Tag Archives: Japanese

Japanese Bonsai Charges Onto Good American Machine Guns

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Most of you probably are celebrating the return to the Philippine Islands this day in Nineteen-hunnerd and forty-four today.  Or in the instance of my charming ex-wife, Caroline, merely being born in Nineteen-hunnerd and forty-seven.  Both events teetering the scales of the human  balance in the Universe somewhat in the direction of ‘good’.

The US Military experience in the Philippines was ‘good’ mostly because contrary to previous behavior on other islands the Japanese didn’t come storming out of caves with fixed bayonets pruning trees as they ran down onto US machine guns.  Those damned trees remained intact for the most part if they weren’t hit by good US bullets and shells.  No damned bonsai forests of fancy trees for the Filipino population to deal with after the surrender.

That, and there wasn’t a problem with Death Marches the way happened the last time the US military ran up against the Japanese military in the Philippines.  That Bataan Death March was evidently most unpleasant, both for the GIs being forced to walk shoeless and hungry across the island, and for the Japanese having to shoot or stick them with bayonets for lollygagging.  Nothing of that sort in 1944.  The Japanese were perfectly well behaved, though uncompromising.  And the GIs resisted the entirely justified impulse to kill every last man of them.

The harbor at Manilla ended up being a great place for US sailors to put in and get drunk and whore.

All in all everything worked out well in the end.  Seemed almost no-time at all the US was fire bombing Tokyo and nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Then rebuilding the Japanese steel and other industries bombed to rubble during the war so’s everyone made a pile of money.  And another great place for GIs to get drunk and whore!

Heck, guys were still getting drunk and whoring in Japan all the way up into the Vietnam War.  When I was in Korea almost all the GIs took two weeks ‘rest and recuperation’ leave to Japan sometime during their tours.  The Japanese whores were generally more cosmopolitan, it was believed, than Korean ladies.

So for those of us alive December 16, 1944, it was the first day of the rest of our lives and it all turned out good.  Except for a few Japanese troops hiding in the jungles who wouldn’t listen to reason.

Think of it!  If Japan had surrendered December 16, 1944, it could have avoided having Tokyo firebombed and Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuked.  And I’d have been able to celebrate it with this blog entry.

Old Jules

Jeanne arrives back in KC area fleeing Japanese nuclear attack on US west coast

Hi readers.  Hydrox and Ms. Shiva did Snoopy dances last night when Jeanne arrived back here.  She’d been the past couple of weeks climbing wet mountains and doing other things people do out there under the Japanese nuclear threat.  Although she didn’t say so to the cats, her arrival was timed in such a way as to suggest she came back fleeing the Japanese invasion of Hawaii.

Japan practices amphibious landing in Hawaii

It’s long been known, both by Japanese military planners and by US historians that WWII would have gone a lot differently if Japan had followed up the Pearl Harbor attack with an invasion of the island.  The recent reinterpretation of the post-WWII Japanese constitution allowing renewed military adventures by Japan requires absorbing lessons learned from WWII so they don’t make the same mistakes again.  Practice landings on Hawaii, and possibly later on areas of the US west coast not yet too heavily contaminated by radiation from Japanese nuclear plants will help assure that next time things will be different.

Anyway, Jeanne didn’t say anything about all this.  Her climbing of Mount Whatchallit, Ranier? etc etc etc went as well as could be expected.  She took plus/minus 2500 photographs, stayed various places, and despite the radiation, wasn’t all that anxious to return.

Today’s a new beginning returning to working two, count’em, two, jobs again.  Which evidently still weighs in better than radiation poisoning as a way to count off the days she has left in life.

The cats and I were glad to see her back, everything else being equal.

Old Jules

“If those Japanese could have held out through one more atomic bomb we wouldn’t be eating this crap!”

Hi readers.  Here’s wishing you a fulfilling independence from having the British for your bosses ordering you around and making you drink their damned tea.  If our ancestors hadn’t won their independence from the British we’d have had to fight on their side during WWI and WWII, the way their other colonies did.

Anyway, that WWI museum got me thinking about what GIs used to eat.  There was a long shelf of displays of their mess kits, carved fancier than a POW would do.  Beautiful designs and artwork produced while their feet were rotting off in trenches between having the bejesus shelled out of them and being sniped at across no-man’s-land.

 In Korea, at least in the First Cavalry Division, what we ate in 1963-1964 whenever we were on field rations was all left over from WWII.  1945ish WWII.  K Rations.

