2002-03-06 - 10:24 p.m.
Last weekend, instead of dashing off to Tokyo as per usual, I stuck around Kimitsu. Friday night I met up with my co-workers from the junior high school for an “enkai” (work party) at a posh sushi restaurant. The music teacher, who I dare say speaks better English than the you-know-what teacher, kindly took it upon herself to arrange a special vegetarian menu for me. But sure enough, when I sat down to the multi-course meal, I was presented with an array of raw fish and other ineatable stuff. The music teacher had a word with a waitress who promptly replaced one of the dishes with a small bowl of purplish baby squid. Quickly sizing up that this was not right either, the music teacher made one last plea to the kitchen on my behalf, and I was finally given a full spread of vegetarian food, including veggie tempura, sushi, salad, and egg pudding.
The frustrating thing about being vegetarian in Japan is not that there isn’t enough vegetarian food to eat. It’s that no one has any concept of what a vegetarian is, so trying to extract the vegetarian food from the kitchen and onto your table is a painful process. It’s as if in America I went into a restaurant and told the waiter that I only wanted food that had not been cooked above a certain temperature (these people actually exist, God help ‘em in Japan). While I might be able to look at the menu and pick out the foods I could eat, the kitchen probably wouldn’t have a clue. This is made worse in Japan because many Japanese restaurants have only “set” menus -- several dishes with soup and rice for a fixed price. So much of Japanese food is vegetarian -- this is the home of tofu, after all -- but getting a vegetarian meal at your average Japanese restaurant is a headache.
That’s why I love the izakaya. Izakaya are kind of like Japan’s answer to the diner. Actually, it’s more like a pub, but I’ll focus on the food here. Usually open from 5 PM - 5AM, izakaya have all sorts of Japanese food, everything served a la carte. At my local izakaya I’m free from set menus and I can order vegetarian dish after vegetarian dish without having to explain myself. After Friday night’s experience, on Saturday I did just that: silky tofu with ginger and soy sauce, fried soybeans, grilled potatoes, and pumpkin fritters with cheese.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Lela and Bernardo came over late Friday night and on Saturday morning we took the train to the “hiking course” near my junior high school. The entire course is along paved roads, but it’s a pretty walk nonetheless. And sure enough, on Monday everyone at the school knew that I had been hiking through the town with two friends. I had been spotted by a teacher and two or three students.
Sunday was Hina Matsuri, the Dolls’ Festival. I went with two other JETs to dinner at the home of two students from my adult class, a mother and daughter. Girls are given a set of dolls at birth and on dolls’ day they are displayed. The traditional meal includes a colorful rice dish made with eel (I had an eel-free version). The traditional snack are these sweet little pink, yellow, green and white rice puffs which taste like Fruit Loops. To confirm this theory, today I bought some on sale and ate them with a bowl of milk. Close enough.
In more exciting news, the ticket is all paid for, and I’ll be heading off to Thailand for spring break in a couple of weeks. Looking forward to drinking coconut drinks in a bungalow while trying to avoid sun rash and poisonous spiders.
