Japan Survival Guide Point 4 – Food and grocery shopping.

So, you’re coming to live in Japan. You’re going to teach English probably, and you’ll have your own apartment and quite often you’ll be cooking for yourself. What’s that like? What is Japanese food like and what are my choices when I eat out?

Shopping in Yokohama for food.

These are all important questions. Let’s start with self-catering and seamlessly melt into eating out via the convenience store, a big part in the lives of people in Japan, foreigners and Japanese. The first question you may have is – ‘Are supermarkets significantly different to those at home?’

Well, yes, and no. Firstly, fruit and vegetables are very seasonal here. I come from Australia, and things are not so seasonal at home because of our mild to non-existent winters. In Japan there’s plenty of snow, so that affects produce. Also, there simply isn’t that much land here to farm, and so much of that land is used for, you guessed it, rice.

We studied chapters at school which talked about Japan’s importing of food, and there’s so much that is imported. A high percentage of the beef and meat comes from other countries, including Australia. They like to marble the beef with strains of fat, so lean beef is not so easy to find. That’s the way they like it here. You will also find that meat is often sold in small, thin ‘strips’, rather than fillets.

There are a lot of noodle products, usually plenty of vegetables with an unhealthy obsession with radishes. Vegetables, I feel, are pretty expensive, especially in winter. A tomato could cost you $1.50 or more for one, and they tend to price per unit, not by weight although that is not always true. There are plenty of chips on the shelves and it’s often hard to know what flavour they are by the packet.

Lots of ice cream too, and you’ll find green tea is a very popular flavour here for it. And many other things as well. Ham and cheese especially are disappointing for quality and choice. Sausages are hard to find, unless you are looking for wieners. Self-raising flour is very rare. Bread is ALWAYS sold as a half loaf, is usually white and sweet and cut into very thick pieces. 1.5 cm is pretty standard and it gets thicker from there. That’s why I have made my own bread for two years in Japan, I want it cut thinner, I want it brown and with less sugar and chemicals. You can leave you bread in the fridge for weeks here and it doesn’t change. Yes, bread is disappointing. I HAVE seen bread as thick as an INCH.

I could go on but you get the idea. Then you get home and most houses, apartments and whatnot don’t have an oven, just a stove. And that usually doesn’t come with your apartment, so you end up renting or buying a one burner stove and that’s what you cook with. So no baking for you! Or roasting. Keep that in mind when you try to whip things up of an evening. Also, I find prices more expensive here in Yokohama than I did in Iwate which makes little sense, unless it’s sales tax.

If you’re in a rush, you can do what everyone does and that’s go to a convenience store, or as they call it here, a ‘conbini’. 7/11, Lawson, Family Mart, Sun K us… there are a legion of them here, I have never seen so many. They carry bentos (a kind of prepared lunch pack), sandwiches (not advised, will send you to the loo!), hot dogs, some very nice fried chicken, hot pockets, chips… for a few dollars you can sort a meal out for yourself with a bit of variety. Of course, it’s unlikely to score well in being healthy. But this is what a lot of Japanese people do and they love their conbinis very much.

Then you could go to a restaurant. And truly, of course you must try some Japanese food whilst you’re here. Here are some examples.

Sushi – you know sushi and sashimi right? A sort of rice ball or tube with raw fish, or vegetables, or egg or maybe something else on top or inside? You’ll find them at supermarkets, conbinis and restaurants and they are actually pretty healthy.

Okonomiyaki – well this one is a sort of omelette thing I guess. It involves egg, cabbage and a mixture of various other vegetables, often sprouts, a bit of meat maybe, restaurants specialise in this one. You can often make it yourself with a little hot plate included on your table! Cook it yourself and then smother it in ketchup, mayo or brown sauce. It ends up not being really healthy, and I don’t much go in for it, but many love it.

Yaki-soba – can be really delicious. It’s a sort of noodle thing mixed with cabbage, pork (or some other meat) and other vegetables. Really really nice! My favourite Japanese food.

Natto – this one is more for the brave I think. Strong smelling beans in a sort of sauce served usually with rice. It hails from Iwate I believe, and to be honest is not my cup of tea. But it might be yours!

