On Having Sushi Delivered by a Conveyor Belt in Japan | 回転寿司

Posted on October 1, 2010 by

Japan put a halt to the crazy sushi bullshit just after the California roll. Leave the Philadelphia roll to America. In this country, there are no catfish-and-cucumber rolls with picante sauce and names like Samurai Komodo Dragon Rolls.

If you want sushi in Japan, you will get an expertly sliced piece of raw fish placed, with a dab of wasabi, on a small ball of white rice. It will be delicious, but not American delicious, and it will probably come to you on a conveyor belt: Kaiten Sushi - or Conveyor-Belt Sushi, or, if you are living in modern Japan, “Sushi.”

Sushi in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Long before the first conveyor belts began to roll coal out of devastated mountainsides, I imagine the DaVinci of fishermen sketching the device for posterity. “Maybe not today, but someday, this is how men will eat.”

The process is near-perfect: The belt runs clockwise, so you can hold chopsticks in your right hand while grabbing the plate with your left. It runs at a finely tuned 8cm per second, keeping the food moving without spoiling fish through aeration. Different colored plates mark the prices. At the end, the waitress tallies them up.

The sushi comes out by type: Three plates of fried shrimp, three plates of squid, three plates of natto and sea bream, etc. This triggers a hunting instinct and a finicky urge to wait. You don’t want the perfect plate of calamari to pass by when you are chowing down on mediocre sea bream.

It’s like playing “Hot or Not” with raw fish.

A Cold Fish Medium
At Genki Sushi in Hakata, you can order sushi through a television screen. There’s real food on the conveyor belt, but if you desire something on the TV, they’ll assign you a number and send it on a plate with a card. Other places have monitors with virtual fish.

Kaiten Sushi, though, has its downside: Traditional Sushi is practically nonexistent, going the way of bluefin tuna. In Japan, I’ve seen hundreds of Ramen and Udon places, but my hometown in Maine (with 40,000 people) had more sit-down sushi places than my current home, a suburb of a Japanese metropolis.

Sushi is Dead
I can’t speak for the nation as a whole – I’m in a region that celebrates its Ramen with as much ferocity as its baseball team – but traditional sushi is pretty much absent, with the low-cost Kaiten taking its place.

Barthes, in the last chapter of “Empire of Signs” before he started getting complicated – talked about the process of sushi as a chain: The chef (who doesn’t cook) is carving fish in the same way that calligraphers paint strokes; only instead of making words out of ink, he is making food out of fish. The conveyor belt, then, is like a printing press: cheap, affordable, accessible sushi for the masses. And with it goes the holiness of a hand-inscribed book.

It’s not an exaggeration. Sushi, for the purists, is an art form. Traditional sushi chefs spend 10 years in training and 3 years before they serve a single piece (Compare that to the 2 years for an Art School MFA and you’ll see that sushi is actually more rigorous, albeit more conservative). The first three years are spent learning how to select the fish. The next two years are dedicated to rice.

Reducing this process to one guy at the end of a conveyor belt carving up salmon bought in bulk at Costco kills off that exclusive culture. This would make Yoshiaki Shiraishi – who invented the conveyor-belt sushi system in 1958* – a kind of Andy Warhol** for sushi.

Shiraishi (“Sushi Innovator” Shiraishi, in his 2001 NYTimes Obit) built the conveyor system and a robot-based sushi-delivery system (which doesn’t have the same degree of success) after staffing problems hit his restaurant.

If there is real hand-wringing in Japan after 50+ years of conveyor belt sushi, I wouldn’t be able to understand it anyway. But in a country that is constantly negotiating rapid progress with a deep history – where shrines are sandwiched between industrial buildings and shopping plazas – kaiten-sushi stands as a complete compromise to modernity, a surrender.

But it’s delicious and costs 150 yen a plate. So I suppose modernity has its charm.

