When possible, I endeavor to break out of the everyday when it comes to beer and try something outside my experiences; it's a bit difficult when local beers are always the easiest to find, but if you're dedicated you'll turn up lesser-known labels here and there. In particular, I'm always interested in seeing what the state of the quaff is like in other lands - and if I don't have to leave Metro Vancouver to discover that, so much the better. That can be a bit of an irritating road when you find that a great deal of "foreign" brands are actually just brewed by license in Guelph; it kind of defeats the purpose, at least the way I see it. At minimum it's not even the same water, and the nature of the water you use for anything has a great influence on it.That being said, in one of my recent lookarounds I was intrigued to find a bottle of Asahi Black, produced by Asahi Breweries Limited of Japan. It's not an unfamiliar name - another one of their brands, Asahi Super Dry, is commonly sold in beer stores across British Columbia and Ontario, and there's a big advertisement for it opposite one of the escalators down to the Granville Station platform, but like I said, it's produced under license in Guelph. This bottle of Asahi Black is different - the real deal, imported from Japan. I can tell because the back label is nothing but Japanese writing.I tried my hand at translating some of it. Unfortunately for me, written Japanese involves a damning density of kanji, imported Chinese characters that are rather opaque if you don't already know them. I was able to recognize a few terms, like chigaimasu, so Asahi Black is different from something - perhaps Asahi's other beers - and it's possible that its taste is without rank, if I'm reading it right. Also, it contains hops and starch, has an alcohol content of 5%, and is an Asahi beer.Yep, I'm only a few steps from mastery of the Japanese language now, for sure. Ganbatte!
My first thought on pouring it was "man, that's a deceptively small amount for a bottle that size." I doubt it would even have filled my San Francisco Living Sober 1991 coffee mug, except I wouldn't try, because that would be disrespectful. It's a 334-milliliter bottle, which gives it less drinkable content than even an ordinary can - looking at it now, it is significantly more tapered than North American bottles, but it was never obvious until it came time to pour. I would not be surprised for breweries over here to cotton onto this - charging the same price for less - eventually, so keep your eyes open.Not that your eyes can tell you much about Asahi Black other than that, well, the name is appropriate. It's very dark, opaque even when held in front of a light, and had a vague woody smell. As for the taste, well...It took me by surprise, because it wasn't there. I found Asahi Black to be a particularly watery beer, and though I thought there'd be some twist of flavor or a hint of bitterness - I've never had a Munich-type beer, to my knowledge, so I wasn't sure what to expect - there was nothing. No taste and no aftertaste. I might as well have been drinking alcohol-infused water, assuming my tastebuds did not all choose that moment to malfunction.Asahi Black is a strange beer - it doesn't match what I would have expected at all. Where I expected taste, I got no taste. Where it has the look of something heavy and viscous, it's instead smooth and light. This is the first from-Japan Japanese beer I've had; I'm not sure if it's representative of the state of the brew over there or not. I think this calls for additional research.ANDREW'S RATING: 2.5/5 - mostly for the questions that it raises.Previous Quaff Reviews
The lights are still on in Japan, but a year after Fukushima the question on everyone's mind is how best to keep them on. After experiencing such a massive shock to the system, the whole idea of nuclear power is being approached very skeptically in Japan; it's a vast change from before the tsunami, when government plans were for Japan to continue increasing the nuclear foundation of its generation capacity. Considering the incompetence with which Tokyo Electric Power Company, the owner and operator of the Fukushima reactors, approached not only the disaster but disaster planning - ignoring or dismissing multiple opportunities in past years which, if implemented, could have prevented the meltdown - along with the dream of "absolute nuclear safety" being shattered in such a dramatic way, it's absolutely reasonable for people to have second thoughts. Of all the nuclear reactors in Japan, by the end of this month only the Tomari Nuclear Power Plant in Hokkaido will still be generating power, with the remainder suspended for checkups and stress-testing. Utilities across Japan are, therefore, confronting hard choices: not only what to do to keep the lights on for the immediate future, but how to approach power generation in the years and decades to come. Earlier this week the Japan Times reported that the Kansai Electric Power Company, which supplies electricity to Japan's populous Kansai region partially from eleven nuclear reactors, is potentially facing demands from some of its shareholders - namely the cities of Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka - to phase out its nuclear generation capacity, accounting for nearly half of its total supply, and replace it with renewables.When taken in isolation, this is a laudable goal; however, laudable goals don't easily translate into reality, and it's possible that the highly understandable reaction to the Fukushima disaster may end up worsening things in its own way.