Ramen – and if none of these appeal to you, try a bowl of ramen noodles. I like it with pork slices on top, the ramen noodles are in a delicious soup with vegetables too.

Tempura – well tempura can be many things from chicken to vegetables to shrimp. It’s basically just a Japanese take on covering something in batter and frying it. And yes it can be pretty darned tasty, and no, it’s usually not healthy.

You might also want to try –

Yakitori – grilled chicken on a stick in a sauce, really nice.

Onigiri (Rice balls) – People here LOVE rice balls for lunch or snack, usually wrapped in seaweed. Me? Not so much.

Soba, udon – more interesting kinds of noodles. There are many!

Curry & Rice – known more simply as Curry Rice, it’s usually a curry with maybe a little potato or other vegetables, and rice. It’s very popular up in Iwate, tastes okay and is usually not particularly hot.

So there are a few quick ideas to start you off for eating in Japan. Japanese cuisine is varied and usually tastes very strong, they don’t like things mild here. Again, I have only touched the surface there are so many different Japanese dishes. Be adventurous, but be aware you may end up with a bowl of something you can’t stand! Japanese food is really a love or hate it sort of deal. 

Fish Markets and Kabuki

I certainly had a busy day yesterday. I visited the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo and took in a single act performance of Kabuki Theatre, then discovered some more of Tokyo’s secrets (that’s for another blog because this one is going to be long enough).

My mother-in-law had suggested that I go to the Tsukiji Market with her, but my wife didn’t think I’d been keen on the idea. It’s not an unreasonable reaction, my hatred of fish has not been kept a secret which has limited some of my eating options here in Japan. However, I thought it would be interesting and at the very least offer a chance for some photos. I hadn’t seen it and it was something to do!

There be fish this way!

So it was that we headed out yesterday on the train to Higashi Ginza station, below the Kabuki-za theatre and a short walk from the market. Or ‘markets’ is possibly a better way to describe it. I mean, it is the biggest fish market in the world! I can strike that off my bucket list now!

There are two markets principally – the inner and outer fish markets. The outer market is a grid of streets where people sell to the public and there are numerous small restaurants and food stalls. There were a couple of small ramen shops with people grabbing a bowl of noodles, and we had a sort of sweet egg thing so not everything is fish-based.

Ramen shop.

You can wander around and see all types of different fish for sale, and you may even see whale meat. The whole whale meat argument is one, folks, I am not entering into because I am here in Japan and my wife is Japanese and in Japan you don’t talk about religion, politics and whales. But I was told that this photo is of whale meat.

Reputedly whale-meat

Inne Market, note the trolley- things!

From there we went to the inner market, which is, from what I understand, a wholesale market. It’s the sort of place where you see people at work and the world go by. I saw some interesting looking seafood there, took a number of photos, and watched these really cool buggies driving about the place. Only part of the inner market is open to tourists, and you can’t enter before 9am. But all in all both were interesting places to see. I also noted so many TOURISTS! WOW! Even at the Cup Noodles museum in Yokohama most visitors were Japanese, but yesterday I saw more foreigners than I have for 12 months I think.

Then, Kabuki Theatre. What is really great is that you can get pretty cheap tickets to see a single act of the show, which may or may not be a complete story. We went to the Kazuki-za Theatre, which is a very modern building – it was completed in 2013 after the previous theatre was considered unsafe and the one before I think burnt down. It was massive and they must have been able to seat a few thousand in there.

Our tickets were 800 yen each, about 8 dollars. So for the tourist it won’t break the bank and for 500 yen more you get an earpiece with English translation. They have a limited number of spots, you need to be in the first 90-100 to get a seat. You are given entrance according to your ticket number. It’s a good idea to buy the tickets a couple of hours before the performance from the little booth outside the theatre, the single act tickets go on sale a little over two hours before that show. Note – I have no photos of the performance, because they are not allowed.

