Tuesday, October 13 (archive)
Today in Japan
What day is it?
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1804年Anesthesia Day麻酔の日
On this day in 1804, by the calendar used at the time, a doctor named Hanaoka Seishu removed breast cancer from a patient he had put fully to sleep with an herbal medicine. The Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists calls it the world's first surgery under general anesthesia. The famous ether demonstration in Boston came more than 40 years later.
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1987年制定Sweet Potato Dayさつまいもの日
A local group in Kawagoe, Saitama, a town famous for sweet potatoes, created this day in 1987. It comes from an old Edo joke: sweet potatoes are "tastier than chestnuts," kuri yori umai. Kuri sounds like ku-ri, nine ri, an old unit of distance, and yori like yo-ri, four ri. Nine plus four is thirteen. October is the season, so the 13th it is.
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Chrysanthemums Bloom七十二候「菊花開（きくのはなひらく）」
In the old seasonal calendar, which splits the year into 72 short seasons of about five days each, today begins "chrysanthemums bloom." In Japan the chrysanthemum is an autumn flower for festivals and contests, but it's also the most common flower people place on graves, so it's safer not to bring a bunch of them to a dinner party.
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If someone asks you
Why do people in Japan buy sweet potatoes from a truck?
That's a yakiimo truck. It carries an oven full of hot stones, and the sweet potatoes roast slowly inside, which makes them really sweet. The trucks drive around neighborhoods playing a long, slow recorded call. You see fewer of them now, because supermarkets and convenience stores sell roasted sweet potatoes too, but the call still makes a lot of people hungry.
Phrase of the day
These are sweet potatoes, but they taste almost like dessert.
Sentence of the day
Today is Anesthesia Day, after a Japanese doctor's surgery in 1804, and also Sweet Potato Day. It's the perfect excuse to buy a roasted sweet potato on the way home.