Top 5 "I don't believe they call that food
30 October 2002, 04:53
Japanese foods
1. Natto
The stuff they serve as appetizers in Hell. Imagine a pile of soy beans covered in snot and raw egg and left to rot for a few weeks and you got yourself natto. The Japanese swear its “very healthy” but this is simply an excuse for the country’s biggest culinary fuck-up.
2. Uni
Revolting sea snail paste masquerading as a mashed-up piece of tongue.
3. Konyaku
No idea exactly what it is (Animal? Mineral? Vegetable?), but looks and tastes like a chewy purple jelly-fish with bits in it. Like flavourless jello gone horribly wrong.
4. Sea Snails
Sea snail shells encasing a raw slug. As appetizing as it sounds.
5. Salmon roe
The part of the sushi platter that always gets left behind. Big squishy salty fishy pustules. Yum.
And what’s this about octopus icecream? What will our little friends think of next?
Permanent Link | Pornilicious?
27 October 2002, 20:44
I was in a subway station in Akasaka the other day and picked up a strategically placed flyer directed at “the foreigner”. The prevalence of porn advertising amuses me as much as it concerns me. It’s not enough that we get these flyers in our mailbox every day. Now we get bombarded in subway stations with “happy (or in this case, sullen) little prostitute” agencies advertising ‘special rates’ for foreigners.
I’ve become immune to seeing pornographic advertising littered throughout our gas and electricity bills, but what about the young kids who often collect their household’s mail? I’m not convinced that seeing muff and titties on a daily basis doesn’t affect the way they view women as being merely muff and titties.
But I’m looking at this from a westerner’s perspective. Who’s to say that these very kids are not immune to the less-than-subliminal advertising as well? They live in a culture where strangers of both sexes bathe together butt naked (muff, titties, willies, the whole shebang) with no sexual innuendo… Does depicting a semi-clad woman with a phone number beneath her, constitute an abberation?
And why do some foreigners get their jollies by collecting these pieces of paper, scanning them and posting them on the web?
Top 5 "I've died and gone to Heaven
26 October 2002, 21:35
Japanese foods
1. Curry rice
A little bit Malaysian, a little bit Thai, mostly indescribable. Not only tasty, but cheap. 500yen will get you a large plate of curry rice practically anywhere in Japan. Top takeaway picks are CoCo Ichibanya (Spinach curry - 600yen) and Matsuya (Chicken curry a steal at 390yen).
2. Okonomiyaki (literally “cook what you like”)
Japan’s answer to bubble and squeak. Comes in two styles; Hiroshima style, which is a big layered savory galette with fillings of meat, fish and either soba or udon noodles, or Kansai style, which combines whatever fillings they have in the kitchen, with crepe batter, eggs, pickled ginger and cabbage which are then cooked into a big pancake. Most Kansai style places are DIY, that is they give you the bowl and you cook it yourself on your table’s hotplate. After cooking your mutha-crepe, smother it in tonkatsu sauce and mayo and inhale. Heaven on a hotplate.
3. Gyoza
Not strictly Japanese (Chinese) but when the Japanese are onto a good thing they like to make it their own. These little puppies are pork and spring onion dumplings, served over rice and drowned in soya sauce, garlic and vinegar.
4. Donburi and Tonkatsu
Another cheapo meal, thus an excellent end-of-month feed. Tonkatsu is either pork or chicken fillet, crumbed, fried and dumped on a bed of rice with tonkatsu sauce; and Donburi is tonkatsu and rice, with a beaten egg poured over it and lightly grilled. Tonkatsu sauce is a Japanese hybrid of ketchup, worcestershire sauce and mysterious spices which tastes better than it sounds…
5. Tempura
Another import (from the Portugese this time). Battered and deep fried shrimp, vegetables etc. Served on either plain rice or udon noodles.The truly chic places also like to give herbs like basil and rocket the tempura treatment.
And then there’s deep-fried cheese (a perennial izakaya fave) which I couldn’t, in all conscience, put in my Top 5… a cholesterol-churning and yet sublime experience. But not one for the kids.
Japanese TV
24 October 2002, 18:22
The beauty about Japanese TV is that you don?ft have to speak Japanese to understand every word.
When I first arrived in Japan, I shunned any television program which wasn’t a music show. Then I got addicted to The Wedding Planner, a Japanese drama centred around a wedding planning agency. Maybe it was the introductory music, I don’t know, but I was hooked. To this day, I have understood maybe 4 words, and yet am able to follow it perfectly. The reason is this:
Japanese dramas are all over-exaggerated theatrics, airborne limbs and extreme facial expressions. And they illustrate the archetypal patterns of heartache, loss, betrayal and love triangles with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer splitting a pile of bricks. Think of them as an oriental Days of Our Lives on speed.
But the cream of Japanese TV undoubtedly comes in the form of game or private eye shows. One particular favourite is this gem (name unknown and inconsequential):
Every week, a team of TV investigators sets up a guy who is suspected of cheating on his girlfriend/wife. They send in a red-hot model type to convince him to go out on a dinner date. During the date, the model seduces him (of course) and after the man agrees to go home with her, the model excuses herself to go to the bathroom. At this point, the disgruntled girlfriend, dressed up in the same clothes, and with the same hair and make-up as the model, walks in from the bathroom and sits down in the model?fs place. The aftermath is standard reality TV fare.
Another strange show is set in a studio where a couple (obviously having issues) is put in a wrestling ring and spends half an hour hurling abuse at each other. There?fs not even a Rikki Lake to interject with pearls of wisdom.
Not that I’d be able to understand them if there were.
Struggling with the technology
22 October 2002, 20:51
1. The first purchase for our apartment was futon bases. We bought the bases, which are thin pieces of foam covered by sheeting. We slept on the damned things for about 5 nights, thinking hmmm, the Japanese are hardy characters, and hoping we’d get used to how hard they were, before we were informed that, in fact, the futon bases required actual futons to be put on top of them.
2. We have, in our apartment, a bath called a “furo” (strictly speaking o-furo - oh very honourable bath) Its about one metre squared and you are supposed to soak upright in it after you’ve scrubbed yourself to the consistency of a raw prawn outside of it. Japanese people spend up to an hour in the bath, citing it as a religious experience.
One night, Matt and I fired up the furo. We knew it would take a bit of time to heat up, so we left it and returned to our game of scrabble and sake. When we went back to it, the water was bubbling and we thought hey cool, its like a spa bath! Only then did we realize the water was boiling. We had a bath full of boiling water which took another hour of pouring cold water on it before it was remotely bearable to immerse our bodies into. I spent 5 minutes in it before God told me to get the hell out before I fainted of heat exhaustion.
