CHALLENGE-MASHO

Last night, I had this amazing conversation about food with one of my JTEs. We were talking about how recently, there's this category of food called B-rank-gome. It includes places that serve food that's not quite restaurant-y, but isn't quite fast food. It's good food, it's cheap, and it's fast. It includes things like takoyaki, okonomiyaki, and ramen. Apparently, Tsuyama is quite well known for it. They even have contests to figure out which place is the best B rank restaurant.

The interesting thing though, is that the ranking kinda stops there. There's no C rank. A rank is really just like, sit down food, so there's not much of a point of differentiating between A ranked restaurants.

But there's more to that, other than the rankings not being an indicator of general cleanliness and likelihood to pass health inspection (though, I really would rather not think about that since there may or may not be a link to this; I know next to nothing about how Japanese kitchens operate, but when I was at this Izakaya place learning to make torimomo oroshiai, well, I dunno if kitchens in America do that too but yeaaahhhh). The place has to have backing from the community, or something like that. I'm not entirely sure. More research is required. So the JTE I was talking to said he'd email his anthro prof from college and ask him for resources on that, since he was pretty sure there was a good deal of scholarly articles/books written on the topic of food in Japan from the Japanese perspective.

I find this all completely fascinating. （≧∇≦）Seriously, if I get into grad school, it's the kind of thing I want to study. But. This means that my kindergarten level kanji skills need some serious level up grinding, cause it really is that low. Sigh. I need to be able to read newspapers. Sigh. LET'S KANJI SHIMASHO~

Speaking of grad school, several of my friends were kind enough to tell me about/point me in the direction of a different ranking style for the GREs: the percentile ranking. Hooray. But, basically, my Verbal scores are fiiiiiiiiiine.