Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Oddly, my neighbours invited me round for a bit of food and few beers yesterday. These are the same neighbours who I have lived next to for a year and have said hello to almost every day, but it has taken until now for them to extend an invite. Not that I really expected them to lay out a red carpet and massage me with their breasts or anything but lets be honest - the onus was more on them than it was for me, them being the long-term residents in both Japan and this neighbourhood, and me the newbie who spent his first month here eating nothing but household cleaners because he got the supermarket aisles mixed up after reading some Japanese wrong.

Once I sat down at their table though, some part of me wondered whether the whole thing was some kind of sadistic test, for laid out infront of me was a veritable menagerie of animal parts that could rival only the contents of the offal bin on Noah’s Ark during rainy season. First up was one of my reeeal pet hates - a certain kind of yakitori. Yakitori is a bit like a mini shish kebab - you have a small stick that is skewered with some meat and veg (there are many varieties) which is then grilled. However, THIS kind of yakitori was the type that is just chicken skin interspersed with cartilage, covered with a kind of slimy congealed brown sauce. It is the worst kind. It’s what I refer to as ‘pikey kebab’ since it clearly is the type of food you eat when you are really clutching at straws and all that’s left of last weeks chicken feast is a knee and a bit of beak. This of course is delicious, to the Japanese.

Next up was deer sashimi. Apparently deer meat is ONLY eaten as sashimi in Japan. Well lucky me. I was informed before I stuck the quivering red chunk of flesh in my mouth that deer is a ’suki kirai’ type of food, meaning that it is not universally liked - some people like it, others do not. I was more the latter. As I was chewing I couldn’t help but imagine a pissed-off Thumper calling me a bastard then pummelling my face into the ground with his foot. For me, deer crossed that threshold of eating animals that are actually quite aesthetically pleasing to look at when they are alive. Lets face it, cows, chickens, pigs, whales - these are all stupid looking animals and they deserve to be eaten. Deers however, are a graceful, even noble animal, and it just felt inherently wrong to be eating one. That and it tasted like crap.

Anyway, skipping over a few other organs, we came to the finale. We were each given a bowl of hot rice (a good thing) and then a small plate with an oval patty of something bright red sitting on it.

This was ‘mentaiko’ - a delicacy from Fukuoka. It is basically a sac of flavoured cod roe. Spicy fish eggs, if you will. And you know what, it was pretty damn good. I’m not a big fan of fish eggs (I hate that ikura stuff), but these eggs were so small that it was more as if you were eating a kind of paste than a bunch of tiny fish foetuses. And going by my previously stated benchmark, fishes look innately stupid too, which makes it both ok to eat them AND their defenceless unborn young.

Sticking to the food theme I discovered SPACE FOOD at the supermarket. Well ok, its not space food, but it does have the same 70’s retro-futuristic chic that I expect all space food does (steak dinners in the form of pills etc). This is a tablet that when immersed in water expands to form quite a hefty amount of vegetables. Used in a bowl of instant ramen, it turns something truly deserving of the prefix ‘instant’ into something altogether resembling an actual meal.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2003 at 6:11 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.