Yomikata musings

We had a semi-interesting discussion in class about 読み方 (yomikata) – which is to say, readings of kanji. When you see a character, there are often multiple ways it can be pronounced: 人 might be hito, jin or nin, and in some compounds hito becomes bito, in the same way that handbag isn’t pronounced like a combination of hand and bag, but as hambag.

We ran into confusion with 日, “day” or “sun”. This has yomikata of hi, bi, ka, jitsu and nichi. Except that this is clearly not the end of the matter, because in the very common word 明日, “tomorrow” none of those sounds appear. The word’s pronunciation is, in fact, either ashita or asu (myounichi exists, but is very formal).

This caused a minor argument-slash-misunderstanding, because I suggested that one yomikata for 日 is ta. The teacher disagreed, on the basis that the whole word is pronounced as ashita, but that doesn’t mean anything for the individual kanji. I don’t pretend to have any authority to argue with the teacher about whether this is officially true, but I do think it’s confusing.

I suppose this comes down to ways of thinking. I don’t know what the ‘point’ of yomikata is, or whether anyone has actually defined it. I assumed they were a system for classifying the possible pronunciations of kanji, and under such a model omitting ta* would be a failing: a person encountering the word 明日 for the first time would be totally unable to come up with the correct pronunciation, despite having a perfect knowledge of all yomikata. This is presumably not the only word which has a pronunciation not reflected in any yomikata, either.

* shita is probably better on reflection because 明 does have an official yomikata of a

So basically, I think if you think of yomikata as the set of official kun-yomi (Japanese-devised) and on-yomi (Chinese-derived) readings for kanji, then indeed shita does not exist, not being on the list. However, if you think of yomikata as the real-life set of possible ways to read a character (as its name would suggest) then one of the ways you pronounce日is, indeed, shita, in the word 明日 if nowhere else. It’s all a bit confusing! The omission seems arbitrary (I don’t know whether it is arbitrary, and it doesn’t especially matter).

English has a related problem, in that pronunciation is really only defined at the level of the word, though there are of course many patterns that exist between similar words and are reflected in spelling, so a lot of extrapolation is possible. I suppose the difference is that a) I’m a native speaker, b) our alphabetic writing system works quite differently from syllable-based kanji, and c) as far as I know, there isn’t an official list of possible pronunciations for English letter combinations claiming to be complete and authoritative.

I would tend to argue that, for a person learning how to pronounce kanji (so, anyone who ever learns Japanese, including Japanese people), it's more useful to include all possible pronunciations of a character rather than just a subset. You can of course learn idiosyncratic words like 明日 entirely separately, but I generally think having a comprehensive mental model is more useful than a partial model and a string of special cases. However, I am not World Yomikata Authority so it doesn't really matter what I think.

The short version is, I suppose, that what yomikata exist for a word depends very much on what you think yomikata are, and the official answer is, official yomikata. Be aware.

Further culinary adventures

So previously on the blog, I failed to make curry due to basic reading comprehension. But I am not so easily defeated.

Having actually secured curry roux this time, it was fairly simple to repeat the process (first making sure that the instructions were essentially the same). The curry was strong and rich, and made for a series of very nice (and quick) meals for the next few days. I am also inclined to accept Pear's claims of its heat-fatigue-beating properties.

On a particularly hot day when I was walking a lot, I tried an alternative drink, which turned out to be rather peculiar. It seems to be a white grape and aloe thing, which isn't a combination that would occur to me. Flavourwise it was a little unfamiliar, but basically okay. However, for some reason the aloe was added in the form of small gelatinous cubes! This meant I was taking swigs of weak grape juice, and constantly getting a mouthful of bits of jelly. Somewhat distracting, to be honest, and I don't think I'll be buying it again.

As promised, I have make additional bread. This time, I used the hot-metal-tray trick, as well as a water-based dough that I could leave out much longer without concern. The result was some plump, relatively soft bread rolls that made delicious sandwiches. The only downside here was the crust turning very dry. This was because of a feature of the microwave's oven setting: it preheats, which is nice, but it runs a preheating cycle every time you use it. This means if you accidentally set the oven to run for one minute, then it will insist on preheating again (thus drying out the crust) before letting you run it for another 14 minutes. Sigh. Maybe next time.

