Costa Rica Coffee-Maker
The process of growing one bean
The entrance to our hotel. In the jungle, the rivers are the roads.
Getting ready for our canopy tour
I totally got stuck in the mud!
Ahh, heaven.Thursday, October 16, 2008
Costa Rica (Aug/Sept '08)
Costa Rica Coffee-MakerThe process of growing one beanThe entrance to our hotel. In the jungle, the rivers are the roads.Getting ready for our canopy tourI totally got stuck in the mud!Ahh, heaven.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Run for Autism - Please Donate Any Amount!
CLICK HERE: Lisa's Autism Speaks Run Fundraising Web Page
Please support - any amount is greatly appreciated!!!
While 1,500 runners join Susan Pereles and her family in Potomac, MD, on July 4th, I will be running in a 15K race in Santa Barbara. I wish I could be on the opposite coast at this very special event, but I will be there in spirit as I do my own run in support of the Potomac 5K. Join me in supporting research, advocacy and awareness for this disorder that affects Shant, Aram, Steve, Bianca, Ben, Griffin, Olivia, Hunter, Dov, and 1 in every 150 children born in the U.S.
Thank you to Brendan, Dilip, Jane, Kristina, Seimeen, Taylor, Barbara, Tiffany, Maggie, Jenna, Melanie, and Mom for your generous donations!!!!!!!!
Please support - any amount is greatly appreciated!!!
While 1,500 runners join Susan Pereles and her family in Potomac, MD, on July 4th, I will be running in a 15K race in Santa Barbara. I wish I could be on the opposite coast at this very special event, but I will be there in spirit as I do my own run in support of the Potomac 5K. Join me in supporting research, advocacy and awareness for this disorder that affects Shant, Aram, Steve, Bianca, Ben, Griffin, Olivia, Hunter, Dov, and 1 in every 150 children born in the U.S.
Thank you to Brendan, Dilip, Jane, Kristina, Seimeen, Taylor, Barbara, Tiffany, Maggie, Jenna, Melanie, and Mom for your generous donations!!!!!!!!
Friday, April 25, 2008
Kiyomizudera
My father was in Japan fifteen years ago and I asked him what his favorite temples are in Kyoto. After looking it up to refresh his memory, he told me Kiyomizudera was his favorite. (If I can remember that name fifteen years from now, or even remember enough to find it on the internet, I will be impressed with myself, as I am with him!)
The last morning I ran to Kiyomizudera and took a cab back. I learned that morning that a wooden structure high on a hill at 7 a.m. on Monday, offers a more tranquil experience (to say the least) than the ostentatious Kinkakuji (“Golden Temple”), which is smack-dab in the middle of the tourist track.
On the way up (after seeing the first Japanese jogger I had seen, making me feel a teeny-bit less odd), I heard chanting. As I came closer the chanting of monks became more audible and the temple appeared. I couldn’t see the monks but I stopped running to lean my head against a large stone gate at the entrance and let the music soothe me…
…and back to Japanese pop on my Ipod. (Morning Musume, a group of 17 members with questionable talent, in case you want to download some J-pop.)
Uphill again. I must run toward the goal and work hard for it and then I will slow down once inside. They made us do it at Saihoji and it worked.
I was on my way down when I saw a small uphill pathway to my left. More hills? Well, is it worth it? What does the sign say? Nothing I can understand. Well, maybe there are plum blossoms there and I must work to get them. There were no plum blossoms but rather a wooden pagoda at the end of the pathway – perfectly stunning and well worth the trek.
And for dessert? A drink from the waterfall of pure water.
Background on Kiyomizudera:
The main hall of this wooden temple complex is notable for its vast veranda, supported by hundreds of wooden pillars.
It was built in 780 and still functions as a temple for the Hosso sect. The present buildings date back to 1633 and Kiyomizudera was named an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.
Visitors from the sacred water of Kiyomizudera, which is believed to bring health, longevity, good fortune, and success in studies. It has been said, since the Edo Period, that if one were to survive jumping from the terrace at Kiyomizudera, his wish would be granted. The lush vegetation below may cushion from the 13-meter fall, however, from the 234 jumps recorded during the Edo Period, 85% survived. The Japanese saying to “jump off the stage at Kiyomizu” is equivalent to the English to “take the plunge.”
The last morning I ran to Kiyomizudera and took a cab back. I learned that morning that a wooden structure high on a hill at 7 a.m. on Monday, offers a more tranquil experience (to say the least) than the ostentatious Kinkakuji (“Golden Temple”), which is smack-dab in the middle of the tourist track.