The Tomari Nuclear Power Plant in Hokkaido. Photo by Mugu-shisai, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
I don't remember what it was like to not be able to read English; I can't remember that far back. I know from what I've been told that I started reading simple things as far back as preschool and never stopped. I kind of wish I did recall that experience now, because without that knowledge the next thing I can fall back on is the conviction that I must be able to learn to read, since I've already done it once.Read Japanese, that is. Recently I've had Japan on the brain, and this has manifested in actual academic study of the Japanese language through the University of British Columbia's continuing education program. Despite my failed attempts to sign on with the JET Programme at the end of my university days, I never had a real opportunity to study the language in Ontario. Right now I'm capable of extremely basic conversation, but speaking a language is only part of it - if you can't also read it, you'd better be a pretty good bluffer if you have to spend any significant amount of time in a society that speaks it.You've probably heard that Japanese doesn't use an alphabet natively. Instead, it uses two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, as well as kanji, an array of Chinese logographic characters of which up to three thousand or so are in common use in Japan. The familiar Western alphabet isn't unknown over there, though - it's called romaji, is often used in a Japanese context on things like street and destination signs, identification, and computer interfaces, and it's taught in the schools. So, even if a Japanese tourist visited Canada with only a limited command of English, written material wouldn't be completely unfamiliar.The reverse is, unfortunately, not the same. I've heard rumors that some high schools in British Columbia offer Japanese as an elective language class, but otherwise it's pretty much no dice unless you attend a university with a sufficiently sophisticated languages department. Neither is there a particularly strong presence of Japanese writing in Canada, so far as I've noticed. Not even my package of authentic miso soup has any. The result of this was that when I started trying to learn hiragana and katakana, they were completely alien systems that bore no resemblance at all to anything I'd ever seen or heard of before.
Over the course of a few weeks I did manage to eventually wrestle katakana to the ground, but for a while there it was a struggle that would leave my mind blank at the most inconvenient moments. Hiragana presents its own challenge that I still have yet to take on squarely, and kanji... there's a lot of kanji. But it would've been considerably simpler, I think, if this had been the sort of thing that I'd been exposed to through society during the course of my life.In retrospect, in some ways it's almost surprising that there wasn't very much of this. Back in the 1980s, when I was growing up, one of the dominant cultural assumptions in the West was that Japan was going to rule the world thanks to the unrelenting power of its keiretsu megacorporations - the bursting of the economic bubble put an end to that particular assumption, but even so. In other ways, though, it's not surprising at all - until very recently, Western culture in general was rather provincial and xenophobic against anything that wasn't considered to be a subset of "the West." Sure, there are sushi and pho places on practically every street corner now, but twenty years ago the situation was vastly different.So I'll continue learning. Nevertheless, I can't help but look at photographs of subway station signs from all across Japan, seeing their names given in kanji and romaji both, and wondering why not even the SkyTrain does the same in reverse. I mean, they're replacing the signage anyway. Sometimes, the will to read comes from the most unlikely places.
You may have heard, a couple of months back, about how the Japanese government was going to give free airfare to ten thousand foreigners so that they could pump their money into the Japanese tourism sector, still reeling from the Tohoku earthquake in March. If you were looking forward to that, well, keep dreaming - the Japan Times reported yesterday that Japan's Finance Ministry has refused the Japan Tourism Agency's ¥1.18 billion request for 2012. Apparently - and I know this is hard to wrap one's head around, but work with me here - they "thought it would be difficult" to convince people that it was so important for their tax yen to go toward flying a bunch of gaijin over; besides, if newspaper travel sections are any indication, a lot of them may not have made it out of Tokyo anyway.Though, when you think about it, that billion-plus yen might not necessarily go as far as you think - I wondered, would it even work? With today's exchange rates, that works out to just under $15.6 million Canadian, and while it's easy to think of that amount as pocket change in a government's context, the Japanese government already has all of its change spoken for and then some. Dividing the amout by ten thousand gaijin leaves ¥118,000 or $1,552 to cover fare to and from Japan for each one of them. Ideally, some would have come from inexpensive places; while an Air Canada round-trip flight from Vancouver to Narita in October 2012 is a little more than $1000 before fees and taxes, the same flight on Japan Airlines is a staggering $8,125.14. It seems, however, that it's considerably cheaper to fly JAL from the States.It's a bit of a shame since I was hoping on being one of those ten thousand gaijin. In the end, though, this doesn't change anything; aside from a few Internet hopes and dreams being shattered, perhaps, everything is the same as it was yesterday. As far as my thoughts about this go, it comes down to the differences between the dedicated traveller and opportunistic tourist.
