Stranger in a familiar land



Tebasaki

Last weekend I was visited by some friends from university, or rather a friend and her boyfriend, whom I had met only once and didn’t really speak to him. It was one crisp autumn morning in late November that I received a message from her asking whether we could meet up over the weekend and guide her around Nagoya and show her and her boyfriend the sights of Nagoya. A normal request you might assume, but panic began to set in, as I began to realize two things; firstly, there

 are no real tourist attractions in Nagoya, secondly, the few that there are, I had never been to. Reaching into my bookshelf, I pulled out my trusty copy of the Lonely Planet’s guide to Japan and flipped through the book to learn about the city I’ve practically been living in for almost 4 months. There were only 8 pages in a book of about 500 that were about going to visit Japan’s fourth largest city, most of them being about which net-café to stay in or where to buy tebasaki (a type of peppery chicken wing that is almost ubiquitous in Nagoya). In other words, it was absolutely useless.

So when Saturday finally arrived, I wrapped up in my coat, scarf and jumper and headed out to Nagoya on the train. After eventually meeting up in the train station, we took the underground to the government district, Shiyakusho and that’s when I realised that my palms were getting moist, my forehead getting hot and my clothes were starting to stick to me. Not a tropical disease I can assure you dear reader, but something much rarer; warm weather. As a result, I arrived at Nagoya castle carrying most of my clothes under my arm in a desperate attempt to try and not boil to death (just how much snow are you getting in the U.K.?) Buying a ticket, I made sure to stop off at a traditional Japanese tea room, which sold green tea with gold leaf in it. I’m not sure what gold leaf adds to the flavour or how Zen the experience of drinking something so opulent is. My friends and I took a short detour through the woods, passing by a depiction of Nagoya castle as a piece of tofu with flowers in its hair on the way. After the hippie’s wet dream we went to see a bunch of actors dressed up as soldiers, accompanied by a cutesy representation of Ieyasu Tokugawa. I’m still waiting for Hampton Court to feature a cutesy Henry VIII wandering from room to room killing his cutesy wives or a doe-eyed Winston Churchill chasing an adorable Hitler around the war rooms. Eventually we made our way to the inner walls of the castle compound, only to realise when we got there it was still largely a building site. Apparently, the castle was completely burnt to the ground during World War 2; half of it was rebuilt in 1959, but didn’t start re-building the other half until 2009.

Miso Katsu

Standing in the open courtyard, being slowly roasted by my over enthusiasm for cold weather, we made our way to the donjon - twin keeps connected by a raised walkway, and looked at the exhibitions inside. One of the key features of the castle is that it has two tiger-headed dolphins on the top posed in such a way as they look like deep-fried prawns (another Nagoya speciality) from far away. After visiting the various exhibitions and sitting on various displays of traditional Aichi culture, we went to the next best place; the wretched hive of saturated fats and heart attacks known locally as Yabaton. Yabaton, for those that aren’t aware, is a local restaurant chain that serves deep-fried pork in a miso sauce. The taste can a little overpowering for a newcomer, but my friend’s boyfriend seemed to enjoy himself immensely. In fact he was so pleased by the meal that he bought a T-shirt from the restaurant, which I suppose is right up there, in terms of fashion statements, with buying a T-shirt with a haggis on it from Scotland, or a Cheesesteak on it from Philadelphia or a kangaroo on it from Australia.

