed” to the end. Some things are simply constant across cultures…

[Updated by Roy]

Unfortunately I had forgotten to charge my camera battery that day, but I got a few shots of the cookie making process before it died. They aren’t great, but I think you can get a fair idea of it.

What Joe forgot to mention-and this is critical information-is that they are miso flavored! There was a sign in all the shop windows saying this, and advertising that no eggs are used. Trying for the vegan market?

Graham and Kim

Our friend Curzon over at the Cominganarchy blog posted last week an excellent piece on the history of the involvement between the familes of the Reverend Billy Graham and the Kim dynasty of North Korea. The connections are, as usual, longer and more interesting than one would expect from just reading the news. I highly recommend reading it.

Chinese economy now #3

China has edged above Germany to become the world’s third largest economy, based on newly revised GDP data:

China’s economy leapfrogs Germany

The Chinese government has increased its estimate of how much the economy grew during 2007.

The revision means China’s economy overtook Germany’s to become the world’s third largest in 2007.

Gross domestic product expanded 13%, up from an earlier estimate of 11.9%, to 25.7 trillion yuan ($3.5 trillion).

The BBC tries to play this down (“Many Chinese people have not benefited from the boom”), but let’s use some simple algebra with vaguely realistic numbers pulled out of thin air to take a look at some rough growth scenarios:

China vs. Japan

Scenario 1: Given zero growth in Japan’s economy vs. 8% annually for China, China will overtake Japan in 2011.
Scenario 2: 2% growth in Japan vs. 6% for China = China overtakes Japan in 2014.
Scenario 3: 2% growth in Japan vs. 4% for China = China overtakes Japan in 2021.

China vs. US

Scenario 1: Given 2% growth in the US economy vs. 8% annually for China, China will overtake the US in 2034.
Scenario 2: 3% growth in the US vs. 6% for China = China is top economy in 2057
Scenario 3: 2% growth in the US vs. 4% for China = China rules us all in 2080.

So barring some major calamity or re-Maoization, China will overtake Japan as the #2 economy in a few years. The US seems a little safer but numbers like this make you sit up and pay attention to the Business section!

Dumbest research project ever?

I think we have a very strong contender here.

Karen, formerly a Hong Kong-based correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, seeks your input and is traveling around Asia for the next few weeks looking for people to interview.

Give your ideas below or shoot over an email. Here is Karen’s pitch:

Last month I wrote a two-part series for the Post called “Continental Divide” about the problems divorcing when you live outside your own country. I’m now in the region developing this series into a bigger project–both for the paper and as a possible book/film– on expat lives.

Expats live in a parallel universe. While they are culturally fish-out-of-water they can also live glamorous lifestyles. And while it can be a great experience for some, there is also a dark side to expat life. I’d like to further explore the issue by asking the simple question: Can marriages survive the expat life?

I’m looking for both men and women who are willing to share their experiences and willing to talk about the unique challenges they face. Men work long hours, are more stressed at work, and encounter greater temptation in the region. Women often quit good jobs at home, and while they find themselves nicely pampered at home, they often seen their identity slowly slip away as they face long days without husbands, and long months without family members or support systems.

So if you have something to say on the issue you an contact me at karen at mazurkewich dot com

I hope some people do write her with their opinions on this piece of Orientalist fantasy tripe. And this lady wrote for the WSJ? I take back everything I ever said about hoping the big newspapers survive.

Who owns these bodies?

Interesting mini article from the Taipei Times a few days back.

WWII graves located

Taiwan’s representative office in Papua New Guinea has located graves that it believes to be those of Republic of China (ROC) soldiers who died in World War II while they were enslaved by the Japanese army on the Pacific island, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. Lee Tsung-fen (李宗芬), deputy-head of the ministry’s Department of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, said that local Chinese compatriots said the graves at Rabaul were first discovered by an Australian pilot. It is thought that more than 1,600 ROC soldiers were captured by the Japanese and sent to Papua New Guinea camp during the war. Many of the soldiers reportedly either died in the camp or on the way to it. Lee yesterday said the Ministry of National Defense would send officials to the island to ascertain the identities of those in the graves, adding that the ministry would decide whether to transport the remains back to Taiwan after consulting with the relatives of the men.

