My apartment (on the fifth floor, remember) is right across the street from a Yaoko supermarket, a corner of which is pictured here. It's really quite handy.
Most Japanese people, I believe, go food shopping daily and there’s always very fresh prepared food available in supermarkets - fried fish, cooked vegetables and noodles, obentos - boxed takeout meals of fish or chicken and rice and vegetables - and packaged sushi, which must be fresh because no one likes day-old sushi. A lot of people I know don’t even like fresh sushi that much - in the U.S., I mean. Here, nobody doesn’t like sushi, to paraphrase Sarah Lee. It’s one of the questions you’ll get asked if you ever get in a conversation with a Japanese person. They know a lot of the world thinks eating raw fish is kind of a strange thing to do and are a tiny bit defensive about the fact that people in Japan love it. I mean every single person.
If you do say you like sushi, the person asking you will be surprised every time. I don’t think the average Japanese on the street realizes how common sushi has become in the U.S. Sushi in Japan and in the U.S. can actually be quite different, though. There’s the standard kind of sushi - maguro, ikura, tamago - but the sushi chefs in the U.S. have gotten a lot more creative. Dragon, Caterpillar, and Volcano sushi plates are among those I’ve seen in California, along with something that included hash browns. I once took a Japanese friend and her parents to a sushi restauarant in California and the sushi was such a surprise to them that the parents took pictures of it to show the folks back home.
Another way to impress someone from Japan is to be able to use chopsticks. They seem to be pretty sure that it’s an inate talent for Japanese that no westerner could ever hope to master and if you can use them, everyone is very impressed and will tell you so. I have actually met a couple of Japanese students that said they never used chopsticks when they were growing up, but that’s extremely unusual. There must be whole forests cut down every day to provide Japan with wooden chopsticks. Koreans use metal chopsticks. This is a much more environmentally sound choice, but those things are slippery. It takes a bit more skill to eat with Korean chopsticks.
Anyway, there are lots of choices right in the supermarket. This is convenient for me for several reasons. First, I’m not a particularly talented cook. Also, I tend to put off meals until I’m hungry and ready to eat and then realize if I actually prepare something, I still won’t be eating for a while, and, as I mentioned, I’m already hungry. Now that tendency results in a five-floor each way trip to the supermarket when I realize I'm hungry and have nothing in the apartment to eat.
Or that the food I do have in the refrigerator may be a little suspect. The deciding factor for dinner recently has been that my refrigerator (reizoko) is maintaining about the same temperature as my kitchen or possibly a little warmer. It’s small by western standards in the first place and not a lot can be kept in it in the best of times, but now I don’t trust leaving anything in it longer than a day. It took me two days to figure out it wasn’t working in the first place. First, the control dial is where I have to get on my knees to see it. Then the markings are, of course, in kanji which is the Japanese writing system - one of four systems used in Japan, including western letters - that uses Chinese characters and they are too small for me to even see so I can't even check the dictionary and try to figure out if colder is to the right or the left. You would think to the right, right? Or is it the left that’s colder in the U.S.? See what happens? That’s the thing about coming here from the west. Things one country would consider logical are actually the opposite in the other country. To open my front door, first, I have to put the key in backwards according to my western ways (the opposite side of the key - not the opposite end!) - or maybe upside down would be a better description - and then turn the key towards the door jam to unlock the door. Of course, the reverse is true when locking it. I mess it up every time because at first it was my habit to do it backwards and I had to remember to do it in reverse of my natural inclination. Now that I’m getting more used to it, I start to do it the right way and then change it because I now feel like the right way is the wrong way. It’s the small things that make me realize I’m not in California anymore. (That’s my second paraphrase of the day.) One of these days I’ll talk about crossing the street here. Of course, that’s backwards, too, and a lot more dangerous than unlocking a door.
Oh, yeah - the refrigerator... So, what I had to do was turn the dial all the way one way and wait for a while to see if the refrigerator got colder. I tend to not think about the refrigerator until I need something from it, so this stretched on into one day because I forgot to check it. It still wasn’t cold the next morning so I just turned the dial the opposite way figuring then it would be okay. The next day it was still just as warm and that’s why it took me two days to figure my refrigerator wasn’t working. Actually, neither is my clothes dryer. That’s even more complicated because there’s a lot more kanji on it and I tried a lot of combinations of buttons before giving up and calling the landlord. Then I had to explain to him in my broken Japanese what the problem was and he explained something to me in his excellent Japanese that I couldn’t understand, but I think he said to just hang my clothes outside to dry and stop complaining. I may or may not be getting a new dryer and a new refrigerator in the next few days. There’s a problem with the toilet, too, but I don’t feel like getting into that again right now.
