Just as Japan was filled with unexpected minor irritations in daily life, so was it filled with little moments of happiness. They were the small mundane things that I never expected but that kept me sane and happy throughout my year there. Now that I no longer live in Japan, they are the things that make me nostalgic and wish for another day to spend in my briefly adoptive land.
DELIVERY
I didn't expect a simple thing like home delivery to make me so happy, but I certainly never encountered a system like that in the United States. To briefly summarize, I could walk into nearly any shop in Japan - big chain stores to small local businesses - and, rather than find a friend with a truck or try to fit my boxes on the bus, I could utter those magic words, "home delivery please!" I would fill out a short form with my address, pay a few bucks if anything, stamp the form with my name-stamp, and set up a time for delivery. Nor did the delivery have to be during 9 - 5 business hours, when I would be at work, as it would in the US. It could be any time from early morning to late evening, any day of the week. Whenever is convenient. I'd check off the box I wanted and go home totally secure in the knowledge that the parcel would be delivered at precisely the time I wanted, and without a single dent of damage in it.
This convenience didn't just work for large purchases of furniture or appliances; I could have food, books, or anything else I could think of delivered to my door. After I discovered a foreign food mail order service, I could once more have mundane delights from home such as dried beans, cereal, peanut butter, and brown rice; moreover, these would arrive tucked into an enormous box that waited for me when I came home from work, not more than 4 or 5 days after ordering. Amazon.jp, meanwhile, had a seemingly endless selection of books in English that took even less time to wind up in my mail slot. I may have been in a foreign country, but mail order service brought the US to my doorstep packed in a tidy brown box whenever I wanted.
What happened if the deliveryman did not bring up my sofa at the appointed time? Or if I received a package while I was not home? I would find a notice in my mail slot detailing what time the delivery had been attempted, along with a phone number. I only had to call to schedule a time for another drop-off. Thinking it would be as much of a hassle as our parcel delivery services here in the US are, I dreaded making the first phone call. Finally, I got up my nerve and dialled, only to be surprised by a gruff voice barking hello in the local dialect. It turned out to be the driver's cell phone. Without fail, the driver would still be in the local area when I called, and would offer to stop by in about 15 minutes to give me the package. Also without fail, the package would arrive within 5 minutes, not 15.
Where in the US can you have your furniture delivered for free, and where will you find a delivery person who leaves a notice with his cell phone number so he can bring you your package the moment you arrive at home? The level of service in Japan was not always as perfect as the mythical image we have, but in this particular regard, I couldn't have been happier.
USELESS LITTLE GADGETS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
In the US, we recently started having self-checkout lines. Do they always work properly? Of course not. Does any new gadget - especially one that is subjected to abuse by the public on a regular basis - ever work properly in this country? In my experience, no.
But in Japan, do these nifty, somewhat-useless advances in technology work? Always.
There is a change machine on the bus so one can make exact change. Tickets for the bus, the train, plane travel, subways, admission to hot springs, and even Buddhist temples are sold through vending machines that can make change for a $100 bill without a pause. In front of the electronics department store in my town, there was a reliably-cold ice cream vending machine that always dispensed the correct item. There are little cell phone chargers in department stores, where one can put the phone in a little case, make a security code to type in order to get it back out, and stuff a few dollars into the coin slot. In a while, come back, enter the code, and get the phone back fully charged. Would this work in the US? I venture that it would not. But I wish it would.
VENDING MACHINES
Vending machines are pervasive in Japan. From the heart of the city to a rural road surrounded by nothing but rice fields and crickets, there they are, glowing, monolithic, iconic. They are plugged in, running, cold or hot as the season dictates.
The machines are not just filled with pop, as they would be in the US. There are no 20 oz. Pepsi dispensers. These vending machines are stocked with green tea, black tea, barley tea, tea with milk, tea with sugar and lemon; they have Coke, Sprite, all fruit flavors of Fanta, juice, sports drinks, coffee with and without milk, water. Not only do the machines contain this variety of beverages, they also have a variety of different sizes priced accordingly. Do I want a little can of green tea for 90 cents, or do I want the big size for $1.50? Either way, it will come tumbling out of the machine whenever I want.
