Japan & Food II: “It’s a good fat”

First, my listing of recent vending machine drinks. Managed 7 between yesterday and today; a disappointing yield but I was with friends and we had tea and sake and ginger chai at a cafe – give me a break, my bladder can only hold so much!

1. W coffee Cappuccino Cinnamon: Braced for the hot beverages, I was still surprised by the heat of the dark green can – it burns! Delicious, delicate cinnamon flavouring, though, even though I spilled it all over my bag when I pulled back the tab to open it. First of several spills that day. Recommended.
2. Itoen Roasted Green Tea: One of many short plastic bottles of tea, with an orange label, white lettering and what look like brown twigs – no English words on the label at all. Has a smoky sort of burnt flavour, not at all sweet. Maybe for a more advanced palate than mine; I didn’t like it. Not recommended.
3. Mitsuya Cider: Don’t be fooled – tastes nothing at all like apples. More like 7Up. Fizzy, sugary, nondescript lemon-lime; fine if that’s what you’re into. Not recommended.
4. Qoo (20% something?): Despite the adorable kitten and bunny on the label, this cold orange drink was tasty but really annoying, as the screw-top lid did not seal properly, causing it to leak sticky orange drink all over my jacket pocket, gloves and the inside of my bag. Design fail! Not recommended.
5. Fanta “Furu-Furu” Shaker (aka Fanta Shake-Shake Shaker): A tasty carbonated lemon drink with jelly in it. tStephen says, “highly recommended”. I say, “recommended only if you’re okay with sucking jelly from a can. Recommended.
6. Suntory Cocoa: Tastes kind of like chocolate pudding cups but more liquid. Stephen felt it tasted okay, but the portion size was too small. Recommended.
7. Kochadan Royal Milk Tea: Milky, very sweet, made from 100% Uba tea leaves, mediocre. Tastes like tea for small children. Not recommended.

As my “local” guides, having lived in Japan for nearly 5 years now, Stephen and Skye have been helping me answer 3 pressing questions I had about Japanese cuisine:
- What in the Japanese diet generally (with the exception of sumo wrestlers) makes this country’s citizens so slender and long-lived?
- What is really rude, totally to-be-avoided behaviour at the table when eating in Japan?
- What is the nastiest food Japanese cuisine has to offer?

The first question: What do the Japanese eat that keeps them thin and healthy?

I think this is impossible to answer. Foreigners might think the Japanese diet mostly consists of heart-healthy fish and rice, and to some degree this is true. However, take a look at my last entry on vending machine and street food, and you begin to see this is not the whole story. There is a whole lot of fried food happening in Japanese restaurants. I submit to the jury as evidence…

Breakfast yesterday was the Shinjuku-station bento box (cost: 650 yen), full of rice with shredded fishy bits, mushroom slices, lotus root, pickled salt plums, and a variety of other tasty goodies. Skye informs me that each of the larger train stations in Japan have their own bento box called “eki-ben”, so this was a local specialty of sorts. I give it two thumbs up, if you’re ever hungry and in Shinjuku and about to depart on a long train journey: it really hit the spot. I was cruelly tempted by the bevy of tasty pretzel-chocolate stick snacks into buying some Pocky for dessert. Verdict: vegetables, protein, carbs, nothing deep-fried, chocolate pretzels = mostly, but not entirely healthy.

Lunch was with Stephen & Skye at Yamaneko-tei, “Mountain Cat” soba restaurant in Shimo-suwa. We ate delicious buckwheat soba, a local Nagano specialty. There are 2 main kinds of soba noodles in this region: “hachi-ni” (or “8/2″) which are 80% buckwheat, 20% flour, and for the connoisseur, “ju-wari” (or “10×10%”) which are 100% buckwheat and rather dry and lacking in bounce. We ate the less-healthy hachi-ni, accompanied by large dishes of tempura, where otherwise healthy lotus root, eggplant, onion, pumpkin and chrysanthemum leaves were coated in batter and deep-fried until crisp. And of course, we had beer, as you do. Verdict: partly healthy buckwheat, but mostly beer and fried stuff = rather unhealthy.

Dinner was in Matsumoto, at Sushi Ten (loosely translated: “Encyclopaedia of Sushi”). Our meal was prepared by a rare creature: Mama Fujisawa, a female sushi chef, which I’ve been told is a near-mythical creature in Japan. Her family runs the restaurant and they’re really friendly, so much so that I got a goodbye hug even though I was so tired after a day of train rides and castle viewing that I fell asleep under their kotatsu (low, heated table), despite Stephen yelling “gambatte!” at me (which apparently means “suck it up!” in Japanese). The restaurant is just west of the train station and the food was a steal – I recommend going there. I was pretty zombified by jet lag, but I recall there being lots and lots of sushi, and at least 3 deep fried starters, including deep fried chicken parts, deep fried squid and yes – deep fried avocado. Skye placated my feelings of waist-expansion guilt by telling me “it’s a good fat”. Verdict: many deep fried dishes, lots of fatty raw fish, and milk pudding for dessert = not wildly healthy.

The second question, about food taboos and bad table manners, is more easily dealt with.

I was assured there are only two things you should never do at the table in Japan: don’t pass food from your chopsticks to someone else’s chopsticks, pass from chopstick to plate or chopstick to mouth; and don’t stick your chopsticks into your rice and leave them standing upright. Both of these taboos are related to Japanese death rituals. Chopstick passing is for funerals, where family use chopsticks to pass bones from the cremated remains into the urn or other vessel that will act as the receptacle for the dead. And at Obon (Japanese Hallowe’en), the day when the spirits of your dead family return to wander among the living, chopsticks are stuck upright in rice to ritually represent leaving food for the spirits of your ancestors.