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Posted in Food, Weird | 7 Comments

Audio: Dazaifu Jinko-Shiki Ceremony

Posted on September 28, 2010 by

Dazaifu Shrine by onigiripod

Recorded at the Jinko-Shiki (“God Procession”) Ceremony at Tenmangu Shrine in Daizafu, Japan, part of a Shinto tradition marking the Autumn Equinox. It’s a purification ritual for priests and ends with the lighting of 1000 candles.

The music reminds me a bit of Akron/Family without the noise, but maybe I’m crazy.

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Posted in Audio, Shrines, Temples and Ruins, Zen | 1 Comment

On Japan’s Accidental Pot Culture | 日本乃過失は楓葉

Posted on September 24, 2010 by

Every so often I come across a 9-year-old kid in a “Ganja” T-shirt covered in pot leaves.

Or else it’s a book cover or pencil case with red, yellow and green colors in the background and the pot leaf outlined. Sometimes it has the word “Cannabis” in yellow. Sometimes it’s a T-shirt covered in a repeating pattern of marijuana leaves.

It’s present from elementary through high school, and it’s particularly shocking because Japanese drug policies are extremely restrictive: One gram of marijuana can get you five years in jail and up to $344,000 USD in fines. Foreigners will serve their sentence before being deported and banned for 10 years to life.

Marijuana Laws in Japan
There are no “class” distinctions for drugs in Japan, so marijuana = cocaine = crack = heroin, etc. A simple urine test is enough to merit a conviction and it can be administered based on suspicion, meaning that merely talking about marijuana use in public can get you convicted and deported if you’re within earshot of a bored cop (and in Japan, cops are usually bored: Outside of Hakata Station, one cop’s job is smiling on a small ladder while waving at people).

So, with the law coming down so hard on pot users, you would think parents and teachers would crack down on their 9-year-old’s celebrations of the stuff.

The problem is that marijuana laws are so restrictive that no one knows what it looks like. According to a 2008 survey, only 1.5 percent of Japanese citizens has smoked marijuana (Compare that to 42 percent of Americans).

Government statistics rank pot as the 6th most-abused drug; it falls behind the obvious (caffeine, alcohol and nicotine) but also behind speed and huffing paint. Combine that with a more restrictive legal status and you have a black hole of awareness.

Sure, hipper kids may see it in movies, or pick it up from context. And clearly people use it: There’s a head shop called “420″ in a local dive-bar neighborhood, which sells pipes and other smoking supplies. Japan’s proximity to Thailand and other marijuana meccas ensures that there’s some available on the black market – and shady street merchants selling hand-made necklaces (exclusively after dark) are probably a good source.

The Wrong Leaf
So, yes: There are pot smokers in Japan. But everyone else is just super into leaf-peeping.

There’s a word for leaf-peeping; Momiji-gari, literally, “Maple-tree hunting.” The weather report in Japan tracks the change of foliage across the country; the fanaticism is so intense that a good number of Japan’s residents are convinced that it’s the only country that has seasons.

So ask the typical 9-to-17-year-old kid what the plant on their pencil case is and you will probably hear that it’s a maple leaf. He isn’t bullshitting you. Their parents and teachers will probably say the same thing. I’ve even seen the marijuana leaf used as a logo for a wig store. And even if the word “cannabis” appears with the leaf, it doesn’t matter: English is decorative, and almost never read (If English was read as a language, you wouldn’t have shirts that say “Work Hard, Play Hard, Tyrannosaurus Rex”).

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On Listening to The Strokes in Japan

Posted on September 22, 2010 by

In dreams, mind reading doesn’t have any side effects.

You have access to people’s thoughts. You know secrets. You find out things that make you angry, excited, sad, embarrassed. But if mind-reading could be the subject of documentaries and not just comic books, I bet our protagonist would resent the endless chattering and long for solitude.

You don’t notice how exhausting listening to a language is until you leave it behind. Sure, all of you back home can order food in a restaurant without nervously grinning and pointing wildly. Bravo, champs.

Your brain is also working overtime filtering out noise. You endure the psychic bombardment of cell phone conversations, aggressive customers, guys screaming from cars about how gay you look.