Added to the pervasiveness and variety of the beverage vending machines is something really crucial, a quality that sealed my love for them. In the summer when I arrived in Japan, everything in them was cold. This was just as I expected; machines in the US always keep things nice and cold too. What I wasn't ready for, though, was the winter: the machines started heating the beverages too. I was wary of this at first. How could a can of coffee be kept at the appropriate temperature in a vending machine next to the bus stop? But out it came, a comfortable temperature to hold with the liquid inside just cool enough to drink. I began to make special trips to the machines just to buy a warm can of green tea on my way to do my errands; in the bitterly cold wind and under a dark winter sky, that hot vending machine tea raised my spirits like nothing else would.
On the appropriate day, of course, all of the machines were switched back to cold beverages. I was told once, jokingly, that one can tell the official first day of spring in Japan because all of the vending machines will switch to cold drinks. I laughed a little at this joke, but was more confused than anything. "Surely they don't really do that. Or if they do, it's some Tokyo thing that hasn't filtered down to my area." But after experiencing this one year, I can absolutely say that it is true.
FEELING THE SEASONS
"Ah, it's really getting to be fall now. What a lovely fall day." I blinked in confusion at my coworkers when they began to tell me this in September. I'd look out the window at the glaring sun, see the students sweating in 95-degree weather outside, smell the heavy breezes of summer. How could the imagine this hot, muggy weather to be fall?
But sure enough, when I took the bus in to the city wearing jeans and a tank top, every other woman sitting with me was bundled in a light jacket, scarf, and high boots. No more sandals or breezy tops for them - they were dressed as though a frigid breeze were blowing leaves over their heads. The women in my workplace collectively began wearing heavy blazers on the same day and putting on their knee socks, enduring the humidity of the classrooms under their many layers. I was astonished, shocked, dismissive of this dressing by the calendar. Even if my watch said it was the middle of September, it felt like summer to me, and so I dressed for summer. I couldn't wear a heavy coat in that hot weather, so why did these woman feel they needed to? I laughed at this along with my other American friends and wondered again how the people of Japan managed to function.
As the year wore on, I realized that the national appreciation for the seasons went farther than dress. It affected how people spoke and what images they conjured up in their speech; it affected their activities and what they did for fun; it dictated what they ate and drank and how they decorated their houses. In fall certain types of fish were eaten. In winter, it was nabe, a stew cooked on the table and eaten as a group, each person picking what they want out of the pot. The clouds of warmth rise up from the stew pot and warm the face and hands and stomach even as the feet are warmed by sticking them under the kotatsu, a kind of heated table with a blanket to keep the legs warm. People go to onsen (public baths) in the winter, soaking the warmth into their bones before going home to cold houses.
As it became spring, everyone aired out their spring clothes before it became warm enough to wear them; women bought white and yellow and light blue coats to reflect spring pastels. I drank a certain kind of sake that is only available in the springtime, and ate spring foods and saw spring rhododenrons. With the rest of Japan, I went outside to a park in the city during the appointed week for cherry-blossom viewing, and despite the fact that there were no cherry blossoms to be seen, I enjoyed the afternoon with the hundreds of other people who sat on blue tarps drinking beer and joking with their friends.
The appreciation for the seasons was more than just a comment on the weather or getting ready for a certain holiday in Japan. It was more than fanning myself and yelling about the heat in summer, or bundling up and sipping hot cocoa before a fire in winter. It allowed me to experience the essence of the season with my whole body, tasting and smelling and feeling the weather, reflecting what I felt outside me with my clothes and posture and habits. What I dismissed as silly and unrealistic at first grew on me as I experienced the weather and moods of the year in ways that seemed more subtle and deep than I would have at home. By the next summer, I discovered that I was regretting not being there to smell autumn cooking and eat traditional holiday soup on New Year's Day, enjoying the seasons with all of my senses, along with the rest of Japan.
ONSEN
Onsen and sento - hot springs and public baths - instilled only the emotion of apprehension in me when I first arrived in Japan. Much as I considered myself an open-minded and adventurous person, the prospect of going into a public bath, naked in a crowd of naked Japanese people, ignorant of the customs, and blind without my glasses, was simply terrifying to me. I heard the baths' praises sung by everyone I knew, Japanese and foreign alike, but as curious as I was about them, I couldn't get up the courage to visit one on my own.
