August 16, 2002 - 5:05PM
Wes Ehrlichman

Today I'm going to talk about Japanese food. It will be part education and part entertaining, so read on.

First of all, if didn't already know it, I'm a vegetarian. Before I came I kept hearing that it was really hard to be a vegetarian in Japan and that vegetarian JETs often decided to eat Fish when they got here. I'm pretty stubborn though, so I decided to continue to not eat fish.

My theory before I got here was that being in Japan as a vegetarian would probably be like being a vegetarian in a city of nothing but Steak Restaurants. In other words, it's going to be possible to find something to eat everywhere, but it will probably be something that the restaurants doesn't exactly specialize in. In my example of the steak restaurant that would be a bad salad bar or a baked potato.

My theory has yet to be disproved, but the problem is it only works for when I go out to eat and in Kedouin there really isn't anywhere to go out to eat! The problem with being a vegetarian is actually more of a language barrier issue. At home, when I go to the store I look at the labels to figure out if something has meat in it. This is extremely hard to do here since the labels look like this:

I realize this is a bad picture, but trust me when I say that if the picture was better quality you still wouldn't have any idea if there was meat in it. I didn't at first, but now I have a better idea. After asking various people in the grocery store I have discovered that these are the Kanji to look for:

meat fish

niku sakana

They're easy for me to remember because the meat kanji has two pairs of exposed ribs on the front, and the fish kanji has four legs like an animal, reminding me not to eat it. The meat one is often accompanied by a kanji to its left that means either pig or bird. Now, look through the ingredients list above and see if there are fish or meat. To see if you're right check the bottom of this journal page.

When I've finally found something without meat in I'll buy it and take it home. Even if it doesn't look that good. It never fails though, that whenever I pull something out to cook it I have no idea how to cook the stupid thing! At home I am very reliant on the labels. Absolutely every time I cook spaghetti I check the side of the box to see how long to leave the noodles in. Here it just isn't possible. I look for some kind of hints, but I never find anything that gives away very much.

I still haven't figured out how to cook Tofu. My supervisor told me to boil water and throw the tofu in. I get this far and then I can't figure out how the heck to get the tofu back out. It's so watery that when I try to pull it out with a fork or a pair of chopsticks it just slips right out of my grip. When I finally get it out it's always too runny and seems like it should have cooked for longer, but I never want to mess with trying to put the tofu back into the water and pull it out again so I just eat it.

I bring up this food stuff today because last night I finally decided to do something about it. I told the vice principal of the school, who is also the busiest person I've ever met, that I wanted him to tell me some recipes if he could. He thought I was asking him to take me out though and he skirted around the issue, saying that he was very busy, which I no doubt he was. I reassured him that I just wanted some recipes and he STILL showed up at my house at around 8 and asked me to go to the sushi restaurant with him. I went and I actually met his wife. We had a lot of fun and I got to try a lot of sushi I haven't tried before.

Something I've noticed since I got to Japan is that whenever someone is paying close attention to my eating or drinking of something it's usually a sign that I won't like it. This has happened twice so far. Once on my first visit to the Beer Garden, and once on my first trip to the middle school.

The beer garden one was just the first time I tried Shochu, which is the popular alcoholic beverage of Kagoshima. It's a wine made from Sweet Potato. I guess it's supposed to be pretty cheap, and a lot of people around here like it. When I first tried it at the beer garden, everyone crowded around the table and said, "a lot of people complain about the smell." My bigger problem was definitely the taste in this case, as the first sip has made me gag the two times I've tried it.

The first time I went to the middle school, one of the teachers was eating a spiny green vegetable by the fist full and he offered me some. They told me that it was a vegetable from Okinawa called Nigagori and that it was a bit bitter. The guy offering it to me reassured me by saying, "It's not poison. Here, have some."

I took one bite of it and I understood why he made that specific reference. It tasted just like poison! I don't think I've ever had anything as bad in my life. It didn't make me gag, but actually kind of did the opposite. The vegetable is so trying on your mouth that even though it's a fairly dry vegetable it makes your mouth water and the small amount of fluid that's released when you bite into it meshes with your spit and forms a venomy taste.

Today I was at the middle school all day. It can get pretty boring since there are no kids there yet, so I jumped at the chance when Mr. Tokumori asked me to leave my desk and go into the teacher's break room, where two of the lunch ladies and the PE coach were hanging out, to share a vegetable drink. I got into the room and was handed a mug of a very thick, chunky liquid. I asked what was in it and was told that there were tomatos, ice, and Nigagori (the vegetable that I was offered last time). Despite my initial disapproval I took a few sips. It was ok, about as good as any mixed vegetable drink, but it still had a little bite of aftertaste at the end that reminded me of it's poisony ingredient. After a few sips I turned down the rest.

I stayed in the room for a while, trying to read the labels of some of the different snack foods on the counter. Again, they offered to let me try something, and again they seemed very eager. This time, they offered me a mini yellow peach looking thing. I pushed the skin of it inward to get a feel for the texture. It was very mushy so I wasn't too sure. I put it in my mouth and it actually wasn't so bad. I started chewing and the flavor was full, but wasn't directly bad at all... that is, it wasn't bad until someone said, "Isn't it salty?"

I hadn't noticed it before, but as soon as they said that, the salty taste rushed in, filling my mouth with double the salty hell of an olive (the only food I didn't like until I got to Japan and found out that there were many other foods not to like). I spit it out then got a drink of water and started to stress how delicious the water is, so that I wouldn't have to try another of Japan's "delicacies."

I looked at all of the food and thought about the fact that I still had no idea how to make a well planned recipe. I asked the lunch ladies to take me out to the grocery store some time. That day, they took me out and we bought some carrots, two types of sprouts, some instant Miso Soup, some tofu, and some spaghetti with sauce already in it. When we got to school they showed me how to cook up the carrots and the sprouts, then added in some tomatos and some cucumber from the school's garden to make a vegetable salad. They also cooked up some tofu in case I wasn't full. The salad they made was fabulous. Everything was perfectly ripe, and since there was no lettuce in it, it was like a salad stripped down to only the best parts.

Now I've got most of the stuff to make it at home so I can try to emulate it.

So the two morals of the story are these:

A: Being a vegetarian in Japan isn't hard because of a lack of things to eat, but rather because of a lack of the ability to find out if something is vegetarian in the first place.

B: For every terrible piece of Japanese food that you eat, you'll find one that's so amazing you won't believe you didn't know it existed.

I was going to write about some other stuff too, but this is getting pretty long, so I'll leave you with this. It's a picture of a dinner I cooked for myself a few nights ago. It tastes just how it looks. Thanks for reading.

If you said that the kanji above were not in the ingredients list, you're right! But unfortunately there actually is meat in it.

If you look closely you will see in Katakana the words chikinekisu and pookuekisu, right next to each other. As the words imply when said aloud, there is both Chicken Extract and Pork Extract in this particular product. I'm not sure how they extract chicken or pork, but it means that I probably shouldn't eat it!