Afterwards we headed to the Osu district of Nagoya, one of the few places I had been before, sometimes called the Akihabara of Nagoya (minus the maid cafes, the porn, the wall-to-wall electronics or anything that really makes Akihabara what it is). Osu itself largely consists of a large covered street with innumerable clothes shops, shoe shops, South American restaurants and trendy cafes. In short it’s more like Paris than Akihabara, well it would be if central Paris didn’t have any white people. We visited the giant Shinto temple there called Osu Kannon, got our fortunes, rang the big bell and quickly moved on. Travelling to Sakae, the city’s entertainment district and home to the so-called Sakae girls (girls who dress in short skirts and wear their in dyed ringlets that flock to the innumerable nightclubs here), I felt obliged to introduce my charges to yet another Nagoya speciality and something I’d never had before – Hitsumabushi. Hitsumabushi is charcoal-grilled eel served with rice, stock, wasabi and other accompaniments. The idea is that you divide the eel into quarters, the first quarter you eat unadulterated, the second you eat with wasabi and seaweed, the third you eat with stock and the last you have as you like it. I ruined my last quarter by putting too much stock in my bowl, turning my delicately balanced and harmonious meal into a rice gruel with bits of eel floating in it. Unfortunately my friend’s boyfriend didn’t like eel, so he had the thing on the menu with the least eel in it – dried eel spines. It was like watching Monty Python’s spam sketch. So while he sat there eating his bones, my friend and I quickly finished up so we could go to another restaurant so he could get his fill of another Nagoya speciality – Oyako-don, a name that means parent and child rice bowl. In case you haven’t figured it out, this relates to the fact that the dish consists of chicken and egg. Wikipedia calls this turn of phrase poetic; to me it’s more of a brutal reminder of harsh reality. Having torn apart a family by shovelling it into our gaping maws we said goodbye and I went back to resolutely under-exposing myself to the culture of my new home.

Apologies for the lateness of this update; you'll get two this week to make up for it

The rolling stone gathers no Mos

We all know America as the kings of fast food; the streets of New York are filled with street vendors peddling hotdogs of dubious quality, Jamie Oliver was practically lynched when he went there and there are more burger joints than there are libraries*. Britain too has become a fast food nation, even though our first fast food restaurant chain in Britain, Wimpy, served its hamburgers on a plate and expected us to eat them with a knife and fork. For those that are interested; Wimpy itself went out of fashion in the seventies, along with flares, unionism and 25-minute rock songs about goblin kings, but the British tendency to eat burgers and pizza with silverware, lives on. Normally Japan isn't really considered a fast food-loving country, since its population aren't corpulent gastropods, but it is. Japan loves it some fast food, some imported, some indigenous, all seemingly served by a good looking young girl with immaculate manners and strong perfume (i.e. the polar opposite of British fast-food workers). So allow me dear reader to explore some of the food options for the lazy foreigner in the land of the rising sun.

American imports

Colonel Santa

KFC – The Japanese have their own version of fried chicken called Kara Age, which is widely available as pub food. That said, one should never underestimate the appeal of bread crumbs and fake colonels, as KFC holds an important place in Japanese culture. The Japanese for some reason associate KFC with Christmas (perhaps they cannot tell two bearded white people apart.)

Mr. Donut’s – A shop that sells...well...doughnuts. Coming from the land of grey skies and gloomy faces, Mr. Donuts was like taking an LSD trip whilst watching the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine film, in that the sheer range of colours blew my mind. They don’t taste half bad either. In Japan the stores occasionally give away free doughnuts, prompting queues lasting for several hours.

Mc Donald’s – Do you know what they call a quarter-pounder with cheese in Japan? They call it a “Kwohta Paunda Chiizu.” The Japanese also sell Teriyaki burgers in Mc Donalds, which are actually better than most of the other things on the menu. The burgers are suitably ‘Japanese’ in size. There are a number of imitators such as the unfortunatly named Mos(s) burger, but none of them sell cheese fondue burgers. Mc Donalds does.

Japanese fast food

Yes, that is a raw egg in the middle

Gyuu-don (牛丼) – Shredded beef (gyuu) over a big bowl of rice (don). This basic dish comes lathered in a delicious sauce not unlike a casserole sauce you might find in British cooking. The bowls come in small, medium, large and Godzilla. These dishes are normally remarkably cheap considering how much they fill you up.

Takoyaki (たこ焼き)/ Okonomiyaki (お好み焼き)– These two dishes are most commonly associated with Osaka and the Kansai region of Japan. Takoyaki are bits of octopus inside batter dumplings and topped with a vaguely sweet sauce, mayonaise and mountains of spring onion and katsuobushi  (かつおぶし), which are dried fish flakes. Okonomiyaki on the other hand is a thick pancake made of batter and diced cabbage fried and topped with essentially the same things. Co-incidentally, the best way to annoy an Osakan is to insist that these two originally come from Nagoya or worse, Tokyo.