Winter in Japan changed everything: I started to consider 40 degrees Fahrenheit to be a reasonable temperature in my apartment, I washed dishes in hot water just so I could warm up the kitchen, and I no longer questioned putting on a hat and scarf before crawling under my five blankets in bed. Most houses in Japan still do not have central heat, and my old, cheap apartment was not insulated; moreover, I was more wary of the match-lit kerosene heaters that I was encouraged to use than of the cold. Instead, I brought out my little ceramic heater and shivered under piles of electric blankets. I spent evenings reading in my bathtub for the warmth, the only place where my bones didn't feel seeped with cold.
A friend was in Kyoto over the New Year's holiday and gave me a glowing review of the large sento that he visited there - several floors' worth of different types of baths, and a wonderfully relaxing and warm experience. My interest was renewed: if my best friend could do this, why couldn't I? And so I resolved to experience the baths for myself.
I cannot remember now which hot spring I set foot in first; I only remember the ones that stood out as the best, the most varied, the most friendly, the most relaxing. You see, after I got the courage to leave my clothes in the locker and make my way carefully (and blindly) to the baths, holding my tiny bath towel awkwardly in front of me, it only took one moment of easing myself into the hot water before I fully appreciated the appeal. In fact, it was more difficult for me to convince myself to get out of the baths after I had finally gotten myself in. It was not uncomfortable or awkward, because everyone at the baths was so used to the communal environment; I would even say that I found the public baths to be one of the least judgmental places I encountered in Japan. There was never any whispered reference to my foreignness, nor any pointing. People were friendly and curious, wanting to know where I lived and what I did, and how I learned Japanese. Little children asked me what I was going to eat for dinner. Mothers told me about their sons that went to college in the United States and how they still preferred Japanese-style baths over showers. They laughed with surprise when I agreed with them on that point.
But most of all, I was there to relax, and the baths were the perfect opportunity. Each onsen that I visited regularly had a wide variety of different baths to try: some so small that they could only fit one person, and others larger than a swimming pool. Some were scented with cypress wood (hinoki), or with lavender and floral perfumes; others were medicinal baths that were meant to have certain healing properties. There were the whirlpool baths and the jet baths that shot out streams of water to massage your back and legs, as well as a simple hot bath of pure water. Several onsen featured a "pearl" bath, thick, moisturizing water that was infused with a mix of ground pearls, lotions, and scents to make one's skin smooth for weeks. When I became too hot, I could dip quickly into the cold water bath for a refreshing shock.
One of the more luxurious onsen I visited had more than ten different baths, most of them outside in a fenced, secluded courtyard. The wine bath had a miniature water wheel turning in it, and the hot water bath was an enormous, winding pool made of rock, complete with boulders to lean against and a lamplit cave that contained a little Buddhist shrine. Even without my glasses, I could lean back against one of the boulders in the cold winter air, feel the steam rise up around me, and almost imagine that I could see stars blinking in the night sky when I squinted upward.
The onsen didn't just contain baths, however; the luxury onsen that was my favorite also had a steam room and a sauna, one complete with piles of smoldering herbs and grasses to scent the air. The courtyard was scattered with lawn chairs for relaxing. At another, there were "salt baths" - a sauna with large, ornate tubs of flavored sea salts to rub invigoratingly over one's skin. One of my favorite onsen, located right downtown, had courtyards on the roof and I could lay on a platform covered with reed mats as I cooled off, watching snow fall and airplanes roar overhead.
Perhaps the most appealing thing about the onsen for me that winter was the warmth; even more than the relaxation, the warmth of the nearly-scalding water seeped down into my bones, my muscles, my very essence. Even after I had toweled off, stepped out into the cold night, and endured a bus or train ride home, I felt as though I were glowing with heat radiating from inside of me. Sadly, I could not endure the onsen as the weather grew hot and the nights rarely cooled below 85 degrees, but I could still close my eyes and remember the overwhelming feeling of safety and warmth that I had as I crouched in a single-sized bath outdoors, letting prickly snow fall on my face as I warmed myself to the core.
ENGRISH
Engrish is commonly known as the misuse of English by speakers of foreign languages. It is not, however, simple grammatical mistakes or imperfect knowledge. Rather, Engrish is imperfectly-used (or ignorantly used) English in advertisements, on signs, on t-shirts and purses, in the names of businesses and organizations. It seldom makes any sense; however, when it does make sense, it's often more frightening than the Engrish that is simply random assortments of unrelated words. The Engrish that makes sense often tells a story in very competent and clear language, but it is the content of the story itself which is disturbing or terrifying to the reader fluent in English.
