Quest for Kunpen, Part 1: Why

I had just arrived in Okinawa, and I was looking through some local sweets and asking the store clerk about them, "What is this Kunpen… is it like a manju?" "Kind of," she replied, "but it has peanut butter in it." I was hooked. Having lived in Japan for 18 years, a lot of me has "gone native", but I am still hopelessly addicted to peanut butter, and the prospect of a peanut-butter-rich dessert was too good to ignore.

Kunpen, also known as Konpen or Kunpin, is an Okinawan "o-sonai-mono" or offering - special foods that are placed on a family shrine as an offering to one's ancestors. During the summer observance of Okinawa's "shiimii", which is analogous to mainland Japan's "o-bon", families gather to catch up, play with cousins, and tell thread-bare stories of shared embarrassments. The express purpose of the holiday is to pay respects to deceased family members, but it is really a way to reinforce family ties. In mainland Japan, family members gather at the home of the current head of the family, and they determine that by a combination of familial arithmetic plus tweaking for circumstance and convenience. In Okinawa, families gather to picnic at the main family tomb, and kunpen is usually a part of the meal.

One Okinawan co-worker told me that he did not like kunpen when he was younger, but as he ages, the "soboku" or plain, simple character becomes more and more pleasing. A younger Okinawan co-worker told me that for her kunpen is comfort-food - mild, familiar, and trustworthy; when she feels down or anxious, she goes to Zaha for a kunpen (see the review below), and things just seem better.

The dependability and honesty of the unchanging, unassuming kunpen became the focus of my interest. The Japanese snack food industry is aggressive about innovation and variety, turning out new flavors and gimmicks so fast that many consumers never get a chance to try a new flavor before it disappears. And the need for variety results in some pretty wild products. A few years ago, I remember feeling ill after washing down a bag of Kalbi Wasabi Beef Potato Chips with a Cucumber Sprite, but that was still better than when I tried a Cherry-Blossom Kit-Kat with a can of Nestle Sparkling Cafe - cold, sweet, carbonated black coffee. In Japan, crazy and creative snacks, gum, candy, and drinks are debuted and withdrawn all the time, but amidst it all, traditional sweets like the kunpen stay the same. They are the rocks in the tide, the bass and drums in the jazz jam, and that is why I decided to do a selfish and subjective review of as many kunpen as I could find.

Kunpen look like large, fat cookies or baked versions of Chinese steamed dim-sum buns. They consist of a bready or cookie-like "gawa" (skin) or bun and sweetened peanut butter, sesame and/or bean paste "goo" or filling in the center.

This is the first of four installments:

• Quest for Kunpen, Part 1: Why
• Quest for Kunpen, Part 2: Department Store Kunpen in which I review 14 kunpen found in department stores
• Quest for Kunpen, Part 3: Shuri Kunpen in which I review three very special kunpen from Shuri
• Quest for Kunpen, Part 4: Naha by Chance in which I add some Naha old town favorites

Sansui Coffee Review

For the past few months, I had been buying coffee beans from the Starbucks in Okinawa City, but since that means a 30-minute drive from where I live, I decided to local shops that roast their own. I live in Onna, so no matter where I buy them, I will have to drive a while to get there. Of the shops I found, one is here in Onna - Sansui Coffee in Yamada.

The shop is off of Route 6 in Yamada, but it is really easy to miss. Use your car navigation system or a smart phone.

Like other local roasters, they have a display of green coffee beans arranged near the entrance, but behind them are the bulk roasters visible behind a window. They only do large batches, but they roast almost daily, so no matter when you visit, there should be something fresh and waiting. 

Though Sansui has other shops and is sold here all over Okinawa, this is the headquarters where they roast the beans. The owner is a generous and friendly native of Okinawa who has been roasting coffee for over 20 years. She helped me choose by offering single bean samples to crunch and taste. I took a Kilimanjaro dark roast that the owner said had been done just that day. The beans were still warm.

The moment I got home, I ground the beans and tried it out. At 1.5 minutes in a French press, it was crisp and dark… clean with good body. At 3 minutes in the press it was thick and heavy, almost overwhelming, but not sour or overly bitter.