The ROC is of course the official name of the government which now runs Taiwan and its accompanying islands, but during WW2 it was one of the two governments competing for mainland China, along with the CCP, while Taiwan was a Japanese colony. Presumably these soldiers were in fact soldiers from the ROC of that time, i.e. NOT Taiwan, were were fighting against Japan and then captured as POWs. Of course, this brings up the question of who should claim these bodies. Is it today’s ROC, i.e. “Taiwan”, or the PRC, i.e. “China”? While similar questions have come up in the past regarding property disputes between the two governments, this case is complicated by the fact that much of the surviving ROC military moved to Taiwan, along with many of their relatives. Should these remains be brought to:

A: Their place of origin (China, NOT Taiwan)

B: The place held by the successor to the military and government that they fought for (Taiwan, NOT China)

C: The location of their closest living relative (could very well be either Taiwan OR China)

IIjima Ai’s meaning to Taiwan

The mysterious death of former porn-star turned memoir author and TV celebrity IIjima Ai has been big news in Japan. I wouldn’t normally mention something like this due to lack of really caring much, but I was alerted to a rather interesting twist in a comment by Taiwanese TV Journalist Michella Jade Weng at Michael Turton’s blog. Weng linked to an a Mainichi article explaining that IIjima’s death has been unusually big news in Taiwan for a surprising and fascinating reason. I’ll give a translation of most of the article below.

Due to the import of adult videos starring Ms. IIjima in the early 90s when Taiwan was democratization and the opening of society were proceeding, Ms. Iijima became a “symbol” of freedom of expression and culture. The [December] 25th edition of China Times, one of Taiwan’s big four newspapers, had a front page article above the fold article which, along with showing a photograph of Ms. Iijima, stated that Iijima Ai “became the common shared sexual dream of Taiwanese men born in the 1960s to 1970s.”

Note that China Times now has a special feature section on their website, under the amusing folder name of “sexgirl.” UDN, another of the big four papers, also put together a special feature on Ms. Iijima, describing her as “a memory of all the men of Asia.”

Assistant Editor of China Times, Zhang Jing-wei, explained this treatment by saying “The period when Ms. Iijima was active overlapped with the period when Taiwanese politics and society were opened up.　We were not trying to be funny at all, and decided that Ms. Iijima’s death has social significance.”

In 1987, Taiwan’s 38 year period of marital law ended, and restrictions on cultural expression such as newspaper publication and songs were lifted. The Japanese adult videos that began pouring into Taiwan in the 1990s were considered a symbol of social liberalization.

Weng also reports that her editor explained it in more direct terms. “In addition, she was the common link between nearly all men born in the 60’s and 70’s, because almost all of them hid in their bedroom and watched her videos at one point or another.” Including her editor.

Burying the lede?

The NYT has a new article explaining in a decent length how currency-finagling led to a codependent financial relationship between China and the US over the last few years. Yes, that’s all very informative, but as is often the case they slip the best part in towards the end, where most readers will have already given up.

In a glassed-in room in a nondescript office building in Washington, the Treasury conducts nearly daily auctions of billions of dollars’ worth of government bonds. An old Army helmet sits on a shelf: as a lark, Treasury officials have been known to strap it on while they monitor incoming bids.

With a line like that, it’s criminal that the photograph for the article was Secretary Paulson and President Hu wearing boring suits.

A ruin in Taichung

Taiwan is full of Japanese style wooden houses leftover from the colonial period, but most of them are vacant, rotting hulks. There was one such house behind my apartment building when I lived in Taipei, which I posted two very nice photos of here and here. I was told (by Michael Turton) that this is largely due to the fact that insurance companies will not sell coverage for these wooden houses, and few are willing to live in an uninsured home.

While wandering around Taichung (in fact, just a day or so after visiting Michael at his home in that same city) I happened across this ruin and wandered around inside with my camera. Here are the photos.

I recommend using the flash slideshow in fullscreen mode for best resolution, or you can go to the Flickr page directly. Note that the pig was not actually inside the ruin, but tied up out front of a nearby shop.

Update: I should mention that it was late at night, and these photos were taken with available light and extremely long exposures. My zoom lense was broken at the time, so all of them are with a 50mm lens (1.6x crop factor). The camera is a Canon EOS 300D, which is aging fast and desparately needs to be replaced.

Taiwanese aborigine former comfort woman speaking in Tokyo this Fri/Sat

I should have posted a notice about the talk by a different woman here in Kyoto a couple of weeks ago, but it just didn’t occur to me even though I went to it. Anyway, here’s the info that I got through a mailing list. No point in giving the details in English since you’d need to understand Japanese (or Taroko, which is rather unlikely) to understand anyway. I’m sure there are people with all manner of views on the comfort women issue reading this, but hearing some first-hand testimony may be interesting to any of them.

Details below, for those who may wish to attend. It mentions a “texts fee” of 1000 yen, but I believe (no promises) that it is not required for admission.

Continue reading Taiwanese aborigine former comfort woman speaking in Tokyo this Fri/Sat

Anecdotal evidence that the “Axis of Evil” isn’t really all that tight

This weekend I had a conversation with a Zainichi-Korean girl who holds North Korean citizenship, who is studying Farsi at a university in Kansai. When her class was going on some kind of short study abroad trip last summer, she was the only person unable to go, as the Iranian Embassy would not issue a visa to a DPRK citizen not living in the DPRK.