Another little misunderstanding

In Japan, when you buy convenience food in a convenience store they give you a set of eating utensils. So, if you buy a dessert, they give you a spoon, if you buy noodles they give you chopsticks, etc. It is very nice, if a little wasteful, as I have spoons and chopsticks at home. Anyway, on Friday, after the baseball, I needed a quick, convenient snack so I bought a cup noodle, (not a pot noodle, they are completely different) on my way home. The server popped my purchase in a carrier bag and an eating utensil. To my horror, I noticed that he didn’t give me chopsticks, he gave me a fork. So that’s what racial profiling feels like. 

Talking of chopsticks, last night I spent over 4000 yen on a meal. That is about 30 GBP. (I will just pause for a moment for those who know me to recover their composure. I don’t like to think of myself as tight, I prefer careful, I can be as generous as the next person once I’ve carefully considered all the options and implications of my generosity. But those who know me are right to be taking deep breaths at the news that I spent £30 on a meal and I do think it might be the most I’ve ever spent on one feed.) It looked like a good deal, an all you can eat set-up, with all sorts of different types of beef; tongue, skirt, roll and rump, actually it sounds a bit like a 50 Shades sequel rather than a menu. Anyway, there was an all you can drink menu too, so it was washed down with copious amounts of beer and Sake, which apparently is alcoholic, who knew? After I ordered, I sat back and waited for the food to come, imagining the chefs preparing my beef, medium to well-done, just the way I like it. I took a sip of beer and watched the kids helping themselves to the do-it-yourself candy floss machine. Then, my first plate of food arrived. To be honest,  it didn’t look well-done, it looked badly done;  a little on the rare side. Another plate came that too looked more uncooked that cooked. I know the locals like their fish raw, but their beef? There must be some mistake. It was then I realised the heater in the middle of the table was not a heater, but a grill, they were going to cook the food in front of me, well that was well worth 4000 yen. Another server brought some tongs, and smiled. I waited for the person to come and grill my meat for me, (not a euphemism, despite how it sounds.) but no one appeared. It was only now that it dawned on me. It seemed like I was supposed to do it myself. 

What? Hang on a minute?

I was paying 4000 yen and I had to do the cooking myself? If I wanted to cook for myself, I could have stayed at home. For 4000, yen I half expected to have a semi-naked celebrity look-a-like of my choosing to come and grill my meat. (stop it!) 4000 yen? You can buy a mini bbq in Poundland for a pound in Cardiff, three burgers from Hopkins the butchers in Barry and you have the whole meal for a tenner. I indignantly placed my first slice of meat on the grill. I then placed the meat in my mouth and my rage melted away like the meat melted on my tongue. How could I be angry when there was a little bit of heaven in my mouth? (also not a euphemism, stop it!). Apparently, I had unwittingly discovered Yakiniku.

Dear Japan

Dear Japan, 

Thank you so much for the warm welcome, it has been a pleasure to be in your midst, or should that be mists, as the misty, hazy, non-stop, Welsh-type rain you have provided for me since my arrival has really made me feel had home. Just a note on that, it is nice to feel at home but now I’ve been here for a week, I think I could probably do without the rain for just one day. But I digress, thank you for tolerating this lost foreigner who knows nothing of your rules and thus flaunts them with alarming regularity, thank you for being patient whilst I try to order god knows what from your lovely English menus and thank you for providing the best loos in the world. 

However, I am writing to you with a few complaints that I am hoping you can address with haste; as I am only here for three months and would like to enjoy my time as much as possible. 

Firstly, please can you make Karaoke as easy as it looks? I thought after years of practice bashing out Sinatra and Joel tunes whilst taking baths and showers, having the words and a microphone in front of me would be an easy transition and that I would be a natural. But no, for some reason the booth made me sound like a howling cat on heat. It’s meant to be a private box but the people next door came and told me to pipe down; that’s never happened at home in the bath. 

Secondly, can you please stop making life so easy? For example, frequent trains arriving and leaving on time, convenience stores everywhere and open all hours, working vending machines on every corner, sensible rules that people respect, a plethora of toilets, clear signage at tourist attractions, easy to book tickets for events and efficient and friendly bureaucracy, have all meant that my transition and settling in period have all gone remarkably smoothly and I’ve not flown off my short handle even once. Where is the fun in that? 

Finally, can you cut back on the food please. Everywhere I look there is delicious bowls of ramen, plates of gyoza, slates of sushi, yards of yakitori and countless other things that they don’t have in Wagamamas back home and that I very much want to try. Even the convenience stores have onigiri, pickles, and corn dogs that make your mouth water. It is a veritable nightmare making a choice between the myriad of delicacies on show. I only have three months here, I can’t try it all.  What’s more, I’ve not seen one Wagamamas,  Itsu or Yo Sushi, almost like they are not real Japanese places. Please can you see to it that there are just three dishes to choose from in every restaurant for the foreseeable future, so I can enjoy my life without the tyranny of choice? 