One of the few fairly cheap fruits here is kiwi, so I've been eating a fair amount of them (such hardship!). I've used these before in stirfries, but they also seem to work well freshly-sliced as a foil to peppery stir-fried beef. The tart sweetness contrasts nicely with the rich savoury beef and the peppery kick.

Tune in next time for more fascinating pictures of food what I have eaten.

Fukuoka Castle and Maizuru Park

I've met up with some of my language partners a few times now, and once the initial rush of emails was dealt with and I started actually meeting humans, things have generally been easier. It remains a bit tricky to some extent, because school timetables change every week and so you can't schedule a regular meeting slot or plan too far in advance, but it's not been a huge problem. And of course, if you're meeting people after work rather than in the daytime, that's doable.

A little while ago, one of my language partners (who I will call KM) took me off for a walk in the grounds of Fukuoka Castle that turn out to be conveniently near the school. It was a bright, sunny day and so somewhere around 30C in the shade, but we survived somehow (always bring a hat, and an umbrella, and a bottle of water).

Although we were strictly going to the castle, the fun really begins at the moats outside. A big chunk of these have turned into lotus forests, which have a nice soothing effect. They're unfamiliar enough to me as plants that I can easily kid myself I'm looking at some alien jungle, and detach myself from the actual scale of the plants to picture myself boating between the stalks in some floating forest on the moons of Jupiter.

The lotus forest harbours quite a bit of wildlife, though equally it's hard to see much. There are huge pond-skater creatures that look like many-jointed clockwork insects, and small near-transparent fish; on one leaf I saw a baby terrapin the size of a walnut, but unfortunately wasn't able to get any pictures.

Others may well not appreciate it, but I am personally made up with that photo of the fly, which is about my first ever successful use of the ultra-closeup feature on my camera.

A little further along is another moat that has been turned into a koi pond, where vast carp swim slowly through the murky waters while ducks float above. More excitingly, this is the home of the terrapins! As some of you already know, I have enormous affection for terrapins and all their kin, so this was a great joy to me, and we ended up spending quite some time admiring all these creatures.

When we passed by later, a family had been feeding the fish and gave us some leftover bread, to our slight embarrassment (I'm pretty sure they thought we were on a date and I was ill-prepared). This was a great opportunity to discover just how rambunctious, rude and downright alarming koi can get when there is food in the offing.

The water boiled in the feeding frenzy, a writhing mass of muscular fish, chomping fishy maws and bubbles, with everyone constantly shoving everyone else aside. The poor gentle terrapins were also striving to win some bread, but were constantly buffetted, squirmed over and sent flying underwater or aside by the koi - I was a bit worried for them at times, but they seem pretty tough. Perhaps wisely, the ducks made no attempt to intervene.

I can't be the only one who thinks the koi look genuinely creepy like that?

After a bit of practice, and some cunning divide and conquer on our part, we managed to lure enough fish away that it was possible to feed the poor terrapins. To my jubilation, a determined attempt to ensure it was indeed the terrapin that got my bread led to me being lightly nipped by one of them in the process of nabbing my bread, and it turned out that they will in fact accept feeding by hand. This alone made the trip probably my favourite afternoon in Japan so far.

There was a little bench nearby and a few birds sitting shyly in the trees or flitting back and forth overhead. I stopped to scatter a few crumbs on the path in the hope of getting some photos of these charming foreign birds, especially the unfamiliar corvids (possibly a jungle crow, but also something sparrowlike. To my surprise, they were extremely shy. Now usually in Britain, anywhere that people tend to drop food, birds quickly get bold and learn that it's safe to come and pack at the food, especially in places where they actually feed birds. Here was a place that people came to feed the fish and ducks, but apparently birds were scared to come near me. After sitting quietly for several minutes and leaving breadcrumbs in a long trail, eventually they were willing to come and snatch the furthest, but they never came within less than four yards of me. Twice they were interrupted, once by a walker and once by a runner, and in both cases it again took several minutes before they'd return to the ground. I don't know whether there's some cultural difference in how people interact with birds; maybe they frequently get chased away here by people trying to feed the fish? Anyway, a shame.

Eventually the teeming mass in the moat subsided, and all was quiet once more.

Anyway, we did also pay a visit to the actual castle ruins. The whole thing is entirely free, which makes it very much worth doing.

