Munchies, Nummies, and Eats

Since the picture of my very, very empty kitchen (see previous post) probably has several people worried about my fooding situation, I figured now would be a good time to make a food-themed post to reassure certain parties that I am in fact getting nourishment, in abundance even.

The simplest way I can put it is that Japan is madly in love with food and the preparation thereof. This is not an exaggeration. If anything, it may be an understatement. Although there are only four or five channels on Japanese TV, on any given day you can easily view at least 24 separate programs entirely devoted to food. These usually follow the format of talk shows in which various celebrities recount their experiences of local specialties from all over Japan, interspersed with video clips of their adventures and educational information about the dishes and their places of origin. I've even seen a half-hour segment that featured an American family in New York City preparing crab cakes, steaks, and grilled vegetables in their penthouse apartment. Because the Olympics are being covered almost 24/7 by at least two channels at any given time, right now I would say that food-tourism shows make up about 60% of the programming. They probably account for at least 80% of television programs regularly. In other news, 72% of statistics are made up on the spot, and I'm too lazy to research this further right now, but I'd be willing to bet money I'm not far off the mark.

食べ物 (things what you eats) are also the preferred kind of おみやげ (little gifts you bring back to your co-workers and / or family after a business trip or vacation; sort of like souvenirs, except it's pretty much mandatory because you need to show some consideration for the fact that while you were out having a good time, everybody else was stuck back at the office / school / whatevs). Apparently the little mochi (rice cakes filled with bean paste) I brought back from Mie Orientation in Tsu City were a big hit. I was told that they were gone within a day. I was in Nagoya on Monday and Tuesday, so today I brought in a big box of wafer-cookie-things filled with buttercream. What makes them special is that their wrappers have pictures of Nagoya Castle. Also, they're pretty effin' delicious.

Of course, as I'm sure many people have heard, there are some things about foodstuffs in Japan-land that seem a bit...off. For instance, TV dinners: stick in microwave, remove after 2 minutes, eat. Yes?

No. As far as I can tell, there are no quick-fix dinners that you can actually fix quickly in the microwave. Everything I have come across at a konbini ("convenience store" conveniently shortened into three syllables. Sometimes Japanglish works a whole lot better than my native tongue. I'm making all these annoying parenthetical explanations now so I don't have to bother explaining my pidgin-speak later. You should probably take notes) has a big warning somewhere on the side of the packaging along the lines of "if you make the regretful choice to honorably place this holding thing in your microwave, we must humbly inform you that a bothersome electrical fire will unfortunately result." No matter how innocent and metal-free the container looks, you must never ignore this warning. I tried it with a styrofoam cup of pasta. The cover on it, which for all the world looked like nothing but plastic, had a thin coating of aluminum or something on the inside. Several large sparks and a few rude words ensued.

The other thing that never fails to take me by surprise and cause me some discomfort is the ubiquitous but very, VERY sneaky usage of mayonnaise. The local stores sell sandwiches that are actually two slices of bread with the crusts removed and the edges fused. So really it's like a sandwich-cake with delicious mystery filling. The type of sandwich is actually indicated on the wrapper - egg salad, curry, peanut butter, etc. So I figured when I picked up a menchi karoke sandwich, I was going to bite into it and find myself a nice menchi karoke in the middle (karoke is a little fried patty of something-or-other, usually meat. I still don't quite know what menchi is, and I doubt even the Japanese can tell for sure. Nevertheless, it's powerful tasty) The advertised filling was indeed there, but it was resting on a generous spread of mayonnaise. I purposely stayed away from egg salad, or any other kind of "salad" sandwich, because these of course always include mayo, but I have a feeling that even if I had chosen the "banana cream" - which was extremely tempting - I probably would have found that the "cream" was in fact mayonnaise-based. I'm not really keen to test this theory out, because there are alternative combinations of bananas and cream which I know for a fact don't include surprise condiments.

It's about time I checked with my supervisor downstairs (this post is being written in the computer lab on the third floor, which actually has more high-tech machinery than any of the labs I saw at Nanzan University. I am perplexed and bemused by this, seeing as Shima High School is in the middle of nowhere, and Nanzan is in the middle of Nagoya. What the what now?). She's still working on getting me internet at home (>_<) Erg. Once I finally got my alien registration card so I could prove to the phone company that I wouldn't just order up internet service and then flee the country or something, all the public offices were closed for Obon holiday. That holiday period ended Friday, but then it was the weekend, which means no work. And I was in Nagoya Monday and Tuesday. If I don't have the use of the webbernets by the start of the school year, I honestly might just start going American on people and beat them up until they give me what I want, and then beat them up some more for the hell of it because I police the world. Or, yanno, just wait and gripe quietly to a few people, and use all the time I would spend on the computer at night watching cooking shows.