Oishii pizza (that's delicious for you gaijins)

The Japanese have a thing for pizza. The pizza I've encountered here is either very thin crusted and extremely light on sauce or totally peculiar with popular toppings like mayonnaise, eggs and corn. Those are actually kind of good...but eel, dried fish flakes, kimchi, cod roe and scallop balls aren't my cup of green tea. I won't say that they're an abomination to pizza lovers everywhere, the Japanese just have a very unique taste profile. To each their own.

No mention of Japanese pizza would be near as entertaining without mentioning squid ink pizza though. Yes, that dark substance that is secreted out of cephalopods, like a stink bug I imagine.

Secreted, a world I like to think about while eating. Tasty. Squid ink replaces the tomato sauce in an oh-so-yummy, stain-your-mouth-black, tastes-earthy-like-wet-leaves kind of way. Those poor shrimp look like they're dying in black tar. You find squid ink used often here for sauces and pastas.

When the base WTF lives on opens it gates a few times a year to the local nationals, the first place they bee-line it to are our two pizzerias-Sbarro's and Anthony's. These aren't exactly the finest representation of American style pizza but when you've been eating squid ink and scallop balls (do scallops even have balls?) and thinking it tastes good, the doughy, greasy, gooey, cheesiness of a good 'ole slice of American pizza is probably like the search for a glass of water amidst the dry, sandy emptiness of the Sahara. Anything will taste exquisite.

These ladies were sporting pizza box carriers, because cheap grease is best when served from a stylish print.

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Ikea, say no more

Armed with an iced chai tea latte and my own personal navigator-who as you later will learn is actually no help in reading signs because she's chatting more than paying attention to the road...of course I'm a model citizen, well, a temporary, long-term visitor in this country, and I would never engage in reckless road behaviors that would steal my attention. So with yen on the ready for the tolls, WTF headed northward, maybe eastward-I actually have no idea what direction we were headed, to Ikea in Kohuku, about 40 minutes from the base.

I've waited all my life to go to this Swedish retail giant. I giggle every time I think that I had to come to Japan to shop Swedish. The parking lot was the most ridiculously large structure I've ever seen-I was suddenly very thankful it was a weekday and not a weekend, my claustrophobia could only handle so much and it would have severely hampered my shopping high if the lot were full.

After cruising the second floor first, we stopped in the cafeteria for some totally delish food. Smoked salmon, Swedish meatballs, potatoes and ligonberries, crusty french bread and creamed spinach soup and even though we didn't imbibe, a very inviting wine bar.

And since I've never been to an Ikea before, I cannot say for certainty that this is another stroke of Japanese brilliance, but how clever to have a rolling cart as you make your way through the cafeteria. I didn't notice this until I had already paid, instead I struggled pushing Kawaii Girl #2 in the stroller and balancing our trays in my hands and on the stroller hood. I was lucky to have made it to the table. There would have been tears if my ligonberries had ended on the floor.

With a full tummy and a shopping buzz, we loaded up the car with our finds and headed for home. Feeling pretty good that I had completed a u-turn, which is most tricky in Japan, we were so proud of ourselves for making it there, making it out and heading in the right direction. Wouldn't you know we spoke too soon.

My personal navigator and I were gabbing away-okay, maybe I encourage our talking as well-and we were a bit too slow to react to the fork in the road and headed off to the right instead of left. In our defense, the text we were looking for was very little and sort of hidden on the sign. Okay, no problem, we had enough yen for more tolls, another 400 for this turn around.

Wanting to be sure of how to correct ourselves, I grabbed my little blue card from my wallet, that says in Japanese, "I'm lost, please help me find my way to Yokosuka." I was so excited to use it. For reasons that cannot be explained, I love figuring my way through this country, making missteps and still accomplishing what I set out to do. Living in a foreign country is, for a lack of a more articulate word, very cool, and whenever the day comes that it is time for us to leave, I will be very sad to say goodbye to this adventure.

Since we were on a time constraint to pick up the other Kawaii Girl, I wanted to be sure we expedited the exchange with the toll booth worker. So between my limited Japanese and the little blue card, he showed me where to circle around and what turns to take.

He spoke with a bit of English and lots of hand gestures and when he was done, he looked through the window to my friend and laughed, a fairly hearty chuckle. You see, my better shopping half is Japanese, her mother from Tokyo, and looks as if she should know what she's doing in these parts, though she speaks less Japanese than I do, which isn't saying much. He said, "Oh, well, you understand don't you?" and then gave us a confused look for why I was struggling with Japanese and he was struggling with English. I couldn't stop laughing, she gave her very best Doumo Arigatoo, we paid our toll and got back on the road.

