Japanese stationery

The Japanese do love their stationery, which is reason enough to want to visit there someday, in my eyes. I have loved the Japanese site Jetpens for a long time, and I'm always browsing through looking for some new cool pen or paper. Our favorite pencil sharpener is from Jetpens, and Sam gets a lot of his art pens there as well.

We watched this Begin Japanology episode about stationery, and one of the interesting things we learned was that the ink from erasable Frixion pens turns clear when it's heated. That should have been obvious, maybe, since that's the whole point of the friction eraser (it heats the ink so it will turn clear and disappear) but we were still excited enough about it to test it for ourselves.

Abe wrote with one of our Frixion markers on this paper:

And when we held the paper under a hair dryer, sure enough, the ink began to disappear! Soon the whole paper looked white again. So cool!

We also watched this episode on Japanese scissors, which made me really want to try some U-shaped spring scissors sometime.

Bonsai Art

Sam teaches an Art Lesson to the children (and me) when he can on Fridays, so during this unit he taught a class using Bonsai as a vehicle for some fundamental art principles. He showed this video on fractals and then discussed areas of rest and areas of detail, line flow within a composition, etc. He had us draw bonsai using big shapes and try to make them interesting and dynamic with the shapes they chose. After they had their shapes drawn, he had them fill in the shapes using ink and paintbrushes. It was quite fun to do, because the ink was so satisfyingly wet and bold and black! :)

Our bonsai pictures.

For awesome pictures of bonsai (and instructions on how to grow and cultivate them, but that is way too big of a project for us right now!), we recommend this DK Publishing book: Bonsai. We loved looking through it. We just love bonsai in general! 

We liked this video about bonsai, and especially the teeny tiny MINI bonsai they show, no bigger than your thumb. The cutest! Daisy almost died of happiness.

We went to a store that sells bonsai (Cactus and Tropicals) so we could see some in person. We like them so much. If they didn't seem like so much work to keep alive and beautiful, I would definitely want some in our house!

Animals of Japan; Geology/Geography of Japan

We watched several "travel video"-type movies about Japan during this unit, and our favorite was probably this one from "The Little Travelers." It's made from the viewpoint of two little girls traveling (alone, they make it seem like) around Japan. Daisy and Junie especially liked it. There are funny parts where the little girls try new foods or play with other children, and it just gives a feel of "this is real life in Japan." It was cute.

We talked a lot about Japan's geology, since it is so exciting! Hot springs, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunami…all things the children are interested in. We had watched some videos of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami during our Natural Disasters Unit (you can find links here) so we looked up those and watched some of them again. The power of those huge waves is truly amazing.

We also thought the pictures of the earthquake's aftermath, here, were very interesting.

Here is an episode of Begin Japanology about Japan's volcanoes.

The children, naturally, also loved learning about the Shinkansen or bullet train. They've loved all kinds of high-speed trains ever since learning about them during our Train Unit, but we talked more about the TGV than we did the Shinkansen at that time, so it was fun to learn more about this specifically Japanese innovation. We learned that the Shinkansen was developed by a man who made kamikaze fighter planes (with no landing gear, but with streamlined fronts suited for dive-bombing ships) during World War II. He used the streamlined nose designs from the planes to inspire the distinctive front end of the Shinkansen. This was a good video about the Shinkansen, and this video about how the workers clean the trains in only seven minutes was interesting too.

Japan has many interesting animals, but we were most interested in a couple specific ones: the Japanese Macaques or snow monkeys (the ones that like to sit in the geothermal pools—we're always seeing pictures of them) and the bunnies of Bunny Island.

We quite enjoyed this movie about the Snow Monkeys. It's your typical kind of nerdily-dramatized nature documentary (narrated by Liam Neeson). Be aware that does show some monkeys mating. And a baby monkey dies. :( But the monkeys are so cute! We loved them.

Speaking of monkeys, my friend Carrie Ann told us about her visit to this monkey park near Kyoto. It was in one of the travel videos we watched too. It looks so fun! We would love to go there.

Bunny Island is a tiny island in Japan where there is a huge colony of semi-tame rabbits. They think some rabbits were maybe left there by schoolchildren a long time ago, and then multiplied? Here is some of the story behind it. It looks like a place I would love to visit. So many bunnies! There are lots more pictures and videos:  Here, here, here,  here and even more here.

