ASIA / PACIFIC
Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
November 16, 2015
Sushi and culture: Dining with locals on a visit to Japan
MORE THAN A MEAL. Swiss tourist Alexandra
Kossi, right, and American tourist Diane Freyhofer,
center, prepare sushi at a dinner hosted by Shino
Fukuyama, left, at her home in Tokyo. Tourists can
learn about sushi and kimono while dining with locals
thanks to EatWith.com, which links travellers to
chefs and talented home cooks around the world.
(AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama)
By Donna Bryson
The Associated Press
OKYO — Some of my most
treasured travel memories involve
food. Like the time my husband
and I went to what was billed as New
Delhi’s best rumali roti stall, where we
turned the hood of a car into a table so that
the extravagantly thin and succulent
flatbread could be wolfed down before it
cooled. Or the time I introduced my in-laws
to a Johannesburg street vendor’s
vetkoeks, slightly sweet, slightly sour
dollops of fried dough.
So when we were planning a trip to
Japan and my husband heard about
EatWith.com, we knew we had to try it.
EatWith links travellers to chefs and
talented home cooks around the world to
share a meal. It’s one of several sites,
including EatFeastly, VizEat, and
PlateCulture, offering opportunities to
dine informally with locals. The price is set
by the chef, typically comparable to a
mid-range restaurant meal.
We used EatWith to book a date with
Shino Fukuyama, a marketing manager
who loves to share her country’s cuisine
and culture. I, my husband, our tween
daughter, and my father-in-law and his
wife experienced what felt like a homestay
for an evening.
Fukuyama’s father was a foreign
correspondent and their family lived in
Mexico and South Korea. In 2002, her
husband’s job took them to New York.
They devoted much of their spare time to
exploring restaurants with a Zagat guide.
But it was a Thanksgiving dinner in the
suburbs with the family of her husband’s
co-worker that gave her a taste for sharing
T
worlds over a meal in someone’s home.
She studied how to teach sushi-making
in 2010, and opened her home to visitors
after Japan’s tourism industry began to
revive following the 2011 tsunami.
We scheduled our visit with Fukuyama
toward the end of our stay in Japan’s
capital. That gave us a few days to get to
know our way around the city a bit before
venturing by subway from the sleek
Roppongi embassy-and-nightclub district
where our hotel was located to her more
down-to-earth Meguro neighborhood in
central Tokyo.
Fukuyama and her friend Akiko
Yamauchi, an auction company art buyer,
met us as we emerged from the subway
station. They first ushered us to a nearby
supermarket, where they answered
questions about meats, vegetables, and
fruits we had until then only seen on
restaurant menus. Fukuyama agreed to
add whale bacon, spotted in the prepared
meat case by my husband, to our menu. We
would come to see how gracious that was
when we realized just how meticulously
she had planned the evening. Fukuyama
told me later she usually spends two days
preparing for her guests.
The supermarket was a five-minute
stroll to Fukuyama’s home, a modern
concrete box that was a fitting setting for
her traditional touches — tatami mats,
paper sliding screens, minimal decor.
Along the way, Fukuyama pointed out
local landmarks. The Shinto shrine. The
liquor shop that’s been in the same family
for three generations. The kimono consign-
ment shop where we bought a delicately
woven, lightly used kimono. The textures,
patterns, and stories of fabric make it, like
food, one of our family obsessions. It
turned out Fukuyama is a kimono
connoisseur. She and Yamauchi met in a
kimono club, where people who like to look
at and talk about the traditional clothing
gather. That night, she wore a chic dress
cut from an old kimono that she had
ordered on the internet.
Once we arrived to Fukuyama’s house,
we learned how to roll sushi using fish she
had bought ahead of time. We also learned
to set a Japanese table with pottery
handed down in Fukuyama’s family.
Chopsticks are placed horizontally in front
of diners, with the narrow ends that touch
the food pointing left.
Dinner stretched from our sushi, mine
inexpertly rolled, to fruit cut into the
rabbit shapes that doting Japanese moms
put in their kids’ bento boxes. We had plum
pickled by Yamauchi’s mother-in-law.
Fukuyama’s husband was out socializing
with workmates, but he left us a vegetable
dish he had prepared the night before. The
whale bacon, more a textural experience
than anything else, didn’t clash with
Fukuyama’s carefully curated menu. (I’ve
never eaten a rubber ducky, but I imagine
it tastes like the whale bacon did.) After
dinner, Fukuyama dressed my 11-year-old
daughter in a kimono, delighting her
grandfather.
Fukuyama said such moments when she
can surprise and charm her guests, along
with those when she learns something
about another culture are among “the joys
of my life.”