The first question I was asked whenever I sent pictures of particularly egregious Engrish spottings to my friends was whether the Japanese knew what they were saying. "But, do they understand it? Why are they using it to write these things? Why would they use it if they know it's wrong?" The answer only makes sense if one realizes what the true purpose of Engrish is: it is not to convey meaning. It is a design element. Much as we use Chinese characters on t-shirts and in interior decorating, the Japanese neither know nor care what the characters on their clothing mean. The Engrish - and now, often French or German - simply looks cool, edgy, modern, refined. The meaning of the words is utterly secondary.
Why would I list Engrish as one of my true moments of happiness in Japan, then? Simply put, I was an Engrish addict. I devoured the strange stories on the packaging of my food, on restaurant menus, on advertisements I saw on the train. I heard Engrish on radio and saw it in my students' homework assignments. For some reason, the sheer absurdity of it delighted me whenever I encountered it; not only did I crack up at the strange wording, but I always found myself wondering about the mental state of the author of the particular slice of language. "What were they thinking? What were they going for? And what kind of image made them write this?"
No matter what kind of terrible mood I was in, the sight of "food panic" at the mall, "human quality" at the dry cleaner, and the "family catcher" vending machine (where one could presumably find a new family?) never ceased to cheer me up. I would stop dead in my tracks, agape, at the sight of a ramen shop on a back street with the simple sign: "SHOT YOU." I would ask myself, "why?" But no answer ever came.
There was never any explanation behind the random bits of miscommunication that littered my daily life, but then, perhaps it was for the best.
MY BIKE
About halfway through the year, I acquired a bike. This was a turning point in my year, much as I didn't realize it at the time. Before, I walked everywhere: school, the bus stop, the train, stores, bars. Everything was so close that a bike did not seem worth buying, especially if it would only shorten the time it took for me to walk by a few minutes. If I wanted to go farther - into the city, say, or hiking in the mountains near my apartment - it would still take long enough that I would take the bus. At over $100, why bother for only a year?
I wasn't even thinking of my lack of transportation when I stopped by my school to take care of some mundane business during the winter break. While I was standing in the office talking to the staff person who took care of my paperwork and details all year, she paused and looked thoughtful. "Do you have a bike yet?" she asked. I shook my head. I wasn't planning on buying one. "Well, hold on one minute. Come with me."
There, in the entranceway where we all left our outdoor shoes when we arrived for work, was parked a rusty old blue bicycle. "You see," she explained, "this had been stolen from me a year ago. I gave up on expecting it to be found, so I bought another new bike. And now it's been found and returned, but I don't have any use for it. I am so sorry that it's so old and inadequate. In fact, it's terrible of me to ask if you'd want it. But if you would like to borrow it, and it's not too awful..."
She trailed off as my eyes lit up. A free bike?! I didn't care how beat up or ancient it was, how covered in rust, and whether it had ten gears or only one. (It turned out to be the latter.) It was free transportation. Much as I talked about how I didn't need a bike, and how they would all be too small for my long legs anyway, I was ecstatic at the prospect. The world suddenly seemed to be shrinking, and I was already imagining all of the places that had been previously off-limits to me without a set of two wheels. Happily, I thanked her over and over, and wheeled the bike carefully out of the parking lot. In fact, I walked it the whole way home, still consumed by disbelief of the situation.
A few days later, I'd gotten the courage to get on the bike. It was old and tough, hard to pedal, and didn't go fast. Its single gear kept me mobile but slow. The front wheel turned stubbornly, requiring deliberate movements to guide it down the road, and when the basket was full of groceries or books, the entire frame took on a different sense of balance. Pushing the headlamp's grip to touch the front tire made the situation even worse, requiring twice the force to both pedal the bike forward and power the light. Moreover, the lamp's loud whirring could be heard for miles away. I joked that anyone would hear me coming long before they ever saw the dim beam shining above my groaning tires.
But I was right: the bike gave me a newfound freedom that I'd never known I was missing. I still didn't use it to travel to school, nor did I go all the way to the city. But the mountains visible from my window were now only a fifteen-minute ride at a brisk pace, rather than a half-day's walk, and the tiny villages surrounding me were more or less accessible. What had before been a two-hour journey into the city and straight back out in a slightly different direction on public transit was now perhaps an hour's brisk ride. I no longer had to depend on the bus routes to explore my area; I had the freedom to travel to any nearby region I wanted to explore, rather than being constrained to the ones that were home to a significant number of commuters.
