Blahgorrhea

Well, I suppose my Japan trip really was a white road adventure just as I had hoped. I was pushed way outside my comfort zone, and I learned some things about myself, most notably that I really don’t like being pushed outside my comfort zone (they don’t call it “comfort” for nothing). Sure, it didn’t turn out ideally (no revelations about my life, no profound insights into the workings of the universe, no inspiration for a good business), but it was an adventure, and that was the point. I will probably not travel alone again, and when I want a vacation, I will head to someplace familiar, someplace warm, someplace easy. Then when I want to travel, I will pick someplace new, and there are plenty new places to fill many years of travel. But for now I will relax in the comfort of my own home, familiar, though sadly not warm.

Pickles. I love them, and Japan has some of the best pickles in the world (as well as some damn good kim chee borrowed from Korea). Better still, they serve you pickles at every meal, including breakfast. Different pickles for different meals or dishes, and always just a small amount — just enough to help with digestion. Even better, all of the markets have tons of different pickles for sale with samples of them all; you could have a small pickle meal just walking through the markets. Radishes, carrots, burdock, cucumbers, things I can’t identify but that look like sea monkeys. And they all taste so good, fermented in miso, sake and other exotic brine ingredients.

A couple things I appreciated about the Japanese meal time experience: towels, tea, and the check. The meal starts off with a warm towel to wipe your hands with. No need to travel to the bathroom to clean your hands before eating (where you would probably end up with cold wet hands anyway). And then you get a cup of hot tea, which typically stays full throughout the meal. With the cold weather outside, this hot tea is a welcome respite, and most places serve a good brew of dark green tea. One place served smoked tea, which was impressively good, and if I knew how to distinguish smoked tea from the hundreds of other teas available at the markets, I would have brought some back for myself. Finally, when you are finished ordering, the check is left at the table and when you decide to leave, you take the check to the register, settle up and take off. For a foreigner especially, this makes the conclusion of a meal easy, but it also serves another good purpose: to separate the food handlers (the wait staff) from the money handlers (the hosting staff). Makes a nice psychological division as well as a practical cleanliness one.

Japan is a crowded country. They do use just about every inch of their land for some functional purpose (except for the thousands of acres of imperial parkland, but people rarely mention that). Of the space they have left available to build buildings, the Japanese cram their cities with tall buildings with stores, restaurants and offices up to every level. This means that some famous soba noodle joint that the guidebook recommends could be up on the third floor of an office building. Not exactly what you would expect, but given a good guide, some help from the locals, and good luck, you might be able to find the place in time for dinner. [Continue reading…]

For a country that is literally religiously fanatical about cleanliness (Shintoism is obsessed with purity), there is a serious lack of napkins at your disposal. Granted, I am an awkward Westerner and thus tend to make a mess of myself while slurping goopy slimy fermented vegetables with chopsticks, but because there were never napkins at the restaurants, I ended up wiping my face with my hand and then my hand on my pants. Wouldn’t a napkin be easier and cleaner? Our tour guide one day told us the Japanese are paranoid about trash and that we should never throw our trash in someone else’s garbage can. Given that, and the lack of napkins, I envision millions of Japanese walking around with pockets full of soiled handkerchiefs, tissues and towels. Wouldn’t it be cleaner just to throw those all out in public trash cans?

The Japanese do not bathe in the morning. That’s just what they do. they wake up, eat some kind of weird breakfast consisting of a combination of pork, noodles and seaweed and then head out to work dirty. But when they return home for dinner, assuming they have not gotten piss drunk with their colleagues, they shower and soak briefly in a stiflingly hot tub before eating dinner. In a traditional household, I suppose they even wrap themselves in a lightweight kimona called a yukata for their dinner. That is how Jen and I ate our meal at the mountain top temple in Koya-san, and it is a very civilized way to end your day.

And while we’re talking about toilets, Japan has public bathrooms all over the place. It is an excellent service. They were for the most part clean, but there was one drastic flaw. Most of the bathrooms offered no way to dry your hands after washing. So you end up in the middle of winter walking out of a public bathroom onto a cold street with cold wet hands (no hot water in these bathrooms). Then again, the ones that offered automatic hand drying machines featured a high powered dryer that you stuck your hands down into and slowly raised as the water was blown off them. Worked like a charm.

Squat toilets, more commonly known as “Japanese style” toilets in Japan, are the ones that pretty much resemble a hole in the ground with some added plumbing. No, these toilet are not the most comfortable to use, but in terms of cleanliness, assuming you manage to keep from pooping on your pants, the Japanese style toilet cannot be beat. You don’t touch anything with your bare skin that someone else has touched, assuming like me, you push the flush lever with your foot. Sure, these toilets don’t work for the American standard of relaxing on the crapper for a half hour as you read the Sunday Times, but I am not advocating these things for use in American homes, only in public locations where many people use the same toilet. But I definitely do not advocate their use on trains, airplanes, buses or anything else that moves. That is a disaster waiting to happen.

I’ve been back from Japan for a couple days now, and I haven’t had a good restful sleep yet, so I am clearly jet lagged. I don’t miss Japan; I’m quite happy to be back in the comfort of my own home, not taking trains or deciphering photos of food. But there are some things from Japan I would not mind keeping. Most of them relate to how civilized a culture the Japanese have. And there are some things that the Japanese can totally keep for themselves, most of which relate to some odd rigid formality of their culture. [Continue reading…]

I’m frustrated at Japan. This whole trip has seemed like a total waste. I had this grand impossible vision of my vacation being just like A Cook’s Tour, eating crazy new meals that were all just fantastic. I haven’t had a good meal in two days, and it is really starting to bother me. The worst part about it is that I’m sure I could make things somewhat easier on myself if I just had the balls. I could just waltz right into some joint that in no way caters to foreigners and ask for “chef’s special.” Or take the guidebook along and show the waiter Kanji words of food I might want. But what if I walk into a tempura joint and ask for yakitori. Then I look like a dumb ass American and bring even more disdain than I would have received walking into a place I didn’t belong. See, for all the talk of Japan being welcoming to people and the wait staff at restaurants expecting us to be awkward and ignorant, I get this strong sense every time I wander down a dimly lit alley that I know is lined with tiny restaurants that I don’t belong there and am not welcome at all. And that is part of what is so frustrating to me right now. I just want to have a good meal.