Mike

Ball

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November 5, 2007

Japan, Part 2: How, Oh How, to Get Top Balloon Teams Eating Raw Squid?

OK, so here we are in Japan. We’ve come here to fly my friend Scott’s balloon in the Saga International Hot Air Balloon Festival, an event designed to introduce top balloon teams from all over the world to the idea of eating raw squid.

It seems like everything you eat in Japan involves raw squid. If you buy a traditional Japanese meal, it includes at least one plate of it. If you order a steak, you get a side of it. I kind of expect my next cup of coffee to come with cream and two raw squid cubes.

I’m not really sure why these people eat so much raw squid. I think it may have something to do with an ancient Japanese philosophy that the key to a long, healthy life is eating stuff that the rest of the world would only use for bait.

There are two major kinds of Japanese raw food. Sushi, which is strips of raw fish or meat wrapped up in or plopped on top of a chunk of rice, and sashimi, which is just strips of raw fish or meat. You dip your sushi or sashimi in a mixture of soy sauce and wasabi, which is a kind of green horseradish paste that is designed to blow the back of your head off. Then you pop the whole thing into your mouth and make “yummy” noises while the wasabi blows the back of your head off.

And as far as I can determine, there is nothing that the Japanese won’t eat. Yesterday we went to a restaurant that specializes in unagi. Unagi means “eel.”

This was a place where you could pay your respects to your soon-to-be lunch, still slithering around in a big tank with a lot of other eels. The lunch, not you. While we were there we enjoyed a special delicacy served between our eel salad and the eel entrée – fried eel bones. The trick to eating fried eel bones is to smile and crunch on them loudly while you try to forget that what you’re eating is fried eel bones.

The Japanese people are a small race, and they are rarely overweight. This is because they don’t overeat. And they don’t overeat for two reasons: First, considering the kind of stuff they find on their plates, they don’t really want to. Second, they use chopsticks.

You know, it seems like the people who invented the samurai sword and the Toyota might have also been able to come up with silverware.

The secret to eating with chopsticks is to hold your plate up close to your mouth and tap on it with your chopsticks while you lap the food up with your tongue. If you can establish a steady spray of rice and raw stuff hitting the walls, floor and ceiling, you’re on the right track.

While the Japanese do not eat a lot of food, they more than make up for this when it comes to consuming alcohol. They even have a special phrase to describe the Zen of drinking, pronounced “jyun kaitsyu,” which basically means drinking yourself into a stumbling, slobbering stupor. You reach the perfect Zen state at the exact instant you pass out facedown in your plate of fried eel bones.

It’s time to go now. I have a plate of squid sashimi waiting for me and a fair amount of jyun kaitsyu I’d like to catch up on.

Next week – all these idiots are driving on the wrong side of the road.

Copyright © 2007, Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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