Info at a Glance

DEADLINE

APRIL 30th

Levels available for the summer sitting N1, N2, N3 (the hardest top 3)



TEST CENTRES:
Japan all centres

GETTING THE FORM
Japan
Forms are available in Japan at any major bookstore. 日本語能力試験の申し込みフォームはありますか？ Nihongo Nouryokushiken no moushikomifoumu wa arimasuka? Is what you need to ask for. A full list of bookshops is written in Japanese here. I have bought them from Kinokuniya and the Aoyama Book Centre in the past. It costs ¥500 for the pack and a further ¥5500 for the application fee, which can be paid at the convenience store using the payment slip included in the pack.
Overseas
Application forms for overseas tests are different, and the procedures may be different too. Check the with the overseas institution you are applying to (see link)


FILLING IN THE FORM
Japan
Filling in the form is relatively simple. Follow the instructions in the pack, filling in both sides of the form and including a photo. Note you cannot choose specific test centres, they will be assigned to you based on your general area (Kanto / Kansai etc.) Remember: the address on the form will determine where you take the text and will be where the results will be posted. Also, make sure that your name is written on the door or the mailbox in both Katakana and Roman letters otherwise your results won’t get posted to you.

Overseas
Overseas forms may be different.


DEADLINE

APRIL 30th

STUDYING
This year is the first year of the newly revised tests. You can practice some of the new styles of questions by downloading a pdf from the JLPT website. Unfortunately, the textbook publishers haven’t kept up with the exam schedule so there are still far fewer N1~N5 books available than the old Level 1~4 books. Do you have any recommendations for the new exam books? Let me know!

March looks to be the hardest month on Masanobu Fukuoka’s seasonal cycle, and so, taking carrots as a pivot, I fell back on a fusion dish, some o-nigiri – adaptable to any season – and which is surprisingly hard to learn how to make, finally a slight cheat with carrot and coriander soup.

Soba

I’m indebted to Abel & Cole, the organic veg box company I used to get seasonal organic veg from in the UK for this recipe. They sent out each box with a recipe that correlated to the ingredients inside, and I managed to grab a handful of these sheets that had Japanese ingredients listed on them before I left the UK. Within reason, the vegetables could be substituted for whatever you have at hand.

Method

1) Make the sauce by whisking the ingredients together until well blended, then season to taste with salt and pepper, set aside.
2) Cook the soba noodles, drain, and rinse with cold water.
3) Heat cooking oil in a large wok, add the ginger and stir for 30s
4) Add the asparagus and carrot and stir fry for about 2 mins
5) Add the white parts of the onion and mirin and stir fry for 3 mins
6) Add the tofu and stir until heated through.
7) transfer to a large bowl and toss with the sauce, sprinkle with peanuts and the green parts of the onion and serve

konomi o-nigiri

o-nigiri is a Japanese staple – the Japanese sandwich. As such, it is infinitely adaptable, and only limited by your imagination. It is however, surprisingly tricky to get the hang of (o-nigiri bloopers to follow). My biggest piece of advice is to wait until the rice has cooled properly! In any case, if you are finding yourself buying sugar filled bleach-white bread and plastic cheese… as new arrivals seem doomed to do, get out the rice cooker and master this quick healthy meal option.

Method
1 ) After cooking the rice, measure your portion size by putting the amount of rice you want to eat into a bowl.
2 ) Put the rice into a larger bowl, and leave to cool a little (this is important!)
3 ) Prepare a bowl of cold water to protect your hands and reduce stickiness
4 ) Use the rice spatula to gently chop the rice with the sesame o-nigiri mix. Be careful not to squish the rice.
5 ) Now that the rice has cooled (important!), wet your hands lightly in the cold water and take a handful of rice and shape it into a triangle. This is done by the cupped shape of both your hands fitting together.
6) Make a small hole in the middle and add filling.
7) Cover with rice and pat in to shape again, maintaining a gentle touch.
8 ) Wrap in a piece of Nori and eat!

Carrot and Coriander soup

This is a standard recipe that you can find almost anywhere. The only thing to note is that finding stock cubes in Japanese supermarkets can be a challenge. Since the chances of having an oven in Japan are 0 to minimal, making stock the old fashioned way doesn’t tie neatly in to the roast dinner lifestyle of the UK. Hats off to you if you make the stock from scratch, otherwise head for the condiment aisle, and look for a packet like this, called consommé, rather than stock, (or コンソメ）. This one is by Ainomoto.
Coriander on the other hand can be easily grown on your balcony and should be available to purchase at a neighborhood plant shops. Herbs on my south-facing balcony seem to be pretty resilient, growing quite happily from late March / April through to November or December. Well the winter weather is lingering this year so I used a heavy dose of the dried stuff.

