Japanese food: fails

Japanese food is weird and mostly amazing, but we had our share of food-related fails in our time there. My first real taste of the strange and varied food there was when I met up with Casey and Jordan in Yamagata: not a typical tourist destination, but we were there to chase cherry blossoms. After having some delicious Yamagata beef the night before, we had a day straight out of a fairy tale: we walked in parks with the trees' small pink and white petals falling all around us, and once we found a comfy tree to sit under, we watched local people having picnics, eating food from the nearby food stalls and drinking sake from large bottles that they brought from home. We were feeling hungry, so we decided to visit the food stalls and get a snack. Many food stalls were selling the same thing, and we had seen dozens of people walking around eating it: a small ball-shaped snack called konnyaku, which kind of looked like a glazed meatball. It came in threes, on a skewer, with a tiny dollop of mustard on each ball. We bought some, figuring if everyone was eating it, it couldn't be too terrible. Turns out, it was. It is apparently potato, but it tasted like something gelatinous and flavourless with a texture I couldn't handle. I felt like a toddler, but I had to spit mine out. I watched in horror as Casey and Jordan continued to chew theirs and laboured to swallow it. I was glad I got rid of mine, because Casey could still taste hers hours later.

Aside from festivals at parks like this, there isn't really much of a "street food" culture in Japan, so we ate at restaurants most of the time. Ordering food from restaurants was always interesting. Many of them don't have English text on their menu, and none of us read Japanese, so in a la carte places, we tried to go by pictures, if they were present on the menu, or find a server who spoke enough English to tell us whether something was chicken or beef, noodles or rice, raw or cooked. Of course, the pictures couldn't always be trusted. In a restaurant in Sendai, Casey and I ordered a sushi boat, and Jordan ordered a plate of noodles. They looked roughly the same size from the pictures on the menu, but when they came, we could barely see over the massive pirate ship boats delivered to us, while Jordan finished his noodles in three bites and watched us eat.

Sometimes, just finding an open restaurant was difficult enough. A recurring theme (and joke) with our time there was that everything was closed: from palaces and temples to amusement parks, and once an entire town, it was a struggle to find something that was actually open to us sometimes. This included places to eat. We were eager to find a place for dinner and a drink in Sendai, so we went to a district called Kokubuncho, which apparently boasted thousands of bars and places to eat. First, we tried an Aladdin-themed place. The door was locked, and it was a strip club. Next, we tried a superhero-themed place, whose door was also locked. That one was probably a strip club, too. There was a Beatles-themed bar that was completely abandoned. After almost an hour of locked doors, dashed hopes, and rumbling stomachs, Jordan had high hopes for a place called TANK DUMP. We tried the door, expecting it to be closed, but to our surprise, it opened and a smiling man appeared, inviting us in. Finally. Jordan was a few steps in when the host saw Casey and said: "Oh, uh, no women. Gay only." After briefly considering leaving Casey to fend for herself while we ate and drank, we decided to stick together and moped away.

When we did find places to eat that were open, sometimes menus were all in Japanese with no pictures, and no restaurant employee who could speak English. In such circumstances, we consulted Casey and Jordan's Japanese book and said: "Please order for us". This yielded mostly great results, but of course there were a few questionable dishes as well. In one such instance, one of the sushi chefs spoke a bit of English, so he was asking us if we wanted to try certain things, to which we always answered yes. He laughed when we said yes to one particular dish: natto. He pulled it out to show it to us, and we understood why he was laughing: it looked like a giant, light brown, spoiled rice krispie treat in its container, and when he pulled some of it out, it has a saliva-like substance that stretched along with it, no doubt tying it back to its mother brain to receive more alien commands. After trying it in a maki roll, we found out it was actually just fermented soybeans. We had it again a few nights later in a salad. Casey was happy when the chef took her salad bowl away when it was still half full of the beans, but when the chef realized he had taken it away "too soon", he promptly handed it back and she begrudgingly finished the beans as Jordan and I egged her on. She washed it down with some sake and forgot all about it.

There were a few more fails along the way at sushi counters (sea urchin and herring roe sushi), but the vast majority of the food we ate in Japan was incredibly delicious. And even when it wasn't, we were having too much fun to care.