Once again thank you for being such a welcoming and polite host and I trust you will deal with these minor problems in good time.

Yours. 

Gareth 

Ascend to the Throne

Alphaville have always given me the impression that I would be big in Japan, but this just isn’t the case. Let’s face it, my belly is big everywhere but despite the stereotype that Japanese people are small, I am not towering over anyone. No one is looking up at me and asking me what the weather is like up on my lofty heights. I am not ducking to get into doors or staring at my midrift when I look in mirrors. I am not Big in Japan, I am pretty damn average in Japan if the truth be known. In fact, I am beginning to blend in so much that people don’t even realise I’m a Geijin, one could say I am turning Japanese. This lack of giant status is just one of the many disappointments that Japan has sprung on me. Plenty more of those to come as the blog continues on, but what I really want to talk about today is toilets. I know my previous two entries have had mention of toilets but I thought there should be a specific entry just about the throne.

At least three Japanese people have complained to me about the state of the bogs in Britain. And, you know, they might have a point. Whereas in Britain, public toilets are few and far between, they are expensive, grubby, places, that you can only use if you are a customer, or have the correct change or have no sense of smell. But here the public toilets are plentiful, clean and free. Every train station has a lovely loo, the convenience stores have welcoming W.Cs and the cafes and restaurants have jazzed up johns. Okay, most of them are lacking hand-dryers, but one can’t complain when everything else is provided for you, they  even have  that seat for kids so your toddler can have a front row seat to watch you pee.  

And the toilets themselves are state of the art. They look like Captain Kirk’s chair on the Starship Enterprise, with the plethora of controls close at hand. Seriously, not only can you clean the seat, warm the seat, play music to protect your modesty, disinfect to hide the smell, cleanse yourself with a built in bidet (be warned, if you have the water on too hot or too powerful can bring a tear to your eyes,) you can also order pizza and launch a missile attack on North Korea. So maybe, the locals have a point and us Europeans can learn a thing or two about toilets from our Japanese cousins. But they shouldn’t get too smug. They are not perfect. For one, that control panel is missing one button, the flush button. That is hidden. It could be behind the toilet, on the wall next to the toilet or just up the road, turn left, turn right and then behind the pillar. Secondly, their toilet signs leave a lot to be desired. If I ruled the world, I would make sure all toilet signs were clear and unambiguous, not like the ones below. I am sure clear toilet signage would solve 99% of the worlds’ problems. Finally, Japanese toilets go from the sublime to the ridiculous as you can see from the pic below adn of course, you only come across those when you really need to go. 

is it me or does this woman look like a man?

Luckily this man looks more like a man. 

So your child can watch you pee, 

if you can't see this, this reads, 'be careful to avoid hiting child when opening and closing door, etc. 

It's not all Starship Enterprise. 

Faux pas - Shitsugen

Another day, another faux pas, maybe, I should have called this blog, Shitsugen in Yokohama - according to Google Translate shitsugen means faux pas. 

Just down the road from me is a Japanese Restaurant, it looks quite posh from the outside but once you got inside it kind of has the appearance of a Wimpy bar from 1987 – a Japanese Wimpy bar mind you. Anyway, as it was raining like it can only rain in Cardiff – that’s how polite the Japanese are, making me feel like I am at home by turning on the rain –  I thought I wouldn’t go far for my dinner, so I popped into the Japanese Wimpy. My first job was to work out just how the hell the umbrella stand might work. Now you might think that you can’t f*** up when using an umbrella stand, in which case you’ve never used a Japanese one. Think supermarket trolley crossed with bike rack and then apply that to the humble umbrella and you have the kind of thing I was faced with. My first effort at locking up my brolly failed and I spent a good twenty five minutes trying to retrieve the umbrella from the bottom of the rack. Let’s say, just to save me from further embarrassment that the second of my attempts was a success, my brolly was finally secure. (By the way, there are three bikes outside my apartment unlocked overnight, so why this restaurant felt it needed such brolly security is beyond me, although I did have peace of mind whilst eating that my umbrella was safe.) Anyway,  back to the faux pas in hand, with my brolly safe I could now enter the restaurant. I did so, bowing slightly and asking very apologetically for an English menu, they had one. I then took a seat, in a kind of well and this is where my problems started. Another waitress came over. She was trying to smile, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. No, her eyes were looking at me like I had just bitten the head off a live goldfish, not any old goldfish but her pet goldfish. She pointed at me, and at my feet. She said something in a language I didn’t recognise, at a guess Japanese, and then pointed at my feet again. It dawned on me slowly that I had not taken my shoes off and my dirty, rain sodden trainers were now touching the tatami mats beneath my feet. I was in trouble, big time. 

