Ben Says Hi.: tell and show

A few disjointed notes on Thursday in Tokyo:

Today began with the craziness that is the major wholesale fish market of Tsukiji, Tokyo. It is a dense and dark gigantic warehouse filled with stall after stall of fresh-out-of-the-ocean seafood of all kinds and huge frozen fish bodies that workers with either bandsaws or long sushi knife blades (long as in three feet!) slice into sellable portions. Men pulling handcarts or driving flat bed shop carts seek to get around as fast as possible, and since there are many of them, they often nearly run you over. Everybody`s moving, and there`s extremely little space to operate. There were seven of us there, and a few of us wanted to be touristy and take pictures, which often times mostly just stopped up the flow of traffic and nearly caused casualties, which sort of lead to some annoyance on my part, but what can you do, eh?

The "school" portion of the day was an open-grill do-it-yourself lunch of vegetables, steak, chicken, and seafood at the Asahi brewery out in the country, followed by a factory tour and some fresh-off-the-line beer tasting. Not that dry lagers are my favorite by any means, but the small taste that I had was pretty good.

This evening was a bit of a personal triumph, however. I was able to search out and locate the sushi restaurant I wanted to try--figuring out the address system in the process--and have a copious amount of great sushi. Surprisingly, the hamachi was not the god`s gift it usually is--not that it was bad at all, but just not the best of the bunch. The regular tuna was meltingly textured and richly flavored, the toro was even more so, the octopus was meaty but not rubbery, the clams and scallops that I tried (and were served with such flair; ask me about it!) were highly delicious, the river eel was warm and salty without being over-dried, but the big surprise was something I had never seen in the states at all: bonito. I don`t know much about the fish itself other than dried blocks are used to make flakes that are used commonly in Japanese fish broths, but the raw form of it--a rich red meat, garnished with a little green onion, garlic, and sauce--was absolutely soft and rich, so much so that the chef didn`t even slice it up but simply pulled off strips with his fingers. Was it all that I hoped for and more? Yes. Even the green tea was the delicious traditional powdered kind, and complemented the meal perfectly.

Afterwards, the two others that I was with and I sauntered back to Ginza to show the one that hadn`t been, and we ended up running into a couple of Las Vegas residents who needed a picture taken in front of the Ginza Kabuki theater. We chatted a little bit--they had been to Portland before--and a little further down I took another picture for two men from London, the younger of which had been around the U.S. A little later the three of us ate at this semi-fancy French-ish pastry shop, where you have to buy a (rather pricey) beverage if you sit and have cake. So, my Opera and espresso was delicious, and it topped off quite the nice evening.

I still enjoy the subway/transit system immensely, and really feel that I`m getting to know it. From what I`m hearing, China is not as organized or clean, and considering that I`ll be nowhere near as autonomous there as I can possibly be here, it will be a little trickier and will force me to be reliant on more groups that I am here.

One meandering thought: the space restrictions here (very finite amount of land to hold so very many people) really dictates so many intrinsic cultural norms as well as the choices in production. One reason that wi-fi is not as prevalent or popular here is because everyone uses cell phones to use the internet, e-mail, and communicate. Most people don`t have enough spare space in their homes or bags to hold a full laptop and cart it around with them--not to mention there`s never very much space inside shops and such to place a laptop or plug it in--so that space restraint really becomes the basis for such innovations, not just some arbitrary preference. What a luxury it can be to be able to take up space in so many ways! "In America, first you get the open space, then you get the power, then you get the women."

And now, more pictures (again, click to enlarge):