On the way up (after seeing the first Japanese jogger I had seen, making me feel a teeny-bit less odd), I heard chanting. As I came closer the chanting of monks became more audible and the temple appeared. I couldn’t see the monks but I stopped running to lean my head against a large stone gate at the entrance and let the music soothe me…
…and back to Japanese pop on my Ipod. (Morning Musume, a group of 17 members with questionable talent, in case you want to download some J-pop.)
Uphill again. I must run toward the goal and work hard for it and then I will slow down once inside. They made us do it at Saihoji and it worked.
I was on my way down when I saw a small uphill pathway to my left. More hills? Well, is it worth it? What does the sign say? Nothing I can understand. Well, maybe there are plum blossoms there and I must work to get them. There were no plum blossoms but rather a wooden pagoda at the end of the pathway – perfectly stunning and well worth the trek.
And for dessert? A drink from the waterfall of pure water.
Background on Kiyomizudera:
The main hall of this wooden temple complex is notable for its vast veranda, supported by hundreds of wooden pillars.
It was built in 780 and still functions as a temple for the Hosso sect. The present buildings date back to 1633 and Kiyomizudera was named an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.
Visitors from the sacred water of Kiyomizudera, which is believed to bring health, longevity, good fortune, and success in studies. It has been said, since the Edo Period, that if one were to survive jumping from the terrace at Kiyomizudera, his wish would be granted. The lush vegetation below may cushion from the 13-meter fall, however, from the 234 jumps recorded during the Edo Period, 85% survived. The Japanese saying to “jump off the stage at Kiyomizu” is equivalent to the English to “take the plunge.”
In Japan…
In Japan…
…the elevators will close on you even if you have your whole body in the doorway!
Likewise, the bullet train doors may close on you, if the bullet-train-staff doesn’t push you inside the train first.
…it is Halloween everyday. Just kidding, but there are so many professions that take their uniforms very seriously. Think, taxi driver in full bellman-like suit and white gloves. Firemen outfits that must weigh 50 pounds with all their gadgets and pockets. Garbage women in the train station with pink tops, white pants, pink hats, carrying pink garbage bags.
…you will receive a coffee “to-go” with a sticker placed over the mouth hole and the cup put inside of a bag with another sticker to seal it. The Japanese do not eat on the go. Nor do they walk and smoke. Nor are there any garbage cans, because if you’re not eating while you walk, then you won’t be creating trash.
Consequently, the streets are very clean. I am not clear on the laws for littering, but I am sure that it’s not illegal to walk and eat. However, the Japanese seem to feel a responsibility over space. They use the city streets so they keep them clean. Highways, where trash is more hidden from the pedestrian, are filled with litter. If there is responsibility over space, it’s immaculate. If there’s questionable responsibility, it’s not always clean. Beaches are not clean at all. Hotel beaches are very clean.
…macaroni and cheese (which was part of the Japanese section of the breakfast buffet) is delicious.
…there are many Italian and Chinese restaurants but “almost no genuine Italian or Chinese food. Ingredients are altered and watered down, and there is even a brand of olive oil which bears the label ‘specially reconstituted for Japanese taste.’” (from airplane magazine)
…hot dogs, french fries, and even takoyaki come out of vending machines. Still, they don’t eat on the go.
…there are buttons all over the toilet, which when pressed may shoot water up in an unknown direction, and most toilet seats heat up. Also, there is a heating system in most hotel bathroom mirrors that stops them from fogging up when you shower.
…there is even emphasis on Japanese syllables. For instance, Hiroshima should not be said with an emphasis on the –ro, nor on the –shi.
…a Japanese woman said I look Indian. Well, my last trip was to India. Maybe on my next trip I will look Japanese.
…“do as the Japanese do.”
…the elevators will close on you even if you have your whole body in the doorway!
Likewise, the bullet train doors may close on you, if the bullet-train-staff doesn’t push you inside the train first.
…it is Halloween everyday. Just kidding, but there are so many professions that take their uniforms very seriously. Think, taxi driver in full bellman-like suit and white gloves. Firemen outfits that must weigh 50 pounds with all their gadgets and pockets. Garbage women in the train station with pink tops, white pants, pink hats, carrying pink garbage bags.
…you will receive a coffee “to-go” with a sticker placed over the mouth hole and the cup put inside of a bag with another sticker to seal it. The Japanese do not eat on the go. Nor do they walk and smoke. Nor are there any garbage cans, because if you’re not eating while you walk, then you won’t be creating trash.
