Soy Sauce and Mayo

I love my balcony view of a storm approaching Mt. Fuji at sunset. It makes one ponder themselves, their inner-most workings. It makes me think: I’ve been eating, since I came to Japan. It’s just one of those things I can never stop doing. What gives? A Japanese breakfast at our house often consists of:

1. Left-overs from the previous night’s dinner. This often consists of some sort of salad, potato or otherwise, rice-balls (onigiri), sometimes miso soup, and slices of hot dog, and pickles. Soy sauce and mayo (Japanese mayonnaise, pronounced "my-oh") go on just about everything.
2. Tiny bowl of cereal. Yumi’s mom (hereafter referred to as “Mom”) has been extremely considerate in buying me a box of cereal, which is still kind of an oddity in Japan. They don’t come cheap, and so I eat very small portions to make it last, which is fine because the cereal bowls are microscopic. Also, Mom makes me a mug of coffee. Did I mention that she officially rocks?

     As far as I can tell, there’s not much difference between breakfast food and dinner food in Japan. Maybe add a bread-product in the morning. And in America, we tend to eat one or two main things per meal, and just heap them up on our plate. Mountain of potatoes- BWAHHHH!!!! Half a cow- MEAT!!! RRAAARRRRR!!!! Maybe a sprinkling of ceremonial vegetables on the side, ya know, for color. YEE-HAWWWW!

     Japanese cuisine means variety in small portions. The tables here are scattered throughout the day with many small dishes of all kinds of things. These communal servings usually cover all the food groups and are relatively healthy, especially compared to American microwave-cooking standards. The result: Japanese people look fan-TAS-tic in slim-fit clothing! But take note: if you find a plate you especially like, please refrain from multiple visits to said plate. Share the wealth.

     In The States, I’ll bury everything on my plate in mashed potatoes, shunting anything with any sort of color pigmentation cleanly off the plate. In Nippon (that’s Japan, to the Japanese) you’d get dirty looks for hoarding any one particular item. Ask Yumi’s brother, any time we have Chicky-Chicky-Bone, or buffalo wings, as we know them. If you’re not fast enough, or if you like to wash your hands before eating, you’ll arrive at the table to find Yumi’s youngest brother (hereafter referred to as Youngest Brother) picking his teeth with the last of the tiny bones. Chicky-Chicky-Bone is one of the three predicted causes of an impending WWIII.

     As I try to adjust to this style of eating, my stomach rumbles between meals. Or maybe that’s the thunder from the typhoon off Okinawa just now. So on the way back from the supermarket, I bought one of my favorite doughnuts to tide me over til lunch.

An open letter to Cicadas:

“Dear Cicadas,

Please LAY OFF MY CURRY DOUGHNUT! This is MY curry doughnut! It and its tasty filling are not for your kind, so you can just stay up in your jealousy-tree and scream your whining song of pure insanity down all into the night, cause you aint getting any of this here CURRY FREAKIN DOUGHNUT! It’s MY doughnut! Get a job and get your own 98 yen. Ikea is currently hiring part-time!

             

Yours everlasting,

Brett J. Farnsworth

Oh, and PS, Cicadas: Don’t even THINK about dropping any more of your creepy-nasty discarded exoskeletons down on my head, cause I’d hate to bite into, for example,  a curry doughnut, and find a misplaced crunchy bit that came off of that Starship Trooper-looking thorax of yours in my tasty pastry. That’d really chap my fuzzy white-boy hide. FYI, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry. Just a head's up. Laters!

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PPS. Winter is coming…BWAHAHAHAHAAA!”

Also on the way back from everywhere we’ve been going lately, we’ve been running into these great little local festival parade thingies. Yumi said that each little locality has their own shrine and right now, throngs of people, little kids to really REALLY, like medieval-period-OLDE people, have been marching the streets in their traditional garb, matching yukata’s and tabi and all, playing flutes and drums and banging wooden blocks together while teams of people hoist their shrines onto their collective shoulders, chanting and singing who knows what.

One of these days I’ll have to learn Japanese. Even an ignoramus like me knows that we should have more community pride and all-inclusive street parties like this in The US. Even not knowing the language here, these little parades are the most charming surprises to encounter around the many narrow little corners. Yumi says these sort of mark the end of summer. For those of you who are thinking of coming to Japan, please know that these in no way resemble what Kurt Russell encountered in the very realistic documentary “Big Trouble in Little China.” Japan is a very safe place (but do watch out for those dirty, thieving cicadas and all the Godzillas- they’re everywhere here).

By the way, I've been looking ALLL over for one of my favorite seasonal flavors: Pumpkin. Pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, pumkin soup, all those things that I know you see state-side right now. I can't find it ANYWHERE. Really! Starbucks doesn't even have Pumkin Spice Lattes here (those traitors!)... But I'm learning a bit about fall seasonal foods in Japan. Chestnuts! It's all about chestnuts here, and yes- they do start roasting them on an open fire long before Bing starts crooning it across the Pacific. You can get them roasted at a street-stand or as a flavor in many many things here. That's Nuts!

A final anecdote on food for this entry: Tomorrow is my 34^th birthday. I REALLY hope I outlive Kurt Cobain and Jesus because I’m having too much fun here. To celebrate, Mom and Dad ordered a delicacy called Dominos Pizza for lunch while Younger Brother is here. They asked me to choose the pizza, so I looked through the menu and veered promptly away from the one with the crab claws hanging over all sides, looking like a creature from some nightmare Tim Burton had. I chose a couple of options and they ordered two EXTRA-LARGES! WOO-HOOO!!!

This next part says a lot about the size of food-portions in Japan. The pizzas arrived approx. one minute before they were due and I couldn’t help but notice that the mondo-size in Japan translates to just slightly larger than our personal-size pizzas in The States. But Mom to the rescue- our pizza lunch also consisted of the aforementioned onigiri, kim-chi (yes, that’s Korean, but still popular in Japan), Chicky-Chicky-Bone (I got two wings and a new scar before they were gone) and a very rare treat indeed, Coca Cola! Ok, the coke isn’t rare, but the Japanese aren’t into it the way Americans are (you can’t find 2-liters here), and it just plain tastes better in Japan. Hey, it’s all about context! Plus, the pizza was pretty dang good, and just a mere $60! Happy Birthday to watashi!