Herringtons in Haruna: Day 54 Community Pizza Party with the Neighborhood Chief

Saturday October 24th 2009

We were graciously invited to a private pizza party. It was hosted by Nakajima-san. He is the man that is chief of this area that we live in and invited us over last month for his wonderful homemade Soba noodles. He has a hand built brick pizza oven in his backyard too. The women got together around 2:00pm to prepare the dough and topping for the pizza. It was fun yet a little frustrating for me. First I didn't have Paul with me to help understand the conversations. Second most of the women knew English, but purely to help me with my Japanese were told not to use English, Japanese only.

These situations really emphasize how little Japanese I know. But it is also a good reminder to study study study. Of course they helped me out and answered my questions, but when I couldn’t answer a simple question I just felt plain ignorant. It was a lot of fun getting to know a lot more women in the area. All the ladies lives within walking distance, so hopefully I will see them around.

Around 5:00 the guys started to come.

Over the course of 4 hours we consumed about 18 pizzas between 15-20 people. It was a lot of food. And we had fun trying a lot of different pizza. In the US most of these ingredients would not even come close to a pizza. They had a sweet sesame-seed and miso paste sauce, a tomato sauce, pumpkin, natto (fermented soy beans), eggplant, boiled eggs …. I tried to make one with the most American toppings they had, but it still wasn't the same. Oh well, it was a blast making the pizzas and meeting new people. We were introduced to a lot of people from the community and we hope to make many new friends from this.