Fugu Survivor

Last night I had another quintessential Japanese experience. Mari-sensei invited me and Khaleelah to her house for a fugu dinner. She's retiring this year, so it was partly a farewell dinner and partly 'just because'. I really feel she did too much for us and feel so indebted now; I think K and I should pitch in and get her and her husband something nice. This was the family that took us to eat ayu back in September. It seems they have taken it upon themselves to give us a well-rounded Japanese marine cuisine education!


Fugu (河豚, ふぐ) is pufferfish. It is fatally poisonous if not prepared properly, and so is notorious as one of the more interesting dishes in Japanese cuisine (it was featured in 'The Simpsons', so it has official popular culture status now!). It is also extremely expensive, and somewhat rare, especially outside Japan. A full course of fugu can cost hundreds of dollars, and so, without this opportunity, I doubt I ever would have been able to try it. Fugu contains lethal amounts of tetrodotoxin, and if you ingest enough of it, you will be paralyzed while remaining fully conscious, until you asphyxiate. People die every year from eating improperly prepared fugu... and that's why chefs must pass a special licencing test in order to serve fugu at their restaurants. In the US, there are less than 20 restaurants with this licence (according to wikipedia). The best chefs leave a small amount of poison in the flesh, which is harmless, but leaves a tingling sensation on the tongue. In the Kansai region, fugu is called teppo, which means rifle or gun. Nice advertisement. And in Yamaguchi Prefecture, fuku is used, because fugu sounds like a word meaning 'disabled'.


Hiroshige painting: Fugu is the smaller fish at the bottom.

Before last night, all I knew about fugu was that it was poisonous if not prepared properly and that it was expensive. In hindsight, I'm glad I wasn't aware of the details of the poison's mechanism of action, or the meanings of its various names across Japan. I wasn't even particularly anxious about the experience. But I felt a slight twinge of nervousness when I found out that Mari-sensei's husband prepared the meal himself. His sister owns a fish market somewhere in Gifu, and she gives him fugu a couple of times a year. Despite my slight reluctance, I knew that this was a wonderful and very rare experience and took comfort in the assumption that he has years of experience when it comes to preparing fugu.

We were served the 'fuuru coosu' (full course):
-thinly sliced fugu sashimi (raw), transparent and beautifully arranged on a plate, which we dipped in a carrot/green onions/paprika/mirin/soy sauce... to slice this by hand is no mean feat!
-fugu nabe (hot pot), containing pieces of fugu, bones and skin, along with shitake and enoki mushrooms, cabbage and chrysanthemum leaves
-rice cooked in the nabe broth, served with tsukemono (after-dinner pickles)
-and memorably, sake in which the fins of fugu had been soaked.

So how did it taste? Well, pretty good. I always like sashimi and nabe. But, I am not the first to say that it wasn't as good as the hype leads you to believe. Fugu is commonly described (especially by foreigners) as somewhat bland. Honestly, if it wasn't for the threat of paralysis (!), fugu probably wouldn't even exist as a dish. I'm incredibly greatful to Mari-sensei and her husband for giving me the chance to enjoy fugu, but if I had forked over 200 bucks for it I would have been disappointed. I didn't notice any tingling sensations, although if I did, I probably would have put it down to the effects of the sake!

After the fugu feast, Mari-sensei and her husband showed us their very Japanese home, complete with Japanese garden, tatami-mat room containing a shrine for the ancestors, full set of Meiji period armour (!), hand-painted sliding doors and special paper screens for full-moon-viewing, and a 1961 Japanese car in the process of restoration. This is on top of the things we witnessed last time- the 2 meter by 1.5 meter television screen and karaoke room. Amazing house, by any standard.

A night to remember, for so many reasons!

Horumon and Karaoke - just another day at work

I’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do, blog-wise, and what better time to do it than the month of March, officially the most unproductive month in the school calendar. The Japanese school year finishes in late February and doesn’t start again until April 1. (Which, by the way, is completely inflexible- school starts on April 1st, regardless of what day of the week it is, even if it’s a Sunday!) Yay! Holidays, right? Well, no. This is Japan, so we must always be at work, even if that means not having a damn thing to do. I have spent the last few weeks at work sitting at my desk, busying myself with various tasks I can barely remember doing (sounds like a typical office job back home, doesn’t it?). For example, reading, studying Japanese, writing blog entries (not enough, obviously), cleaning out my desk, observing and evesdropping, chatting with K, Wikipedia-ing, checking emails and doing web searches on everything from earthquakes to how to prevent greasy hair, and planning my next trip outta here! Unlike back home, it is completely acceptable to be at work and not actually do any work, or even attempt to appear so, just BE there. Presence is the key. So it’s not like I need to make a show of looking busy, although years of conditioning in that vein have meant I haven’t gone as far as watching a DVD on my computer (although apparently my predecessor used to).