Ramen （らーめん）- Big bowls of soup and noodles which may or may not include meat, boiled eggs, spring onion. I’ve only ever been to proper Ramen restaurants after binge drinking, and as such I always subconsciously associate them with donner kebabs. The dish is hearty and delicious, but I must confess that I’ve never been able to finish one

This sort of silliness would never be
tolerated in a good old-fashioned
Indian restaraunt

Curry （カレー）- Curry in Japan is not Indian, thicker, sweeter with more sauce and fewer vegetables. The curry is always brown. You can usually choose how spicy you want it and pick a meat cutlet that you want to deep-fried and served on top. Served with the thick risotto like Japanese rice that is ubiquitous here rather than Indian basmati rice. The rice is always white.

British fast food

Fish and Chips – Only found in ‘British’ pubs, it’s actually scampi and potato wedges.

So there we have it everything you ever need to know about Japanese fast food. You now no longer need to come over here and try it.

*This is not just idle fact, but cold hard speculation

Gaijin Smash

It’s gotten much colder here in Japan. However, I feel I must stress the relativity of Japanese conceptions of cold; in Japan, it’s cold when you have to wear a jacket, whereas in Northern England, it was cold when it became hazardous to kiss someone lest your lips get frozen together. As oddly temperate as Japanese cold weather seems, mainland Japan seems to neglect to install any radiators, insulation or even close the windows in its school classrooms or corridors. In fact the only place which has those things is the staff room, where we also have a coffee machine. This has lead to fantasies of sipping a cafe au lait, laughing, whilst the Japanese waifs and urchins outside press their noses against the window, silently sobbing wishing only for more gruel.

It was on one such brisk morning that I strode into one of my lessons, wrapped up in a sweater and feeling a little tired from another sleepless night getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. In acknowledgement of this cold weather, the teacher ordered the children to close the window. Clambering over the bookshelves and desks three of the boys prompted started to struggle to close the window, which was above the door to the classroom. Feeling every inch the symbol of masculinity and physical strength the gaijin is supposed to be, I brushed the students aside and proceeded to show the children how it’s done. Placing one hand on the window, it promptly fell out of the rail and fell, frame and all, on the floor outside the classroom.

As there was no immediate sound of broken glass, I was optimistic, but after closer inspection it was revealed to be in worse condition than the re-election prospects of the Lib Dems. Sheepishly I walked back into class, pride shattered. As a third teacher came to clean up my mess, I endeavoured through a mixture of professionalism and sheer pomposity to carry on with a normal lesson and ignore the white elephant in the room. Unfortunately I chose this moment to smack my head on the metal bracket encasing the enclosed T.V. Normally, low-flying T.V.s aren’t really a problem in Japan, but then again, there are precious few Japanese people over 6’.

After a hard day’s work self-harming and vandalising school property I arrived home only to smack my head on a door frame. I’m thankful that I’m not into the habit of leaving discarded banana peels around my apartment, because the universe would not be able to tolerate such high concentrations of clichéd slapstick, and I’m sure I would have received some form of divine retribution. Still it was good practice for when the economy falls through completely and I have to persue a career as a circus clown. Now I just need to learn how to terrify young children...

Maid in Japan

Me after having just donned
my night's attire

Halloween is a time where all the scary monsters and demons come out of the woodwork to terrify little children and make grown men cower in fear. Of the many monsters in the Halloween canon, the most terrifying is easily the 6’3 transvestite with hairy legs, a beard and a maid costume. Just for the record, I never intended to dress as a maid for Halloween, just as I never intended to get sexually molested (again), accidently expose myself and pass out on the train ride home, but I did. With your interest hopefully piqued, dear reader, I shall start my tale at the most suitable of locations, the start. Having been invited to the annual JET party, I was in a spot of bother, it was three hours before the party and I still didn’t have a costume, so I made my way to one of Japan’s most curious institutions, Don Quixote, or Don Kihote as it’s known in Japan. Besides being the fictional, farcical knight who famously tilted at windmills, Don Quixote is also the name of a Japanese chain of shops that sell almost everything under the sun and have a famously convoluted floor design. In particular they sell a number of costumes amongst other tat, and being Halloween, they had a very good choice of costume. Remembering my previous cross-dressing experience, I suddenly felt the compulsion to wear a skirt again. I was tempted by the Neon Genesis Evangelion school uniform, but it was pricy and didn’t fit me anyway. That’s when I saw the answer to my prayers; the manly schoolgirl/maid costume set, featuring a fat Japanese guy on the packaging gurning and posing in a feminine stance. Having already been a schoolgirl in Japan the choice was obvious, French maid it was.



