Gastronomy

06/02/2002 English German

Edition # 40
San Francisco, 06-02-2002

Japan, Finally Aircraft as Arcade Tokyo Gastronomy Tokyo Fish Market Masks Beverages Beer Paper tissues Shuwattchi! Fashion Safety Technophilia Shinkansen Japanese speaking English Busy Bodies Rambunctious Youth Surveyed by Students Geishas Original and American knockoff Consumer Frenzy Japanese toilets Bicycles in Tokyo Train station in Tokyo Uniforms Taxis To Bow Shoes Off and Shoes On Hiroshima Ryokan Japanese Bath In the temple for AOL Koya-San Cemetery in Koya-San

Gastronomy

Figure [1]: Somewhere, something delicious is always sizzling.

Michael But back to the starting point of our journey: In Tokyo, you can mainly do two things: shop and eat. We ate out three times a day for a week without visiting the same place twice. However, dining out as a tourist is not that easy because the menus are usually only displayed in Japanese. And even if you, like us, can read Hiragana and Katakana quite fluently and know many Japanese dishes by their Japanese names, it usually doesn't help because the menus are full of Kanji characters. You need to know about 3,000 of them to be able to read a newspaper reasonably well. We know about 80 Kanji—and that's far from enough to understand even the menu of a sushi joint.

Figure [2]: Noodle Bar

Figure [3]: Restaurant

Upon inquiring with the waiter (in Japanese, of course), it sometimes turns out that there is an English menu available somewhere or a sushi menu with pictures on it. This proved to be a lifesaver on the first evening, as we could point to something and then say, "Two of those, please," which we can manage. If necessary, you can also drag the waiter outside to the display window and point to the plastic food replicas presented there. While illustration 4 shows the display of a restaurant with quite European food, in illustration 5 you can see the shop window of a store that sells the plastic items to the gastronomy industry. A single one of these deceptively realistic sushi pieces costs more than 5 euros, and a beer glass with plastic beer and foam costs over 30!

Figure [4]: Restaurant with plastic food display window

Figure [5]: Store for plastic food

One evening, we were wandering around downtown, unable to find the dive bar recommended in the travel guide, so we simply chose a nice-looking sushi bar. It's worth mentioning: when you enter a subway or a pub in Tokyo, you are, with very few exceptions, the only white person there. Coming from San Francisco, we're used to a diverse mix of people hanging around, but in Japan, we realized on the very first day that we were the only Westerners far and wide. Japan is almost 100% Japanese. When we entered the place, there were only Japanese people in suits hanging around, who like to eat after work (typically: only men and in suits) and relax with a drink with colleagues after a hard day at work. Everyone was shocked when we sneaked in. We felt like we were in a zoo. And this in downtown Tokyo, can you imagine! I bet no Westerner had set foot in this place in years. We got a table a bit away from the action and asked the young waiter in Japanese if he had an English menu. He laughed and said just one word: "Nothing!". Ah, yes.

We cautiously ordered a beer and concluded with sharp reasoning that this place must have a sashimi combination (just raw fish without rice). The waiter nodded enthusiastically. We ordered two, but after he looked at us in horror, we settled for just one. A short time later, he brought it over, and the fish were really out of the ordinary—one of them was a freshwater fish, which you generally shouldn't eat as sashimi due to the risk of food poisoning, but of course, we devoured it. We could hear the staff whispering, but everyone was impressed when we declined two forks offered by a waitress and ate with the chopsticks lying on the table. (Actually laughable, as I can, of course, eat thumb-sized pieces of duck with bones or a bowl of dry rice with chopsticks.) I also praised the sashimi with "Oishii desu!" ("This is very delicious!"), upon which we heard a waitress happily repeat the short phrase to her colleagues several times.

Figure [6]: The note that the waiter brought in the sushi joint

Then the waiter came with a pen and a few pieces of paper, on the top one of which (written by someone else, probably an English-speaking guest) it said that if we wanted anything else, we should perhaps write it down (Figure 6). We laughed, and I wrote in Japanese "Please, a beer" (in Japanese scribbles), which caused almost tumultuous scenes among the guests. We then ordered and ate some tempura and were about to pay when another plate with beef rolls around something like potato salad came on the house. We explained in our very broken Japanese that we were from Germany and not working in Japan, as had been assumed. Everyone was thrilled, and I believe we have proactively ensured good weather in German-Japanese relations, as preparation for the soon-to-arrive football hooligans -- the Japanese will be in for a surprise, it's going to be a disaster, they have no idea what's coming their way!