Japanese food: gyoza, tempura; "Kawaii cooking;" teppanyaki-style food

One night we decided to try making gyoza, which are the Japanese version of potstickers. We LOVE to eat potstickers, so we were pretty sure we'd like making them too.

I adapted this pork gyoza recipe, but now that I've made them once, I think it would be pretty easy to make up our own filling using cabbage and other vegetables, or adding some other type of meat. Apparently even the restaurants in Japan don't usually make their own wrappers, so we bought some of the round pre-made wrappers at the store and that made it easy. It always takes a while to fill so many little dumplings, but it's fun to do, and we got the hang of the pleating pretty well after a while. They turned out really quite delicious.

Our very favorite thing about studying Japanese food (besides eating it) was when we learned about the sampuru, or plastic food samples, often used in Japanese restaurants. These food samples are so realistic and delicious-looking that Japan is famous for them! I've even seen them at a ramen restaurant we went to in California one time. There is a cool introduction to the food samples here, and also a fascinating video here. You have GOT to watch the man form cabbage by dropping sheets of warm wax into water, and then folding it together and slicing it. It is AMAZING!

Anyway, one of the most popular food samples to make is tempura shrimp. So we decided to try making that, too. I have never shelled and de-veined shrimp before, but I asked the man at the meat counter to show me how, and he did, so now I can do it! The children helped me. We made tempura shrimp and also tempura vegetables, and everything was delicious. We used this recipe here for the batter and some miso mayonnaise dip (very yummy).

On another day, we talked about the Japanese concept of "kawaii," which basically means "cute," but has other implications as well (see a discussion of "kawaii" here). We watched some episodes of THE CUTEST YouTube show, called "Kawaii Cooking," which shows you how to make all sorts of impossibly tiny and edible things. They are adorable. Our favorite was probably this one showing tiny donuts.

While we were making gyoza, Sebastian decided he wanted to make a "kawaii gyoza." So he did:

Eeek! The tiniest!

Our own Japanese food was delicious, but I must admit it is not as good as food prepared by real Japanese chefs who know what they are doing! We got to go to a Japanese tepanyaki-style restaurant (called Bonsai Japanese Steakhouse; we recommend it; it's awesome) and we were amazed at how good everything was! 

Incidentally, lots of people (including the owners of this restaurant, so it must be acceptable) call this type of restaurant a "hibachi" steakhouse, but we learned that this isn't quite correct: a hibachi is a small grill with a grate, usually not even used for cooking in traditional Japanese homes, but just for heat. Teppanyaki is the correct name for the big griddle that they use at these places. Maybe since there's also an actual restaurant called Tepanyaki, it's just too confusing to call it that?

Anyway, Sam and I have been to a Tepanyaki and also to a Benihana (same kind of place) and we think this restaurant, Bonsai, is the best of all of them. We loved it. And of course the children loved the onion volcano and all the other antics of the chef. It was a really fun place to go (for a special occasion—it is not as expensive as Benihana, but still not cheap).

Japanese Tea Party

We do like a good tea party in this family. I wasn't going to do one for our Japan Unit, but after talking about how important the Tea Ceremony is in Japanese culture, the children insisted. It was probably the most inauthentic Japanese tea party every attempted, as we did not have traditional green tea (we just had our own camomile and other herbal teas), we didn't sit on the floor on tatami mats, and we didn't do any of the rituals or even have an actual ceremony. We did watch this video that explains the meaning of some of the parts of the Japanese Tea Ceremony, though. And we did drink out of bowls, which kind of resembled traditional Japanese tea bowls:

And we quite enjoyed ourselves, anyway!

Japanese treats

One of our neighbors served an LDS church mission in Tokyo, so we asked him to come over and tell us some of the things he knew about Japan. He was SO good with the children. He had them using chopsticks and learning to bow and say "konichiwa," and all kinds of fun things. We had a wonderful time. At the end of the night, he brought out some Japanese treats he'd gotten from the Asian Market. The children especially loved these little gelatin cups with the awesome name of "Portable Jelly":

The girls ate about half of this box all by themselves. Then they kept the little cups and played with them for several weeks.

I thought they tasted kind of funny, but not bad. They sure looked pretty!

Everyone's other favorite were these little Pocky Sticks (strawberry and chocolate flavors). Yum!