Kabuki-za Theatre

I saw an act called ‘The Dance of the Quiver and the Monkey’. The story is about a female Samurai who wants to take a trainer’s monkey to skin it and make a quiver out of it. However, the monkey starts to dance and the Samurai relents. Apparently the man playing the monkey trainer is a very famous Kabuki actor who had been ill for 12 months and was making his comeback. The entire theatre, which seemed pretty full (single act area was completely sold out) applauded when he came on stage and shouted his theatre-name aloud, which is apparently the tradition to praise the actors this way.

Kabuki theatre, from what I understand, is an offshoot of Noh Theatre, an older Japanese style of performance. The actors all dress up in amazing colours and paint their face and showing body white, speak very loudly and extremely theatrically, and there is a slow, deliberate kind of dance used as well. Kabuki means sing, dance & skill. The actors are accompanied by singers and players of the shamisen, a sort of Japanese ancient guitar (it’s the best I can describe it). The music is slow and the singers warble, rarely in tune and to be honest, it sounds bloody awful as non-appreciator of the art form.  But everything has its own skill set.

Kabuki-za promotional poster.

The stage is set. A long way back!

The female samurai was played by a male actor who specialises in female roles, and the monkey was played by a child and frequented received calls of ‘kawaii!’ from the audience (‘cute’!). He was the best thing about the show from my perspective. It moves rather slowly and is the complete opposite to naturalism. Which is interesting in itself, when I look at Japanese television (see my previous blog post) it very much is naturalistic. Whereas today’s movies and television in the west often err on the side of realism, being gritty, in Japan the dramas and indeed talk shows are very much over the top and ridiculous (with dramas less so, but the acting does appear very OTT).

Stunning work on the backdrops.

I found it really interesting. The crowd really enjoyed the performance and it’s so good to see, a little like East Europe and ex-USSR countries, that people still appreciate culture other than you know, hip-hop. Haha sorry to alienate my younger audience, but I’m 38 going on 70 here!

If you are in Tokyo, why not try a slice of culture? The stage is not so much a traditional, rotating Kabuki stage, but it featured a number of gorgeous backdrops as we waited for the play to begin that kept rolling over one another. Must have been serious work painting those. One act might be 20-40 minutes, so if you don’t like it, you’re not stuck for three hours and you haven’t shelled out your entire daily budget either. The play’s the thing, as someone rather important once said. JK Rowling I think it was.

My ebook Short Journeys: Japan has many more things to do, see and experience in Japan, and a few stories too.

Tomorrow (Thursday 17^th April) is a very exciting day for World Journeys, the World Journeys Podcast is beginning. You will find it here, but also it should be going up on itunes and I would LOVE subscribers there! It might take until Friday for it to be available on Itunes though, will let you know! Please do watch this space, and may the journey never end!

How to be on TV in Japan

For two years I lived in Iwate in a small apartment with just my laptop for entertainment. I could choose what I watched and the like and the world of Japanese TV was far away, as I didn’t have one. But for the last two weeks I have been with the in-laws in Yokohama, and although I’ve done my best to avoid watching TV, during the evening hours it is on when have dinner and sit and chat and the like and well, I’ve seen ENOUGH!

How can this be explained? I don't want to know!

Japanese TV is a strange beast, to say the least (ooh! Little rhyme). Dramas exist, but I haven’t got to see many. The dramas here appear to be shot a little like documentaries, with a sort static use of the camera. The actors do SEEM to be over acting, quite a bit but that I think comes from Kabuki Theatre and the style that has been used for centuries on the stage in Japan.

Come the evening though, it’s a kind of talk show / game show thing that is hard to describe. Well, no easy to describe, harder to define. What seems quite common is a story being told, and a group of maybe 15 Japanese celebrities watching and commenting. They stop the story, chat, go back to it. Usually there’s a little screen in the top right corner of the main picture showing the celebrities’ reactions.

These stories vary greatly – two nights ago they were talking and watching a story about a famous actress who threw herself off a building, last night it was about a guy who ghost-writ a famous song. Other times they have had stories about mystery illnesses and so forth. The sets are garish and packed with colour, the sort of thing that would go do well as a backdrop for a drag show. Sometimes the celebrities answer quiz-like questions. They had a show all about the top 50 most influential people on the world - interestingly, half or more were Japanese. They seemed to dumb it down a little. The most interesting thing about Mozart was apparently that he wrote a song about ‘poo’. A man conducted the celebrities as they sang this song in Japanese.