Geesh, you'd think having a Japanese friend would be useful. We laughed the entire way home and are already plotting our next Ikea trip. Our philosophy is to experience Japan one shopping trip at a time, plus we're Ikea Family now and we need to use our card.

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Good Eats - Sushi

It's not like I expected the things I know to be true in America to actually ring true here, but I was kind of hoping that I'd see a California roll on the conveyor belt come my way. I didn't. I'm a confessed sushi virgin. Apparently there are still a few of us out there and I'm not ashamed to admit it. On Friday night, when I ventured out on the rainy streets of Yokosuka looking for a sushi-go-round (sushi served on a conveyor belt), I experienced real sushi, for the first time. Streets that while being very densely populated with people, were surprisingly quiet. Well, mostly quite. I was talking, loudly of course.

The types of sushi all my friends and family eat are basically a western invention to suit the American palette. Of course we'd have to do it differently, the majority of us couldn't stomach the the things I saw. However hopeful I was, there were no California rolls of avocado, crab and cucumber...no Dynamite rolls of yellowtail and spicy mayonnaise...no Spider rolls of fried crab...definitely no Philadelphia rolls of cream cheese, salmon and cucumber...and absolutely no rolls coated in fried tempura batter. This is a good article on "Why They Think We're Crazy".

What I did encounter scared me to the point of giggles. Sitting inside a nondescript sushi-go-round, part restaurant, part fish stand, the smell of fish was sobering. I wasn't drunk, though hopeful, but any bravado I had to that point was kicked to the curb like last week's trash. There on the conveyor belt was Nigiri-zushi, little fingers of rice topped with wasabi and a filet of raw fish. I sat stunned for several moments. My girlfriend actually had to nudge me to jumpstart my breathing again. There were a few non-raw specimens, a cooked piece of shrimp on rice, an egg omelet and some inari (fried tofu pouches of rice) all of which I happily ate, while I turned down plate after plate of fish guts, octopus with the suckers still sucking, and something fairly transparent that reminded me of sperm with little eye balls staring back.

After a biiru, lots of pep talks from my girlfriend, even a fellow gaijin stranger prodding me along, the time had come. I settled on tuna. It took me a minute or two, my chopsticks quivering, probably from the laughing convulsions of my nervousness. It is hard to think that I blended with the rest of the patrons.

I didn't eat the whole of the two pieces. I should have because I didn't find it offensive in the least. It was butter tender, with no traces of fishiness. If I had been blindfolded and told otherwise, I would have believed it to be the finest cut of beef available. But I knew. I knew I was eating raw fish and that was stronger than the sweet, delicate taste of the tuna.

For a first timer, I suppose I followed most of the rules of etiquette, and there are quite a few. Thankfully, the Japanese are very forgiving of gaijin misteps, because as it turns out after some research, I made a faux-pas or two. The local sitting to my right kept a watchful eye on me, offering me a plate for I thought the leftover shrimp tails. She quickly waved her hand, made a little noise that I couldn't identify and pointed to the pot of gari (ginger) that you use to cleanse your palette between bites. Oh! Okay, oops! I dipped the whole sushi into the mixture of shoyu and wasabi, which is a no-no, as I learned, it sort of makes a rice soup when the bits of rice fall off. Fish only dipping. Oh! Okay, got it! And as for as mixing the shoyu and wasabi...in my defense that is what my girlfriend told me to do...that is considered an afront to the itamae (sushi chef). Last time I listen to her. He portions the exact amount of wasabi to the proportion of fish and rice. Why then do they provide little packets of wasabi? I guess you're supposed to sneak it on the fish when he isn't looking. What happens when he catches you? I thought he had a more than watchful eye on me.

It has been said (by who I don't know but this his quote) "The only rule at a sushi bar is to eat what you like, how you like it, and as much as you like. Anyone who tells you differently is full of it." So there, I like to dip my rice in shoyu, use a separate plate for my shrimp tails and dare to have the ginger sitting next to the pieces of sushi on my plate. And I like wasabi, far more than the itamae deems sufficient.

