Japanese Restaurant

46061782Today, I went back home to Altoona for the weekend. My aunt told me the other day that a new Japanese restaurant opened in town called Aki. There are a few other Asian restaurants in Altoona, but none of them offer even close to what I would consider to be authentic Japanese food. My dad and I both love Japanese food, especially sushi, so we decided to check out this new restaurant for dinner tonight.

We ordered a steak and scallop hibachi and eel and tuna sushi. We are both very big fans of eel, and to our surprise, their sushi was excellent. Then came the hibachi dinners. A chef came and did several tricks, juggled his spatulas and knives, and told jokes before lighting the grill. He spun an egg on the grill and tossed it around with his spatulas. He then would throw it and catch it on his hat or in his pocket. Then, he poured oil over the top of the grill and lit it on fire which made a huge fire only an arm’s length away from everyone. He then fried a massive pile of rice and vegetables and served some to everyone at the table. At one point, he tossed pieces of eggs at everyone for them to catch in their mouths. Then he made a volcano with onions and made fire come out of it (as shown in the picture on the left). Finally, he cooked all of our meat and served us the rest of our dinner. At the end, he jokingly squirted a sauce at a girl, but it was actually just a string that came out instead of sauce. It was funny to see her reaction, and it was unexpected. It was definitely an entertaining and delicious dining experience. The food was definitely very good and, compared to the other restaurants in Altoona, I would say that this is the closest we can get to something that tastes like authentic Japanese food.

However, the “performance” that the chef put on while cooking our food on the hibachi grill is nearly, if not entirely, identical to other American hibachi places that I have been to. It is interesting considering the background of hibachi style cooking in Japan. For example, in Japan, there are countless restaurants where a chef will cook on a hibachi grill (there are even some where you cook on the grill yourself!), but they are not always as performance based. Most places, they just skillfully prepare the food in front of you without any jokes or tricks for entertainment. Apparently, this style of cooking on a hibachi grill became more popular to tourists in Japan rather than Japanese people, so they emphasized the entertainment factor to attract more tourists. This is where the strange and funny tricks and jokes came. It’s interesting that in America, cooking on a hibachi grill is done the same way, because they are replicating a style in Japan that was catered to tourists. This is by no means a criticism, rather a curious observation and a review of a restaurant I went to tonight.

Either way, the food was excellent, the chef was entertaining, and most importantly, I enjoyed a great dinner with my dad. Currently, this is our favorite local place for sushi (other than making it ourselves; I make excellent sushi).

Paradigm Shift Outline

6bgrlvas60k1b8udmne3rg

 

 

 

Introduction

  • Topic: Increasing distrust in government at federal level
  • Not a major trend in local and state levels

Increasing trust until 2002

  • Kennedy (1941-1945)
    • 80% approval and trust
  • Clinton (1993-2001)
    • Increasing trust
    • Prosperous

Decreasing trust after 2002

  • All demographics and political parties trust the government less in general
    • More common with older Americans and republicans
  • Distrust with all branches equally
  • G.W. Bush started decline of trust
  • Obama
    • Most dramatic change in trust came from democrats and independents
      • Republicans already had very low trust
  • NSA
  • Economic problems

Societal and Political Impact

  • Local and state level
    • Trust remains consistent but could be impacted by federal government
  • Federal level
    • Even further divided politics
  • Societal impact
    • Unnecessary blame as scapegoat
      • Ebola

Conclusion

 

Studying Abroad

Earlier today, I attended an Asian studies meeting, and there, I received more information about minor and major requirements as well as study abroad opportunities. I have already decided that I definitely want a minor in Japanese, and I even went as far as figuring out exactly which classes I will take in the next four years in order to achieve that. Turns out, if I continue taking Japanese every year that I am here and also include my independent study, that is enough for a minor! I’m currently a business major (tentatively supply chain management and economics), and it is very likely that I will stay within the Smeal College of Business. However, it is incredibly marketable to be able to speak other languages in the business field, so that is how I would make Japanese work with my major. No matter what language, it is always helpful to be knowledgable about another culture and its language, esepcially in this field. In my business classes, my professors always emphasize how business is global now more than ever, and its crucial to be able to interact with people of other cultures. In the future, I would love to work with a company that would allow me to travel to Japan frequently. Conversely, maybe I would want to live in Japan permanently and work with a company that would send me to America often instead. The latter option is much more likely because there is such a strong American influence on Japan, so it would be rather easy to find a company that works closely with the United States. However, if neither of those options are available to me, at the very least, I can incorporate my knowledge of Japan into my every day life by speaking it with my family and traveling on my own frequently.