At the restaurant

I arrived at the party venue early, and deftly slipping into my one piece outfit and matching alice-band, I went to meet the other party goers outside. Luckily the night wasn’t cold, and seeing as I had neglected to invest in any stockings, I was in luck. As more and more of my friends arrived to see me at my most beautiful, I was slightly disappointed to see that I wasn’t the only man to come in drag, some Japanese guys had the same idea too. The restaraunt itself was fantastic, the food wasn’t the most creative in the world, just the familiar Japanese izakaya fare, but the atmosphere was superb. The restaurant was decorated as a horrific prison, with the individual rooms being enclosed behind prison-bars and the staff dressed as goblins and ghouls. Half an hour in, the lights went out and the staff put on a horror show; having strategically positioned myself between two attractive Japanese girls I was in the best position to capitalise on the terror they invoked. Afterwards though, things took a turn for the surreal. As the effects of the copious amounts of alcohol on offer started to kick in, I left my seat and my new companions behind and joined in the frenzied dancing that had erupted in the middle of the restaurant. Limbs flailed, skirts flew and at least one fake samurai sword prodded me in the arse. That’s when the skirt flipping started.

Mickey makes some
new friends

As much as I’d like to say it was mostly women that were lifting up my skirt, it would be an outright lie. Although there were a substantial number of women trying to lift my skirt and even pull down my underwear, it was mostly men who were trying to get a peak at what lies beneath. So for the next few hours I wandered around the restaurant, having alcoholic beverages foisted upon me and desperately trying to fend off the advances of drunken patrons. Eventually the party finished and the attendees went their separate ways. Some went to Karaoke, some went drinking some even went home for an early night, but having not had enough of being the center of attention I decided to join some of the Japanese in going clubbing. That’s when things turned from bad to Japanese.

I wasn't the only one
to have this problem

Arriving at the club it became apparent that I was right to assume that Halloween was mostly about getting drunk and dressing like a tit, the streets outside the clubs and off-licence were teeming with drunken revellers. There was a group of wallies, sexualised Disney characters, and characters from films as diverse as Avatar, Donnie Darko and Battle Royale. What I did notice was a relative absence of traditional Halloween monsters; no ghosts, no Frankenstein’s monsters and only a handful of vampires. Having entered our first club, my companions and I proceeded to start to dance the night away, only to be shooed off-stage 15 minutes later when it was announced they were starting the transvestite show. Half a dozen men came on stage one after the other to perform erotic dances and create an atmosphere of complete moral decadence and perversion. It was fantastic. None of them were particularly convincing, but they acted in such a supremely confident manner, I couldn’t help but admire them, it was like watching a real-life version of Bara no Soiretsu, aka ‘Funeral parade of roses’.

Transvestite

Naturally the skirt flipping didn’t stop, only this time, I seemed to have forgotten to redo the flies on my boxer shorts after a toilet break, accidently giving the two girls who successfully flipped my skirt rather more than they bargained for. Having failed at my attempt to convince them to reciprocate in a “I’ve shown you mine, now show me yours” type affair, I moved on to other clubs. The rest of the evening was spent in much the same way as before, being come on to by both men and women alike watching another tranny show and spending a lot of time dancing and drinking, it eventually got to 4.00. Exhausted by my endeavours, I decided to pass the time waiting for the subway to open by eating a huge bowl of ramen and drawing the attention of every other patron, naturally all drunken revellers. Like one of the living dead I stumbled back to the station, boarded my train and promptly passed out. I tried to keep myself awake by listening to the Beatles’ White Album, but that just made things worse when I woke up to Revolution no.8, a song seemingly designed to be as disorientating as possible. Unfortunately, I’d missed my stop and woke up at the end of the line, with a group of high school students eyeing me nervously and keeping their distance from the drunken cross-dressing foreigner lying with legs akimbo (boxer-button naturally done-up) and splayed across the train seats. The walk home from my stop was horrible, it had gotten colder, I was exhausted despite my un-scheduled sleep and I was already starting to have a hangover, but it was one of the best nights of my life.