This area is under excavation at present. It used to be a diplomats' lodge (鴻臚館 korokan) until around the 11th century. It's the only one that has been found in all Japan, so apparently this is something of a big deal. It just looks like a field right now, sadly.

It's notably different to a typical British castle. There is a substantial garden-like area within the moat, and as I understand it, it was basically more like a fortified complex than a castle as we'd understand it, with a central keep that was the main defensive point. This is now a little park, though orginally there would have been various buildings (and no visitor centre!). There are shady trees, including some odd hairy ones that I didn't recognise at all.

This is a 藤棚, a wisteria trellis. It pleases me that there's a specific term for a wisteria trellis, although sadly it is a compound noun rather than its own unique term.

The castle walls are stone, but nothing else. They have a steep angle rather than a flat wall, probably for architectural reasons. An interesting thing to me was that they seem to be built essentially by dry stone walling, with very rough stones of varying sizes carefully formed into a massive fortress wall.

I read somewhere that this technique helped protect the castles from earthquakes: without mortar and being only partly fitted, the stones could shift slightly without breaking the overall structure, and so could survive even cumulative minor earthquakes. The top part was basically a wooden structure, which was largely fireproof because of the thick layers of plaster and the tile roofs. Although Japan did have gunpowder (unsurprisingly, it's near China), it doesn't seem like they had similar tactics to the Europeans (I don't know about Chinese tactics); anyway, some combination of tactical philosophy and technology means that they didn't develop the siege-resistant stone castles of Europe. I think it was more common to sally forth and meet the enemy in the field.

There's very little left other than the castle walls, but you can get the best view I've yet seen of Fukuoka from the top.

I was intrigued by the way the complex has been integrated into the city. In Europe, abandoned castles near towns have usually been plundered for stone; KM was very surprised, and a bit shocked, when I told her that. I suspect the difference here is that European castle architecture involved a very large quantity of finely-masoned stone. The stone itself, its transport costs from a quarry far away, and the masonry work all added up to a considerable value, and so there was a lot to be gained from looting a castle ruin. Also, because most of the castle was stone, once left to rot it would quite readily start falling apart and you could fetch away useful bits, even without making a concerted effort to dissassemble it. And of course, in Europe a lot of buildings were made of stone, from castles to churches to manor houses to posh barns, and even some wealthy farmers' houses. In Japan, most things seem to have been made from wood and plaster for the majority of history (possibly related to all those earthquakes), and so there was less demand for stone. Even if you did loot the stone, for most purposes you'd need to get it masoned, and so you wouldn't be saving very much.

On the other hand, I have yet to see any historical site in Britain that is more or less extant, but where someone has fairly recently been allowed to build a sports pitch in the middle of the grounds.

There are several of these; at one time apparently a nasty concrete baseball stadium was also present. I can only shrug.

As we were wandering round, I saw some tourists with some kind of tablet device. It turned out that these are visualisation tools. Basically, you can hold it up anywhere in the site, and it will show you a reconstructed view of the old castle from that spot: buildings, walls and so on are recreated for you. It can't be long before they offer a headset version, surely? Anyway, we didn't get round to trying that, but it seems very cool and I'd recommend looking into it if you go. I suspect you get them from the museum. The museum also has displays, and a large model/map combination of the castle area as it was. The staff there were very helpful in explaining how the model mapped onto the modern city, as some bits have changed very substantially. It turns out a bit chunk of the waterfront area has been reclaimed from the sea. KM very kindly helped interpret for me, though the staff obviously had some English.

For other GenkiJACS students: this is very definitely worth a visit, and it's so close to the school that you could go for a quick wander there at lunchtime, if you wanted, or even eat lunch in the grounds (I saw people doing that). It's one of the best days out I've had and I heartily recommend it. It was a really good way to spend a conversation session, because it gave us loads to talk about, from nature to history, politics and society. If you have a well-informed conversation partner, or some other Japanese friend interested in such things, then definitely set aside a couple of hours to wander around at your leisure and make the most of it. There's a cafe or two nearby to recover afterwards.

An odd note to finish on, but I was genuinely struck by this on leaving the grounds. I'm pretty sure this is the only segregated pavement I've seen since arriving in Fukuoka. Everywhere else, bikes fly around at tremendous speed in total silence, passing by pedestrians like a school of dolphins weaving past clumsy divers, and with about the same non-existent clearance between you. It's highly alarming, to be quite honest. For some reason, this pavement has been singled out for a great honour. It's probably just because it's wide, but there you go.