Breakfast Unit  Canned meat product Biscuits Compressed cereal bar Powdered coffee Fruit bar Chewing gum Sugar tablets Four cigarettes Water-purification tablets Can opener Wooden spoon

Breakfast Unit
Canned meat product
Biscuits
Compressed cereal bar
Powdered coffee
Fruit bar
Chewing gum
Sugar tablets
Four cigarettes
Water-purification tablets
Can opener
Wooden spoon

Camp Howze, Korea, had an enormous bunker chock full of K Rations of the nostalgic variety dating from before the Japanese surprised us with a surrender while we still had an atomic bomb and one-hell-of-a-lot of K Rations left.  I can testify from personal experience the US Army was patriotic and continued eating those rations 20 years after the premature and cowardly surrender of Japan.

Dinner Unit  Canned cheese product Biscuits A candy bar Chewing gum Powdered beverage Granulated sugar Salt tablets Cigarettes Matches Can opener  Wooden spoon

Dinner Unit
Canned cheese product
Biscuits
A candy bar
Chewing gum
Powdered beverage
Granulated sugar
Salt tablets
Cigarettes
Matches
Can opener
Wooden spoon

 Our quonsot hut had a corner filled with Ks still in the cartons so we could fill those long winter nights with partying song, beer, and anything worth eating in a crate of Ks.

Supper Unit Canned meat product Biscuits Bouillon powder Candy Chewing gum Powdered coffee Granulated sugar Cigarettes Can opener Toilet paper Wooden spoon

Supper Unit
Canned meat product
Biscuits
Bouillon powder
Candy
Chewing gum
Powdered coffee
Granulated sugar
Cigarettes
Can opener
Toilet paper
Wooden spoon

The cigarettes in ours weren’t Chesterfields.  Ours were Lucky Strikes in a Green package.  As in the old radio WWII jingle, “Lucky Strike green has gone to war!”  Lucky Strike changed colors after the war to red and white, but Luckies kept right on fighting in green until all those damned Ks were consumed by GIs.

Ahhh.  Nothing like sparking up a Lucky out of a carton of Ks, working fast to inhale a little tobacco smoke before it burned down to your fingertips.  Those smokes were 20 years old and we never found a way to add enough moisture to keep them smoking instead of burning.

And the chocolate!  The godforsaken chocolate turned white with age.  We didn’t care.  Everything in those Ks got tried and nobody ever died from them.  And I never heard of anyone getting drunk from them.

Fact was, a person with extra money could go to the PX and get crackers, but if he did he’d have to share with the whole hooch.  Same with sardines.  And we had KATUSAs in our hooch.  Four of them.  Korean Augmentations to the US Army.  And those bastards could go through a case of crackers, cans of sardines, quicker than you could make a grab for a can before they were gone.

But even the KATUSAs couldn’t make remarkably short work of a case of Ks.  There was always enough for everyone, along with some leftovers to munch on guard duty.

Damn.  These modern all-volunteer military guys are spoiled.  Except maybe in Korea.  Hell, in Korea they might still be eating Ks and wishing to hell the Japanese had gutted out another atomic bomb.

Old Jules

Japanese whale hunting, seaweed, salmon and next year’s Toyotas

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.  Toward the bottom of this post you’ll find my favorite quote for 2013:  Salmon News:  “We think something happened in the ocean.”

The good news is the Japanese are still eating whales, even though you could light up Tokyo with the radiation in a whale liver.  Seaweed, too, they’re still eating. 

[This sushi thing’s something I’m going to miss.  Used to always look forward to going to Tao Lyn Oriental Market in Albuquerque and buying packets of seaweed and sushi ingredients.  That’s probably something I won’t be doing again.]

The bad news is that the Japanese will likely pass up the rest of the human species in the race to the next evolutionary step.  Possible good news is they’ll devote that extra intelligence in the second head to actually improving Toyotas into the next evolutionary level.

http://factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=879

[Nice pic of a half-butchered red whale]

http://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20090819-Ray%20Kinnane%2030257371_redwhale.jpg

 

Love of Whale Meat in Japan

Home > Japan > 05Animals…

WHALES, WHALE MEAT, SCIENTIFIC WHALING, WHALE HUNTS AND JAPAN

Many Japanese, especially older and middle-ages ones enjoy eating whale meat. It is sauteed, roasted and eaten raw. Japanese say it tastes more like beef than fish. Whale bacon sells for as much as $180 a pound at gourmet food shops and dishes made with whale go for as much as $100 a plate at restaurants.