Anyway, onto the real subject of this blog entry: the first-year class’ teacher’s party, which I attended the weekend before last. At the last minute, I considered backing out, mainly because I discovered that the main dish served would be horumon (放る物). Originally I guessed it meant ‘hormones’, as in parts of the body that produce hormones. Because that’s kind of what horumon is- bits of animals that are not usually eaten. But no, it literally means ‘discarded things’, because these parts would normally be thrown away. A much more inviting name, right? Well, I went to the party anyway, to face my fear and in the spirit of experiencing all Japan has to offer.

The first dish was tongue. All I could think about was the revolting irony of eating something that itself had been used to eat stuff. It was pretty awful too- very tough and not particularly tasty as far as beef goes. Next, we fried up some slivers of meat that I assumed were normal pieces of beef- but who’s to know? Finally, we were presented with the real thing- and the teachers started to get excited. There were various strange-looking pieces of flesh on the hot-plate. I tried two and left it at that. The first was, I think, a piece of intestine. Again, very tough and a little bitter. My final venture was probably some kind of organ; maybe the pancreas or thyroid…? (haha, a guess based on my anatomy classes but very likely not correct!) I told my colleages that I preferred not to be told what each item was. But in hindsight I think I should have asked, if only to be able to confidently boast about my accomplishments later.

The worst thing about all this was that this meal was not cheap at all- about 50 dollars for a not-particularly filling or tasty meal. Maybe it’s true that if you stick a high price on something, people will be drawn to it because it then seems exotic and special. (Ironically, horumon cuisine originated among Korean immigrants in Osaka who were too poor to afford anything besides animal viscera.) The other interesting thing about horumon is that the Japanese consider it ‘stamina food’, whatever that is. I asked my colleagues about this and they couldn’t explain it, but said that horumon is good for women and children. Maybe because it’s all protein.

After an eventful meal which took a lot of guts to eat (haha), we went to a karaoke bar. This was a little different to my previous karaoke experiences, where you pay for a private room for just you and your friends. At the karaoke bar, you share your singing experience with other patrons and the barmen/maids- who in our case happened to be two aging hostess types with cleavage- something I hadn’t seen in Japan until now! My colleagues were a few middle-aged male teachers, two younger soccer coaches, and only two other women- my supervisor and the school nurse. Of course I was coerced into singing something- solo- and unfortunately the song they chose for me was ‘2 Become 1’. I felt a little uncomfortable to say the least, singing such an explicit song in front of 6 Japanese male colleagues alone. So, I only sang the non-explicit lines, which happen to be all of two lines in the chorus. I’m sure they thought I was against the idea of singing, but that wasn’t it at all - I made up for it by doing a duet of ‘Yesterday’.

The rest of the night, I was treated to some very stirring performances of Japanese enka music, and another suggestive song, ‘Cherry’, sung by the 21-year-old school nurse, which, as you might guess, is about the same kind of thing you would expect an English song with that title to be about. Enka music is (to paraphrase Wikipedia) traditional popular Japanese songs from the Showa period (1926-1989). It has been compared to Western country music in that the themes are love and loss, loneliness, ongoing hardships, even suicide and death. The sound is very distinctive and a little strange to Western ears, because it mixes “the Japanese pentatonic scale with Western harmonies”.

(As a side-note, recently an African-American guy (Jero) has become a popular enka singer in Japan. His grandmother is Japanese, so as weird as it sounds for a black person to be singing traditional Japanese songs, that fact probably lends him some validity in the eyes of Japanese people.)

The evening was a success overall, mainly because I got to speak to some fellow teachers who are usually so taciturn at work. Enkais (office parties) (http://everything2.com/title/enkai) in Japan are really an essential part of the job. It’s where people gossip, bond and show their ‘true selves’. It helps that enkais usually involve nomihoudai (all-you-can-drink). Some pretty wild behavior can result, even beyond what you would expect at the office party in a Western country, where people still have to worry about how they might be thought of the next day at work. For example, at my school’s Bounenkai (end-of-year-party) last year, one teacher came prepared with a mask and wig, which he forced other teachers to wear. Paradoxically, in companies, many important business decisions are made not in the boardroom, but at bars, during drinking sessions. People feel comfortable enough in this context to speak their mind and give their opinions, and it is generally understood that what is said will not be referred to later back in the office. So it was not really surprising when I became privy to several juicy tidbits, including who thinks who is a bad teacher and who thinks who has a bad ‘vibe’. There’s a lot to be gained from going to your office enkai, way more than can be gained from the average piss up in Australia… gastronomically and socially.