There’s nothing floating in my soup!!

Ordering food at a restaurant is usually a challenge with me, not because of any special dietary requirements but because I am like the kid who wanted something else after getting one thing. Ironies of life never end, anyways I stray… But being in a foreign country can elevate the challenge to completely new level as I soon started to discover. I had felt it would be rather easy for me after all I had eaten sushi, tempura, sashimi, and my kung fu with chopsticks was not brilliant but I could hold a piece of chicken while I took a bite of it or even eat rice with it.

There obviously are the omnipotent restaurants called Bombay or Italian ristorante & trattorias , French bistros & café, and Chinese .. well noodle house (?) or whatever they are called along with the ubiquitous American McDs, KFCs and Subways. I even got myself ready with few additional words, udon (white noodles), Soba (buckwheat noodles), gohan (rice), Tori (chicken), sakane (fish), yasai (vegetables), bifu and proku are obivious while nikku is meat and hai is yes, nashi is no or don’t add. So for no meat you would say nikku nashi, simple right?

The problem with Japanese is that they do everything with a lot of dedication, be it the quality of food or the way they speak or act to differentiate their place from others, you could deprive me of sleep for two days then allow me to fall asleep and wake me up 15 minutes later to hear a recorded voice and I could tell you without opening my eyes that it’s the subway sandwich maker from Aoyama twin building! They are very generous with their Japanese, all off the staff will greet when a new customer comes in, they confirm your order, they will tell you how much money you paid and then how much change is due to you and they will all politely thank you and wish you will come back when you leave! It is so much Japanese that it is not even funny.

The good news though is they all have wax food displays kept out or pictures so you essentially know how your food will look, so first problem solved you point noodle or rice looking thing on the menu and   then say bifu nashi, cool but can it be that simple? We did the problem and the good news but before we get on with the story we need to do a funny thing too right? Here it is, they speak to you in fluent Japanese (I am assuming) …… ok that was not the funny thing I promised; they speak to you in normal speed Japanese like they knew you from diapers, even when they can clearly see that I am not a Japanese and that I am actually pointing a figure at the picture on the menu and staring at them blankly… not sure if they want me to realize that I am missing speaking the most pleasurable language on the planet or that they are simply rude or daft!

Anyways I completely ignore her and point my finger in the general direction of noodle and tell her ‘bifu nashi’, then some more Japanese comes my way, I smile, she circles the picture with her finger, the noodles and associated bowls looks like they form a set, I say ‘Hai’, I point at the bowl she seems to have consciously missed, she says ‘tori’ (chicken .. that’s great), I nod my head… mistake, some more Japanese and she walks of and comes back with some bowls, not only is the pointed bowl missing but so is the meat from everything. Japanese value addition I get noodles in a spicy broth with some bean sprouts floating with plain boiled rice with sea weed on top all the fun stuff gone! I drown my English along with my disappointment in the soup, and eat my noodles pay and leave; good part is no one tips in Japan so thankfully no insult to injury.

Japanese custom demands you eat plain boiled rice served with the main dish separately as an accompaniment, no mixing that too to be eaten by  chopsticks … ya tell me about it. So using chopsticks slowly becomes second nature, it’s like the Saholin training you can’t sit chasing rice, grain by grain with a chopsticks in a 45 minutes lunchtime! First comes the spearing technique, it’s not good ‘manneru’, then you graduate to using them as shovels, amateurish, and then comes nirvana. But my theory is they don’t mix the main course with the rice as the sauces/gravy from the main dish makes the rice soggy and breaks its stickiness (now I want to see a Japanese eat this rice in 45minutes), of course you could have argued they could have just used or invented a spoon or simply eat by hand. But it’s akin to Greeks/Romans not being able to figure out a zero and making their building entrances wider and wider to handle the digits! It takes an Indian to figure out a zero and that a hand can actually be used to catch, clean, cook and even eat food … they have dedication we have logic!

Yakitori Nights

For a while I was starting to believe I was cursed to haunt the streets of Gurgaon, and the drastic change of scenery to Tokyo was a welcome relief, of course I continue to live out of a suitcase but for once even the suitcase is enjoying itself. Japan provides visiting Asians various levels of awe and shamefulness,  if you thought all that bowing was just movies then you are wrong, it still happens and in copious quantities and everybody is referred to by their name and suffix ‘san’ (our ‘ji’) and unlike our north Indian friends they really mean and act the graciousness of the language!

Like the mysterious Bermuda triangle Japan lies in its own triangle of idealness and everything here is gracious, detailed oriented and abhors bad quality. The kids are shockingly well behaved, the weather turns lightly bad during the weekdays and it becomes gorgeous over the weekends and holidays, people match the weather by wearing grey and black on the weekdays and transition to pastels (west would definitely declare them gay)! And everyone here is dressed immaculately with layers, colours , bags, shoes and styling gels, damn where do they hide their poor?

Universally a crow is known to have a shrill crowing in the ‘Ka-ka’ there are sufficient hidden ‘r’s but not here, here they can lull you to sleep! The dogs are designer, I almost thought these were the newest Honda Aibo robot with fur and all they don’t bark, they complement and fit well in the Louis Vuitton (LV is rage here women take loans to buy them) bags and if something happens that make them bark then they immediately bow their heads in shame for having done so.

I guess having a disease here is foreign, their food is healthy, bland and they don’t even know what diabetes is! I couldn’t find sugar substitutes even in Starbucks!! But whatever little they made in sugar free they took it to the next level … Asahi Beer Zero! Oh Alcohol here is plentiful, and the Japanese quality makes their whiskey, beer as good as the Scots  make their scotch or Belgians make their beer!  Their cuisine is fun to eat, restaurants aplenty and fortunately they eat the same set of animals as most Indians do which makes it a treat to eat anywhere in Japan.

The language is complex though, over engineered like everything else, adopted Chinese symbols (kanji), a script (hiragana) for writing natively Japanese stuff and a script for writing imported stuff (katakana) all used in the same sentence … go figure! But this has its hilarious moments in translations; like most Indian languages Japanese is a subject-object-verb (SOV) language while English is (SVO subject-verb-object) and unlike our 200+ years of colonization, English is here is brand new! Not that we don’t screw up but it’s funnier here; oh and by the way  they sound south Indian sometimes … biru (beer), taberu (table). Now you also know why you don’t hear English words in Japanese language, it’s not that they have a word for every English word it’s just the way they pronounce that one would never recognize unless trained!

I had this paranoid feeling that there is something wrong with the place and it’s not what it looks like but after two weeks I discovered that though it suffered from some of the Asian weaknesses related to gods, spirituality and women (in their psychological contemptuous thinking) but otherwise they are the most advanced, dedicated, detailed and work worshiping set of people on the planet today.

The cynic in me in the absence of finding anything to be cynical about turned to conspiracy theories of the supernormal kind. I believe that this place is cursed to be single minded in their approach to life and be seriously service oriented, which would explain the fact that a sweeper will use long tongs to collect cigarette butts stuck is tile cracks one by one and people in general will follow the procedures/queues for everything, the trains will be accurate to the minute and they will believe that it is their fault if they have been unable to understand you or serve you! But like everything there is a flip side, this living puts them under tremendous strain and when alcohol liberates them on Friday nights you see what pain they hide.