Method

1) Heat some cooking oil in a pot and saute the onions until translucent
2) Add the carrots and potato and fry for a few minutes
3) Stir in the ground or fresh coriander
4) Add the vegetable stock and bring to the boil. Simmer until the vegetables are softened.
5) Leave chunky or put in the blender.

Soup Garnish

Making soup gives me the opportunity to make use of any bread that didn’t get eaten, so for some fresh croutons try this:

Method

1) Cut bread into cubes
2) fry in the olive oil with with herbs and salt and pepper, put on top of soup.

The newly elected Democratic Party of Japan, now well past the 100 day mark in office, has decided to dip its toe into the easily muddied waters of green home rennovation. Like other nations’ government initiatives, this one awards but does not penalise, whilst simultaneously making incremental changes to the building regs laws of new-build only homes.

The headline offer is a maximum of ¥300,000 (about $3000) per household. The aim is to give a boost to the building industry which has seen the first dip in its 1,000,000 new projects per year record, in 42 years.
However, it is being advertised on a green ticket: to upgrade the performance of the disastrously insulated properties accounting for most of the archipelago’s housing.

According to the Asahi shinbun, the following offers are available
1) Change to double-glazing 2000~18000 yen-points
2) Build new outer walls 100,000 yen-points
3) Government standard insulation for roofs / ceilings 30,000 yen-points
4) Government standard insulation for floors 50,000 yen-points
and if either 1 or 2 are improvements that fix other health and safety issues int he process then more points are awarded.

Applicants may only have work done by an approved eco-points builder and the accumulated points can be used to either purchase more eco-rennovations or from a slightly eccentric list of apparently ‘eco’ products from a catalogue that includes Beef steak from Iwate Prefecture, and pre-paid cards for gasolene…(!)

Despite being one of the easiest gains in carbon savings, neither the UK or Japan are moving fast enough to meet their climate targets (of 30% and 25% cuts respectively, from 1990 levels by 2020) in this area, but Japan’s are coming even later in the day and with smaller benefits on offer than the UK, which has had several such benefits & grants schemes in place for over a decade.

Looking at the policies of any country around the world which invests a significant amount of its energy usage into either heating or cooling its homes, and you’ll see such top down approaches are increasingly common. But with the different housing stock and climates in each locale it can be hard to compare.

From my own experience, which confers with the JREF / wa-pedia authors a majority of Japanese homes are built with wafery thin wood combined with aluminium, single glazed, sash-sliding windows, and are heated with electric air conditioning units (that also blow hot) or stand alone units, both of which are just plugged into the sockets in the wall.

Checking the survey results of the Housing and Land Survey 2008 confirms that 59% of Japan’s housing stock is wooden.

The UK has its own set of problems, compared to Japan (which due to the flimsiness of the traditional building materials combined with frequent earthquakes has a fast turnover in building / rebuilding homes), the UK has many more old buildings – more than 28.9% of UK homes were built before 1950 compared with 4-11% of Japanese homes. In reverse, new build since 1990 accounts for just 11.4% in the UK compared to 41% of new Japanese housing. (See English House Condition Survey 2007 Annual Report by Communities and Local Government Publications)

The inefficiency of older UK housing is one of the biggest factors in our household carbon emissions, but in the case of double glazing we seem to be far ahead of Japan.

According to a factsheet on the glazing sector by the Energy Efficiency Partnership for Homes,

“In Defra’s ‘2009 Survey of Public Attitudes and Behaviours Towards the Environment’ 89% of respondents claimed that they had double glazing in their homes, with 76% claiming that all windows were double glazed

This is consistent with the CLG’s ‘English House Condition Survey 2007,’ which reports that almost 90% of homes have some kind of double glazing”

One final thing to consider is that the new Eco Points scheme is only aimed at home owners and developers, and Japan also has a lower home ownership rate compared to many developed nations, between 5 -10% less than the United States and the UK. No provisions appear to have been made for the some 40% of the population who are tenants and have little say in the energy efficiency of the homes they rent, typically on a long lease of 2 years or more. Even in the UK where some green renovation schemes have been means tested and aimed at tenants, the energy efficiency of the private rental sector has only caught up with owner-occupied properties in the last 5 years after consistently under-performing year on year.