Japanese Cherry Blossom Art

Inspired by these collages and these lovely paintings, we decided to do a combination of the two and make some multimedia pictures of Japanese cherry blossoms (or sakura.) We liked learning about the significance of sakura to the Japanese, and its symbolic associations with the samurai and the fragility of human life. This video tells more about cherry blossoms, and we also liked this book about the cherry trees Japan gave to the United States.

Utah actually has a similar story: Boy Scouts in Japan donated some cherry trees to the International Peace Gardens in Salt Lake, but they had to be burned because of quarantine issues. You can read that story here.

We made these paintings by first washing a thin coat of blue paint onto watercolor paper (cut into long rectangles to look sort of like a Japanese scroll). Some of the children put a paper cup over their paper and painted around it to leave a white "moon" in the background.

Then we put lines of very watered-down brown tempura paint onto our papers and blew along the paint with a straw. This was supposed to move the paint organically down the paper and make it fork into natural-looking branches. It worked pretty well, though it was hard not to blow down and make a big blob on the paper. We got better at it as we went along. We also kept getting light-headed, so if you try this remember to take breaks every now and then.

Last, we put little squares of pink tissue paper around the eraser side of pencils, dipped them in glue, and pressed them onto the paper. I remember how much I liked doing this in kindergarten, and I STILL like it. It's just fun.

Some of the children wanted to write things on their pictures, so they looked up kanji characters and tried to copy them.

Junie's cherry tree. She did this all by herself. I like it.

Using Chopsticks

Even though I try to practice with chopsticks whenever I can, I'm not very proficient with them. The children have hardly ever used them at all. But we played some games (all based around the idea of picking up mini-marshmallows with chopsticks) to help us get some idea, anyway, of how they are used.

We liked this graphic about chopstick etiquette.

There's an episode of "Begin Japanology" about chopsticks. We didn't ever get to watch this one, but we still plan to. (I would like to watch every episode of this show. I love it.)

And we love this finger math game called "chopsticks." Apparently this is a game children play in Japan. We had played it before and knew it as simply "sticks." But it's a really fun game—try it!

Daisy, picking something up with great concentration

"I did it!"

Abe and Seb are pretty much chopsticks pros. :)

Homemade Sushi Party

Before this unit, I had only tried sushi a few times. I liked it okay, but I didn't really…get it. It seemed faintly strange to me, and I worried about the raw fish, but mostly I just didn't see what the fuss was about and I felt like maybe I was missing something.

MAKING our own sushi somehow transformed it into a food that I understood! Putting all the components together myself made me realize how many variations in taste and texture sushi can utilize, and I realized that "sushi" wasn't just one thing, but a whole class of food that could be adjusted to suit almost any taste. It just suddenly made sense. 

I think the other thing that helped me understand it was just seeing in videos how carefully and lovingly Japanese chefs prepared their sushi. I saw what an art form it was and began to appreciate the visual and creative elements. Two videos we really liked were this one on the history of sushi, and this Begin Japanology episode on sushi. And then seeing, in those same videos, people enjoying and relishing their sushi so greatly, helped me get over the hump of feeling like it was a strange food, and just feel more like, "Wow, so many people like this and think it's delicious…I want to try it too!"

Oh—and it also helped when I learned that each piece of sushi was supposed to be eaten in one bite. I can't always manage that, of course, but I think the first few times I had sushi I just felt so awkward eating it, because it fell apart or I couldn't quite get it with the chopsticks. But when I looked at each piece as an entity meant to go together, where all the flavors were supposed to join and make one multi-layered taste, I was more willing to just stuff it into my mouth and enjoy that deep blend of flavor. And not worry about if it was messy or if I looked silly. :)

The children didn't have any preconceived notions about sushi, but they loved all the other Japanese food we'd tried, and they had seen all the same videos where it was made to look so delicious, so they were all excited to try it. Their absolute favorite thing, though, was this video we watched about conveyor belt sushi restaurants in Japan. They LOVED the idea of getting your food from a conveyor belt, right at your table! It's too bad we don't have restaurants like this around here because they would have been overcome with joy to go to one.