U.S. colleges head to China to grow basketball fan base
By Justin Bergman
The Associated Press
ANGZHOU, China — Forty years
ago, former basketball star Bill
Walton made a decision he still
regrets today. His UCLA college team was
invited to play an exhibition game in
China in 1973, the year it won its second
national title with Walton, and he decided
not to go. The rest of the team then stayed
home, too.
“I said I didn’t want to come,” he said. “I
didn’t know any better. I was wrong.”
The men’s basketball teams from the
University of Washington and University
of Texas have done what Walton chose not
to: play a game in China, halfway around
the world from their college campuses.
It wasn’t just an exhibition, either. The
contest — in which Washington defeated
Texas, 77-71 — was the first-ever regular-
season college basketball game in China,
the first of perhaps many for U.S. univer-
sity teams as they try to tap into a new
market for their sports — and their schools
— in the world’s second-biggest economy.
“The opportunity that these young
people have to come to this country ... (it’s)
an opportunity that I sadly turned down,”
said Walton, who provided commentary
for ESPN’s live broadcast of the game in
the U.S. “It was one of the biggest mistakes
of my life.”
Hopes are high on both sides that the
opportunity leads to a much deeper cooper-
ation than anyone could have imagined
just a decade ago, let alone in 1973.
In the Pac-12 Conference, which organ-
ized the game at Shanghai’s Mercedes
Benz Arena, officials spent the past few
years trying to find a way to build on the
well-known academic reputations of their
schools in China, as well as the Chinese
love of basketball, to build a fan base for
their sports programs.
And on the Chinese side, e-commerce
giant Alibaba Group jumped on board as a
H
JAPANESE JET. Japan’s first domestically pro-
duced passenger jet, the Mitsubishi Regional Jet
(MRJ), takes off from Nagoya Airport in Toyoyama,
central Japan, for its first flight. (Muneyuki Tomari/
Kyodo News via AP)
Mitsubishi jet in
first flight, in step
for Japan aviation
TOKYO (AP) — Mitsubishi, a maker of
the Zero fighter, took a step toward
reclaiming Japan’s one-time status as an
aviation power with the maiden flight of its
regional jet.
The aircraft took off in the central
Japanese city of Nagoya, as seen in a live
webcast. It landed about an hour later.
Mitsubishi pushed back the jet’s first
flight by a few months but said the delay
would not affect its planned commercial
deliveries.
The project reflects a desire to turn
Japan’s
modern
engineering
and
manufacturing prowess into a top-tier
aircraft industry, some 70 years after
Japan suspended making planes following
its defeat in World War II.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and other
major Japanese manufacturers are key
suppliers for many aircraft parts and
systems. But a large share of the
components in the 70- to 90-seat Mitsu-
bishi regional jet came from leading
foreign suppliers.
Mitsubishi faces a stiff challenge in
competing with Brazil’s Embraer, which
dominates the difficult regional jet
market, analysts say.
HOPES HIGH FOR HOOPS. Former National Basketball Association star Yao Ming, right, watches as
Dejounte Murray of the Washington Huskies, in white, falls on Eric Davis Jr. of the Texas Longhorns during a Na-
tional Collegiate Athletic Association match at Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, China. Two men’s basketball
teams from the University of Washington and the University of Texas played the first-ever regular-season college
basketball game in China, the first of perhaps many for U.S. university teams as they try to tap into a new market
for their sports — and their schools — in the world’s second-biggest economy. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
way of acquiring content for its brand new
sports platform and, as founder Jack Ma
put it at the company’s headquarters in
Hangzhou, to help young Chinese learn
the value of playing — and working — on a
team.
“China is pretty good at the single
sports. Ping-pong is very good, but we
think China should focus more on team
sports — basketball, soccer, and volley-
ball,” Ma said. “The world is very con-
nected and China needs to work like a
team with the (rest of the) world. If we
cannot make our kids focus on that, it’ll be
terrible in the future.”
The curiosity was evident as young
Alibaba employees took a break from their
last-minute preparations for Singles Day
— China’s biggest online shopping day —
to line the glass wall at the company’s
basketball court and watch the Texas
basketball players sprint up and down the
court in a spirited workout.
Still, the process will likely take time.
The National Basketball Association
(NBA) has had success bringing preseason
games to China over the past 11 years, but
it remains to be seen if Chinese fans will
have the same passion for U.S. collegiate
sports.
“NCAA is not known in China. Period,”
said Joe Tsai, Alibaba’s executive vice
chairman, referring to the National
Collegiate Athletic Association. “That’s
because in China, when you go to college,
have a normal college academic experi-
ence, they don’t emphasize sports. If you’re
an athlete, they separate you when you are
very young and you’re on a separate track.”
Part of Alibaba’s motivation for joining
forces with the Pac-12 Conference is to
change this mentality in China.
“Sports is part of education,” Tsai said.
“You don’t separate sports from your
academics because you learn so much
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