Consequently, the streets are very clean. I am not clear on the laws for littering, but I am sure that it’s not illegal to walk and eat. However, the Japanese seem to feel a responsibility over space. They use the city streets so they keep them clean. Highways, where trash is more hidden from the pedestrian, are filled with litter. If there is responsibility over space, it’s immaculate. If there’s questionable responsibility, it’s not always clean. Beaches are not clean at all. Hotel beaches are very clean.
…macaroni and cheese (which was part of the Japanese section of the breakfast buffet) is delicious.
…there are many Italian and Chinese restaurants but “almost no genuine Italian or Chinese food. Ingredients are altered and watered down, and there is even a brand of olive oil which bears the label ‘specially reconstituted for Japanese taste.’” (from airplane magazine)
…hot dogs, french fries, and even takoyaki come out of vending machines. Still, they don’t eat on the go.
…there are buttons all over the toilet, which when pressed may shoot water up in an unknown direction, and most toilet seats heat up. Also, there is a heating system in most hotel bathroom mirrors that stops them from fogging up when you shower.
…there is even emphasis on Japanese syllables. For instance, Hiroshima should not be said with an emphasis on the –ro, nor on the –shi.
…a Japanese woman said I look Indian. Well, my last trip was to India. Maybe on my next trip I will look Japanese.
…“do as the Japanese do.”
aesthetically-pleasing or incredibly disorienting
Pumpkin, by Yayoi Kusama
and sunset from Benesse House, Naoshima Island
Japanese modern artists have been very imaginative.
The person who goes to a modern art museum and says over and over “I could do that” wants art to be representative and pictorial, which is fine. There is another kind of art. One that encourages conversation and contemplation, oftentimes about what art is and who we are. The Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima Island has art in places and ways you least expect, demanding from us to wonder if we are happy when we are disoriented. When art and architecture do not do what we expect them to do.
The architecture and nature of this island work together to make an individual constantly question where they are among it. While architecture traditionally serves as protection from nature, here it serves as the medium through which we experience nature. Similarly, the art - which can be inside or outside, aesthetically pleasing or incredibly disorienting - encourages us to allow ourselves to be disoriented and have fun with it. As our study leader Angus said, “This place is about play. It reassures you that you don’t have to take art too seriously. Let’s move on. Let us use Japan to move on.”
Japanese modern artists have been very imaginative.
The person who goes to a modern art museum and says over and over “I could do that” wants art to be representative and pictorial, which is fine. There is another kind of art. One that encourages conversation and contemplation, oftentimes about what art is and who we are. The Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima Island has art in places and ways you least expect, demanding from us to wonder if we are happy when we are disoriented. When art and architecture do not do what we expect them to do.
The architecture and nature of this island work together to make an individual constantly question where they are among it. While architecture traditionally serves as protection from nature, here it serves as the medium through which we experience nature. Similarly, the art - which can be inside or outside, aesthetically pleasing or incredibly disorienting - encourages us to allow ourselves to be disoriented and have fun with it. As our study leader Angus said, “This place is about play. It reassures you that you don’t have to take art too seriously. Let’s move on. Let us use Japan to move on.”
And in the words of the modern artist Man Ray: "I have been accused of being a joker. But the most successful art to me involves humor." (Undated interview, circa 1970s; published in Man Ray: Photographer, 1981.)
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Classmate looking for a bone marrow donor
A classmate at Oxy and a wonderful person (and 6,000 others in the U.S. at any given time) is looking for a bone marrow donor.
http://ericamurray.blogspot.com/
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/media?id=6058314
You can look for drives by zip code here: http://www.marrow.org/HELP/Join_the_Donor_Registry/Join_in_Person/index.html
Registering is incredibly easy - just a cotton swab in the mouth and it puts you in the registry. When someone like Erica needs a donor, they will search the registry to try to find a match. The fact that she may not find a match is heartbreaking. There are a lot of people in the registry, but it is such a small percentage of our country. In my opinion, everyone should be in it. If you are called, even years later, you should be committed to donating your bone marrow, so I shouldn't pretend it isn't a commitment, but if you read Erica's blog, you will be convinced that donating would be a small price to pay for being able to save someone's life.