Struggling with keigo

So today we finally (to my dismay) went back to a chapter we’d skipped: keigo. I will confess that, having not slept very well, I was not in the best mood for studying a fairly tiresome aspect of Japanese. On the plus side, GenkiJACS do sensibly leave it until you've studied absolutely everything else in the textbook, since everything else is much more genuinely useful for most people.

Keigo is basically a set of formal, polite language used for various situations where you want to show additional respect or to seem humble. In English and similar languages we tend to control politeness through the choice of words, hedging words like “possibly” and “would”, and by using avoiding allocating responsibility for problems to the person we’re talking to. Instead of “will you finish making the tea by six?” we might say “I was wondering if you happen to know yet whether the tea is likely to be ready by six?” Often we also tag on ‘explanations’ to excuse what might seem like rudeness: “…only I was thinking of nipping to the shops if there’s time”, or something like that.

In Japanese, I’m sure that sort of thing happens too, but they also have special vocabulary that replaces a lot of common words. There are entirely new verbs used in place of the most common ones, and other verbs are put into the passive to show politeness – they don’t actually become grammatically passive, but you use that form of the verb. Prefixes get added to many nouns, making them “politer” through some magical process.

Obviously, it isn’t my language to gripe about, but I have to confess that (as you might have guessed) I basically find keigo annoying.

For one thing, as a learner, keigo adds a significant burden to learning the language, without offering any very tangible benefit. Keigo gets used quite a lot in things like the service industry (shopping, restaurants), and by junior staff or pupils, as well as cropping up in formal kinds of media. All of those are common situations for language learners to discuss or encounter in real life, whereas the everyday situations where normal language is used tend to require actual friendship. It’s quite important to learn keigo, at least enough to pick out the key bits and filter the information you need from the sentence. However, what learning keigo bestows is the ability to speak in ritually polite and formal ways – which are only necessary because keigo exists. I already know perfectly adequate words and phrases for doing all those things; I don't want to waste valuable brain on learning slightly different ways to say them to different people.

And the existence of keigo makes it that much more difficult to read, listen to or watch things in Japanese by essentially replacing some language you've already learned with an equivalent that you don't yet know. It's one thing if you're swapping, say, "rake" and "libertine", or "undulate" with "oscillate", because both are fairly uncommon; it's quite another thing to switch "be", "come", "do," "go", "eat", "drink", and other vital everyday terms with entirely different ones that mean exactly the same thing. Keigo can also be quite confusing, because ambiguity is politer, but this sometimes makes it more difficult to work out what is actually happening: one common practice replaces the verb for "be" with "become", for example. It's not inherently wrong or anything, but it's another arbitrary thing that you need to learn.

Another thing is that the very formal levels of politeness in Japanese reinforce some social ideas that I find very uncomfortable. I’m fairly competent in using politeness in English when called for, but I have a very egalitarian philosophy and don’t tend to vary my language much for people’s social status. The Japanese idea that you owe particular respect to older pupils, or to people who’ve worked in a company longer than you, or that your boss is an elevated and worthier person rather than someone who does a different job as part of the same system and incidentally gets paid a lot more, are ones I instinctively revolt against. I want to respect other people’s languages and cultures, but at the same time, I don’t feel comfortable adopting these ways of talking or thinking.

The third issue is that keigo seems to be increasingly an entirely artificial thing, a lumbering zombie hulk kept in hideous unlife by demands from the ever-influential They. Native speakers notoriously don’t really understand keigo, so that even those who pride themselves on mastery of the language complain of their mistakes. Companies send their employees on special courses in using keigo so that they’ll be able to use these speech patterns with customers and colleagues. Shops have keigo manuals to instil the correct language in their peons (and purists leap all over their supposed mistakes). There are complaints that young people simply aren’t used to speaking this kind of Japanese, and no longer understand how to use it. In fairness, there have always been complaints that Young People Can't Speak Our Language Properly; I imagine the early Proto-Indo-Europeans were revolted that Today's Youth couldn't pronounce [gʷʰ] properly and kept dropping word-final *s without applying compensatory vowel lengthening.