Anyway, during the presentation, it was strongly recommended that students study abroad at some point if they are interested in a minor in a foreign language. So currently, my plan is to study in Japan for a summer or possibly just a semester. The only reason that I wouldn’t want to take a whole year abroad is because I feel that Penn State offers a lot of opportunities and connections for business students, and it would be difficult to take advantage of those things if I’m not here. Ideally, I would like to go somewhere around Tokyo so my mother and the rest of my family could visit me occasionally. I would probably go sometime after my sophomore year so I have time to improve my Japanese before then. However, a part of me really wants to study in a country that I have never been to before. I always want to travel and see more of the world, and I feel like I might not get the most out of studying abroad if I go to Japan again. On the other hand, the last time I was there was a few years ago, and I have learned so much about Japan and grown as a person that I feel like it would be a new and fresh experience to me if I went again. I could also fulfill my desire to travel to other countries by traveling on my own time as a vacation for example.

 

Japanese

I was sitting in Japanese class the other day, and I was thinking about all the different ways that Japanese and English are incredibly different. First, Japanese uses syllabaries, which are basic characters instead of letters. Each character is assigned a specific sound, and they are combined to create words and sentences. There is hiragana which is the basic syllabary used for Japanese words. Katakana is hiragana‘s counterpart, except used only for borrowed words. Finally, there is kanji which are characters that represent words (sometimes multiple kanji are combined to make a word). Kanji was borrowed from the Chinese writing system, although there are variations among the characters. (Fun fact, I once did a basic Rosetta Stone for traditional Chinese, and I could read some of the words, but I could not speak Chinese because the pronunciations were so different. I would imagine that is why many Chinese students are in my Japanese class, because they are able to read Japanese kanji for the fig3-3most part.) In the picture on the left, each of those lines say the exact same thing, “Japanese (as in the language)” which is pronounced as “nihongo” (in English, think “knee-hone-go”). The kanji line says, in order, “ni-hon-go.” In this particular case, individually, the kanji for ni means sun or day, the middle kanji says hon, which means book, and the third and last kanji is go, which means speech or language. When the three are used in combination, it means Japanese. In hiragana, the characters from left to right read “ni-ho-n-go,” and that is simply because those are the sounds each character represents. Katakana is exactly the same way. Hopefully that wasn’t too confusing.

Another interesting fact about Japanese is that each word is said with a certain pitch, although it varies based on dialect or accent. Regardless, words are differentiated by pitch. For example, “nihongo” is pronounced with the initial “ni” low, and the rest is a high pitch. It’s hard to find a similar example in English because we use pitch for intonation. For example, in English, toward the end of a question, the pitch is higher.

The way that sounds are pronounced are also completely different. The most noticeable difference in my opinion is the differences between the R sounds. This is also what contributes to the typical accent that Japanese speakers have when speaking English. For example, my name in Japanese is “haruka.” I would describe the “ru” sound to be more like a “du” sound. For example, when saying the word “letter” quickly, the “tt” turns sort of into a d sound. This is pretty similar to the how the r sounds are in Japanese, and the sound is made by hitting the tongue toward the back of the mouth like in “letter.” Thankfully, I learned both English and Japanese at a young enough age that I can speak either language without a noticeable accent. My mother, a native Japanese speaker, and my father, a native English speaker, both have slight accents when speaking the other language although they both have studied the language for several years.

Overall, there are many distinct features that make Japanese different from many languages.

TED talk response

chimamanda-bioChimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” was both entertaining and thought-provoking. I enjoyed that she gave several examples of how people have fallen into the danger of only knowing one side of a story, and she even presented several perspectives. I appreciated that she used herself as an example. I found her speech to feel more personal when she admitted her own ignorance and mistake of doing exactly what she encourages others not to do. Overall, she emphasized the necessity of understanding more than just the surface of a story. Adichie misjudged a boy and his family based on what her mother said, her roommate made assumptions about her based on her ideas of Africa, and people make generalizations of foreigners. I was especially responsive to her use of repetition and anaphora. There are several phrases that she repeats at times during her speech to make it more effective (e.g. “…and you have an entirely different story,” “what if my roommate knew about…”). I found her to be an excellent storyteller, and she conveyed her message wonderfully and effectively.

We also watched Melissa Marshall’s TED talk, “Talk Nerdy to Me,” and conversely, it did not evoke the same response from me. I felt that Adichie’s talk was more poetic, eloquent, and engaging. In fact, and I hate to say this, the contrast between the two talks only highlighted Adichie’s mastery of elocution. However, Marshall’s speech did convey her message clearly and with simple examples, and it was by no means a bad speech. Had I not had Adichie’s talk so fresh in my mind, perhaps I would have a higher opinion of Marshall’s speech since I currently can’t help but compare the two.