The final question: What is the nastiest food Japanese cuisine has to offer?

I know there are some weird fish dishes out there, and Stephen and Skye have repeatedly tried to get me to eat raw horse, but of the things I’ve been willing and able to maneuver into my mouth, here are the two contenders. I think nattou wins the prize, but tororo deserved an honourable mention.

Winner! Slimy, with a consistency somewhere between snot and glue, and a flavour not unlike stale beer mixed with turd, nattou is fermented soy beans that are marketed in Japan as a healthy snack. I don’t wish to malign another culture’s tastes, but personally, I see nattou as something I might find in a remote area of my fridge after a long period of cleaning neglect, and would put on rubber gloves to remove. Stephen was forced to eat it as part of his hazing ritual when he joined the local volunteer firefighters, but has now developed a taste for it. When you eat it, it is necessary to kind of swizzle the chopsticks around below your chin to catch the floating, gossamer-width sticky strings that connect the beans in your mouth to the beans in the dish.

Second place. Slimy, with a consistency akin to snot, but with a compelling BBQ flavour, tororo is made of grated mountain potato, which my friend Skye described as being a vegetable that looks like “a pair of hairy legs”. Look for it in a supermarket near you! See movie below for visual proof of nasty viscosity.

Japan & Food: Vending Machine Cuisine

My readers have spoken, and I have listened! Darren requested food photos. Ask, and ye shall receive!

Eating in restaurants is for when you’ve got company. For solo, bachelorette-style eats, you want vending machines! When I travel alone, I make up little games for myself – little challenges to be met, little tasks to accomplish – to stay entertained and help push through the jet lag.

Today’s challenge was a culinary one: to make it through the entire day trying to eat only food that a) could be purchased at either a vending machine or street vendor, and b) had little or no English translations on the packaging. Basically, I was playing Russian roulette with breakfast, lunch and dinner. No clue what kind of tasty comestibles I was putting in my mouth at all.

Here is the list of vending machine beverages I drank today, and my impressions of them:

1. Georgia Hot (coffee): I wasn’t fully awake when I bought this, and having only experienced cold vending machines in Canada, I actually yelped when I picked it out of the dispensing tray and it was hot to the touch. My first real WTF?! moment in Japan. Sugary, but acceptable coffee. Recommended.
2. Calpis (lemonade): Bought this mid-morning, to wash the coffee taste after my mouth. Was hoping for a nice, tart, cool bottle of lemon drink. It was also hot. Hot lemonade?! Second WTF moment. Tasted surprisingly good, though. Recommended.
3. Minute Maid Morning Banana: The one thing the Japanese palate can cope with that mine rebels at is consistency. Why can’t they understand that giving food the viscosity of chunky slime is nasty? This beverage comes in a little pouch with a narrow capped spout, sort of like a Capri Sun. You can’t actually see what’s inside before you drink it. I put it to my lips, sucked, and nearly spat it out all over the sidewalk when I got banana-flavoured chunky goo on my tongue, thick like chewy curdled milk. Third WTF moment. Mega gross. Not recommended.
4. Boss Coffee Rainbow Mountain Blend: I thought Darren was hallucinating when he suggested I look out for the “coffee with the moustache guy on it”, because there were no machines selling such a can anywhere near Shinjuku or Shibuya. But once I reached Akihabara, there it was. Boss. Lots of it. The marketers would have us believe “Shintory Boss is the boss of them all since 1992″. I passed over the blue and yellow cans and tried the rainbow can, and I can say it seems to be the sugariest of them all. Darker roast and bolder flavour than the other coffee, though. Recommended.
5. Pocari Sweat: Although I have to give them snaps for their bold marketing campaign (who wouldn’t want to drink sweat?), this drink was quite bland. The closest thing to it would be watery Gatorade or flat Sprite. Meh. Not recommended.
6. Karada-Meguri-Cha (tea from Coca-Cola): this blend of 8 traditional chinese herbs and 4 natural tea leaves tastes like ass. Not recommended.

For “breakfast” (I’m going to use quotes around all of these meals, because my inner clock is so messed up that breakfast felt like dinner and vice versa) I had some rice gluten balls filled with red bean paste and possibly chestnut paste. One had sesame seeds on it, another appeared to have coffee beans or something in the skin, one was green, another pink. They all kind of tasted the same, actually.

For “second breakfast” I had more glutinous balls, smaller ones on skewers, covered in thick, gelatinous red bean paste. I also had a triangle of rice with some salmon inside and a cunningly overpackaged piece of seaweed to wrap it in.

For “lunch” I had two mystery foods, both unexpectedly involving hot dogs. One was a rolled-up pastry that looked like a sort of cheese blintz/crepe thing, but was more like a piggy-in-a-blanket, with a surprise hot dog tucked into the cheesy center. To get some veggies I bought what looked like little chains of mini-corn but are actually green corn husks tied together with string, wrapped around… something. I have not yet opened them to discover the mystery, but my scooby-sense tells me it will either be rice, red bean paste, fish, or some combination of the three. I followed it up with dessert in the form of strawberries in what looked like a chocolate shell, but on closer inspection proved to be yet more gelatinous red bean paste.

Now, Z warned me not to eat any fugu, on account of my sensation of impending doom as I prepared for this trip, but she was non-specific as to the consumption of crazy exploding bombs. So I ate one for “dinner”. See below for details of how they are made – inside my cooked bomb thing there was a whole quail egg, a one-inch long diagonal slice of hot dog (disturbingly finger-esque), and some pink stuff, all covered in a liberal coating of mayonnaise and green onions. I ate it 9 hours ago and haven’t regurgitated it yet, so I guess it was okay.