White bread

For a change.

Valentine's Day is coming 3

The whole main floor of the mall is now filled with chocolate. That's in addition to all the separate displays in the shops.

Mall food

Fuji Grand isn't exactly a mall in the usual sense since almost all the stores are owned by the same department store company. The food court, too, seems to be all company-owned, though there are a few other options downstairs (McD, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Mr. Donut).

The food court had about eight stores:

• udon
• ramen
• omraisu (rice-stuffed omlets)
• Korean pibimpap
• soft (ice) cream
• and a few others

My wife and daughter had udon with a few fairly substantial toppings.

I had a very Japanese version of pibimpap, with canned tuna and mayonaise:

It was the mildest Korean meal I've ever had. Typically Japanese.

Soft cream

It's not exactly the season, but signs and displays for soft ice cream (called soft cream here) are still prominent. As you can see, it's pretty expensive.

Leftover bora

The piece of bora I bought two days ago was big enough for three, but my daughter decided it was unfamiliar fish and therefore inedible. My wife and I just ate the leftover bora. I sauteed it in canola oil with fresh ginger and negi (Japanese leek), sauced with sake, mirin, and soy sauce. I won't give you a recipe since nothing was measured. Just a way of making sure the fish didn't go to waste when it was too old to eat raw.

Cafe Rest

Rest, of course, means restaurant.

When Japanese adopt foreign words, they sometimes shorten them. The classic case is the Japanese word パソコン, pronounced pa-so-kon, meaning "personal computer." In Japanese, you wouldn't call a restaurant a "rest" but the signs for American style restaurants that are similar to Denny's or Howard Johnson's always say "Cafe Rest" -- except for one I know which has a large sign, proudly proclaiming it to be a "Cafe Lest."

Devils out! Sushi in!

Well, technically it's "Devils out! Good luck in!" but an essential part of this is to eat a sushi roll with seven ingredients. In fact, you're supposed to eat the whole sushi roll without speaking. One thing everyone does try to do is to eat the roll, or at least start to eat it, facing in the lucky direction for the year. How do you determine the lucky direction for the year? Check the newspaper. This year it's SSW.

My daughter thought it might be a good idea to eat her cucumber sticks facing SSW for extra luck.

I didn't make the sushi rolls. I bought them with a crowd of other shoppers at Mama no Mise. They come complete with an 赤鬼　(aka-oni, red devil) picture, just so you know they're special Setsubun maki. I got the regular ones, that taste exactly like everyday maki, passing up the ones with roast beef and other modern variations on the theme.

Lined up and ready to go!

There's a ton of information about Setsubun on the web. The only thing I want to point out that originally Setsubun (that is, this setsubun, the are four, one for the beginning of every season) was part of the celebration of the New Year. When Japanese New Year migrated from the lunar New Year to January 1st, it got separated from the rest of the festivities. Why? I've no idea.

The sushi roll eating custom isn't part of the original Setsubun observances. The original custom, still followed, is to throw some roasted soy beans out the door while you shout, "鬼は外福は内" -- oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi -- "Devils out, good luck in!" You can spice up this custom by having someone, usually a grandfather, dress as an oni (or at least wear a mask which you can get at a convenience store) and throwing the beans at him, driving him away from the house. This part of the custom has been modernized by moving it to the schools and having every student in every class take it in turn to be the oni, trying to catch the beans in the mouth of the big mask.

The beans, by the way, were traditionally roasted soy beans but now are just as often peanuts.

There's another bean/peanut related custom that we're going to skip at our house. You're supposed to eat the number of beans of your age. After eating the whole makizushi, if I ate that many beans or peanuts, I'd be too full for dessert.

Today's cutlet -- fish

Yesterday, Mama no Mise had whale cutlets on sale. Today they had fish cutlets.

As the sign says, these are a local specialty -- chopped fish, some stuff to hold it together, plus overly-colorful breading.

Interestingly, they've written the name phonetically as フイッシュかつ. Fish is written in katakana, the syllabary used for words of foreign origin, except for words derived from Chinese, which are written in Chinese characters. Katakana is also used for foreign names, like my name, Weiss, written ワイス which comes out wa - i - su if you say it slowly, as I do in situations where, in English, I would spell my name.

The かつ, katsu part of the name of the food is also probably derived ultimately from the French côtelette, which is odd, now that I think about it since that makes katsu also a word of foreign origin which thus should be written in katakana rather than hiragana. My dictionary correctly shows it in katakana, but my impression is that it's usually written in hiragana. (The whale cutlets yesterday had it written in katakana.) Hiragana is the Japanese syllabary used for verb endings, conjunctions, some names, everything in books written for young children, as well as many other uses. But then, Japanese isn't any more logical than English, and we all know what a mess English is.

Bora

A.K.A. Flathead Mullet.

Unusual for sashimi, but it was marked as さしみ用 (sashimi yo) on the package so we had it that way and it was pretty good, and very cheap. Only 258 yen for all this. (U.S. $2.85)

Cheap tuna

Maguro has a reputation for being very expensive, but you can find it fairly low prices. These pieces have been marked down to half price (originally 398 yen per 100 grams) since they need to be eaten today if they're going to be consumed uncooked.

Whale cutlets?

That's what I spotted in Mama no mise (Mama's Store, my favorite local supermarket) today. They were in the osozai section with the other prepared foods. Quite cheap, only 160 yen for four, probably about 100 grams (3 1/2 ounces) each. I haven't noticed them there before so I assume it's fairly unusual. Of course, based on what I've read, they could be porpoise instead of whale since the term kujira is sometimes used for small cetaceans, but I wasn't about to buy and have it tested to find out.

Famous delicacies

There's a category of food called chinmi (珍味). The first character, by itself, means rare, curious, strange (according to Jim Breen's dictionary), and that should give you a good hint of what's on your plate.

There are chinmi for each prefecture and each region of Japan. Oddly, when I showed my wife a list of four chinmi for Shikoku, the Island where she's lived nearly all her life, she hadn't heard of any of them. I guess that's because they're not exactly the sort of food normal people eat.

• Chorogi -- the pickled tuber of the Chinese artichoke
• Katsuo no heso -- literally "bonito bellybutton"
• Shuto -- pickled bonito intestines
• Dorome -- raw, barely-dead sardine fry (just hatched baby fish)

I've had dorome. The best thing I can say for it was that it was easier to get down than raw baby octopus -- but not much. I think (I've had chorogi, but under a different name a local dialect name, I guess).

There are also three great chinmi for Japan.

• Pickled sea urchin roe
• Pickled mullet roe
• Pickled sea urchin guts

Now, these are all pickled, and all (I think) salt pickled. In other words, you rub salt all around the the "food" and let it sit for days, weeks, or months. What you get is a a sort of semi-fermented, salty mess. I think you can guess who would eat one of these by noting that, in the description of the dish, there's always the annotation, "Usually served with sake." A LOT of sake.