Ito Yokado

I am staying in my mother's apartment close to Tokyo. She lives in Abiko City in Chiba prefecture, about an hour away from Tokyo.

My mother moved here a few days ago, and I am spending time helping her unpack. She lives alone, and she wants to unload 200 boxes in a 3 bedroom apartment. I want to tell her she is crazy, and occasionally do so.

I presume Abiko city has the essence of a suburban Japanese town. There is nothing in the near vicinity save the occasional convenience store, a local train station, and a mega-market called Ito Yokado.

There is nothing like Ito Yokado in America. It is similar to Wal-Mart and Target, except for one major difference: the supermarket is their main trip driver, whereas nobody would buy chicken from Wal-Mart because it tastes good. At least I hope not.

However, the fundamental idea is similar -- plant a huge shopping area in a residential district, and everyone will go there. Some will work there, and others will go there to buy daily necessities.

The Ito Yokado near my mother's house is a 5 minute-walk. The first story comprises a supermarket, a Starbucks cafe, a food court, and a sit-down restaurant to accomodate patrons with larger wallets.

The above pasta is from the said sit-down restaurant. The sauce was rather oily, but at least the noodles were cooked al dente. This, some foccacia bread, and an espresso set me back 1030 yen, or approximately $12 dollars.

The second story is dedicated to Ito Yokado's clothing and sundry goods. The third floor comprises third party vendor stores. Most Ito Yokado locations have a bookstore, a store dedicated to children's goods, and a store that sells eyeglasses.

Anyways, my only reason for this post was to show the above photo. So there you have it, a photo of some pasta with a long-winded explanation for where it came from.

Last Supper

This is my last dinner as a grad student. A super quesadilla from Ocean View Terrace for $5.50. I ate this in the IRPS computer lab while reading some instructions on "printing onto these printers from your computer" that were taped onto the wall.

People order different things at the "Mexican food" line at Ocean View Terrace this year. It was an interesting experiment in determining the demand elasticity among UCSD students. Until this year, the burrito, priced at $4.50, was considered to be the best bang for your buck in the dorms.

Nothing else could fill you up for $4.50 like an Ocean View Terrace burrito could. In fact, it was more than filling for the average student. Its less popular sibling, the super quesadilla, could be had for the same price, but was not nearly as filling.

Before, I envisioned myself enjoying a $4.50 burrito for my last meal at UCSD. I ate many burritos during my time here, and they were not bad. But as the above photo shows, this was clearly not how my dining experience at UCSD ended.

So what happened between the 2007 and 2008 academic years? Commodity prices went up. And then the burrito price suddenly jumped up from $4.50 to $6.50, a 44.4% price increase. You had one less option to fill yourself up for under $5.00.

At this point the UCSD student could make a choice. Either fork out two extra dollars and take the damage for the burrito, or look for cheaper options.

The UCSD student's eyes will then travel down the menu to find the second item listed: the super quesadilla. At a bargain price of $5.50, the prospect of having something less filling as a burrito for a smaller price suddnenly seemed to make sense.

Until this year, most students would line up at the Mexican food booth for the burrito. We are all poor, and thus need the most bang for our buck. It was the logical thing to do.

Strangely enough, the $6.50 burrito has become a luxury good, and students demand less of it; economists would say that the UCSD student's demand for the $6.50 burrito is quite elastic.

Today my last day of class as a student. I will graduate in a few weeks, and then cross off items on my to do list before I depart in March. I may learn to play more Bach pieces on the piano or learn to hit a fast tennis serve. I will not, however, eat a $6.50 Ocean View Terrace burrito, unless someone buys me one.

Black Friday Eve

I think Thanksgiving is one of the worst holidays in America. It should be grouped with Valentine's Day and just get chucked out of the calendar. It's another holiday that's there to remind you of how lonely you might be if you don't have a family in America.

However, I like Thanksgiving because of the food. A Thanksgiving meal is like a team effort at work or school, really; if people pitch in to the best of their abilities, the resulting Thanksgiving dinner is fantastic. I've been to some wonderfully executed Thanksgiving dinners, and they are some of my fondest memories of my time in America. I hope my contribution to the overall effort justified my attendance.

