Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

My webhost has been having a bit of trouble, hence those of you who visited on the 4th of February might have had trouble accessing parts of the site. It seems to be back to normal now.

Anyway, a belated Gong Xi Fa Cai for the readers of yongfook.com who celebrate Chinese New Year. I’d like to say that my celebrations for the new lunar year were chinktastically incredible, but sadly, the needle of my fun-o-meter only just flickered over ’shite’ for the duration of the weekend.

It’s easy to forget about events that go on around the globe, outside Japan. It doesn’t help that all the world maps here just have Japan in the middle, with a vast expanse of ocean all around, and the words “here be dragons” written hundreds of times in large, bold type over the water. As such, Chinese New Year sort of crept up on me, like a huge creeping thing.

Sitting alone in my house watching the melee of banality that is Japanese tv, it suddenly occurred to me “bollocks, its Chinese New Year”. Brushing the icicles from my eyelids, I used this point as both a flimsy pretext to find a warmer environment away from my meat locker house, and to give me something to write about on my diary.

So where did I go? Joyfull.

Welcome to the wonderful world of family dining in Japan. “Family Restaurants” (or simply ‘famires’) are everywhere in Japan and they all share two traits in common - they are all cheap and, well- all a bit crap. Although, this is a true love/hate relationship because as a gaijin, you WILL find yourself frequently visiting these places to eat their 500-yen pizza no matter how bad it is, as the existence of these restaurants means that even in the deepest, darkest inaka you are never that far from foreign(-like) nourishment.

Thus I found myself in ‘Joyfull’, one of the many franchises of Family Restaurant in Japan. The slowly rotating illuminated sign. Loving. Welcoming. Sitting down alone and looking generally disenamoured with my life, I plucked the “Grand Menu” from its holding stand. Many of these restaurants name their main menu, the ‘grand’ menu, which I like to think is some kind of bitterly ironic self-parody.

Family Restaurants tend to serve a large variety of meals and try to cater for both Japanese and foreign palettes and even come up with ‘original’ fusions of the two. I like to call this kind of fusion “shitfusion”, which although simplistic, defines such items as pizza topped with seaweed, and burgers served with rice and miso soup quite well. Thus, their menus often look like the drunken brainspaz of a demented ex-chef on speed, with these crazy mixes of Japanese and foreign foods along with things that are just plain wrong, such as ice-cream IN yoghurt and unlimited corn soup.

I don’t really understand the Japanese obsession with corn soup. Its by far the most readily available soup here (apart from the obvious ones like miso and dashi), when to me, making soup from corn makes about as much sense as making a drink from bread. It’s clearly the most inferior of vegetable soups yet for some bonkers reason, it is the quintessential vegetable soup in this country.

But I digress. To make your order at a family restaurant, there will invariably be a button to press, somewhere on your table. When you press this button, the nearest waitress is signalled, probably by way of a small electric shock to the head from a special headset. She will take your order and tap it into her keypad, which then signals the kitchen staff, probably with another series of electric shocks.

I ordered a Hamburg Steak and Karaage Washoku Setto. For some reason its very rare to find a Hamburg Steak in a bun (the technical term for this is a hamburger) at these restaurants, but a large section of the menu is usually dedicated to various hamburg steak sets - that is, a round pat of seasoned beef, with some other random stuff on the side, such as tempura, fried chicken, spaghetti, spring rolls, and generally anything you would expect not to eat with a hamburg steak. At Joyfull you can upgrade any of the regular sets to literally dizzying heights of excellence, with the washoku setto or the youshoku setto. ‘Washoku’ means Japanese style, so you get rice, miso soup and tsukemono along with whatever you ordered. ‘Youshoku’ is western style, so you get a salad and a cup of soup (corn) with your meal.

I finished my decidedly un-Chinese Chinese New Year celebratory meal and returned home. Gong Xi Fa Cai, Yong Fook.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 4th, 2003 at 4:04 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.