Actually, I wasn’t, I smiled and apologised and removed my shoes and locked them away in a little locker with a wooden key. From the look on the lady’s face, I was forgiven and she no longer saw me as the goldfish slayer. 

I know you want to know what I had to eat. I ordered the autumn special – udon noodles in a hotpot. It looked amazing, this pot full of goodies on a gas stove, but I had no idea how to eat it. Did I eat it straight from pot or try to chopstick the contents into the little bowl. No one around me was eating the same thing so there were no clues. but as the bubbles rolled in the pot, I realised eating straight from the pot was likely to cause third degree burns. I clumsily and messily used the spoon and chopsticks to get it into the bowl as best I could. 

So on my little excursion tonight I learnt two things, 1, make sure your socks don’t have holes in and 2 don’t wear clean on clothes when eating hotpot, oh and warn the couple on the table to your side that you might splash, (they didn’t look best pleased as it began raining inside as well as out.)

Finally, talking of splashing,  a word on toilets, maybe this blog should be called ‘On the Loo in Yokohama’. After my meal, I had to visit the little boys’ room and was not looking forward to doing this in my socks. But luckily(?) there were communal sandals there to save our feet from walking in whatever lurks on a bathroom tiled floor. Now, I don’t know about you, but I am no fan of putting on someone else’s shoes, especially when you consider just how many men have used those sandals while urine splashes back from the urinal. 

Chicken Yakatori 18/9

So maybe, just maybe,  I should have prepared more for this trip. For example, I could have learnt at least some of the symbols from the three, yes three, alphabets the Japanese have. Or just learnt a few of the most useful words. But I didn’t, and it’s too late now. So as evening fell, and I walked around Yokohama with a rumble in my stomach, my thoughts turned to the menus displayed outside the many attractive looking eateries dotted around the city. But there was trouble ahead. Or at least trouble in my head, because all the menus were exclusively in Japanese, (I couldn’t tell you which alphabet, but it was no doubt one of the three.) So, now I had a choice; go to KFC or Wendy’s or take a risk, I took a deep breath, saw some surfer dude in the queue for KFC and pushed the door open of a Yakitori place that looked friendly enough. And indeed it was friendly. I presume that in this little corner of Yokohama, they don’t get many Gaijins, and thus they were bending over backwards to accommodate me. And joy of joys, they even had an English menu. Thirst had over taken me, so I ordered a cola immediately and then settled down to study the menu. Immediately the waitress appeared with my drink and a choice of hot or cold towels. I wiped myself down with the hot towel and watched the waitress excitedly tell her colleague which one i had chosen. But… my joy soon turned to horror as I saw that this place wasn’t offering lovely succulent chicken breast on a stick like the picture outside suggested; there was chicken and there were sticks but, there was chicken heart on a stick, chicken liver on a stick, chicken skin on a stick, and, the delightfully named, chicken gristle on a stick. Why had I ordered the coke? I was stuck here now, in this offal place, trying to decide if I preferred kidney, foot or cartilage! They were fussing over me, giving me a basket so my bag didn’t need to be on the floor. (I wasn’t sure if they more worried about their floor or my bag), giving me a cold towel to follow up the hot one and waiting for my order. Oh, the stories they would tell their friends. Crazy Gaijin ordered chicken feathers on a stick. But then the land of my father came to my rescue. I saw it, chicken with Welsh onions, my saviour.

But my nightmare wasn’t over. The bill came, and it came to 1684 yen or something similar. I put 1700 on the plate and took my leave, taking in the toilet on the way. 

How nice it is that Japanese toilets have little baby seats for you to hang your baby in while you are taking a call of nature. And how nice it is of the Japanese to remind the parents not to hit their children whilst opening the door. Anyway, I digress, the point is, I left the toilet and skipped down the stairs, only to be stopped by one of the staff telling me something about my bill. Indignant, I was. I’d left more than enough funds to cover it. Were these unscrupulous Japanese going to rip me off on my first day in town? What happened to the honesty that everyone had told me so much about? The young man was insistent and wasn’t going to let me leave. Then, his colleague came running down the stairs. I wondered what the hell was going on. She held out her hand, I flinched. She dropped 16 yen into my hand along with a pineapple flavoured sweet. It was my change. No matter how much I protested, they insisted I take it. 

Then, they stood there waving and bowing at me until I had drifted away into the night.
Check out the photos below of the food, with the raw cabbage and 'jiggy' sauce. Lovely.

Raw Cabbage 'Jiggy' sauce 

Chicken Ramen

What is a welsh onion anyway?

Meanwhile Somewhere in Yokohama

This is my new blog, detailing my stay in Japan. It is fictionalised reality or realish fiction. Don't believe everything you read. It's not going to be everyday, but I will try to update it semi-regularly.