Spring is coming... soon?

Ah spring... people changing out their winter tires, the roads clear enough to bike, the school entrance ceremonies... and of course, the most ubiquitous thing Japanese people associate with spring is the sakura (cherry blossoms) blooming.  I just flew into Tokyo a couple of weeks ago and they had an announcement about "you are arriving just before the peak of sakura season, so please enjoy the beautiful sight while you are here in Japan..."  And I did get to see some sakura blooming, on the bus ride from Narita to Haneda.  But when I arrived back in Aomori, there was still some snow on the ground.  Now most of it has melted, but there's still some straggling clumps where it was really piled up all winter, and no sakura yet!  My neighborhood is famous for having lots of sakura trees (it's even in the name!) and it still looks like this:  

The sakura bloom at slightly different times all across Japan, from late March to early April in the south and central area, mid-April to late April in the Tohoku area, and even early May in Hokkaido.  Okinawa gets it the earliest, in January!  We're supposed to get them in late April and early May, and there are lots of places to view the blossoms.  Last year I went to a hanami (flower viewing) picnic at Hirosaki Castle, which has over 2500 sakura trees on its grounds!  It was really pretty and a fun festival.  I still have never seen yozakura (night-sakura, where they illuminate the trees) and it looks pretty, so I'm hoping to see that this year.  Although, I have seen sakura at night riding home on my bike, just not illuminated! 

Spring always reminds me of the song 春一番 ("haru ichiban", the first spring) that my Japanese 101 teacher tried to get our class to sing every day in the spring.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kns1DHCa0Ss  We may have been reluctant to sing in class, but hey, Patton-sensei, I still remember the song!  And right now, もうすぐ春ですね~！  

Shira-oh-no...

(Heeeey~ it's the first comic since I started using a more advanced drawing program, yaaay...  Sorry for the inconsistency between this and the past ones)

明けましておめでとうございます！  Happy new year!  \(^.^)/ 

Sorry for not posting a comic in… forever (O.O;)   I got very busy.  I did most of this one over winter break.  One of my resolutions is to draw more often, so hopefully I’ll be able to work on more comics too!  

With the end of the year comes 忘年会 (“bounenkai”) season, which means lots of fun talking and drinking with your coworkers.  Some bounenkai are more formal, and some are more casual.  In my workplace, we have one fancy, all-staff bounenkai held at a hotel downtown, with speeches, games where you can win prizes, and several courses to the meal (so much food… most of it fish, I think because people eat osechi for new years and much of that is fish).  We also have a smaller, more casual party for just my department, that is more along the lines of a regular enkai.  This year, we had it at a fancy-schmanzy sushi place, so I mentally prepared myself for lots and lots of sushi.  But I had no idea what was coming.  (O_O;) 

I don’t eat fish very often and I eat raw fish even less, so my stomach wasn’t feeling too great with course after course of various sea creatures in various states of rawness.  I thought it couldn’t get weirder than the raw sea cucumber (which was saltier than a sailor plucked straight from the sea, and also very slimy and… hard?  Slimy but crunchy.  It was a weird texture).  When I saw them bring in something tempura-fried, I thought to myself “hallelujah, something cooked!”  I saw a good ol’ mushroom on the plate, and even something green!  Yay, vegetables!!  And next to it, a few tempura-fried squiggly blobs, that I did not recognize. 

The above conversation took place with the guy sitting next to me, and after a stealthy under-the-table google search on my phone, I realized that the thing I had just put into my mouth was none other than fried fish sperm.  Yep.  Suddenly his seemingly-random choice of words made so much sense.  The word “shirako” (白子) literally means “white children”, and I would say yeah, that is a fairly accurate description of what sperm is.  Go ahead and google it, if you want to see what it looks like.  Do it, I dare you.  Apparently, I’m lucky I got it tempura fried; it looks like it’s most commonly eaten raw.

Now, I’m all for utilizing all parts of the animal (even if I don’t like actually eating them myself, I understand the appeal of not wanting to waste).  But it seems like it takes considerable effort to extract “the seminal fluid of fish” (thanks, Wikipedia), and that it would really be easier to leave certain things within the organs of the animals that produce them.  I really do not want to think about the process of obtaining that.  Guess I gotta kinkshame the fishing industry, now.

On the plus side, the evening could only go up from there!  After that, the sazae (a type of sea snail) cooked in it’s own shell wasn’t so bad (again, very salty, not to mention sitting on its own little personal pile of salt.  I could feel my sodium levels rise just from that dinner alone).

(the guy next to me probably thought I was instagraming my food)

(not today, sazae-oni!  This time I eat you!)

What an adventurous evening.  I did considerable more chatting at this enkai, reassured a coworker that do, in fact, have friends, teased my boss about liking the Green Bay Packers, informed my supervisor that the Spanish wine he brought was called 牛の血 (“sangre de toros”, Blood of the cows), ate something I once saw in a manga (the sazae, featured in Shigeru Mizuki’s “GeGeGe no Kitaro”), and learned what fried fish sperm tastes like.  I’m really not sure how to feel about that last one.  (≡ω≡;)   

Happy year of the dog, and here’s to a great 2018!  Hopefully with no more fish sperm.