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The Choc of the New

One of the most depressing things about travelling in Japan is how bland and indistinguishable its towns and suburbs are. The same shops, the same restaurants, the same kind of buildings, the same clothes on the same people. Blindfold me, drop me off in front of the station in a medium-sized Japanese city and, if it weren't for the weather, I wouldn't have a clue whether I was in Shimonoseki or Asahikawa.

One of the charming things about travelling in Japan is that the inhabitants of those bland, bring towns don't find them bland and boring at all. They regard them as dazzling, fascinating and unique - in their history, their attractions and above all their food. Wherever you go, the most insiginificant of halts will have a souvenir shop and a restaurant serving the "famous" regional crafts, sake, sweets and noodles. This belief has been institutionalised in the omiyage, the souvenir which all conscientious travellers are expected to bring back for family and colleagues after even a brief trip out of town. Every station has stands selling representative local produce which to the proud locals are inevitably the finest in all of Japan.

In Nagasaki, it's the sweet sponge cake called "castella", in Hiroshima it's oysters, and in Hokkaido it's tins of local bear meat. So what might it be in Tokyo - the greatest of all Japanese cities, a civilisation-within-a-civilisation, where the greatest artisans, cooks and inventors have converged for centuries? What is the one product above all others that can stand as the emblematic souvenir of Tokyo?

See the photograph below, taken at Tokyo station the other day (click on image for enlargement):

Full of beans?

Madame Sosostris, the congested clairvoyant, and this blog's resident supernatural oracle, has got off to a cracking start with her New Year Predictions. Her prophecy for February, of harsh weather and a new humanitarian crisis in North Korea, has come to pass already, as decribed in this grim piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph.

Natto rotted soybeans are in danger of becoming the new daikon (giant radish) of this blog, so I will try not to go on excessively about them. But I would be delinquent if I failed to provide two links.

The first is The Natto Project, a blog written by two friends who hate natto but forced themselves to eat it for breakfast every day. They began last April, and the blog abruptly breaks off without a word of explanation in late May, suggesting that the two may even have died as a result of their experiment.

The second is this thought-provoking rant by a Christian fundamentalist gentleman named Jim Rutz (oh yes!), arguing that soybeans in all their forms make you gay. "There's a slow poison out there that's severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture," warns Jim, whose latest book is entitled The Meaning of Life. "Most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products." (Thanks to the always interesting What Japan Thinks finding this).

Having the slime of their lives

Below is my piece in this morning's paper about the ongoing natto boom.

For the record, I like natto quite a lot.

News in briefs

Reading the Japanese papers can be - yawn! - hard work. Scanning the headlines this evening, I see screaming from the pages of the Asahi:

Once-unpopular made-in-Hokkaido rice gaining popularity

For sheer sensation, however, this is trumped by the Yomiuri:

Health ministry to give specific advice on how to prevent metabolic syndrome after health checkups

The Nikkei emblazons its front page with:

Gov't to help private-sector efforts to preserve culturally valuable music content

Not exactly 'Freddie Star Ate My Hamster', is it?

But just as you are beginning to despair, a sub-editing genius comes out with something like this (actually from Yomuri):

Beagles sniff out sausage smugglers

Now, I have heard of 'budgie smugglers', and even 'smuggling footballs' - but sausage smuggling is a new one. Read about it here. And keep those beagles away from my charcuterie.

A burning ring of vinaigrette

Among the reasons I hold Japanese journalists in such high regard are their exquisitely honed sense of irony and their perfect comic timing. Time and again, in the newspapers or on the TV news, a seemingly straightforward story will be transformed into a masterpiece of Beckettian absurdity by a single deadpan detail.

Take this story from Kyodo news agency (published in the print version of today's Yomiuri).

Police have arrested and sent to prosecutors a 49-year-old doctor on suspicion of attempting to set a hospital on fire in western Tokyo, police officials said Wednesday.

An insurance fraud? A sad case of mental breakdown by an overworked medical professional? It sounds routine enough, anyway, one of those unfortunate things that simply happens from time to time.

The kicker is in the second paragraph:    

Smorgasbord of the Vanities

From this morning's newspaper ... (A far more serious and reverent account of the Tapas Molecular Bar can be read here.)

The whiff of truffle on tissue paper: a sure sign that the glory days are back

TOKYO NOTEBOOK by Richard Lloyd Parry

FOR THOSE of us who were just too young to experience them as adults, the boom years of the late 1980s have a glittering, almost mystical, allure. That was the era of Wall Street and the yuppie, of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Martin Amis’s Money. To work in London or Manhattan, if the myths are to be believed, was like living in a 24-hour Duran Duran music video, complete with champagne, yachts and an excess of hair gel. And nowhere was the consumption more gross and conspicuous than in Japan.

Old timers sigh wistfully about the delicious excesses of Bubble-era Tokyo even now — the night clubs staffed by beauties from across the planet, with gold-leaf sprinkled on the cocktails and mink covers on the lavatory seats. Back then, they say, the sushi was not considered edible unless it was eaten off the naked body of a young beauty queen. But then the Bubble burst, and those of us who arrived here late found ourselves in a pallid and uneasy city, struggling with the funk of recession and unemployment. Finally, though, I have incontrovertible evidence that the glory days are back.