Foooooooooooooooooooooood

So it's no secret that food is a big problem for me in Japan.  There are a thousand different types of fish (none of which are predicted to be available in 10 years due to over-fishing) and a thousand different types of rice (who knew there was more than one kind of rice?) but very little in the way of marmite.  There isn't even the option for one kind of marmite, the bog standard marmite in a jar.  Marmite chocolate is fine in a pinch (that pinch being a three month wait for it to be shipped over), but, realistically speaking, nothing is going to take over the crown of the original.  Marmite crisps are something to be avoided.

So we know how things are from an English in Japan perspective; how about the reverse?

In Japan they have all the fish and all the rice, but they also have interesting takes on well known western classics.  If you're a macdonalds person who has ever been on the internet you probably know about the teriyaki chicken burgers.  They're just fried chicken sandwiches with a teriyaki sauce, so nothing mind-blowing.  Unless you've never tried teriyaki, in which case I suggest you go out and find something adorned with said sauce.  You might like it if you like tangy things, but aside from that I can't really tell you what it's comparable to and whether you should avoid it or not.

I am bad at this.

There are also the chocolates, something I am much more familiar with.  The venerable kitkat has made its way here, only to fall over and get covered in green tea.  It's bright green and tastes quite peculiar.  It doesn't really taste like green tea (who would have guessed that a chocolate company pouring chemical formulations into their chocolate would end up with something that doesn't taste anything like the flavour written on the label, shocking!) but it doesn't really taste chocolatey either, so I'm not entirely sure who this is aimed at.

Locals who have never eaten chocolate or drunk green tea?  Good luck finding that person.

There are also seasonal varieties here.  They love the fact that they have four seasons (for some reason that I have yet to figure out, all Japanese people think that Japan is the only country in the world with four seasons, even though they only have three - hot, cold, rainy) and utilise that for some insidious marketing.  In Summer everything is watermelon flavoured.  In rainy, everything is cherry blossom flavoured.  In Winter everything is back to normal, but with a christmas tree on the cover.

One thing I've also noticed is that apples come around this time of year, apparently from up north (Hokkaido) and they're great.  Super sweet, super juicy and enormous.

Artists impression of various apples.  Big ones - Japanese Winter apples.  Small ones, stupid English apples.

The only problem is, and I say this with all the affection for quirky Japanese customs, rituals and superstitions in the world, they are terrible at eating them.  The worst.

They get a knife, peel the apple, then cut it into equally sized slices, then serve them on a plate.

Everyone does this.  Monsters.

It's a fucking apple!  Just eat the damned thing!  Run it under a tap to get all the nitrates, pesticides and carbon nanotubes off the skin, then eat the fucking thing.  Christ almighty.  I could have washed, eaten and thrown away three apples in the time it takes to peel one.  By the time you're done the thing is brown anyway.  What on earth.

Anyway, apples aside, there are a million variations of normal western food out here, I just wonder how long it's going to take someone to make a sushi stuffed Christmas turkey, like a turducken, only with wasabi.

Oh, wasabi.  You should definitely buy some if you have never tried it.  It's possibly the most revelatory food experience I've had since I've been here.  It's part tastebud destroyer (like the worlds strongest mustard), part decongestant.  It's excellent with almost anything you'd use mustard for, I'm told (I don't eat mustard, mustard is disgusting) and obviously great with sushi.  I've also been known to just sit down in front of the youtube with a tube (of mustard), and slowly work my way through it, instead of going to the corner shop and buying some horrendous slop as a snack.

It's probably given me, or is going to give me, seventy bajillion ulcers because that stuff is basically caustic, but damn if it doesn't get the pipes clear.

Try it out some time.

Yokohama The Third (or Fourth, I Forget) Day!

So today has been a mega doss day.  I ran out of money, so ended up using today to look for jobs and whatnot.  I planned on doing this yesterday, but I got an invitation to go to a CONVEYOR SUSHI RESTAURANT.  This is an invitation I couldn't refuse.

So we spend a full two hours in the restaurant eating the conveyor sushi.  I'll upload the pictures later, and the video I took.  It really is a conveyor belt with plates of sushi on it.  I'm already thinking of ways I could adapt the conveyor system to help with other things.  Maybe a conveyor beer system for long bars.  Place an order on the belt, the beer is poured and then sent back down the conveyor to the customer.  What a brilliant idea.

So after that we ended up just milling around, playing the taiko drum game (which I love so much I've not taken any photographs of it because I'm too busy playing it) and generally checking out the city.

We watched a man playing a guitar hero style dj game with expert precision; he had obviously practiced long and hard to perfect his skills.  The thing is, he had a wedding ring on...  He was quite young, so presumably newly married, but we speculated that with the amount of time he must have spent playing this game, he won't be married for much longer.  It's also interesting to note the demographic of video game players here, in that everyone plays games.  Old grandmas use mobile phones while listening to their ipod, holding a ds on standby, waiting to carry on playing something when they finish their phonecall.  It's amazing!

The work ethic here also seems to have lead to a 'play' ethic as well.  A large number of people here are unbelievably good at the games, presumably because they've practiced for so long.  This means they have to use their spare time, which is in precious short supply, to play these games until they can do them blindfolded.  It doesn't seem a particularly fun way of 'playing,' but it's kind of Japanese.

The trains here stop around midnight too, I haven't been caught out yet but I'm sure it's going to happen sooner or later.