If the team effort fails, well, there's always Boston Market, or at least you get some amusing stories to talk about for the rest of your life, as I do.

Unfortunately, my distaste for Thanksgiving outweighs my affinity for it. It's like sprinkling some bitter medicine over some honey yogurt; you enjoy the yogurt, but the bitter medicine stays on your tongue longer than the sweetness from the yogurt.

Three reasons why I dislike Thanksgiving

1) If you don't have a ton of cash and have family far away, you can't go home for Thanksgiving and Christmas. You have to start talking to people in hopes of getting invited to Thanksgiving dinner, lest you be stranded eating a microwaveable dinner in front of a TV.

Or you can try to host a dinner / potluck yourself, if you are lucky enough to have the physical space. But then you have to worry about unwanted guests inviting themselves to your party whenever you talk to them, and your November conversations can get awkward at times.

2) If you go to school, you have Thanksgiving before Christmas break. It ruins the momentum you had going in, and it's difficult to study under a tryptophan-induced coma.

What would schoolkids say if they had to take a few days off before summer vacation, and then come back to school for one last week?

3) What is Thanksgiving supposed to mean? Now, people just think about Black Friday. They might as well rename it "Black Friday Eve."

I'm not going raise the point about Pilgrims, since Thanksgiving is just a bogus holiday fabricated by Abraham Lincoln. Maybe the turkey lobby had some kind of political clout in the 1860s.

Two Deadly Sins

Thanksgiving represents the paradox of American culture today. For a country that is founded on Christian principles, I still cannot reconcile the Seven Deadly Sins with how the average person acts during Thanksgiving weekend: gluttony and greed. And virtue is another idea that is worth discussing as well.

Gluttony - put a ton of food on your plate, waste the food on your plate you end up not eating, and then complain about all the leftovers that didn't get put on anyone's plate.

I make it a point to cook a whole bird whenever I can; if I had the option, I would like to buy a live chicken, slaughter and gut it, remove its feathers, prepare it, and then throw it in the oven. Unfortunately the most feasible option for me is to buy a whole kosher "organic" chicken at Trader Joe's and look at the lifeless corpse in the baking pan as I prepare it for its roasting.

I do this because it makes me appreciate the fact that an animal got killed so I could eat. It motivates me to do a good job as a cook, and makes me appreciate that I am lucky enough to have food on my plate for another meal. And it makes sure I don't waste any food.

Greed - buy a ton of shit and tell yourself that you are 'stimulating the economy,' and use that as an excuse to buy even more shit.

I am guilty of this. I bought a supposedly $250 suitcase for $80, because I needed a new carry-on. Oh, and I spent $50 on other things I don't really need.

I refuse to go to a store and partake in any of the mayhem we are all familiar with, though. I have eBags and Amazon to thank for my 20-minute shopping spree.

Let's do something nice

Some of us spend a part of Thanksgiving something nice to people who are less fortunate than you for some extra credit. I do not.

The variance in this extra credit activity seems to grow every year; either that, or I am noticing more of it. For instance, some people travel to Mexico to build houses, while others their local Wal-Mart, and complain when they have to leave the store because an employe died.

Aside from the periodic donation I give to a certain relief group (based on a % of my annual net income, which right now is around $1,000 a year), I have come to realize that I don't have it in me to go to a soup kitchen and donate a few hours of my time on a constant basis to help distribute food to the homeless.

At present the contribution I could make is low, both financially and having a network of well-known video game players does little to convince someone to point his wallet at your cause. There are charitable causes, for or not for profit, that can, and are, undertaken by people well into their careers. And that is something I hope to do someday.

...

Thanksgiving is another holiday whose meanings are obfuscated by shortsightedness and mediocrity displayed by the general public. While I contribute to this mediocrity in my own way, one may be justified in telling me to go back to Japan if I had such a huge problem with Thanksgiving.

And I am leaving America soon, but not because I dislike Thanksgiving more than I like it.