Though undoubtedly a political risk, national governments could use the opportunity of new building and renovation policies to redress the imbalance in the home owning wealthy and those forced to rent through financial circumstance. Instead, this focus on homeowners only widens the gap by leaving tenants to pick up the fuel cheque for the leaky homes they rent. It may be years yet before tenants are in a strong enough position to demand high energy efficiency like they do public transport links or local amenities now, and a somewhat moot point if the average remains consistently lower than the energy-efficiency of owner-occupier tenures.

Pre-paid gasolene card rewards aside, an overdue green renovation scheme by the Hatoyama government is welcome, but it has a long way to go if its going to make a real impact.

As well as being a chance to meet the current creators in residence at the ex-UN research building turned live-in studio space, Professor Hisako Hara of the Osaka Electro-Communication University is giving a talk entitled “Current Role and Issues of Artist-in-Residence in Tokyo”.

So what is going on with Artist in Residence programs in Japan? To find out I looked up some of TWS’s history and future plans.

The 3 locations of the Wonder Site project are a product of the metropolitan cultural policy change at the turn of the millennium. According to TWS website,

“In 2001, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government changed its policy from cultural promotion that offers easier enjoyment of culture and art for citizens to one of support for the creation and transmission of culture and art. In the process of determining the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s cultural policy, the promotion of creative work has become a central issue.”

Meaning, I think, that local government redirected funding from the visitor / audience side – (ticket prices?) to supporting new art production / artists. That is a significant shift, and sorely needed if Japan is to create world class artwork.

The director of Tokyo Wonder Site is one spry looking 51-year-old Yusaku Imamura, he is also an Advisor on Special Issues to the Governor.

In an interview on the Shibuya bunka website, Mr Imamura says that his inspiration for the project was the AA School of architecture in London because it focusses not on mere technical skills, but rather on fostering visionaries of talent, (noting particularly preferable the idea of having a pub on campus for people of different disciplines to meet and debate and get drunk together).

On the premise that great art is founded upon great communal spaces to interact and evolve, Tokyo Wonder Site was given form in Hongo, North East Tokyo, in 2001.

The history of artists in residence in Japan is short, and as Yasuko Ogiwara of the Association for Corporate Support of the Arts states,

“in terms of artists coming to Japan, the first genuine AIR programs – as opposed to exhibitions or festivals involving the invitation of participants – were actually organized by foreign embassies. The main reasons for this were probably that interest in AIR programs had grown faster overseas than in Japan, and also that there were many artists attracted to Japan as a location for artistic creation.”

She goes on to explain the rise in rural AiRs run by regional government –

“The main reason that many of Japan’s AIR programs are now undertaken by regional governments is that in 1997 the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ Section for the Promotion of Cultural Activities in Regional Areas commenced the “Artist-in-Residence Program”. Existing and new AIR programs in ten areas around the country were given financial support for three to five years and the Agency joined with various prefecture, city or town-level governments to become the co-organizers of those programs….”

And the consequences of this type of governance -

An obvious consequence of regional governments becoming organizers of AIR programs is that their objectives are broadened to include not only support for artists, but also the promotion or revitalization of those regions. Having invited this ‘creative human resource’ to the region, the question becomes the extent to which they can make it (the artist) available to the community…. Exchange activities provide local residents with the chance to get to know the artists’ thoughts, and even participate in the creative process. In this way, they open up an entirely new world to people who would normally have little contact with art. Depending on how the exchange activities are arranged, their two-way nature can afford a sense of affinity and genuine pleasure that is unattainable in places like art museums, where only a one-way relationship between work and viewer is possible. However, when the artist senses this “service” to local residents to be an obligation or restriction they will occasionally make their dissatisfaction known. Artistic support and regional development in AIR programs managed by regional governments: the balance between these two elements will always be a point of contention.”

Mr. Imamura is the first to admit that arts have been sidelined in terms of funding and status, he notes “It seems art and culture has always been categorized as a hobby or a pastime [in Tokyo / Japan]” and that demands of the public for cost effective spending by government made it hard to implement artist in residences since it was ‘difficult to judge whether the resulting art from a 3 month placement corresponded to the investment’.

Unlike the UK with its wider public support for the arts, a tradition of philanthropy as part of the business model, and the benefits of imperial conquests to create headline shows, Japanese arts organisations have a much smaller corner to fight from. In this climate, TWS’s aims are admirable and ambitious. After 10 years since the first Wonder Wall event (the precursor to the established site), TWS is now well set up with a far reaching educational program. It’s sectioned into programs for those right out of school, to those entering the middle stages of their career, and covers not just studio based fine artists but also musicians, curators and researchers for Japanese residents and overseas guests.

