Japanese "gorumet" dining

On Friday evening, I went out for dinner with the Year 6 teachers from my Friday school. This included the homeroom teachers and the support staff, and me.

The restaurant was one where you order a number of dishes and share them around the table - a very common way to eat out in Japan.

Eating out with a group of Japanese people, I finally had the "opportunity" to sample Japanese "delicacies".

Cooked foods I ate:

• prawn - yes, boring
• crab - two different ways, quite nice
• eel - very strong fishy flavour, not particularly appealing
• octopus - tolerable
• "soft chicken bones" - looked like popcorn chicken, but not quite the flavour... This was one of my gag moments, I managed to swallow about half of what I put in my mouth, but the other half was just too much, and I had to spit it out
• some tasty versions of beef - yay!

Raw foods that I ate:

• salmon - very mild flavour, with a not all that unpleasant texture
• tuna - much like salmon
• squid - mild flavour, but extremely unpleasant texture. It coated my mouth and was extremely difficult to swallow, invoking a strong gag reflex
• salmon caviar - mild and not unpleasant, with a popping sensation
• octopus  - this was medium rare, I chickened out on the raw. This wasn't as bad as the squid, but still invoked the gag reflex.

I drew the line at raw prawn.. one of my co-teachers explained that the brains were a particular delicacy, and as I watched him enthusiastically suck the brains out of the shell, I decided that this was too much for me.

Teasing, I tried to explain to the teachers that a long time ago, man discovered fire, and found that food cooked on it was tasty. Of course, what I said was nowhere near as eloquent as all that, but it got me a laugh.




All the bizarre and mostly unappealing foods aside, I had a great time, some of the best fun I've had since coming to Japan. We communicated in a mixture of Japanese and English (they all had quite good English), and were able to share a lot of laughs. They also taught me a bit of local Japanese dialect. "Nandeyanen" doesn't exactly translate into English, but is used in response to a clearly false claim, kind of a "Yeah, whatever". I was able to use it appropriately later that night, and got high fives (or high touches) all round.

As an aside, on the way home, I heard a kid call out "Rushi Sensei" - no annonymity for me!