My bike may not have been quite the machine that my friend's brand-new orange one was. Its wheel spokes were rusted nearly away, and its light blue paint was flaking off. It was heavy and unwieldy, and the frame was a scant twenty-two centimeters, not nearly large enough for my long limbs. The basket was barely secured to the front handlebars, and it had no little net to cover the top and prevent the contents from flying out. I had to use my hands and my wits for that.
Yet, as the year went on, I began to have a certain kind of bond with that bike. Even if it wasn't quite as maneuverable as my friend's new bike, it was heavy and deliberate in a way that made me feel as though it was an extension of myself, something known intuitively. In fact, as I reflect on my odd and somewhat defensive fondness for my affectionately-named "communist China bike," I recall having the same feelings for my first, similarly aged car. It was small but heavy, a brick on wheels; it had rusted so badly that I could stick my arm through the hole that had formed in the trunk lid. No, it wasn't the best car, but it was mine and with it, I was able to visit places I hadn't dreamed of before. The bike, with its awkward frame and fraying seat, had some of the same appeal. It was old enough and hardy enough to take anywhere, to push to its limits, to pedal uphill while standing up to give myself just an ounce of momentum more.
With the bike, I went over the mountains to ancient shrines; I sped through my small town; I yelled with exertion as I pedaled up a steep hill to my gym. I ran into my students at the convenience store and they teased me that my bike would get stolen when I was inside. "This bike? You're kidding." They just laughed, caught in their own ridiculous statement. Their bikes were all nicer than mine. I could take any amount of groceries home - as long as I fit them carefully into the basket space, and before I learned to estimate properly, I was often seen straining home with grocery bags hanging from my handlebars as well. Eventually, though, I figured it out: everything must fit into one grocery bag that was a foot high and a half-foot deep, securely fastened at the top.
The bike that I swore I didn't need at first had become something so ingrained in my mind that I didn't even stop to consider how much it affected me as I walked through the supermarket, basket in hand, mentally estimating whether I had enough basket space left to get another bag of sale eggplant. Even after I returned home, it took longer than I'd like to admit to stop estimating in terms of bike basket space rather than the trunk of my new car; it was a long time before I could bid goodbye to that bike.
MOUNTAINS
The first thing that impressed me upon getting to Japan was the stretching green spine of mountains out the plane window - not at my orientation in Tokyo, where I mostly saw the insides of hotels and a few shopping districts, but from the plane landing in my own southern city on a shimmeringly humid day. They were hardly visible through the haze, a flat sort of presence in the background, but they rose high in the air, a jagged line above the horizon. I couldn't take my eyes from the car window as two women from my school drove me from the airport to our town, and I asked them what those mountains were called. They looked at each other in surprise; did those mountains even have a name? Neither of them knew. They'd never thought about it; they'd always just had them there in the background.
Being from the Great Lakes, I was used to a relatively flat landscape, perhaps broken up with rolling hills or long ridges. The mountains in Japan - small though they were - boggled the mind. They were bright green, covered in lush cedar forests and blooming rhododendrons, and they were pointy. I've seen my share of mountains in Pennsylvania and in the Adirondacks, and none of those have quite the same shape as the Japanese mountains I grew so used to. They made me think of small-scale Rockies, jutting up into the sky, narrow and sharp, but green rather than snow-capped. They were not much bigger than the rolling hills back home, but it was their extreme shape that made them so compelling to me.
I saw these mountains every day on my walk to work, and nearly every day I found myself being held rapt - sometimes stopping dead in my tracks - by whatever weather system had found itself trapped in their craggy peaks that morning. Clouds loved to travel over and between the three major peaks that lay east of my town, only they had the worst time actually traversing that narrow space. The clouds became stuck, much to my delighted surprise; like great billowing pieces of cotton, their edges and undersides caught on the sharp green points and were held immobile, sometimes for hours. Then the cloud would begin to tear, moving and changing shape, breaking off into smaller pieces and squeezing over and through the mountains until it regained freedom on the other side. Other days, no clouds were in sight and the sky was crisply devoid of humidity; on those days, the clear sun shone down on the various colored trees, those lighter in color making the mountain look weirdly but convincingly textured. The cedar trees atop the tallest and pointiest peak went transparent if the sun's rays fell on them at a certain angle, showing the true rounded shape of the ground beneath.