[Nice pic of a Japanese Whale Hamburger – tastes just like pork or chicken]

http://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20090819-minke%20whale%20bruger%20at%20hakodate%20restuarants%20BBC%20_40657000_ap_burger203.jpg
 Whale meat is dark red and doesn’t look at like fish meat. Japanese consider blue, fin and sei whales to be the most delicious. Sperm whales aren’t regarded as very tasty. Humpback meat isn’t considered that good but the organs are palatable. Japanese generally like minke whales less than other species because they are small and don’t contain much fat, which is what the Japanese love. Meat from minke whales is the easiest to get today. Before the 1987 ban on whaling the Japanese didn’t even hunt them.
 Whale meat in Japan has traditionally made into stews with soy sauce and spinach. These stews are now made with beef or pork. In the whaling town of Wadamachi in Chiba you can get whale steaks, whale jerky, carved whale-tooth jewelry and even a one-meter-long decorated whale penis. Some towns sell whale nose cartilage pickled in sake in cans with a spouting whale. Those who have tried it said the cartilage has a crispy texture and a pungent taste.
 Taruichi, a Tokyo restaurant that specializes in whale meat, offers 36 choices: fried whale, whale bacon, whale heart, whale testicles, whale kidney and even ice cream made with whale fat. Boiled tongue is said to be particularly delicious. At whale restaurants in Shimonoseki you can get fried whale tail, grilled whale tongue wafers, boiled blubber and whale sashimi. In some places you can get sliced whale skin and whale burgers made with fried minke whale.
 Whale meat distributors claim that whale meat is high in protein and low in calories and have alleviated the problem of toughness associated with whale meat through improved freezing techniques. The tail meat sells for as much $70 a pound and is prized for whale sashimi. which is eaten with grated garlic or ginger to mask the odor. The health benefits of whale meat is a matter of some debate. On study found that Japanese in Wakayama Prefecture that eat pilot whale have high levels of mercury in their hair.

Meanwhile, this for you sushi lovers:

Southern California seaweed tests over 500 percent higher for radioactive iodine-131 than anywhere else in US
Thursday, July 12, 2012 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: seaweed, California, radiation

http://www.naturalnews.com/036449_seaweed_California_radiation.html
 

And this for you salmon lovers:

Salmon News:  “We think something happened in the ocean.”
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2013/08/424670.shtml

Sockeye salmon at dire historic low on Canada’s Pacific coast — “We think something happened in the ocean” — “The elders have never seen anything like this at all” — Alaska and Russia also affected

Aboriginal people in British Columbia who rely on Skeena River sockeye are facing some extremely difficult decisions as sockeye salmon returns plunge to historic lows. Lake Babine Chief Wilf Adam was on his way to Smithers, B.C., on Monday for a discussion about whether to entirely shut down the food fishery on Lake Babine, something he said would be drastic and unprecedented.

Mel Kotyk, North Coast area director for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans said department scientists don’t know why the return numbers are so low. “[…] we think something happened in the ocean.”

“We’ve never seen anything like this in all these years I’ve done this. I’ve asked the elders and they have never seen anything like this at all.” said Chief Wilf Adam
These stories were posted up on enenews. This suggests a possible explanation is radiation from Fukushima. That is speculation at this point. It could also be climate change related.

In 2011, Arnie Gundersen, nuclear expert from Fairewinds said this: “So eventually though we are going to see top of the food chain animals like tuna and salmon and things like that that have this process bio accumulates. The bigger fish gradually get higher and higher concentrations. And I am concerned that the FDA is not monitoring fish entering the United States because sooner or later a tuna is going to set off a radiation alarm at some part and people are going to think it’s a dirty bomb or something like that. So that’s not here yet because the tuna haven’t migrated across the Pacific. But I am thinking by 2013 we might see contamination of the water and of the top of the food chain fishes on the West Coast.”

!n July 2012 Gundersen said this: “The federal and even state agencies are not measuring this… I’ve been working on the West Coast and I’ve been trying to get the people of Oregon to demand of their state, the people of Alaska to demand of their state: Check the salmon, it is not difficult, it’s on the order of $500 a fish. Of course you don’t have to test every fish, but let’s test a couple and see. Either alleviate the fear or announce that yes indeed they are radioactive.”

For now I’m thinking the seafood flavored cat food’s still safe provided it comes in half-inch thick lead cans.

Old Jules