Functional illiteracy is a “mute” button. The chatter stops. There’s no meaning hidden in the roar, so you stop trying to find it. You become attuned to pure sensations: The sound of the train, cicadas, birds, the humming of fans.

Other people become mysterious. Their actions become spontaneous. The smallest series of communications are major feats of willpower and patience.

This might describe any expatriate in any country that supports the linguistically inept. But Japanese culture embraces silence. People don’t talk on the subway. Kids rebel by sleeping or staring out windows. People speak softly and keep to themselves in public spaces. The entire country is like a library in July.

And yet, one afternoon of listening to The Strokes in Japan drowns out the entire island.

The Strokes, The Velvet Underground, Joy Division, The Jesus and Mary Chain, etc – pick whatever you want, if it’s loud and “Western,” it applies. Tinny, treble-filled, amateurish guitars shatter the careful silence of a Japanese city.

My first purchase in Japan was a stereo system. The first track out of shuffle was “You Only Live Once.”* Bike-chain percussion and stupid Julian Casablancas’ dorky lyrics gave me a kind of epiphany.

The “Here I am!” of underground indie rock runs so contrary to everything Japanese that you can’t help but love the sheer audacity of “American Rock’n’Roll.” It wasn’t the song, it was its connection to my own American-ness.

Since silence is distinctively Japanese – and noise, distinctively not – the process of filling a room with sound is instantly familiar and weirdly nationalistic. It’s assertive in a country that shuns assertions; it’s a bold claim in a land of socially lubricating ambiguity. It feels like home.

This poses something of a paradox: I’m in a country I embrace for its silence, but I love to fill my head with this crappy American noise. It’s that paradox of negotiating an identity in a foreign culture.

I have limited options. The humidity kills bagels and ironic T-shirts are redundant. What’s left is a sunny afternoon, an open window and my speakers turned too loud. It’s waiting for the cross walk light to turn green while a 9-year-old girl swings her lunchbox around as I’m listening to Cut Copy through ear phones.

Zen and the Art of Jeff Mangum
In America, I’d listen to music in a car. I drove a lot. The sound just floated in the air drowning out engine noise on long highway runs. I don’t listen to much music in Japan – I don’t usually have earbuds on the train; and I don’t listen to music while walking.

Since I’ve started with mindfulness practice – the art of acknowledging that your thoughts and emotions are a story you’re telling yourself, rather than rejecting or suppressing them – I’ve noticed what happens when I do listen to music: It’s actually doing the same thing.

When we’re present to emotions enough to identify them, music helps us fit it into the narrative arc of our lives. The classic example of this is the dorky habit of listening to certain songs while driving – or standing on a train – and imagining the music as a soundtrack in a movie where you are driving or standing on a train.

For actions, this can be a kind of distancing technique; it can pull you out of the present, and modify the story of your surroundings into an epic delusion of grandeur and adventure.

But I wonder, for emotions, if music doesn’t help us assimilate our internal stories as stories. If we’re feeling sad and listening to a sad song, it can help us look at the emotions and confront them – leading to a clearer head than if we’d ignored it or let it simmer.

Sometimes we listen to music because we want to feel something. But sometimes we listen to music because we feel something, and we need something else to help us make sense of it.

Posted in Culture Shock, Homesickness, Thinking | 9 Comments

On Ruins | 城跡

Posted on September 12, 2010 by

Ruins mark the space where something used to be: A castle, a government office, a police barracks. They outline a history, in the vaguest possible terms, of what was once worth something.

Embracing Decline
Growing up in a variety of batshit-crazy religions conditioned me to believe that if the container is gone, so is the essence. The body dies and the soul leaves. You drink out the Coke and you toss out the bottle. But in Japan, ruins mark a different relationship to decline and disappearance.

