Clean it yourself sashimi

At Mama no Mise, whole bora (on the right), about 60 cm. (2 ft.) long.

Tacoyaki

I didn't know they grew coffee there

Cheap eats

And some not so cheap, at the same little udon restaurant in Popogai, a little shopping arcade next to Tokushima Station.

Some sushi tonight

Roast duck

Fugu (the poisonous one). This is the first time I've noticed it on the menu on on the conveyor belt of a 105 yen sushi restaurant. I read that much or most fugu served in Japan is now farm-raised and some of that is non-poisonous. I don't know the story behind this particular fugu. It's good, though.

School Lunch

Here's what the students at my daughter's elementary school will have for lunch the next couple of weeks, until Spring Break.

Last night's mushrooms

Sautéed in butter, sprinkled with soy sauce, my wife's favorite way of cooking almost any kind of mushroom.

Only in Japan

Coca Cola has started selling a new drink here:

Coca Cola Moo Moo White

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Red daikon

I know nothing about these. First time I've ever seen them. Local farmers' markets are fun!

It's very attractive grated (daikon oroshi).

P.S. My wife, who grew up here, surrounded by farmers, had never seen or heard of it either.

Not your average daikon

Local farmers' market, local farmer's very local produce.

Spring is coming

It's

really

really

coming

Daikon -- nude

Tonight's mushrooms

Eringi, a kind of oyster mushroom. I'd never cooked them before so, following my wife's suggestion (always a good idea), I just sautéed them in canola oil and sprinkled on some salt, black pepper, and soy sauce. They were pretty good.

A few choices at a local supermarket

Baby eels and, on the left, even younger babies.

Below, bora. Above, bora eyes.

Baby octopus.

Pachinko -- a kind of tsukudani -- wakame (one of the commonest sea vegetables here) boiled in soy sauce.

Iwashi (sardines) -- sun-dried, in this case.

Hijiki Wakame

Squid

Hamachi (very cheap, very young)

Just what they look like -- I forget what they're called.

"Gourmet" food store

548 yen = US $5.96

238 yen = US $2.59

278 yen = US $3.02

I would never have associated Hakodate with curry. Hakodate is a city on the island of Hokkaido.

How precious is Parmesano Reggiano? In a basket?

1,130 yen = US $12.28 for 200 grams.

That's almost $30 a pound. Actually, compared with the price markup for the Campbell's soup, that's a bagain, isn't it?

Hamachi

A.K.A. yellowtail

This was my main course the other night at a fish restaurant way on the south side of Tokushima City. It was good and really reasonable, 980 yen for a full meal. The pieces of fish were actually a bit too big. I would have preferred twice as many smaller pieces, to enjoy the taste longer.

Actually, the price was a little higher because I opted for tai meshi instead of regular white rice. Tai is a local specialty, though it's local in many parts of Japan. Our local, local tai is called Naruto tai after the town with the famous whirlpools just north of here. Tai is a kind of Red sea bream, I'm not sure which one is our local, local one.

My daughter sometimes still likes to order kid's meals, though usually she's too big for them. This time, the meal was too big for her!

Even though this was a fish restaurant, there's no fish here, just hamburger steak, fried chicken, sausage, some sort of weird potato thing that looked like a waffle, spaghetti, . . . . . . . . . .

Candied fish

Seriously

It was good, too. These are ayu, (アユ, 鮎, 香魚) a relative of smelt. These were boiled, probably for a long time, in sweetened soy sauce. My wife even ate the head of hers.

Ugly, though.

Guess what?

Mossburger lunch for 2

Mr. Mushipan

Which I talked about a few months ago.

Shungiku

Which I'll put in our yakisoba tonight.

Nanohana in bloom

In a field near my house.

And in the farmers' market.

Udon is from where???

Wikipedia and other sources (1, 2, 3) say that udon, like almost every traditional Japanese dish, traces its history to China. Most Japanese, however, think of udon as truly Japanese.

When I first came to Japan to teach English, nearly 20 years ago, I taught in a rural junior high school. I ate the regular school lunch, along with the teachers. Most days, lunch was served with a pair of waribashi, the throw-away chopsticks used by nearly all Japanese when they're away from home, and sometimes at home as well. (I carried my own re-usable chopsticks, the subject of a future blog entry.)

Occasionally, however, lunch was served with a spork, the familiar combination spoon and fork. Curry was served with a spork. So was spaghetti, though udon and yakisoba, other noodle dishes, were presented with waribashi. I asked one of the other teachers what the logic was and he told me that waribashi were used for Japanese foods while sporks were used for food of foreign origin. I told him that I thought the rule should be, Which is the better tool for eating this particular food? I went on to say that, from then on, I planned to use chopsticks to eat spaghetti.

Of course, as I know now, udon also is of Chinese origin. In fact, so is yakisoba, which is simply the lamien I ate all across northern China, noodles fried with chunks of meat (and, in Japan, vegetables). Obviously, this is ramen, another Japanese food, by its Chinese name, though here it is virtually always served in soup.

So where do all these foods come from and what difference does it make? It makes a lot of difference if you think of food as one of the core elements of your national identity. What does it say about you if what you consider emblematic of your national identity was imported. In the U.S., nearly everything was imported from one country or another by an immigrant group from that country. This is accepted pretty well. After all, we've never tried to come up with new names for that emphatically American dish, the hamburger. (Anyone who have never heard of Hamburg, Germany, please return to school.) Think of all the other typically American foods that are still known by their original names, as imported, or names identifying their place of origin.

Part of the difference may be that Americans take pride in the idea of being a polyglot culture, a melting pot, as we used to say. Japanese, on the other hand, are mostly descended from people who immigrated before English was a language. In the two millennia before Japan open to the outside world, only about 150 years ago, probably no more than a few tens of thousands of people immigrated to Japan, mostly from Korea, one of the places of origin of the prehistoric Japanese. This, plus Japan's relative isolation from the rest of Asia, strictly enforced from 1639 to 1854, fostered a feeling of uniqueness. However, throughout this time, educated Japanese were aware that much of their material culture was imported from their much larger and more powerful neighbor, China. In considering this relationship, Japanese scholars developed the idea that, whatever the source of origin of ideas and cultural artifacts, they had been transformed in Japan and had become uniquely Japanese. Moreover, especially in the late 19th century, Japanese scholars identified certain ideas (and foods) as definitively Japanese. So, in 1873, the Japanese emperor emphasized his descent from heaven by creating a national holiday, Foundation Day, which we celebrated yesterday. There's even a style of presenting rice, especially in bento, called Hinomaru bento, plain white rice with a red umeboshi (pickled plum) in the middle. It's modeled after the Japanese flag. Talk about making a foreign food (rice) your own!

Nanohana

Nanohana time has crept up on me already.

Here, we had our first of the season nanohana (rapini, or rape), with karashi miso dressing:

4 tablespoons white miso

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon sake (not the good stuff)

1/2 teaspoon karashi (Japanese mustard, the spicy kind with horseradish in it)

Mochi x 3

Top -- yomogi mochi

Right -- plain, sweet mochi

Left -- chocolate-filled, mango-flavored mochi from Okinawa!

Vending machine prices

This is very unusual now. Most machine drinks cost 140 yen. Anything under 120 is really rare.