With Obon approaching, I am reminded of the first time I helped my mother-in-law with setting-up the dinner table. Coming from the U.S., I am accustomed to having a dinner napkin as part of the dining set-up. Well, my mother-in-law handed me the usual paraphernalia associated with Japanese dining, a bowl of rice, chopsticks, and tea. I was setting the table, when she called for me from the kitchen. I had placed the rice and tea on the table, but didn’t know where to place the chopsticks. Since a napkin wasn’t available and I didn’t want to place the chopsticks directly on the dining table, I quickly stuck them in the rice and returned to the kitchen to further assist my mother-in-law. Then next thing I knew, there was a loud exclamation of shock being exuded by my father-in-law, who had entered the dining room. The loud yelp was immediately followed by a roaring burst of laughter from my mother-in-law who had gone to find-out what the problem was. My husband came running into the kitchen quickly explaining that the manner in which I had placed the chopsticks in the rice bowl was reserved for honoring deceased ancestors during Obon and funeral ceremonies. With the locals being as superstitious as they are, my father-in-law was totally stunned when he saw his rice. Needless to say, I have never made that mistake again. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With Obon approaching, I am reminded of the first time I helped my mother-in-law with setting-up the dinner table. Coming from the U.S., I am accustomed to having a dinner napkin as part of the dining set-up. Well, my mother-in-law handed me the usual paraphernalia associated with Japanese dining, a bowl of rice, chopsticks, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-notes-2004","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jawingon.jet-okinawa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jawingon.jet-okinawa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jawingon.jet-okinawa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jawingon.jet-okinawa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jawingon.jet-okinawa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jawingon.jet-okinawa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jawingon.jet-okinawa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jawingon.jet-okinawa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jawingon.jet-okinawa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}