Then there's food shows. It's not like My Kitchen Rules, which to me is equally as appalling but in different ways, but they love to eat food, show food and remark on how delicious something is as part of the show. Then there was the show when they had to guess how much each dish cost! This reminded me of a show back in January I saw where celebrities went into rich people's houses and had to guess how much their valuables cost. And these shows go on for like 2-3 HOURS!

Other times it turns into a full-on game show with strange challenges. For example, on Saturday there was a show where celebrities had a sort of stick attached around their stomachs with a giant baseball glove on the end and they had to pass balls along a line and get them into a bucket.

The days starts with typical breakfast shows as you get in Australia, the US or UK, and when it hits prime time it’s the same kind of show pumped to the max with speed. The celebrities’ opinions are clearly very important, despite them just being, you know, celebrities.

So. Imagine you want to be on Japanese TV. What are the boxes you need to tick to get on?

1/ Don’t be a woman.

This isn’t quite fair, there are women on Japanese TV. Usually hip youngsters. The number of middle-aged to older women is even less. You’d better have been a famous actress in the day. I would say 70% or maybe more of the people on Prime Time talk/game/whatever shows are male. It’s ok to be an older male, and wear a tie. That seems to help.

2/ If you are a woman, be young, be very cute and don’t have much to say.

The girls from Sanrio Puroland get asked to host shows from time to time.

Usually in a panel of 15 or so, I’ve noticed one of the co-hosts will be a cute girl who is less than thirty and is good at laughing. Then there will maybe another young, cute girl in the panel, who almost never, ever gets called on to pass a comment. The men are usually pretty loud and over bearing.

3/ If you aren’t young and cute, you can be a woman if you are really a man.

Ummm what can I say? Japanese TV is fertile ground for career opportunities if you are a transvestite. There really are quite a number of them on TV here. Last week a show had no less than 3 transvestites on its panel, and no it was not a panel about transvestites, changing your sex or anything like that. In Tokyo it’s not that uncommon to be a transvestite, so this is something society is able to accept. In fact, at one of my schools several boys dressed up as girls for the school festival and did a number on stage. It’s not seen as weird or strange as it might be in western society, although being gay is not nearly as accepted outside Tokyo as in the west.

The most famous transvestite is ‘Matsuko Deluxe’. She is a little portly, shall we say, and gets her face on every show she can. She seems to be regarded as an expert on everything and appears in quite a few commercials as well.

4/ There are two kinds of men on Japanese TV. You are respected and revered, or you are a clown.

This here is Yuki Himura, half of the Japanese comedy duo ‘Bananaman’. I don’t know if they’ve heard of the TV show from the UK voiced by ‘The Goodies’ or not. He has a strange haircut as if they used a bowl and acts as dumb as possible for laughs. Well hey, it worked for Adam Sandler, right? No, I don’t like him either.

There’s always a comedian or two on the shows, and usually they speak funny and act stupid. Balanced by a straight, sensible and knowledgeable guy. That’s your other option.

5/Be this guy.

This is Takeshi Kitano. So revered is he my spell check recognises his name and doesn’t underline with red. He has done it all – acted, directed, written, he is basically the ultimate heavy-weight in Japanese entertainment. As such, he appears in so many shows on TV. His views are widely respected and agreed with.

In Japan, age is respected, regardless of the individual. So you see a number of elderly (usually) gentleman asked for their opinions on stuff. I don’t speak Japanese, but I am guessing that they are not experts on most of the stuff they comment on. But they’ve made it past 60 or 70 and their opinion is important.

And so, if you can push yourself into one of those categories, you have a good chance of making onto Japanese Prime Time TV to sit on a panel and comment on stuff you know little to nothing about. I am off to get a bowl hair cut and wander the city saying ‘wakarimasen’ in a low, slow voice. If that fails, I’m going to have to see if there’s a shop that sells dresses that fit me. In Japan, that’s probably unlikely. Wait – where does Matsuko Deluxe shop