As I later learned, this was a pretty hardcore restaurant. Of course, you will find in Japan, sushi restaurants that serve Maki-zushi, which are rice and seaweed rolls full of fish and vegetables, which, ding-ding-ding, is a more traditional version of the California or Philadelphia roll, though you will never find cream cheese in anything here. Heresy I suspect. There are many variations of Maki-zushi, Futomaki - thick rolls, Hosomaki - thin rolls and Uramaki - inside out rolls. Nothing is straightforward here in Japan.

I will try again, next time choosing a more liberal restaurant, one that doesn't scare the wasabi out of me, but I did it, I did what all the other kids are doing, I ate sushi. And as any newly de-virginized gal does, practice is going to make perfect.

Snoopy, the intercontinental uniter

Thursday was our forced day *ahem* I mean field trip outside the gates, as part of our Intercultural Relations seminar. I like to fancy myself a big adventurer, spontaneous and easy-going but with WTF Husband standing over my shoulder my stretching the truth abilities are rendered useless without being on the receiving end of an elbow to the arm followed by an inevitable guttural throat clearing. So I was glad that I had no choice in the matter. It was cold and for the fourth day in a row, I had forgotten to buy myself a scarf, even so it was awesome to head outside our very American base and see with my own eyes that I was, in fact, in Japan. I knew this because our group very obviously stood out from the other thousands of people we walked passed on the street. Streets by the way that were remarkably clean for a big city, especially since there were no trash cans anywhere in site. Trash is on a carry-out basis only. I learned this after walking around half the day with a strawberry stick in my pocket. ***Outside Hachimangu Shrine, there was a vendor selling candied strawberries on a ritz cracker. They were delish. We gathered it was a treat meant for little kids, as we heard lots of giggling going on behind us from the school ages girls and boys as we bit into them.*** Anyways, mind boggling numbers of people, who noticed when I got excited to have hot corn soup in a can from a vending machine or when in the absence of any other means of communication had to point to the plastic food model on display noting the lunch I wanted to eat. Fried ramen noodles with vegetables if you’re wondering. WTF Husband wanted to try the sushi go-round and I was willing, even showing an eagerness during the walk from the train station to the restaurant but once I saw it, I knew we weren’t ready for it. We’re sushi virgins and we need a little easing into it and this wasn’t the place for Beginners Sushi 101. California Roll…yes…raw…no.

Soup in a can and plastic noodles aside, there were two great things about our trip; retired Japanese man #1 and retired Japanese man #2. After our walk through downtown Yokosuka, we boarded our first train headed to Kamakura. When we got off the train, we were approached by a sweet old man on a bicycle. Very politely he asked if we were Americans, check, and if we were in the military, check-check. He carefully pulled out of his knapsack a handwritten letter with magazine pictures of sake and gyoza, cherry blossoms (Sakura) and grapes glued to it...is there something special about Japanese grapes? It was a letter to “Unknown Person.” We must have been the tallest and most obvious choices in a crowd full of American military. He asked us to read his letter and critique his grammar. Tidbits of his family life peppered the letter but the focus was on his lifetime dream to receive a letter from an American. His English was very good, his writing even better. I was touched while the ever-skeptical WTF Husband thought he was going to ask us for our account information in return for $134,000 if we could only help him with a small international matter. No, he wasn’t pushing a Nigerian bank scam on us WTF Husband. Now my list of things to do includes fulfilling retired Japanese man #1’s dream.

Feeling pretty good that I had successfully navigated a full conversation with a Japanese local, we ventured from the train station to see Tsurugaoka-Hachimangu Shrine in Kamakura. I’ll save that for a separate post. As we were leaving the shrine, retired Japanese man #2 approached us. Are we really that tall? He told us that he learned English from Snoopy. Reading or watching, I wasn't quite sure. We heard all the details from his one and only trip to America…baseball at Fenway Park, Abraham Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty. He didn’t allow us too much talking, though I tried to slip in a few Japanese words. If I was going to be his guinea pig, I was going to try and get something out of it myself. He didn’t crinkle up his eyes in confusion or gasp because I accidentally said something lewd or taboo, so I figured I did pretty well with my very limited Japanese. He recited the Gettysburg Address to us, while he held his baseball cap over his heart, something that I cannot even do in full. Then something very familiar happened, he told us about baseball at Fenway Park, Abraham Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty. I am now officially an international senior-moment identifier, certified in both America and Japan. On the second go round of the Gettysburg Address, we had to skedaddle out of there to catch our next train.