People of mixed ethnic backgrounds are especially needed (Erica is half Chinese, half Caucasian): Because tissue types are inherited, patients are more likely to match someone from their own race or ethnicity. Adding more donors and cord blood units from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds to the NMDP Registry increases the likelihood that all patients will find the match they need.
http://ericamurray.blogspot.com/
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/media?id=6058314
You can look for drives by zip code here: http://www.marrow.org/HELP/Join_the_Donor_Registry/Join_in_Person/index.html
Registering is incredibly easy - just a cotton swab in the mouth and it puts you in the registry. When someone like Erica needs a donor, they will search the registry to try to find a match. The fact that she may not find a match is heartbreaking. There are a lot of people in the registry, but it is such a small percentage of our country. In my opinion, everyone should be in it. If you are called, even years later, you should be committed to donating your bone marrow, so I shouldn't pretend it isn't a commitment, but if you read Erica's blog, you will be convinced that donating would be a small price to pay for being able to save someone's life.
People of mixed ethnic backgrounds are especially needed (Erica is half Chinese, half Caucasian): Because tissue types are inherited, patients are more likely to match someone from their own race or ethnicity. Adding more donors and cord blood units from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds to the NMDP Registry increases the likelihood that all patients will find the match they need.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
An attempt at writing
Japan was wonderful and I have been having a very hard time putting it into words. Why was it that India prompted countless thoughts while Japan leaves me tongue-tied?
I have to let it soak in, I suppose. As Adam advised when I returned from India - you must give your travels the reflection time they deserve. To pay honor to the experience. Perhaps after some time I will be able to write more.
Until then, I will try a haiku! Only 17 syllables, that shouldn't be too hard. Right?
At times do follow
Pick the plums or kindly wait?
You will be taken
Haha! Nice try...
Ogenki de (Keep well)
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
Fortune cookies Japanese?
A single arrow is easily broken, but not ten in a bundle.
Japanese Proverb
A statement once let loose cannot be caught by four horses.
Japanese Proverb
I'm off to Japan next week! Stay tuned...
In the meantime, some fun reading:
Fortune cookies Japanese?
*******
Fortune cookie history cropped up in the New York Times in an article written by Jennifer 8. Lee. Lee reports that the cookies were probably "invented" in Japan, but popularized in America in the middle 20th century post World War II by Chinese-American restaurants, hence our association of fortune cookies with Chinese cooking. Yasuko Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University near Tokyo, is Lee's source, and Lee writes, "Her prime pieces of evidence are the centuries-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 etching of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies."
Lee's website, http://www.fortunecookiechronicles.com/
*******
One woman.
One great mystery.
One consuming obsession.
40,000 restaurants.
There are more Chinese restaurants in this country than McDonalds, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken combined.
In The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, author Jennifer 8. Lee takes readers on a remarkable journey that is both foreign and familiar: penetrating this subculture by traveling the world (and almost every American state) in her quest to understand Chinese food and the people who make it.
Her journey took her to the hometown of General Tso (a military hero immortalized as much for crunchy chicken as his conquests), the surprising origins of the fortune cookie (it’s not China), and to six continents in search for the world’s greatest Chinese restaurant. The book also sparks debates as to who really invented chop suey and why Jews love Chinese food, or as she puts it: Why is chow mein the chosen food of the chosen people?
The book is a tribute to immigrants and to America. If our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie, ask yourself, how often do you eat apple pie? Now how often do you eat Chinese food?
*******
Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Published: January 16, 2008
Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil's national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies distributed by a Chinese restaurant chain called Chinatown.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Audio Slide Show
A Cookie's History
Video
A Cookie's Origins
Enlarge This Image
National Diet Library
Enlarge This Image
Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
COOKIE DETECTIVE Yasuko Nakamachi, a graduate student from Japan, traced the origins of the fortune cookie back a century or more to shops near Kyoto.
Enlarge This Image
Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
CRAFT OF THE CRUNCH At Sohonke Hogyokudo, handmade fortune cookies are formed in a wooden mold.
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But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.
Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.
Her prime pieces of evidence are the generations-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 image of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies.
The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least. "I am surprised," said Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. “People see it and think of it as a Chinese food dessert, not a Japanese food dessert,” he said. But, he conceded, “The weakest part of the Chinese menu is dessert.”
Ms. Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University outside Tokyo, has spent more than six years trying to establish the Japanese origin of the fortune cookie, much of that at National Diet Library (the Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress). She has sifted through thousands of old documents and drawings. She has also traveled to temples and shrines across the country, conducting interviews to piece together the history of fortune-telling within Japanese desserts.