In the matter of solving the infrastructure issue of Japan’s AiR schemes, Mr. Imamura is again aspirational – ‘Of course, Japan also has many other residencies and so we are aiming to build TWS Aoyama as the hub for a national network’.

2010/3.13 sat 14:00 – 18:00 participants
Åbake (Design studio)
Raquel Ormella (Artist)
Jeon Joonho (Artist)
Chung-Han Yao (Sound Art)
Matt Rogers (Composer)
Nicolas Lelievre (Artist)
Yu Kuwabara (Composer)
Nobuhiko Terasawa (Artist)
Hanako Murakami (Artist)
Takayuki Yamamoto (Artist)
Bettina Berger (Flutist)
Meri Nikula (Voice and Performance)

Leading on from my last post, here are 3 recipes for seasonal Japanese food in February. The end of winter, before new vegetables are ready to harvest, is not traditionally the high point of the food calendar. However, the following three are tasty and full of variety in these dark evenings under the kotatsu.

Kinpira Gobo

Method

1) Cut carrots and burdock into thin strips 4cm long
2) Remove Chili seeds and cut into tiny strips
3) Heat cooking oil, then add chili and sizzle for a minute
4) Add burdock and carrot and stir fry for 3-4 minutes until softened
5) Add soy sauce and mirin on a ratio of 2:1, to a strength of your taste
6) Mix in 1tsp each of seasame oil and caster sugar and serve.

Komatsuna Salad

Method
1 ) Wrap tofu in a kitchen towel or kitchen paper to remove excess water, cut into 3 squares..
2 ) If using whole white sesame, grind seeds with a pestle and mortar until at least about half has turned to powder, a little lumpy is fine.
3 ) Mix tofu into ground sesame and stir until it forms a paste.

4 ) Wash and then ease the whole bunch of Komatsuna into a pot of heated water and bring to the boil.
5 ) Drain Komatsuna and run through cold water.
6 ) Hold the Komatsuna from the root and squeeze down with your hand to drain out the greater part of the water. Komatsuna should bunch so that you can cut it in to 5cm chunks. Start at the root and when you get to the ends of the leaf, once again drain by holding it in your fist.

7 ) Add soy sauce and salt & pepper
8 ) Spoon in Tofu paste, mix and serve.

Squid and Bamboo Shoot Stir Fry

Method
Preparing the squid (Click through images)

Cooking
1) Heat oil in a pan
2) Fry squid for 2-3 mins until translucency disappears
3) Add the mushrooms and bamboo shoot and stir fry for a few minutes
4) Season with soy sauce and mirin to taste
5) serve with torn green perilla leaves sprinkled on top.

Masanobu Fukuoka’s life, like a glimpse of bygone rural Japan, heady with animistic whispers, and more familiar to enchanted scenes in Miyazaki’s anime, Totoro, is not the destination one would have predicted for him at age 25: stationed at Yokohama Customs and Excise, as a plant pathologist. Days spent inspecting microorganisms that hitched rides in on imported produce.

Then, hospitalised by acute pneumonia, a radical change of direction started to shape the man who would become Japan’s leading advocate for organic and no-till farming, permaculture and seasonal food, long before these words acquired the meaning they have today.

Masanobu Fukuoka died in 2008, aged 95, and that exact same year, serendipitously I pulled his book, The One Straw Revolution out of the Japan Foundation Library’s book shelves.

This book has so much to say about the ways in which pollution and waste are built in to the systems of food we rely on for daily sustenance. In a culture that discourages dissent, Masanobu Fukuoka courageously questioned the interests of big business, government entanglement with farm chemical companies, and the lack of joined up thinking that has caused many of Japan’s environmental problems.

This book was out of print in English for a long time, but in June of last year, The New York Review of Books republished the English version. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in sustainable agriculture in particular, but also, more generally, a unique outlook of man’s place in his environment, and a story that echoes other courageous environmentalists of his generation, whose words are yet to be heeded.

For those in Japan, one of the most useful parts of the book is the section where he details which foods are seasonal to Japan. Here I found my first link to reconnecting with food, in a foreign country where I didn’t know what many of the vegetables were.

The One Straw Revolution is available in English

• To buy: from The New York Review of Books Bookstore
• To borrow: From the Japan Foundation Library in Shinjuku, Tokyo
• To steal: in pdf form, in several places around the web

わら一本の革命 is available in Japanese, along with many other of Fukuoka’s works,
• At Kinokuniya (Shinjuku Hon Ten)

So, where to begin..

