Snow and Boar

This morning Sasayama woke up to a blanket of white panic known as snow. What always amazes me is that the kids never wear much more than their school uniforms when going to school. I never see a lot of my students wearing gloves and of course all of the girls are wearing their skirts higher than usual. Something about the frigid cold makes Japanese girls want to hike up their skirt. Since all of the roads in Sasayama are thin little two lane roads, if there’s a wreck, the traffic comes to a stop fast. Closing off a lane means that two-way traffic can’t happen. The police officers usually have the traffic alternate using one lane. It’s a slow slow process that makes me glad I walk to school.

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Last Friday we had the “bonenkai” for the year. Bonenkai means “forgetting the year party”. The idea is that you gather with your co-workers/friends and remember only the good things about the passing year. You are supposed to forget everything else. Usually the forgetting part is just from drinking too much. This year my junior high school held the end of the year party at a local traditional inn.

The dish of the evening was “botan-nabe”. Literally this means “Peony Hot Pot”, but it’s really a boiling pot that you fill with vegetables, tofu, noodles and wild boar meat. It’s named “botan” (peony) because the boar meat should be cut up and served on a plate to make it look like a peony flower. I was told that this was because besides the rich leaders, normal Japanese people never ate a lot of meat in the old days. (the same as feudal Europe) When the religious leaders all of a sudden said it was ok to eat meat (because of western influence making beef, pork and chicken popular to regular people), a lot of people were still weary of eating meat. So chefs began to cut up meat to look like flowers and didn’t call it horse but cherry blossom. Wild boar was called peony.

Anyway, botannabe is supposed to be eaten in a group, not by yourself. But the three other people that were sitting next to me, ended up drinking the entire night so I had the whole slab of boar meat to myself. Great success.