Ms. Nakamachi, who has long had an interest in the history of sweets and snacks, saw her first fortune cookie in the 1980s in a New York City Chinese restaurant. At that time she was merely impressed with Chinese ingenuity, finding the cookies an amusing and clever idea.
It was only in the late 1990s, outside Kyoto near one of the most popular Shinto shrines in Japan, that she saw that familiar shape at a family bakery called Sohonke Hogyokudo.
“These were exactly like fortune cookies,” she said. “They were shaped exactly the same and there were fortunes.”
The cookies were made by hand by a young man who held black grills over a flame. The grills contain round molds into which batter is poured, something like a small waffle iron. Little pieces of paper were folded into the cookies while they were still warm. With that sighting, Ms. Nakamachi’s long research mission began.
A visit to the Hogyokudo shop revealed that the Japanese fortune cookies Ms. Nakamachi found there and at a handful of nearby bakers differ in some ways from the ones that Americans receive at the end of a meal with the check and a handful of orange wedges. They are bigger and browner, as their batter contains sesame and miso rather than vanilla and butter. The fortunes are not stuffed inside, but are pinched in the cookie’s fold. (Think of the cookie as a Pac-Man: the paper is tucked into Pac-Man’s mouth rather than inside his body.) Still, the family resemblance is undeniable.
“People don’t realize this is the real thing because American fortune cookies are popular right now,” said Takeshi Matsuhisa as he deftly folded the hot wafers into the familiar curved shape.
His family has owned the bakery for three generations, although the local tradition of making the cookies predates their store. Decades ago, many confectioneries and candies came with little fortunes inside, Mr. Matsuhisa said.
“Then, the companies realized it wasn’t such a good idea to put pieces of paper in candy, so then they all disappeared,” he added. The fear that people would accidentally eat the fortune is one reason his family now puts the paper outside the cookie.
The bakery has used the same 23 fortunes for decades. (In contrast, Wonton Food has a database of well over 10,000 fortunes.) Hogyokudo’s fortunes are more poetic than prophetic, although some nearby bakeries use newer fortunes that give advice or make predictions. One from Inariya, a shop across from the Shinto shrine, contains the advice, “To ward off lower back pain or joint problems, undertake some at-home measures like yoga.”
As she researched the cookie’s Japanese origins, among the most persuasive pieces of evidence Ms. Nakamachi found was an illustration from a 19th-century book of stories, “Moshiogusa Kinsei Kidan.”
A character in one of the tales is an apprentice in a senbei store. In Japan, the cookies are called, variously, tsujiura senbei (“fortune crackers”), omikuji senbei (“written fortune crackers”), and suzu senbei (“bell crackers”).
The apprentice appears to be grilling wafers in black irons over coals, the same way they are made in Hogyokudo and other present-day bakeries. A sign above him reads “tsujiura senbei” and next to him are tubs filled with little round shapes — the tsujiura senbei themselves.
The book, story and illustration are all dated 1878. The families of Japanese or Chinese immigrants in California that claim to have invented or popularized fortune cookies all date the cookie’s appearance between 1907 and 1914.
The illustration was the kind of needle in a haystack discovery academics yearn for. “It’s very rare to see artwork of a thing being made,” Ms. Nakamachi said. “You just don’t see that.”
She found other historical traces of the cookies as well. In a work of fiction by Tamenaga Shunsui, who lived between 1790 and 1843, a woman tries to placate two other women with tsujiura senbei that contain fortunes.
Ms. Nakamachi’s work, originally published in 2004 as part of a Kanagawa University report, has been picked up by some publications in Japan. A few customers have bought senbei from Hogyokudo, the Matsuhisa family said. But otherwise, the paper has drawn limited attention, perhaps because fortune cookies are not well known in Japan.
If fortune cookies are Japanese in origin, how did they become a mainstay of American Chinese restaurants? To understand this, Ms. Nakamachi has made two trips to the United States, focusing on San Francisco and Los Angeles, where she interviewed the descendants of Japanese and Chinese immigrant families who made fortune cookies.
The cookie’s path is relatively easy to trace back to World War II. At that time they were a regional specialty, served in California Chinese restaurants, where they were known as “fortune tea cakes.” There, according to later interviews with fortune cookie makers, they were encountered by military personnel on the way back from the Pacific Theater. When these veterans returned home, they would ask their local Chinese restaurants why they didn’t serve fortune cookies as the San Francisco restaurants did.
