Surviving Japan

I was suspiciously looking at my food stick with something on it that my sweaty Japanese chef happily just plopped in front of me. In Tokyo, going to Yakitori restaurants is not for the faint of heart – the parts that they grill on the stick for you are usually "of chicken origin" if you know what I mean, but you should never ask which part of the chicken exactly. Sadly, my three cooks spoke a little bit of English, so each time they would place a new freak-stick in front of me, they’d proudly announce what food they smoldered on the grill this time. “Bonjiri! Bon-ji-ri! Chicken butt!”

Chicken butt? Well, damn. I accepted the fate, opened the mouth and bravely sucked the stuff off the stick. It can’t be… too… awful, I thought. It WAS awful. Really, really awful, so the Bonjiri aftertaste was accompanied – just like most other Yakitori sticks before – by a crazy amount of sake, just to keep me sane. Allegedly sake helps to cleanse the palate after each fear-factor morsel that they serve you. That night I learned that I don't have much of appreciation for Sunagimo (Chicken gizzards), Nankotsu (Chicken cartilage), Shiro (Chicken small intestine), and some other things that even I don’t want to remember. All three cooks looked really pleased with me at the end; despite their best attempts, I didn’t barf anything out, I was a good soldier and chewed and swallowed it all down. And seemingly I gained tons of respect with my Japanese coworkers that brought me to this demonic kitchen.

Going to small local restaurants after work to eat and drink is a well-known business tradition in Japan, and I quickly noticed that it is expected from me to get madly drunk after a typical day of work. You see, the concept of work is different in Japan and to put it in simple and straightforward Western terms, they work harder and longer than any of us. They come to work earlier, they leave later, and a lot of them work on weekends. They eat at work, they also sleep at work – they call it inemuri – and it is socially totally acceptable to have a nodding person in the meeting, bobbing their head and snoring while the rest of us are running a project review. Inemuri is a sign that you are working very long hours – sometimes over 19 hour days – and is respectfully encouraged.

Respect and formality are also seen in the way how they address each other – always by the last name, adding the honorary title “-san” at the end. I understand that even if two Japanese have worked together for many years, neither of them would ever dare to call the other one by their first name. Compare that with an uneducated horde of gaikokujin (foreigners) where we are all on a first-name basis from the moment we met, and by the end of the day we usually improved our name-calling to “Yo, smarty-pants!”, accompanied with a slap on the back. Watching us slapping, or touching each other in any shape or form, is absolutely horrifying for Japanese people. If we would be cultivated, we'd bow, just like normal people do.

Oh, don’t get me started with all the bowing! There are actual rules that govern how to bow, who bows first, who bows the lowest, when to bow, for how long to keep the bow and how many times should you bob up and down for each dignitary level. Japanese are very respectfully understanding when we - a bunch of meatheads from the West - try to mimic their sophisticated, millennia-honed bowing choreography. I’m sure they are quietly laughing at us, a gang of ignorant water buffalos trying to curl forward awkwardly, trying our best to not trip over and hoping that we still look - kinda - elegant.

In case you didn't notice, I do feel awkward and inferior in that slender, sophisticated, hard working culture of Japan. And they are so clean! Did I mention how clean the city of Tokyo is? I wasn’t aware of that until I saw – and I’m not making this up – a man on a street down on his knees cleaning a public trash can. He was scrubbing it on the inside with a brush, wiping it clean with a cloth and spraying it with a bright blue cleaning agent! And then he moved on to the next one. And the next. That seemingly was his job, and oh man, he was committed! No, seriously, did you ever see anything like that in the Western cities?

But there is one thing that we, Western water buffalos, do equally well as our Japanese counterparts: we are fueled by the same concoction of Alcohol, Caffeine, and Nicotine, the fuel that drives over-worked business people everywhere. Work hard, then drink hard! In Japan, they formalized the drinking part and they call it Nomikai – a drinking party! There is at least one Nomikai every single night of the week, usually preceded by organized eating of various odd types of food. After all, you have to have a reason to consume such crazy amounts of alcohol – if you eat franken-food, you need lots of alcohol to keep your stomach placid.

Before drinking, Japanese love to eat things that have eyeballs or suckers or other totally unacceptable organs still attached to them - and when it comes to freshness, they really appreciate the shortest possible death-to-mouth time possible. The last time that we went to a sushi restaurant, the chef showed us the live squid we ordered, still gasping, then quickly sliced it open right in front of us. Then we were supposed to eat its still-moving and sucking tentacles with a dash of soy sauce and thin slice of pickled ginger, while the squid’s head was quietly staring at us from the chopping board with its glaring eyes and a facial expression that said, “Go ahead and enjoy my tentacles! Don’t mind me! Douzo meshiagare!”

Perhaps we are obnoxious, loud and stinky foreigners, but for sure we are not afraid of any almost-dead food! Let’s show them what we are made of! Let's eat this sucker! Right, John? John??? Why are you not eating your squid, John? Come on, this tentacle is going to escape off your plate!

“You know what, you can have mine,” said John quietly through his teeth. I think he ate virtually nothing anymore for the remainder of our trip – which is fine with me. That will make him as slender and sophisticated as our Japanese colleagues are!