Komaba Times Issue 9

Against All Odds: An Oral History of PEAK’s Komaba-Sai
A roundtable talk by Ricky Negishi, Minghao Xu, and Eriko Yamada in 2019.
Images by Eriko Yamada.
The students:
Ricky: Third year ES 1 student. In charge of the
PEAK 2 booth for Komaba-sai 3 in the year of 2018.
Eriko: Second year JEA 4 student. In charge of
PEAK booth in the year of 2019.
Minghao: Second year JEA student. Worked
alongside Eriko for PEAK booth in the year of 2019.
The talk:
M: Why tornado potato last year?
R: There were a lot of restrictions on the food
items. For example, you can’t use dairy products
or cut ingredients at the booth due to health
concerns. Out of all the options, tornado potato
seemed to work best as a base to add flavors
from different countries. In the end, we had eight.
I think this year’s youtiao (Chinese churros) is
also similar since you can customize it with other
toppings.
Last year I was trying to have fun and get the
PEAK community to get out and about. So, a lot of
people did come to our booth. I hope people, both
within and outside the university, got to know a
little more about PEAK. I know this year you guys
had PEAK quizzes, right? How did that go?
E: I think the questions served the purpose of
letting people know more about PEAK. I think
people also enjoyed answering them and it added
some fun to the ordering process. Plus, you
get a discount if you answered correctly.
Tornado potato
PEAK QUESTION EXAMPLE:
Which of the following is NOT a student club
or organization founded by PEAK students?
A) Bi
B) D. P. Theater at Komaba
C) Komaba Times
D) All of the above are founded
by PEAK students.
R: Last year, we did encounter some problems.
One is that I had zero funds to begin with. And
so, we held a fundraiser by selling PEAK themed
T-shirts. We also simply asked for donations,
which would not be possible if the PEAK community
wasn’t as strong as it was.
E: One of the most stressful things in organizing
the whole thing was the expectation to earn
money. I didn’t realize that was our main goal. At
first I just knew that we had a budget of 140,000
yen from last Komaba-sai, and not that it took so
much hard work to get! So, when I was planning,
I planned to the scale of the budget we had and
did not plan to save any money because we
wanted to advertise PEAK as much as possible,
which created some problems during planning.
M: Nevertheless, this year, we had four flavors:
Chinese Plain Flavor, Thai Syrup, Chocolate and
Sugar Frosting, and Parmesan and Oregano.
They are all there for a reason. The first flavor is
how you would normally find it in China. In our
research, we found people in Cambodia, Thailand,
and many other
East and Southeast
Asian cultures
also eat youtiao,
hence the second
flavor. We also read
about scholars theorizing
that youtiao
inspired churros, so
we have the third
option, which is basically
doing youtiao
in the churro style.
The final option is
actually the most
popular flavor from
last year’s potatoes,
which we took as a
“PEAK legacy.”
E: We also intentionally tried to be more sensitive
to cultural appropriation with the menu this year.
We avoided using country names in our menu if
no research or evidence justified such usage. We
initially had country names for the last two flavors
but decided to take them out because when we
think about what we are trying to represent, we
feel it is hard for us to attach a country to a kind
of food and say, “this is it,” while it might not be
the case. And I guess it can be hard for customers
to grasp such nuanced aspects of cultural
prejudice, so we thought the best solution was
to not have the country names when they are not
duly deserved.
M: One thing we also did was to avoid making
the PEAK booth too much of a “Chinese” or
“Asian” one. We also wanted to be inclusive and
not exclude a large chunk of the community.
Thus, I came up with the idea of selling snacks
handpicked by PEAK students from their home
countries. I always believe that diversity works
best when it is an organic process for everyone.
E: I do think selling the snacks is a good idea in
terms of inclusivity, but one problem was that
when we were advertising, many people were
confused about what we were selling. We were
saying that we had Chinese Churros, and then
that we had snacks, and that we also had the
quizzes. Sometimes it did feel like our booth had
too much information.
M: It could’ve been worse! (laugh) In the very
beginning, we had this idea of selling a few more
fried food items alongside youtiao. I even messaged
an upperclassman on how to make Filipi-
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