The cookies rapidly spread across the country. By the late 1950s, an estimated 250 million fortune cookies were being produced each year by dozens of small Chinese bakeries and fortune cookie companies. One of the larger outfits was Lotus Fortune in San Francisco, whose founder, Edward Louie, invented an automatic fortune cookie machine. By 1960, fortune cookies had become such a mainstay of American culture that they were used in two presidential campaigns: Adlai Stevenson’s and Stuart Symington’s.
But prior to World War II, the history is murky. A number of immigrant families in California, mostly Japanese, have laid claim to introducing or popularizing the fortune cookie. Among them are the descendants of Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese immigrant who oversaw the Japanese Tea Garden built in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in the 1890s. Visitors to the garden were served fortune cookies made by a San Francisco bakery, Benkyodo.
A few Los Angeles-based businesses also made fortune cookies in the same era: Fugetsudo, a family bakery that has operated in Japantown for over a century, except during World War II; Umeya, one of the earliest mass-producers of fortune cookies in Southern California, and the Hong Kong Noodle company, a Chinese-owned business. Fugetsudo and Benkyodo both have discovered their original “kata” black iron grills, almost identical to the ones that are used today in the Kyoto bakery.
“Maybe the packaging of fortune cookie must say ‘Japanese fortune cookie — made in Japan,’ ” said Gary Ono, whose grandfather founded Benkyodo.
Ms. Nakamachi is still unsure how exactly fortune cookies made the jump to Chinese restaurants. But during the 1920s and 1930s, many Japanese immigrants in California owned chop suey restaurants, which served Americanized Chinese cuisine. The Umeya bakery distributed fortune cookies to well over 100 such restaurants in southern and central California.
“At one point the Japanese must have said, fish head and rice and pickles must not go over well with the American population,” said Mr. Ono, who has made a campaign of documenting the history of the fortune cookie through interviews with his relatives and by publicizing the discovery of the kata grills.
Early on, Chinese-owned restaurants discovered the cookies, too. Ms. Nakamachi speculates that Chinese-owned manufacturers began to take over fortune cookie production during World War II, when Japanese bakeries all over the West Coast closed as Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps.
Mr. Wong pointed out: “The Japanese may have invented the fortune cookie. But the Chinese people really explored the potential of the fortune cookie. It’s Chinese-American culture. It only happens here, not in China.”
That sentiment is echoed among some descendants of the Japanese immigrants who played an early role in fortune cookies. “If the family had decided to sell fortune cookies, they would have never done it as successfully as the Chinese have,” said Douglas Dawkins, the great-great-grandson of Makoto Hagiwara. “I think it’s great. I really don’t think the fortune cookie would have taken off if it hadn’t been popularized in such a wide venue.”
Jennifer 8. Lee wrote “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” to be published in March by Twelve.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/dining/16fort.html?_r=2&sq=Fortune%20Cookies&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=all
Japanese Proverb
A statement once let loose cannot be caught by four horses.
Japanese Proverb
I'm off to Japan next week! Stay tuned...
In the meantime, some fun reading:
Fortune cookies Japanese?
*******
Fortune cookie history cropped up in the New York Times in an article written by Jennifer 8. Lee. Lee reports that the cookies were probably "invented" in Japan, but popularized in America in the middle 20th century post World War II by Chinese-American restaurants, hence our association of fortune cookies with Chinese cooking. Yasuko Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University near Tokyo, is Lee's source, and Lee writes, "Her prime pieces of evidence are the centuries-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 etching of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies."
Lee's website, http://www.fortunecookiechronicles.com/
*******
One woman.
One great mystery.
One consuming obsession.
40,000 restaurants.
There are more Chinese restaurants in this country than McDonalds, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken combined.
In The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, author Jennifer 8. Lee takes readers on a remarkable journey that is both foreign and familiar: penetrating this subculture by traveling the world (and almost every American state) in her quest to understand Chinese food and the people who make it.
Her journey took her to the hometown of General Tso (a military hero immortalized as much for crunchy chicken as his conquests), the surprising origins of the fortune cookie (it’s not China), and to six continents in search for the world’s greatest Chinese restaurant. The book also sparks debates as to who really invented chop suey and why Jews love Chinese food, or as she puts it: Why is chow mein the chosen food of the chosen people?
The book is a tribute to immigrants and to America. If our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie, ask yourself, how often do you eat apple pie? Now how often do you eat Chinese food?