My approach to language is one of affection for weird features, but I also agree that actual usage is king. Keigo no longer seems to be any natural part of Japanese. It is an artificial relic of feudal times, one that must be painstakingly learned by native speakers as a bolt-on to their actual language, when their normal language is (like all languages) entirely adequate for their needs. You can tell, because if they actually needed what keigo provides, it would still be part of ordinary Japanese. That’s how language works. If young people are unable to use keigo, it's probably because keigo is not useful to them.

However, because keigo does exist, it creates implications. A quick glance around the internet (even in English) will throw up people complaining of feeling slighted that a shop assistant spoke to them in normal Japanese – even though this was almost certainly the polite –masu form with polite vocabulary, rather than the simple colloquial way they would speak to friends. People who can’t really do keigo are judged for it, in the same way as those who have a provincial accent on the BBC or otherwise use dialect features that are entirely correct but non-standard; I am pretty sure that, like most such situations, it will reinforce class divisions.

In summary: it is a source of needless complexity and redundancy, it reinforces ancient ideas of social precedence that ought to be revised in view of more modern ideas about human equality, and it is so unnatural to modern speakers that it has to be specially taught and is frequently wrong. It doesn’t appear to bring any benefits other than slight nuance, but not using it or using it wrong incites judgement. Here’s to its imminent extinction.

Unfortunately, I do have to learn this stuff, not least in order to pass the end-of-book test that will let me proceed to another class (at least, I have to reason to think this chapter alone is excluded). Equally unfortunately, I find it very difficult to motivate myself to learn it, because it feels like such a waste of time. I can only hope that I'll be seized with a sudden burst of enthusiasm.

Why bread matters

I appreciate that everyone is probably fairly fed up of farinaceous posts by now, but I want to talk a little bit more about bread as a kind of example.

When you go abroad, there are lots of things you'll read about or hear about that will be New and Different and either Delightful or Hard To Deal With. And in some cases this will be true, although in quite a lot of cases the differences actually make a minimal difference to your life. It's true that people in Japan spend a lot more time bowing and negotiating movements than tends to be true in the UK, but actually I don't find I need to think about this at all - I picked up the habit very quickly and haven't noticed it affecting my life at all. And they use paper tissues rather than hankies and don't blow noses in public, but I spend only a small fraction of my time and energy blowing my nose.

Bread is not something anyone really talks about, except briefly drawing contrasts between countries and cultures, but it has a much more profound effect on my life than I'd expected.

In the UK, bread is almost impossible not to get. Every shop that sells food tends to sell bread, down to corner shops and tobacconists. It's cheap and plentiful. Everyone eats bread regularly. A wide range of breads is available to suit different tastes. There are rubbishy but cheap breads, and luxury posh breads, and seed breads and a pleasingly large amount of healthy wholemeal bread.

The other thing about the bread-based diet is that bread support products are available. Cooked sliced meat is available just about anywhere that sells bread. Cheese comes in blocks well-suited to slicing for sandwiches or toast, or is even available pre-sliced. There is an array of spreads and pastes and pâtes for alternative sandwiches. Because there's a market for it, low-priced versions are widely available, as well as the pricier options.

The combination of these things means that it's very easy and cheap to get hold of sandwich/toast-making foodstuffs, and these can easily be stored at home to make a quick, convenient meal. You can make sandwiches in about two minutes, and eat them in a similar time if you want. You can eat them tidily on the go if you're in a big hurry. They make minimal mess, require no cooking and cause little washing-up - I personally tend to keep my perfectly-clean sandwich plates and reuse them for my main meal. They don't require electricity or gas, nor produce heat in the making.

In Japan, bread isn't really a thing and sandwiches definitely aren't a thing. Oh, you can get them, but you can get sushi in England - it doesn't mean life is arranged to accommodate eating sushi.

I've bought a bit of bread here, but most of it is simply not acceptable for sandwiches, being both unhealthy and tasteless. Bread of all kinds is significantly more expensive than in the UK, ranging from twice the price (white bread resembling insulating foam) to around ten times the price (wholemeal sliced loaf), which immediately knocks it out of being a good staple food. Much more important is the dearth of things to put on it - literally the only sandwich filling I've seen here is ham. No other pre-cooked meats seem to be available, and of course cheese isn't an option. You could have an expensive, tasteless ham sandwich every day, but it's neither convenient nor appetising.