This coffee is more than worth a trip to Yamada and navigating the narrow road and tiny parking lot. Good people, good coffee, and the price per gram for most of their coffee is the same or less than I was paying at Starbucks, so consider this a guilt-free luxury. Another good thing about Sansui is that their member' s point cards do not expire, so you can slowly build up points to get free coffee.

Sansui Coffee

239 Yamada, Onna-son, Okinawa 904-0416

TEL&FAX:098-964-4723

サンスイ珈琲 会社概要

〒904-0416　沖縄県恩納村山田239（本社・焙煎工場）

TEL&FAX:098-964-4723

Good Company Coffee Roasters Review

Intrigued by blog posts about locally-roasted coffee and people who roast their own beans at home, I searched the internet for nearby coffee roasters. I found a place called Good Company in Uruma City, but only by the grace of Google Maps on a smart phone. The building looks like a cottage retreat. 

Near the door was an arrangement of barrels and burlap sacks full of green coffee beans, each labeled with country of origin and price per 200 grams. Good Company is a roast-to-order coffee bean shop where you select the beans (they're actually seeds), and they roast them while you wait. 

Junko and Masaki Nakamoto have been doing this for the past 17 years. While bulk roasting with large ovens in the back of the store are probably more profitable, this single-order roasting keeps people coming back.

It is both experiment and performance art, because while you go home with any bean variety roasted any way you like, you also get to watch the owners heat, toss, cool, and clean the beans for you while enjoying a complimentary cup of coffee and a chat.

An added bonus is seeing their roasting equipment, which looks like the love child of a smithy and a steam punk barbecue grill.

I picked a Dark City Roast of their Special Blend, and it really was very nice - fresh and fruity, yet dark and smooth, with no sourness.

Good Company Coffee Roasters

1943-1 Taba, Uruma City, Okinawa Prefecture

Japan 904-2213

TEL:098-974-2002

珈琲豆焙煎工房グッドカンパニー

〒904-2213 沖縄県うるま市田場1943-1

TEL:098-974-2002

And I thought I was a long-timer

Been in Japan since 1994, 17 years now, and I am a super gaijin - fluent, literate in the language, knowledgeable, settled, and... growing more and more unsure of where I fit in.

I went to the H&R Block office near Camp Foster, one of Okinawa's many US Military bases today. It was the closest I have been to a base. There were two elderly women in the waiting room with me. One asked the other, in Japanese, "Are you Okinawan?"

"No, I'm from Hokkaido," the other answers.

The first woman was Okinawan, but she was also very loud, very impulsive. The woman from Hokkaido avoided a conversation with her, keeping her distance with silence and short, definite responses that left not a thread to pull, nothing to grasp onto to build a conversation.

The Okinawan woman finished her business and left, but she was paying US taxes, so she must have been either a US citizen or a spouse of one. It was so strange to be in this space - a US tax accounting office - with these two very senior Japanese women.

"Excuse me, I couldn't help but overhear, but you said you are from Hokkaido. If you are not an American citizen, then why are you paying taxes? Is your spouse American?" I asked the Hokkaido woman in polite standard Japanese.

She stood, coming much closer to me than I had become accustomed to in Japan. While she had avoided the other woman earlier, she was now instantly engaged in talking to me. "I am an American citizen, so I pay taxes in Japan and in the US. It's a real burden, isn't it? I took citizenship in 1951... married to an American."

"So that is why you are here in Okinawa? To have been married to an American in your generation must have been very difficult at times, in those days. You have lived through a great deal and experienced quite a lot, I'm sure."

"Yes, it was much more difficult then. My husband was in the US military. We got married, and I became a citizen. We moved to Okinawa, but he died in 1968. Over 40 years ago."

"Then why are you here, in Okinawa? You can move to the US or back to Hokkaido, or anywhere. Why Okinawa, if you have no family or roots here?"

"I have been an ikebana teacher for many, many years, and I was teaching here when my husband died. I decided to stay here and continue teaching. However, I don't teach anymore, either. But still I live here. I don't see myself moving anymore."

"You decided to stay in Okinawa?"

She paused for a minute and said, "Sometimes it is not a decision. It just is so. You don't decide. It's more like you discover. You find out what you are going to do, but you are not sure why or who or what decided. I am in Okinawa, and that is all I can tell you."

Are we temporally buoyant?