Anki

This is a program based on ’spaced repetition memory system’ which is basically where the computer calculates which how well you know a piece of knowledge that you’ve stored on the program based on your answers after having flipped the computer flash cards. Did you find it easy / good / hard or you need to see it again? From there, the computer calculates how long until you should see that card again. Each card then accumulates a history of your learning of it. The idea being that it catches you in time before you forget, and aids the transition into long term memory. You can do this with paper but the computer is doing some difficult and tedious calculations to constantly be on top of which ones you know and which ones you don’t. Anki could actually be used for learning anything where you need memory based learning, but as the name suggests, creator Damien Elmes made it with Japanese in mind. There are a bunch of freeware SRMS programs out there, but I like anki for some important reasons.

1) A community has started to build up around it and now 3rd party plugins are easily available. This mean individual words that you add to your ‘knowledge’ library can be much more easily assimilated using my favourite plugin – example sentences using Professor Yasuhito Tanaka’s 180,000 english-japanese paired sentences. Go to File>Download>shared plugin then pick ‘example sentences’
2) Its connected to an internet server so you can pick up where you left off by studying online at the office or wherever. A free iphone app called StudyArcade also connects to this server so you can use it on your phone.
3) You can tally how many kanji you’ve learnt and at what level, or just see which ones you’ve missed. Make sure to download Japanese Support File>download>shared plugin> Japanese support
4) Although I don’t use this function, because I found adding content myself is the most effective way to learn, there are pre-made knowledge decks of all JLPT levels, Heisig, and no doubt a number of other popular learning systems

Downsides?
Well, yeah,
1) The user interface is a tiny bit counter intuitive to begin with, so don’t be surprised if it takes you half an hour or so to figure out how to make the kind of flash cards you want
2) There’s no iphone app yet!!! Would definitely pay a few bucks for the ability to use this seamlessly on my phone. StudyArcade is an OKish substitute, but, you don’t get the example sentences plugin, the synch function is only one way – so when you get home the cards you practiced on the train aren’t logged so they are still ‘due’ for revision on the main anki server, and StudyArcade’s developer often lags behind updates with Anki, so a couple of times this year, owing to Anki’s new updates, StudyArcade couldn’t access the server and pull new cards. At one point I was adding 20 new words a day so the stuff on my phone soon got out of date.

Next is….

Denshi Jisho

I just found this 2 days ago. How I love it! Its really simple, just an online Nelson basically. I have a paper Nelson dictionary, 20 years old, falling apart from my mum…. but it has to be quite a kanji emergency for me to whip it out. Usually I just ineffectively type in the sound of the radical I think is giving the yomi-kata and hope its in the same family and will therefore be listed on the computer… seriously lazy and often futile. But no more! Denshi Jisho is a really simple search by radical tool. I don’t know why I couldn’t find one of these before. Thanks very much Kim Ahlström for developing it.

Rikai.com Kanji Map

Ok so this one looks like its been there since the 90s based on the design of the site…. no offence…. but this is a great tool for the other thing I used Nelson for, once upon a time… that is finding vocab associated with a particular kanji. Great for vocabulary building around kanji you already know – which is a great confidence booster. I’m not sure if this is related to rikaichan. Developed by Todd David Rudick. If you land on the home page it can be disorientating with all kinds of unrelated content. Stick to the map.

shinkanji

Next, something I’ve been looking for for a while. a drawable kanji look-up tool for my iphone. I figured there must be hundreds, but only landed on shinkanji today after a long search. I haven’t been able to find a free app that does this, and shelled out £3.49 for it, but so worth it for quick kanji recognition.

So that’s what I’ve been using this year.

Lastly,
I also came across this Kanji Reader device for that pesky portion of text that isn’t digitised. It looked like it could be quite good except that its $300 and the dictionary didn’t seem to be that big.

So what have all of the above tools – bar the kanji reader – got in common? Well, it’s this nice man, Jim Breen.

Like many of the above heroes of modern Japanese learning, he’s first and foremost a specialist in computer science. And somehow on top of that, he has created what must be the most widely distributed Japanese-English resource on the web. Its open source and mirrored in several locations making it nice and speedy to access. I’d venture that even a lot of the paid dictionary apps on the iphone have probably come from this free resource. The dictionary as it stands now consists of 130,000 entries, 720,000 names – notoriously difficult to fathom the reading of – and the Tanaka Corpus I mentioned in regard to the example sentences plug in for anki, is another branch of the WWWJDIC project which besides Mr. Breen is supported by some other key developers. check out Jim’s page for a huge list of Japanese resources, everything from Japanese Linux operating system software to how to get divorced in Japan.
I couldn’t thank all these people enough, no time has it been easier to access Japanese language tools than 2009, now there’s no excuse other than my own time and commitment!