I've been spending a lot of time with Okaasan lately. Yesterday evening she allowed me to cook niku jaga with her. It's a type of beef stew, but maybe the liquid isn't as thick as stew. It includes carrots. potatoes, and onions. The sauce is made from osake, mirin (a sweet, cooking alcohol), soy sauce, and sugar (not white sugar, not brown sugar, but something in between). It doesn't seem too difficult to cook, but I don't have a recipe yet, and I have cooked it only one time, so I don't know if I'll be able to reproduce the recipe upon return to the U.S. Okaasan also taught me how to grill whole eggplants and then skin and season them. I happen to not care for the scent after the eggplant is grilled, however, so even though it's easy to cook and season the eggplant, I doubt I'll reproduce that dish too often.

Tonight Otousan and Yoko were horseback riding at the barn during dinner time, so Okaasan and I ate together. We discussed the population problem in Japan. I told her what I learned last year in class about women not wanting to put children through the strict, stressful education system, and about women not wanting to marry a man only to rarely see him because he works such long hours with a company. Okaasan said in the past, it was socially acceptable and encouraged to get married, and it was even better for a woman's social position if she married and raised children. Now, however, it is also socially fashionable to be a single, working woman who can provide for herself with her own salary. This concept, coupled with the slow but steady push for gender equality in the workplace, is surely making it more desirable for women to have their own jobs. That, in addition to the points I mentioned that I learned at U of I last year, have probably contributed a fair amount to the population decrease.

Okaasan doesn't feel very confident in the new government's ability to ameliorate the population problem. She feels that it's too early to form an opinion, but she senses that some voters may have chosen Hatoyama based on promises he made during his campaign. These promises could provide temporary relief, but they will not solve the long-term problem. For example, the new government declared that it will give each family a certain number of yen for each child in the family who is of elementary or middle school age. Okaasan thinks that many citizens voted for Hatoyama based on policies such as this. Those voters may see the immediate benefits of such a course of action, but they are failing to look at long term issues or ways that the money could be better spent. Okaasan said that families of elementary school and middle school children may not need the money as much as families with university-aged children do, because university tuition is quite expensive. Instead of using that money to fund their children's educations, families may use the money for vacations, or other sorts of expenses. Okaasan also said that the money could be used on other issues, such as too-large classes in schools. There are currently classes with forty students and one teacher, but the money going to families with young children could instead be used to divide those large classes into two classes of twenty students per every teacher. Maybe a Japanese person's opinion depends upon his or her personal situation, but this is what I have heard thus far, and I find it interesting.

But enough politics for now. I have to take a shower and study kanji before I go to sleep.