*******
Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Published: January 16, 2008
Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil's national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies distributed by a Chinese restaurant chain called Chinatown.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Audio Slide Show
A Cookie's History
Video
A Cookie's Origins
Enlarge This Image
National Diet Library
Enlarge This Image
Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
COOKIE DETECTIVE Yasuko Nakamachi, a graduate student from Japan, traced the origins of the fortune cookie back a century or more to shops near Kyoto.
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Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
CRAFT OF THE CRUNCH At Sohonke Hogyokudo, handmade fortune cookies are formed in a wooden mold.
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But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.
Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.
Her prime pieces of evidence are the generations-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 image of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies.
The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least. "I am surprised," said Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. “People see it and think of it as a Chinese food dessert, not a Japanese food dessert,” he said. But, he conceded, “The weakest part of the Chinese menu is dessert.”
Ms. Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University outside Tokyo, has spent more than six years trying to establish the Japanese origin of the fortune cookie, much of that at National Diet Library (the Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress). She has sifted through thousands of old documents and drawings. She has also traveled to temples and shrines across the country, conducting interviews to piece together the history of fortune-telling within Japanese desserts.
Ms. Nakamachi, who has long had an interest in the history of sweets and snacks, saw her first fortune cookie in the 1980s in a New York City Chinese restaurant. At that time she was merely impressed with Chinese ingenuity, finding the cookies an amusing and clever idea.
It was only in the late 1990s, outside Kyoto near one of the most popular Shinto shrines in Japan, that she saw that familiar shape at a family bakery called Sohonke Hogyokudo.
“These were exactly like fortune cookies,” she said. “They were shaped exactly the same and there were fortunes.”
The cookies were made by hand by a young man who held black grills over a flame. The grills contain round molds into which batter is poured, something like a small waffle iron. Little pieces of paper were folded into the cookies while they were still warm. With that sighting, Ms. Nakamachi’s long research mission began.
A visit to the Hogyokudo shop revealed that the Japanese fortune cookies Ms. Nakamachi found there and at a handful of nearby bakers differ in some ways from the ones that Americans receive at the end of a meal with the check and a handful of orange wedges. They are bigger and browner, as their batter contains sesame and miso rather than vanilla and butter. The fortunes are not stuffed inside, but are pinched in the cookie’s fold. (Think of the cookie as a Pac-Man: the paper is tucked into Pac-Man’s mouth rather than inside his body.) Still, the family resemblance is undeniable.
“People don’t realize this is the real thing because American fortune cookies are popular right now,” said Takeshi Matsuhisa as he deftly folded the hot wafers into the familiar curved shape.
His family has owned the bakery for three generations, although the local tradition of making the cookies predates their store. Decades ago, many confectioneries and candies came with little fortunes inside, Mr. Matsuhisa said.
“Then, the companies realized it wasn’t such a good idea to put pieces of paper in candy, so then they all disappeared,” he added. The fear that people would accidentally eat the fortune is one reason his family now puts the paper outside the cookie.
The bakery has used the same 23 fortunes for decades. (In contrast, Wonton Food has a database of well over 10,000 fortunes.) Hogyokudo’s fortunes are more poetic than prophetic, although some nearby bakeries use newer fortunes that give advice or make predictions. One from Inariya, a shop across from the Shinto shrine, contains the advice, “To ward off lower back pain or joint problems, undertake some at-home measures like yoga.”
As she researched the cookie’s Japanese origins, among the most persuasive pieces of evidence Ms. Nakamachi found was an illustration from a 19th-century book of stories, “Moshiogusa Kinsei Kidan.”
A character in one of the tales is an apprentice in a senbei store. In Japan, the cookies are called, variously, tsujiura senbei (“fortune crackers”), omikuji senbei (“written fortune crackers”), and suzu senbei (“bell crackers”).
The apprentice appears to be grilling wafers in black irons over coals, the same way they are made in Hogyokudo and other present-day bakeries. A sign above him reads “tsujiura senbei” and next to him are tubs filled with little round shapes — the tsujiura senbei themselves.
The book, story and illustration are all dated 1878. The families of Japanese or Chinese immigrants in California that claim to have invented or popularized fortune cookies all date the cookie’s appearance between 1907 and 1914.
The illustration was the kind of needle in a haystack discovery academics yearn for. “It’s very rare to see artwork of a thing being made,” Ms. Nakamachi said. “You just don’t see that.”
She found other historical traces of the cookies as well. In a work of fiction by Tamenaga Shunsui, who lived between 1790 and 1843, a woman tries to placate two other women with tsujiura senbei that contain fortunes.