If JAL charges eight thousand dollars for an economy ticket to Vancouver, I shudder to think of how much one of those business-class seats in the front must cost. That's where you'd find a rich opportunistic tourist.
At one time, I figured that by now I'd be in Japan already. Back during my last years of university, when the Great Recession was just an unresolved future possibility, I was after a post as an Assistant Language Teacher in the JET Programme, a Japanese government initiative that brings native English speakers into Japanese classrooms. I got rejected twice; both times they liked my essay, and both times the interview did not go nearly so well. Still, while I was in Toronto it was simple to move on.Here in Vancouver, there are rather more reminders of that possible path I didn't take. One of them I found in, of all places, a beer and wine store: a bottle of Hitachino Nest Japanese Classic Ale - from "hitachino," which not only does not seem to mean "owl" but does not even appear in my Japanese dictionary, and "nest," meaning... well, nest. The front label is easily understandable; it's the back that's swimming in hiragana. It's one of several beers produced by the Kiuchi Brewery in Naka, Ibaraki - close enough to Fukushima Prefecture that the company's English website has front-and-center assurances that no radioactivity was detected in their products.
One reason I was interested in this, aside from the Japanese connection, was that this is a historical beer - hence the name Japanese Classic Ale. According to the back label, this is a modern reconstruction of the first kind of Japanese beer, brewed during the Edo period, which for those of you who fell asleep in Japanese History class lasted from 1603 to 1868. Japanese Classic Ale is aged in cedar casks, though there's no mention of how long, in a technique borrowed from the old English IPA method.So how's it taste? Like nothing I've ever had before - not even Route des épices, that Québecois beer with peppercorns in it. Kiuchi's website describes it as having "a unique note of cedar and [a] complex spicy yet mild aroma," and it did start out tasting spicy when I took my first sip, and pleasantly spicy at that. Beyond that there was another sensation in it, something that took me a while to pin down - it wasn't fizzy, more like little bubbles full of strange flavor coursing over my tongue.Salt. Japanese Classic Ale tasted salty. It may just be in my mind; the only ingredients attested on the label are water, malt, hops, and yeast, and it took me a couple of minutes just to identify the taste. The salty aftertaste lingered for a while afterward, too - which is where Hitachino Nest Japanese Classic Ale loses points with me. Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of aftertastes.The bottle I picked up contained 330 mL with 7.5% alc./vol. Kiuchi's website says that it's available in Japan and the United States, but this isn't completely accurate; I found my bottle at Firefly Fine Wines and Ales in Vancouver, and I was far from the only one to try it out, it seems.ANDREW'S RATING: 3/5Previous Quaff Reviews
I really hate the term "meltdown." Sure, it is technically accurate - for nuclear engineers, who know what they are talking about. If you are not a nuclear engineer, a meltdown means that the nuclear fuel has overheated and melted, causing damage to the reactor core. I would be willing to bet that the average person on the street, for whom The Simpsons is likely their only source of information about nuclear power, thinks that "meltdown" means something along the lines of "the entire nuclear plant melts down into the center of the earth and leaves a big, sizzling, glowing green hole behind it."With the crisis still underway at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan - a plant which is, mind you, still intact after being hit by the fifth largest earthquake in recorded history as well as a tsunami - the word "meltdown" or its non-English equivalent probably appears on the front page of every significant newspaper in the Western world. This is not going to be another Chernobyl, but no matter what happens, nuclear power is going to take yet another bruise.You'd think the media could use this opportunity to educate the public - to expand awareness of how nuclear power actually works, the pitfalls and the possibilities, rather than just go to ridiculous extremes like articles about fallout being carried across the Pacific to the West Coast. But no. The atoms are going to kill us - they're going to melt us, then kill us.
The Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in Pickering, Ontario
