Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Still playing the waiting game on my car, which has consequently left me with absolutely zero enthusiasm to do anything else, seeing as how waiting is about as excruciatingly agonising as my head being twisted off at the neck then fused back together with a mixture of lemon juice, napalm and faeces, whilst listening to Michael Clarke Duncan sing “I’m blue dabadi dabadai”.

So anyway, what has happened since I last updated?

For one, we had Tsukimi. Yet another Japanese festival that is created simply by taking something and shoving the suffix ‘mi’ (meaning ‘look’) on the end of it, this one celebrates the time of year when the moon is at its biggest and brightest over Japan (’tsuki’ means ‘moon’). I had a barbecue with my eikaiwa students on a particularly cloudy Tsukimi night, which basically meant everyone had fun until about 11pm when we were still waiting for the fricking moon to come out so we could all look at it, comment on how big and bright it was, then go home without having compromised the cultural integrity of Japan.

At Tsukimi you have Tsukimi dango. Now, forgive me for launching into a bitter directionless tirade, but Tsukimi dango symbolise all that is wrong with Japanese food. Don’t misunderstand me, they are very nice, but they really highlight the annoying in-versatility of all Japanese food. Lets take sweet foods as an example first. 90% of Japanese sweet foods will use anko in some way or another. Anko is similar to Chinese red-bean paste, but it is coarser and I believe it is quite a lot sweeter.

Many varieties of dango and mochi have anko inside, but somehow get away with being called by different names by varying themselves in ways such as, ooh- changing the colour or the shape. The end product remains exactly the same in taste, texture and amount that it ultimately satisfies me, which is why things like Tsukimi dango really piss me off. It’s a ’special’ dango, yet is exactly the same as all other dango in every respect (taste, filling, ingredients) apart from colour - it is yellow. Like the moon! Someone please smash me in the face with a mallet and tell me this is not stupid. I’ll stop ripping into Tsukimi dango for a second - because really, there are THOUSANDS of other examples. There is an extremely famous Kyoto omiyage (so, a regional sweet, if you like). And guess what it is. Its mochi, with anko filling. But wait - its in the shape of a TRIANGLE. In the eyes of any given Japanese person, the fact that this mochi defies convention by being triangular instead of round is an innovation of groundbreaking proportions.

For some reason the fact that a round mochi and a triangle mochi are made of exactly the same things thus it is IMPOSSIBLE by all the laws of the natural world for them to taste any different, never really registers with a Japanese person and after tasting one, they will try the other, pause dramatically, and give an ‘oishiiii’ as if they had never tasted anything like it before in their lives.

And why stop at sweet goods?

Foreign people love to coo about Japanese food. Sure, I’ll agree that the kind of artistic guff you see in some soft-focused coffee-table book about kaiseki ryori (the kind of very elaborate, zen-influenced food that you NEVER usually eat here unless it is a special occasion) seems impressive and I’m sure that chefs all over the world secretly masturbate over this type of food (not literally of course. The Japanese only eat whale sperm), but the rest of Japanese food, that is - REAL Japanese food, as delicious as it is really can be broken down into about 3 main ingredients, those being shoyu (soya sauce), mirin and dashi. There are literally hundreds of traditional foods that have their bases made from those 3 ingredients in varying proportions. Ever wondered what tsuyu (generic dipping sauce) was made of? Shoyu, mirin and dashi. The sauce on Unagi? Shoyu, mirin and dashi. The sauce on Tempura-don? Oh that’s special - its made of somen sauce and sugar. Somen sauce is made of shoyu, mirin and dashi.

I liken this to my days at University, where my culinary experimentation reached dizzy new heights of excellence when buying food on a budget meant I was immediately limited to only using different proportions of baked beans, bread and Ribena in all my cooking.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2003 at 6:01 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.