I can walk up a hill outside my house to stone stairs that stop abruptly on a platform covered with wild grass. There’s an abandoned playground to the side; an owl weather vane and then more stairs, which lead to (barely) a path in the forest and then, deeper in, a stone turned tall, written with a 1,000-year inscription in Kanji that I can’t read and which (for that reason alone) I imagine to contain some incredibly profound wisdom of the east.

I could hear thunder rumbling off by the city. Closer, the desperate chirping of dwindling and horny cicadas, the rustling of wind through trees, chanting monks and crowds of men cheering for a baseball game, the digital beeps of the railroad crossing. The only thing missing was an old man asking if I would accept a quest.

This scene, from “Funky Forest,” is a solid approximation. In Japan, if you aren’t too jaded or cynical about westerners “commuting with nature” in “Zen temples” like “douchebags,” you may be able to experience something simultaneously primal and simple, modern and overwhelming, and connective: A sense of peace that comes from man-made sounds invading the otherwise isolated natural world.

Growing up in America, where nature is a distinct and separate “other,” I could enjoy nature when we “went” hiking or camping. Nature was a planned event: Segregated, gone to and not gone through. In Japan, nature is thicker. It pushes up stones on the sidewalk, it floods canals, it sends boiling water out of stones. You feel like a tree when you sweat. And once a week, the local news reports on a monkey attack.

For this reason, I presume, the ruins of public spaces are left to be overrun by nature in Japan. Memory and the decay of the memory occur simultaneously. Nature is trying to change the world: You see suburban sprawl interrupted by lush forest; rain destroying laundry; apartments opening up to centipedes. The area surrounding the local shrine is hidden by thick vegetation; remnants of ceremonial stones show up periodically, and the scene is drowned in a mash-up of environmental sounds and the perpetually beeping racket of civilization.

Wabi Sabi
Buddhism presents three characteristics of the physical world:
1) Impermanence: Everything eventually melts or expands into nonexistence.
2) Permanent Appetites: Nothing will ever fully, finally satisfy us.
3) The lack of any permanent “self.”

All of these are packed into the idea of wabi-sabi, which celebrates objects that show awareness of their age and eventual fate, what Lafcadio Hearn described in his 1895 visit to Japan:

“Buddhism taught that nature was a dream, an illusion, a phantasmagoria; but it also taught men how to seize the fleeting impressions of that dream, and how to interpret them in relation to the highest truth. And they learned well. In the flushed splendor of the blossom-bursts of spring, in the coming and the going of the cicadae, in the dying crimson of autumn foliage, in the ghostly beauty of snow, in the delusive motion of wave or cloud, they saw old parables of perpetual meaning. Even their calamities — fire, flood, earthquake, pestilence — interpreted to them unceasingly the doctrine of the eternal Vanishing.”

The idea of ruins is this concept writ large. What is sacred and meaningful remains, though the building itself is left to dissolve. It celebrates the natural, inevitable end. The ice in your drink melts, and eventually your favorite restaurant closes. Photographs fade. People leave and people die.

Ruins in Japan are precious things left to find their own endings. These buildings don’t just fall into disrepair and collapse; they dissolve and, along the way, continue to reveal themselves, just as they did in their living forms.

Americans are preservationists; we fight death with all kinds of bullshit: Plastic surgery, historic registers. It’s not in our DNA to allow something to collapse without building over it. We’ve never even entertained the idea that leaving something to dissolve is a way of honoring its true nature. We demolish and rebuild, we “get over it.”

But the way that things end is still uniquely and exquisitely theirs.

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Posted in Temples and Ruins, Thinking, Uncategorized, Zen | 9 Comments

Video: Japanese Meat Announcements | 精肉店の交友わ

Posted on September 2, 2010 by

This thing shouts at people day and night in the deli section of the D-Value in Kasuya. There are no breaks for air. I have no idea where the man talking is, but this thing never stops shouting about meat.

This shopping center also offers hot dog sushi. It’s hot dogs, sliced and wrapped in rice and seaweed in a mayonnaise sauce. I guess it’s a Korean dish called “Kimbap” and by some weird coincidence there was a recipe in Salon last month.

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