Gastronomic Cultural Exchange

Today, my vice principal told me something interesting about Japanese food and Japanese cuisine, which explained a LOT of why it can be frustrating to order food here in Japan.

He explained that when it came to making and cooking Japanese food, a chef makes sure to make a dish that can appeal to all the senses - including a sixth sense which he termed as "inspiration" (his English is really really good). He continued on to say that it was important to make things that taste good, smell good, feel good, look good, (and sound good?) but also go well together. Japanese people are a part of the natural world, he told me, and there's a desire to use natural ingredients and so on to stay part of that world, so the chefs make sure to pick things that go well together in the natural world; all the ingredients must match just so. This ties in to the Japanese idea of "wa" or harmony.

This also lends to the popularity and importance of seasonal and regional foods. Regional foods emphasize the locality and the whole "one with the area around you" thing, and foods that go well together in nature probably occur around the same time and place, so seasonal foods get a bonus here as well.

But because of this emphasis on having the right foods in the right combination, Japanese culture tends to shy away from using substitutes in their dishes, which in turn leads to, in some restaurants where they've got serious chefs anyways, distain towards anyone who wants to customize their dish since they're in essence "ruining" the dish by changing it so that the ingredients aren't in perfect harmony. It's hard for people from other cultures to see this though, since we often don't have that background of "all ingredients must exist in the right proportions in harmony together with the natural world." Instead we place a priority on "I want to have a dish that fits my tastes and by god I'm PAYING for this and I'm the CUSTOMER so I have RIGHTS."

Or something like that.

That's what I thought anyways when I first got here. Maybe not in those words. But I was often confused and annoyed when we went to restaurants that were like "sorry no, we can't 'just not add chicken' to this" or "sorry we can't leave out the peppers" or "sorry we can't take out the tomato for you" even though they were making the dish from scratch and could indeed very easily omit adding in the peppers or the tomato. Instead it was this idea that the ingredients must go together when they serve it (probably) that informed their refusal to acquiesce to our requests.

Actually, it's a lot more along the lines of those infamous Italian or French chefs who also refuse to customize orders that I've occasionally heard of, who go into a rage or a fit when someone even thinks of asking them to make a simple omission, or to substitute tofu for chicken or whatever. Substitutes and omitting ingredients harms the purity of the dish, or in the case of the Japanese, the harmony of the ingredients, nature, and the dish.

How's that for culture clashes and exchange? 

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On a more random note, I'm correcting compositions on one of the tests that my academic students took. It's supposed to be between 40 and 60 words but so far... it's pretty dismal. Out of ten points the highest has been a ten, and it's not like I'm being a hard grader. They've just failed epically at responding to the prompt, which was "you met a person at the mall whom you fell in love with. Describe their appearance and what they look like." 

Not too hard, we figured, and we had just done a unit on describing people, body parts, and clothes. So in theory, they had all the tools they needed...

But reading them kinda makes me wish I had a pitcher of sangria next to me. Or a can of beer. Some of them are really amusing to read though. Some students wrote stories about how they met the person of their dreams (and some pointed out that they already had a boyfriend or girlfriend and I was like... how sad! Why would you write that your dream person that you fell in love with had a significant other already!?) like about what they were doing and about their attributes and how they looked kind because they were helping old people or had found the author's ring... 

Part of me feels kind of bad for giggling at this (lord knows my own mistakes are pretty awful and widespread) but some of them are most amusing.

I shall leave you with one of my favorites so far:

"The boy was special face and nice hair. I was surprised it. I think that very very cool. If he is human, it is great."

Precious, precious, wonderful students.