Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

The sakura have exploded upon Japan like a big flowery rash. Sakura (Japanese cherry blossom) season is approximately 2 weeks long, making it a beautiful, but short-lived celebratory period. I’m not really sure why sakura are celebrated so fondly, but I think the story has something to do with robots or aliens, or robot aliens.

This weekend me and some other JETs went for hanami - a must-do event whilst the sakura are in bloom. Hanami is basically a picnic, but with the added novelty of it taking place beside or underneath cherry blossom trees. The word Hanami is made up of two kanji - flower and watch - although some other, more applicable kanji would be alcohol, drink, sing, eat, bring, loud, stereo.

In the night we decided to go to ‘the hippie restaurant’, since it was close by. This is a restaurant halfway up a mountain, home to a group of drumming Japanese hippie’s who all seem to look exactly like Bob Marley no matter what age or sex they are, and who have built the restaurant / hut they live in entirely by themselves from things they have found along the way on their crazy drum-based adventures. When we arrived, outside the hut were a few stalls owned by friends of the hippies. It struck us as rather strange to have a miniature market out in the middle of nowhere, at 10pm at night, in an area where cars are fearfully named “iron ground dragons”, but we advanced regardless.

Nestling in the midst of these fire-lit stalls was a single plate of sashimi. As we moved closer, the stall owner grinned and proudly stated, “Dachou”.

‘Dachou’ means ‘Ostrich’.

There was something frightening about the fact that in the hub of all that is nowhere, they had managed to procure Ostrich meat. Visions of a tribe of bearded Japanese people twatting a giant bird to death with drums aside, this would be like travelling through the Yukon and stopping into an igloo for a Lion steak, or chowing down on a Whale in the middle of the Sahara. The man noticed our predictable hesitance and shouted “Challenge!”. And so it began.

There were two types of Ostrich sashimi available. One was meat as we know it, the other was not. The other thing was a part of the animal that our dictionaries could not fathom, and the best translation we could come up with was “sand liver” - the part found on some birds that filters out grit from the things they eat. The grin still beaming from the man, I couldn’t work out whether this was culturally a good thing for the Japanese, or not. “It filters out shit! And it probably wont kill you! Lets eat it! Challenge! Where is my drum!”.

After eating a lot of normal sashimi and now eating these, I can safely come to the conclusion that all sashimi tastes exactly the same - that being the bland taste of raw flesh. Raw things don’t taste of anything, that’s why mankind invented msg and deep fryers. The only thing that varies is the texture, which can be either mushy or rubbery, depending on the animal and/or part of the animal. People often ask me “how is the sashimi?” when at an enkai. Of course my universal response is “My good Christ its delicious!”, instead of the actual words of my internal monologue, “Well, this tastes like soya sauce. Because I just dipped it in soya sauce”.

Sashimi. Have I got it all wrong?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2003 at 10:25 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.