Failing a conveyor belt restaurant, though, making our own sushi was the next best thing, because everyone could prepare theirs just as they liked it. We had our friends the Rhodes come over and help us. They had mats for us to use for rolling, and Carrie Ann brought the most beautiful platter of fillings (is that what they're called?). Mango, cucumber, carrot, lemon, lime, avocado, cilantro, cream cheese. She arranged them into darling little fish and turtle shapes, which is so Japanese in spirit. It was perfect. I got our fish, tuna and salmon, from a Market Street Grill (restaurant) and had no concerns about its quality, and once I tasted how delicious it was in the sushi, I wasn't concerned about it being raw, either. It was so great to have the Rhodes with us because they knew what they were doing, and helped show us so we could feel confident too.

The rice was easy to make. We used what was called "sushi rice" at our grocery store. Before cooking it, I made sure to rinse it several times until the water was clear, and I followed the directions on the package, which were a little different than the usual 2:1 water to rice ratio. (It was 2 cups water to 1 1/2 cups rice.) Then Carrie Ann told me to add, for every two cups of uncooked rice, add 1 T. sugar and 2 T. rice vinegar. I made two double batches of rice, one in the rice cooker and one on the stovetop, and I thought both were equally good.

So, for future reference (because we will definitely be doing this again), let me write out the recipe as I made it:

Sushi Rice

4 cups water

3 cups rice

1 1/2 T. sugar

3 T. rice vinegar

Rinse rice several times in a colander over a bowl. Then drain excess water so you're left with just rice. Place rice in rice cooker or in saucepan. Add 4 c. water to the rice. Stir in sugar and vinegar. Bring to a boil; cook, covered for 20 minutes (on stove) or as directed for rice cooker.

Malachi looks so sad, but I think he is just concentrating intently

Rolling the sushi was the best part. It was so fun to choose what combinations of things to put into your roll. I loved the salmon and the tuna, and I loved the bright flavor of the thin thin slices of lemon. Next time I want to perfect our sauces even more, but even the simple soy-sauce based sauces we made were quite good.

Todd was the best with the children. They ALL needed help at once, and he was always there to give it. Whereas I kept saying, "Just a minute, I'm making my OWN right now!"

We made some rice balls too, but I think everyone liked the sushi best. Seb arranged his plate with meticulous care, as we had learned how attentive the Japanese are to their food presentation.

Making our own sushi was also great because it allowed us to share the rolls really easily, and try a whole bunch of different combinations. There wasn't anything I didn't like. Everything was SO tasty!

Handmade Japanese Paper Lanterns

When I think of Japanese lanterns, the round or oblong ones like this come to mind first, but when I saw this tutorial showing how to make these really simple paper lanterns, I knew it would be a good project for the little girls. And it was. Really, sitting and cutting the lanterns was quite fun for all of us, but since Daisy and Junie were able to do it all by themselves, I think they were the most excited about it. The good thing about it being so simple is that even when the cuts were sort of uneven or crooked, the finished lanterns still looked good. That's a recipe for a successful kindergarten project. :)

We strung our paper lanterns (one string of mini-lanterns made from origami paper, one string of big lanterns made from 12x12 scrapbook paper) across our living room ceiling before our sushi party, and it gave the house such a fun, festive feeling. Then we left them up for the rest of our unit and enjoyed having our school area feel so Japanese and celebratory. They looked so pretty we hated to take them down at all!

In case you've forgotten from when you (inevitably) made these in elementary school, here is how to make this kind of paper lantern:

1. Fold a piece of paper in half. You can use square or rectangular paper; each will just give you a different lantern shape in the end. If you're using paper that's only decorated on one side, fold it with the colorful side facing out.

2. Make cuts all along the folded side of the paper. Don't cut all the way to the top; leave about a half-inch margin so you end up with a bunch of thin strips connected together:

It doesn't really matter if your strips are varying widths (in fact you can experiment with different widths to see what you like). Just make sure not to cut all the way through.

3. Open the paper up, turn it ninety degrees, and roll it into a tube shape. Connect the ends with a staple or a piece of tape.

And that's it! Malachi and Daisy ended up doing a presentation on Paper Lanterns for their 4-H Demonstration Contest, so they learned about all kinds of variations. You can punch holes for stringing lanterns together; you can add handles and decorative stripes; you can roll up a constrasting paper cylinder and stuff it inside to make the lantern look like it's glowing; and so forth—but the paper lantern at its most basic still looks lovely. I love the effect of a whole string of them in rainbow colors!