But my point here isn't just to gripe about bread, but to talk about consequences. Because it's not really convenient to do sandwiches, I don't really have any options for very quick meals: there's essentially nothing I can make that doesn't require cooking. All meals produce a certain amount of washing-up and make the room hot. Because I have only a single hob, I can't cook a main course and its accompanying carbohydrate at the same time unless I'm doing noodle soup, which means cooking time is extended and more planning is needed (more crucially, I can't make food and brew tea at the same time!). Cooked meals tend to cause more shopping than the equivalent sandwich would, because things need to be fresh, or are shapes that don't pack well in the fridge, or come in bulky packaging, so I have to shop more often.

(I should perhaps mention that although I spent two months in China, lack of bread wasn't an issue. Why? Because I wasn't providing the food - I ate in the canteen at work, and we had a cook in the dorm for evening meals. The only impact I saw was eating different food, and that wasn't a problem.)

The alternative is buying a ready-made bento meal. I've only done this for some lunches at school so far, because it's a bit pricey (though not bad), wastes a chunk of my lunchtime, and isn't as healthy as something I'd make myself. You then have to watch out for leaking sauces as you carry it back, find a place to sit and eat a meal with chopsticks, and potentially queue for the microwave. This is frankly a lot less convenient than cramming a sandwich bag into my rucksack, and then tidily eating it wherever.

The superficial consequence of (Western-style) bread not being as popular in Japan is that I spend more time eating other things. I like eating rice and noodles, so this shouldn't be a problem. The actual consequences are that I need to shop more often, need to be more organised about preparing meals, have no options for a very quick meal, my room gets hot whenever I eat, and I often find myself desperately longing for a decent butty, not just because I am very fond of bread, but because it is just so. much. easier.

I didn't really appreciate the genius of the sandwich as a foodstuff until I moved here. Truly, the queen of foods and perhaps the greatest of British gifts to the world.

Today's lesson is, it's very hard to guess what differences between cultures will actually be significant to you.

Baby Steps in Baking

Between my, um, quibbles about the local bread, insufficient dietary fibre, a baking habit and confusion over what I was supposed to have for breakfast, I have ended up starting baking despite initially-unpromising circumstances. I had in fact brought baking powder for exactly this situation.

An early target was microwave muffins, which I have learned to make using an array of recipes. As most are American, they require a certain amount of finessing: convert measurements from cups to human-parsable units, delete three-quarters of the sugar, that sort of thing.

It's not remotely as good as something I could bake with a proper kitchen setup, but it's relatively simple to make, relatively healthy, and includes valuable wholemeal flour. I use "valuable" in both senses here - it's pretty expensive in Japan, and hard to find, but also crucial because of the national aversion to most fibre-containing foods.

Once I'd spent an evening painstakingly translating some key sections of the microwave manual, I moved on to bread, because I really, really wanted some decent bread so I could just have a sandwich, is that so much to ask?

These turned out much better than I'd feared, although I couldn't get them to rise very far. They tasted good, though. Unfortunately, my more recent second attempt was much less successful. I don't have photos of these, though.

Following suggestions elsewhere, and concerned about leaving milk-based dough lying around for hours, I put it in the fridge overnight. What emerged was, essentially, a biscuit. Nothing I could think of would persuade the dough to stir any further, the yeast presumably exhausted after a relaxing cool night of frolics. It is chewy and not particularly appetising, fit only to eat with jam as a rudimentary breakfast. I was really hoping for sandwiches. I partly blame the fridge itself, which has been known to freeze vegetables in the past, but I don't really know the reason.

The difficulty is, I think, that there's not a good balance to strike. My house is typically relatively cool because I have air conditioning, and that plus the draft discourages dough from rising. There's no direct sunlight at any time of day, which is a great shame, because for the one year of my life that I had a sunny windowsill to place dough on, I produced plump and succulent rolls that have never been equalled. I could leave dough out when I leave and turn the aircon off (which I always do, of course), and the place will warm up, but I'm usually out for four hours at a time, which is a long time for milk in ~30C heat, I feel. Also, I'd need to be so organised that I made bread dough only a short time before leaving the house, which is... unlikely.

One trick I've tried before is leaving things on a metal tray over a bowl of boiling water and a cloth over the whole to insulate it. I'll try it if I can come up with a substitute for that metal tray, which (like virtually every other kitchen item) this flat doesn't possess. We Shall See.