Watching an animation about the sea, I found it interesting that whales and other sea mammals move all the time. Even when mating or giving birth, they are in transit or at least in motion.

On the land, we can stay still in one place, and that takes less energy, too. We can move through X and Y axes, but we can stop or move backward, also. Sea mammals move in the Y-axis as well, but they must be buoyant to do so, and that requires them to continually move forward for stability, perhaps like a bicycle.

Could this be an analog of our existence in the temporal dimension? Are we temporally buoyant, always moving forward? Of course, whales can change direction, but nonetheless, they don't back up or stop in place. There is always momentum.

Time is often described as a flow with us being washed downstream. Perhaps there are also beings like crabs and starfish, beings that are not buoyant and can move or stay still in the temporal dimension?

How to dub a synced audio track (like a foreign lang interpretation) to a video in iMovie '09

First, if you have the time and budget, just buy Final Cut or Premiere and save yourself some headache. If you don't have the luxury of time and money and have to use iMovie '09, here is the best way to proceed:

Ingredients:
Original long vid clip of talk
Original long aud clip of the simul-interp you want to overdub

Procedure:
If the video is in VOB format, which happens often with media people, convert it to mp4 using HandBrake.
Import the full mp4 (m4v) into iMovie. Handbrake will put a m4v extension on the file, and iMovie won't import that, so just change the extension to mp4 before importing.
Duplicate the project.
In the duplicate, select the whole clip and extract audio.
Select the audio file and save as WAV.
Import the simul-interp audio file into Audacity.
Import the WAV file of the extracted audio from the original video file.
Synch the two, being careful to orient the start of the resulting audio at the beginning of the audio extracted from the video clip. By doing so, you can record the time of the beginning and ending of the video clips you decide later and then use these times to cut the audio.
Silence the original extracted audio track.
Save as AudAll in MP3.
Back to original project, duplicate again so that the original audio is still embedded in the video clip as it was before you extracted it.
Go through video and cut it into clips. Review several times and make sure that this is the way you want to cut the video.
Use Excel or Calc to make a list of the clips and there lengths, calculating where the next clip will begin. Be sure to include the offset at the beginning that you get when you add titles. That can be Vid00.
Rename this project ClipAll.
Duplicate VidAll and rename to Vid01.
Delete everything but the first clip.
In Audacity, import AudAll.mp3 and use the times you recorded to select, copy, make new file, and paste the audio clip for video clip 1.
Check it, comparing the timing and content to the video clip you made inside project VidAll.
Save the audio as Aud01.mp3.
Import Aud01.mp3 into Vid01.
Fine-tune the syncing and make sure the end is okay, that you have enough audio to cover the end of the video clip. It is okay to go over.
Export project Vid01 as mp4 and then use the browser to upload to Youtube while working on Vid02.

MAC認証セキュリティシステム（三井情報のSAS）でのDHCP不良

三井情報のSASを導入してから下記の現象が見られました：
２４時間以上使っていないPCの電源を入れるとIPアドレスを取得するには４〜８分かかります。
いろいろ業者と相談してもなかなか解決できなかったが、やっと分かりました。
MAC認証システムは、最小に仮IP（10.255.255.x）を与えます。このIPからDHCPREQUESTを出すとdhcpサーバから見ると依頼元のネットワークが間違っています。そこにこの解決の鍵がありました。

内のdhcpサーバが業者の下請けによってインストールされてのですが、dhcpd.confの中で「non-authoritative」になっていた。そうなりますと、10.255.255.xからのDHCPREQUESTがnon-authoritativeの理由で無視される。dhcpd.confで一番上の行にauthoritativeにすると、「wrong network」のログエラーが出ます。その直後DHCPNAKとDHCPDISCOVERがありますから結局IPアドレスを１分以内に取得できる。

要するに、MACアドレス認証システムを使っていれば、dhcpdサーバのdhcpd.confがauthoritativeになっていないとうまくいかない。

When using a MAC address recognition security system which gives a dummy IP to the client while checking the MAC registration status, make sure that the DHCP server's dhcpd.conf has "authoritative" as the first line. If it doesn't, the DHCP request from the dummy network is ignored, and the next DHCPDISCOVERY doesn't come for about four minutes or so.