Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

The concepts of tabehodai and nomihodai are quite simple. For a fixed amount of money (usually around 3000-yen) you can eat and drink - alcohol included - as much as you want. However, through unfortunately profit-crushing cultural dissimilarities this is often interpreted as eat and drink and much as you CAN, to us, the feared beer-sucking gaijin.

In England we have many places that offer tabehodai-style promotions but I shudder to think what state the country would get into if nomihodai was also available. People would be going out every night and drinking until they fall over, puke, or fall over and puke. The economy would slow to a crawl. The post would be late. Kebab shops would be raking it in though.

Anyway, so. In Kobe we went to Chinatown one night to eat and drink at a Chinese tabe/nomihodai restaurant. Obviously scarred from previous gaijin-related incidents, we were given a set of instructions that fell just short of making us sign a fricking contract on the “please don’t screw us over”-o-meter. Among such instructions were that it wasn’t reeeally tabehodai (you could order a maximum of 20 dishes) and you couldn’t leave anything. This conversation was taking place in Japanese between me and one of the shopowners, who was Mandarin Chinese. I often think how cool / strange it is when I talk to someone who isn’t Japanese, IN Japanese as that is our common language. This has only happened a few times though and the last time I did it was when I was forced to talk to some Indonesian strippers, but that is another story ENTIRELY.

Scared beyond all belief that we would be made into tomorrows deluxe ‘nikku-man - now with meat! (TM)’ if we failed to comply since this restaurant was MOST LIKELY owned by triads (a false stereotype I like to perpetuate for no real reason other than for pointless scaremongering), I took it upon myself to make sure that nothing was left on the plates. I did this mostly by eating all the shit that other people didn’t want to eat. Which was fun.

Gaijin A “Who ordered this? It looks like a human child, except with only one eye. And wait, its still moving” Gaijin B “Whats the kanji for eye? Maybe I ordered it.” Gaijin C “I’m not eating it, its against my religion to eat children with eyes” Me “give it here”

Later on in the evening after drinking a suitable amount of alcohol, I decided it would be an excellent time to go up to one of the waiters and talk to him in my utterly bollocks Chinese.

“I can speak Chinese!” I exclaimed with a grin, in Chinese, to which he replied with a short sentence that instantly made me say “heh?” causing me to remember that “I can speak Chinese” is pretty much the only Chinese I know. Deflated, I sat down and drank beer until I fell over.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2003 at 10:46 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.