2000s Archive

Tasty Character Is Our Criterion

Originally Published November 2000
In Japan, Roy Blount Jr. finds that linguistics and food cross paths in curious.

I went to Japan recently and no, I did not eat fugu, the blowfish that is deadly poisonous when imprecisely prepared. I am not finicky, but I draw the line at any delicacy preceded by a waiver. Nor did I eat eel-on-a-stick, ice cream made from whale fat, or a bowl of tiny squirming live fish. But I did, in Kyoto, eat raw chicken.

When you tell people you have eaten, say, fried armadillo, they may turn up their noses, but they do so with some grudging respect for your exposure to folk food. And they ask you what it tasted like. (A little like fried chicken.) When you tell people that you ate raw chicken—people who scour and bleach their cutting board for fear that some faint vestige of raw bird may lurk in the grain—they look at you as if you have descended to a low animal level, like that of an egg-sucking dog or a gerbil that devours its young. And they don’t ask you what it tasted like.

In fact, many of them seem to think that traveling to Japan these days (a long way from western Massachusetts, where I live), except out of dire business necessity, is in itself perverse. You have to cross the international date line, which I find—and I don’t mean to insist on the irony of this, but there it is—disorienting. You journey earlierward for the better part of a whole day, and yet when you reach the land of the rising sun, back home it is currently yesterday. Although for some time during the night, I think, it will be today.

Then there is the crazy exchange rate. The Reagan administration, in a feckless attempt to improve the trade imbalance between the two countries, devalued the dollar against the yen so drastically that an American tourist finds Japanese products priced higher in Japan than at home, and as for American products—Japanese theaters were charging roughly $l7 worth of yen for Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach.

Getting around in Japan can be daunting. Many street signs are only in Japanese characters (and there are several different types of Japanese characters). A house or building’s street address has no connection to where it is on the street. And although the Japanese study English in school and use it frequently for their own purposes, they tend to resist conversing in it with English speakers.

Well, my girlfriend, Joan, went to high school in Japan and has always wanted to go back. She knows enough Japanese to get around and to mingle some. Friends of hers over there helped us find affordable places to stay. And we didn’t want to see Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach. We didn’t think we wanted to eat raw chicken, either, but we changed our minds.

You are not likely to get poisoned accidentally in a country that produces toothpicks the way they do in Japan. I brought home some of these toothpicks, of the Nice Day brand. They come in a translucent plastic cylinder packed tight, not a micron of wasted space, so when you take off the top you see a solid mass of blunt tips, ranging in color from burnt-brown to tan. Together these tips suggest a cross section of a single many-stranded organism or cable. Or a beehive, maybe, but better organized: 850 toothpicks, needle-sharp and sturdy. The blunt end resembles a chessman: a head, and where the neck would be there’s a groove or circumnotch that fits your fingernail, and then there’s an elegantly beveled torso, and then a swelling like hips, and then another notch, this one less pronounced than the one above, and finally there’s the long shaft leading to the business end. Each pick would appear to have been hand-turned on a tiny lathe, and then cured and tempered. I have encountered such toothpicks before, in Japanese restaurants, but to have a jam-packed quiver of them, which should last for two or three years, is to truly appreciate them. And we may read, in tiny English beneath the Japanese for Nice Day, the following message: “We wish to enjoy meals as we have them every day.”

In China, which is the only other Asian country I have visited, the English language is completely up for grabs. T-shirts say, for instance, “all the world is cocorabbit.” The Chinese must care no more about what the English on their clothing means than do the French. And when the Chinese employ English for functional purposes, they have no qualms about, for instance, hyphenating the word the.

Japanese english is another kettle of fish. I have come to believe that the Japanese are reluctant to bandy their English about interculturally because its resemblance to the tongue of either Americans or Brits is only superficial. The words are English, but the template is Japanese. There are shops in Japan called simply Let’s. And Get! That’s what I call cutting to the chase. On the other hand, there is a bar-restaurant in Kyoto called (with all the dots and quotation marks) “Pooh’s?...” And when you see a sign that says “Relaxation Forest ... For Rest” outside a place where you go to unwind by sitting among potted plants and looking at videos of woodsy settings, you know that this is a culture that has been playing around with English words for some time. And mixing them with other languages, as in “Le Monde des only you,” a private club in the Gion district of Kyoto.

These linguistic considerations might, of course, make a person all the more wary of what he is eating in Japan. You should be aware, to be sure, that the Japanese word pronounced “taco” means “octopus,” and that the magazine B.L.T. deals with Beautiful Lady & Television.

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