The trick then is to hit a mangakisa I think...  Maybe I'll stay in one just so I can take pictures and put them on here...

Ok so these are squid!  They're swimming around trying to escape.  They're going to be eaten.  Yummy!

(They're actually quite tasty)


But the fresh ones like these guys here, are really expensive.  To pick your own swimming dinner is a status symbol I think.

So these guys looked awfully like some kind of grouper to me, with the always depressed looking downturned mouth.  Poor guys.  I want to say it's not so bad, cheer up!  But they're about to be eaten so... Yeah it is that bad.  Poor guys...

And finally, octopus.  I don't really like these guys raw, or sushified, but they're really good in takoyaki.

Yum yum.

This guy didn't look very happy though.  Octopi are supposed to be quite intelligent, maybe he knew what was about to happen.

So we enter the conveyor belt sushi restaurant!  This place is entirely unrelated to the fish above, we just happened upon those in our journey to the sushi place :)

So this is, apparently, quite a big conveyor sushi purveyor.  I can see why this might be so, because if I spotted something but was too slow to pick it up, it took about five minutes to come back around!  Worse than the airport!  Essentially the chefs make sushi that's running low, but they also cater for individual orders too.  now that's what I call service.

Ok so this is barracuda!

The portions of fish here are actually more reasonable than I was expecting.  The seaweed rolled sushi is much smaller, and much more delicate looking; altogether more pansy in my eyes though.  Full on, no holds barred raw fish on a sliver of rice is where it's at.  Having never tried it before, I was pleasantly surprised.  I don't think I could eat it every day, but as a healthy treat, versus pizza for example, definitely a winner in my eyes.

Ok so this particular dish is the fry of...  I forget what.  But this freaked my colleague out, she said the fish were, 'looking at her,' when she was eating them...  Oh dear...

I thought they were quite nice though.  They weren't brilliant like tuna or shrimp, but they were bad like barracuda.

ma-ma

Each colour represents a price.  White is the cheapskate one, right at the bottom there.  Pink is third leaste expensive, orange second least, blue is middle of the road.

What you can't see here is that I tried some mega expensive fatty tuna sushi, just to see what it's like.

Apparently the fattiest bits of the fish are the tastiest, but I preferred the non-fatty tuna.  I don't know why...  I obviously don't have the sushi tastebuds.

Ok so the tall signs on the actual conveyor tell the customer what fish is coming past them.

I spent ages learning the japanese names for all the fish, and my buddy painstakingly researched the name on her phone and translator.  Now I've forgotten them.  Worst.  Student.  Ever.

Ok so this amazing invention is the Japanese version of that coin game, where you put coins in a machine, it fired them onto a ledge with hundreds of other coins, and if you get lucky it forces some other coins off the edge.

Of course this is Japan, so you also sometimes get balls, which you then fire into the machine, it goes around that big long track going round loop-de-loops and all kinds of other flashy showy things, then it falls into a slot, either firing a number of free coins onto the  ledge, or going down a slot that gives nothing.  Amazingly over complicated.

Ok so here you can see the coin tray more clearly.  It is actually an incredibly simple game, but it's dressed up in such a fancy way that it took us ten minutes to figure out how to put coins in, let alone what anything else did!

Games like this are scary...

Now we enter, the twilight zone.

Most arcades, like everything else here, are divided into floors.  (Everything is vertically orientated!)

The lower floors are for children and girls, with cute arcade games (and my personal favourite drum game) and the upper floors are for the hardcore no hopers, who don't like being married or spending time at home.

So I include this picture to illustrate my point.  The guys in the ez-boy recliner chairs, are they playing a game?  It has horses on the screen so maybe they're piloting their own horse in a derby?  No.  They're betting on virtual horse races...

So half-life 2 is a pc game...  Why is it in an arcade?

Any way to make money I guess...


I only include this because I didn't take many pictures on this day...






Ok so now I'm going to include a link to you for my youtube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/NotAzebu

I've put some more videos up, mainly of the crazy Japanese affinity for playing games.

They have one game where you slam a number of buttons, at speeds that make my eyes glaze over, in order to strike a tune or melody.  The game in my videos is really popular here, and can be seen in practically any arcade.  The surprising thing is that the women here play games too.  They're not as good as the men, but they're an absolute tonne better than me.

I've also included a lemmings/lego hybrid game that I think it fascinating.  A group of girls were playing, and you essentially have to make the group of lemmings pick up a number of different objects on the screen, by layering lego blocks in certain ways.  The combination of the tactile element with the video game portion is really interesting, and something I've never seen done before.  I really wanted to have a go, but seeing as it was only girls playing I thought even that would be stretching my 'oh he's only a foreigner,' license a little too far...

Today is a 'down' day.

So today I'm determined to get everything up and running, and update my blog with all the information from the last four or five days.  I've been neglecting my  faithful audience!

The short version is that basically I've not had enough time, and the internet here is awful, it takes five minutes or so to upload a single photograph; cumulatively that's a lot of time spent sitting doing nothing.  However, I've managed to find an ethernet cable directly plugged into the internets which is making the process a lot faster.  Hopefully I can get it all done today!  Then I'll be up to date.

Ok so I've added these posts!  Whew!

I'm about halfways done, but I'm off to eat some sushi now so I'll do it later...

• Yokohama Day Two
• The Trip from Minamisenju to Yokohama
• Ueno Park, The Second Outing!

Doing everything in the order it occurred is turning out to be a pain in the backside...

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