Not by Herman Hupfeld

This week I have a food entry.

Yuba.
Not to be confused with the California town, county or river and especially not with Yuba in the Herman Hupfeld song "When Yuba plays the Rhumba on his Tuba" which Rudy Vallee covered so well in 1931.

The yuba I have is:

yuba (soybean curd skin) 湯葉

Small dialect

There was a dialect in Edo and early Tokyo that was spoken only in a very small area of the city. This was the dialect of the Yoshiwara and has long since disappeared.

This week's entry is on this dialect which turned up in Ghost Slayers Ayashi

kuruwa kotoba 廓言葉

Reading on foot

Sorry folks I forgot to post notice on Monday that the new entry was up.

This is the one I referred to in the last posting.

tachiyomi 立ち読み

In any case additions are listed in the Anime Companion Supplement News page

A convenient five

So I was writing an entry for the supplement last week. Then I noticed that my notes had an example from the Ah! My Goddess Flights of Fancy TV series and misremembered that the example I was going to use was set in a convenience store.

So I figured I need an entry for convenience stores, then I figured I should do entries for the specific chains seen in anime and manga. Upon checking this morning I realized the example was in a bookstore, oh well it resulted in these 5 new entries:

am/pm

FamilyMart Co. Ltd. ファミリーマート

konbini (convenience store) コンビニ

LAWSON, INC. ローソン

Seven-Eleven Japan Co. Ltd. セブン-イレブン・ジャパン

What was I going to originally write about? You will have to wait until next week, or perhaps the week after to find out.

Not sake

This week I do a food related entry, in fact I have plenty of possible such entries lined up but don't want to flood the supplement with them so I'll space them out.

This week a very common ingredient used in Japanese cooking and commonly found in stores in the US, at least on the West Coast.

This is mirin 味醂, which is often mistakenly called cooking sake or sweet sake. While it does have alcohol it is not made from nihonshu. If you like to cook I recommend picking up a bottle. It makes a good addition to many different kinds of dishes, and not just Japanese ones.

Ōta-ku, not otaku

This week I add an entry for Ōta-ku 大田区. one of the 23 ku (wards) of the urban core of Tōkyō.

With this I now have only Katsushika-ku left to do and I'll have entries for all 23 ku. However that will have to wait for me to find a reference to it in an official English translation of a manga or anime (fan translations DON'T COUNT).

Robin Brenner at EarlyWord

Robin Brenner, author of Understanding Manga and Anime will now be a regular contributor on EarlyWord witing about graphic novels. EarlyWord is a blog which calls itself "The Publisher | Librarian Connection" and has interesting stuff for fans in general.

The first contribution is here:

Graphic Novels’ Biggest Fans? Adults

I'll be checking her postings regularly.