Ms. Nakamachi’s work, originally published in 2004 as part of a Kanagawa University report, has been picked up by some publications in Japan. A few customers have bought senbei from Hogyokudo, the Matsuhisa family said. But otherwise, the paper has drawn limited attention, perhaps because fortune cookies are not well known in Japan.
If fortune cookies are Japanese in origin, how did they become a mainstay of American Chinese restaurants? To understand this, Ms. Nakamachi has made two trips to the United States, focusing on San Francisco and Los Angeles, where she interviewed the descendants of Japanese and Chinese immigrant families who made fortune cookies.
The cookie’s path is relatively easy to trace back to World War II. At that time they were a regional specialty, served in California Chinese restaurants, where they were known as “fortune tea cakes.” There, according to later interviews with fortune cookie makers, they were encountered by military personnel on the way back from the Pacific Theater. When these veterans returned home, they would ask their local Chinese restaurants why they didn’t serve fortune cookies as the San Francisco restaurants did.
The cookies rapidly spread across the country. By the late 1950s, an estimated 250 million fortune cookies were being produced each year by dozens of small Chinese bakeries and fortune cookie companies. One of the larger outfits was Lotus Fortune in San Francisco, whose founder, Edward Louie, invented an automatic fortune cookie machine. By 1960, fortune cookies had become such a mainstay of American culture that they were used in two presidential campaigns: Adlai Stevenson’s and Stuart Symington’s.
But prior to World War II, the history is murky. A number of immigrant families in California, mostly Japanese, have laid claim to introducing or popularizing the fortune cookie. Among them are the descendants of Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese immigrant who oversaw the Japanese Tea Garden built in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in the 1890s. Visitors to the garden were served fortune cookies made by a San Francisco bakery, Benkyodo.
A few Los Angeles-based businesses also made fortune cookies in the same era: Fugetsudo, a family bakery that has operated in Japantown for over a century, except during World War II; Umeya, one of the earliest mass-producers of fortune cookies in Southern California, and the Hong Kong Noodle company, a Chinese-owned business. Fugetsudo and Benkyodo both have discovered their original “kata” black iron grills, almost identical to the ones that are used today in the Kyoto bakery.
“Maybe the packaging of fortune cookie must say ‘Japanese fortune cookie — made in Japan,’ ” said Gary Ono, whose grandfather founded Benkyodo.
Ms. Nakamachi is still unsure how exactly fortune cookies made the jump to Chinese restaurants. But during the 1920s and 1930s, many Japanese immigrants in California owned chop suey restaurants, which served Americanized Chinese cuisine. The Umeya bakery distributed fortune cookies to well over 100 such restaurants in southern and central California.
“At one point the Japanese must have said, fish head and rice and pickles must not go over well with the American population,” said Mr. Ono, who has made a campaign of documenting the history of the fortune cookie through interviews with his relatives and by publicizing the discovery of the kata grills.
Early on, Chinese-owned restaurants discovered the cookies, too. Ms. Nakamachi speculates that Chinese-owned manufacturers began to take over fortune cookie production during World War II, when Japanese bakeries all over the West Coast closed as Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps.
Mr. Wong pointed out: “The Japanese may have invented the fortune cookie. But the Chinese people really explored the potential of the fortune cookie. It’s Chinese-American culture. It only happens here, not in China.”
That sentiment is echoed among some descendants of the Japanese immigrants who played an early role in fortune cookies. “If the family had decided to sell fortune cookies, they would have never done it as successfully as the Chinese have,” said Douglas Dawkins, the great-great-grandson of Makoto Hagiwara. “I think it’s great. I really don’t think the fortune cookie would have taken off if it hadn’t been popularized in such a wide venue.”
Jennifer 8. Lee wrote “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” to be published in March by Twelve.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/dining/16fort.html?_r=2&sq=Fortune%20Cookies&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=all
Thursday, January 17, 2008
New York Times Article on Indian Schools,photos by Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/world/asia/17india.html
2nd photo: The school in Lahtora was crowded and cold, so classes were held outside.
3rd photo: A teacher watched as her students took a math quiz. Among the poorest 20 percent of Indian men, half are illiterate, and barely 2 percent graduate from high school, according to government data.
4th photo: Two teachers at the school were absent on this day, and one teacher's aide had shown up more than an hour late, with a crying baby in her arms. Many parents in this largely Muslim village chose Islamic schools because they were seen to offer better discipline.
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