takoyaki

Takoyaki - you mean you eat octopus balls? (and other Japanese foods)

mmm...octopus

When I went to my first festival in Japan, the Naked Man festival (hadaka matsuri) in Iwata to be exact, I found out about takoyaki. Translation is fun. I had been told that takoyaki = octopus balls, to which I raised an eyebrow and had to think about it for a minute, realizing that what I had in mind was simply impossible. I guess that translation is easier than saying takoyaki = a bit of octopus wrapped in a small ball of dough and cooked in special pans that look almost like iron egg cartons and that are jiggled to roll the balls of dough around so that they cook evenly...whew! Anyway, to my utter amazement, after my first taste of takoyaki, I came to love it and would seek out the takoyaki booth that is a staple of almost any festival or gathering in Japan. It's usually located next to the yakisoba booth (another favorite of mine).

	Tako, or octopus, is incredibly visible in Japan. You walk down the street and you just see it there. I went to an aquarium once where a giant octopus was on display in his tank with his suckers stuck to the sides of the glass and thought I was just misunderstanding when I thought I heard someone say "aahh, oishisou ne," "looks delicious, doesn't it," until I heard almost everyone that stopped by to look say the same thing. Wow. You can get octopus on your pizza (which often has corn on it?) or in your salad (also has corn on it more times than not?). You can have it raw, or you can have it boiled. It's actually very good, but it is very chewy like squid is when it's been cooked.

No matter what I ate in Japan, it was always beautifully arranged. It's amazing if you have never seen it before. The top picture is a dinner that was given for me when I went back for a visit to my favorite junior high school a year after I'd left. This was just the beginning, and they kept bringing another beautiful arrangement of food for each one we finished until no one could eat another bite. A better picture is the second one. This was one of the pictures of my sushi calendar from the sushi shop down the street. All 12 pictures are this beautiful. It almost looks to beautiful to eat. It seems that food presentation is a bigger deal in Japan than it is in the US. We want it hot and we want it good, but food being so artistically and beautifully presented is a bonus that many of us regularly do without and don't miss. I guess I wasn't so surprised to see fine sushi restaurants take such care in making pickled daikon radish look like flowers, but I was surprised when I looked around at what lenghts the student's mothers had gone to make their lunches beautiful, too. They all carried these little obento lunchboxes wrapped in a furoshiki, or handkerchief, usually with the top compartment for all kinds of beautiful goodies and the bottom one for rice. A far cry from the peanut butter and jelly sandwich most of us brought to school (incidently, actual peanut butter can be very hard to find outside of the imports section of a large Japanese grocery store, and most of my Japanese friends have only had something not very much the same called "peanuts spread"...ditto for any kind of Mexican food).

	Grocery shopping on a granny bike during typhoon season was always interesting. Living in inaka (out in the boonies), my local grocery store was very small and had almost nothing Western, unless very expensive fruit qualifies as food from home. I was determined to live a Japanese lifestyle which included eating Japanese food, so it was OK most of the time. When I wanted a bigger selection and a chance of finding something Western, I headed to the basement of the department store downtown. I was surprised to find that most Japanese department stores have a grocery store in the basement. This picture was taken at Ito Yokado, my favorite Japanese department store (check out the little carts!). Going downtown meant that I had to first carry all of my groceries home on the train before doing the regular routine of bags on the handlebars and in the basket of my granny bike, praying I wouldn't tip over, like I would at the local store. I hate to admit this, but I probably did 50% of my grocery shopping at Circle K or 7 - 11. They were nearby, they have a lot of good stuff, and their ready to heat and eat meals are awesome...nothing like the 3 day old hot dogs or scary burgers that we have at US convenience stores. You can get sushi, curry and rice, yakiniku (Japanese-style BBQ) with rice, onigiri (rice balls) and almost anything you can imagine. Best of all, it's usually pretty darn good.

Few things are more relaxing than green tea. I lived in Shizuoka Prefecture, the green tea capital of Japan, and had no choice but to fall in love with ocha. To the right is a picture of the endless tea fields and Fuji-san (Mt. Fuji) from a postcard that pretty much sums up my prefecture. Below is another postcard that relaxes me just to look at it, and the other is a picture of one of my students studying tea ceremony. I did my senior project for my Asian Studies major in college on tea ceremony and began to understand why people can study it for years and years and stil have more to learn. It is just so precise and so beautiful to watch.

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