The mountains near my apartment were derided by my two friends from the west coast; how could I think these peaks, only 600 meters at the tallest, were real mountains? They were hills, according to my friends, and they had nothing on the Rockies and Cascades. I gave them this, but did I care which mountains outdid them when I could see these green peaks everywhere I went? There was something more accessible about their beauty; dramatic in shape, but small enough to feel like friendly familiar faces.
I could never get sick of looking at those mountains, and they were my last farewell upon leaving Japan, gazing down and whispering goodbye to my three ever-present friends as the plane circled above my town on its way across the sea.
YATAI
Who could not be suspicious of them at first? These run-down food stalls look as though they are barely standing up and have never been cleaned, and they reek of old socks; in short, yatai are health code violations waiting to be discovered. Beginning at about 6:00 pm, when the earliest begin to unfold out of their 19th-century wooden carts, they and their power generators line the streets, packed so closely together that one can barely pass between them. A clean and unremarkable downtown area is transformed after dark into a seedy transient food market, the glow and smell and noise unmistakable. This is true Japanese fast food.
I avoided these food stands for a long time, eyeing them carefully, wrinkling my nose at the smell. They were dirty and greasy, run by men of indeterminate age and an indeterminate number of gold teeth. Moreover, as a strict vegetarian I was turned off by the tradition of meat-based fast food; I didn't go to McDonald's in the United States, so why would I bother going into a meat-on-a-stick yatai here in Japan?
My attitude changed after agreeing to duck inside one of these establishments with a friend, on the way to our favorite bar in the city. I might as well try the trademark institution of this city, I thought, and my friend assured me that it was worthwhile. Following popular wisdom - the smellier the yatai, the better the food - we found a suitably stinky contraption and ducked under the clear tarp that surrounded it.
Inside, our first pleasant surprise was the comfortable warmth; in the dead of winter, the proprietors all covered their yatai in tarps to keep in the heat, and it was like being inside a heated restaurant. Sitting ourselves at the benches that surrounded the cook, we saw that save for one man slurping away at a steaming bowl of ramen, we were the only patrons so early in the evening. We took our time going over the handwritten menu, surprisingly large for a food stand that could seat barely seven people. I skimmed over the list of things-on-sticks, of things-in-ramen, fried things, stewed things, beer and sake. Delighted, I began to notice little stars of hope shining out from the menu: fried eggplant on a stick, kimchi, fried asparagus and squash and sweet potato. Things-on-a-stick, in Japan, can end up meaning much more than chicken skin and pork bits (though one can get that too, if one desires).
I got up the nerve, finally, to just talk to the cook on one trip to our favorite yatai. "Um," I began cautiously, "do you think you can make this fried ramen without meat?" At any normal restaurant, my request probably would have been flatly refused, but I was beginning to learn that the more low-class the establishment, the more likely that they would make me vegetarian food without even questioning it. This was no exception: the cook was slightly surprised at the request but answered me with a gracious, "Of course!"
And from that moment, I was hooked. No longer was I nervous about going into a dirty, smelly street stand; the lure of the yaki-ramen (somewhat like lo mein) was too great. There is something about greasy fried noodles in thick sauce that warms the soul, and that yatai's yaki-ramen was the king of them all. At $4 for a big plate of noodles and a king-sized beer to go with it - along with the loud and incoherent conversations of the other drunks that stumbled in for late-night meals - I figured that the ghetto atmosphere of the yatai simply added to the friendly and down-to-earth ambience that I'd come to appreciate more than I ever expected.
I bid the yatai a heartfelt goodbye when I left; as I sat in my favorite stand on an oppressive summer night, sipping my beer and downing fried things on sticks, I sadly reflected on the fact that health codes and open container laws would prevent me from enjoying the same raucous and low-class experience in my native United States.
CURRY
Japanese curry is a unique food; it is not like Indian curry, nor Thai. It is served over rice, yes, and it can be made very spicy, but it is more akin to a thick stew than anything else. It is a strange sight, and stranger still is that it's perfectly suited to being comfort food. Mellow spices, slow-cooked vegetables, perhaps covered in gooey melted cheese - combined with pickles, it was my secret addiction for the year.
Curry and pickles? Yes. Don't knock it until you've tried it. They're like no pickles that you've eaten before; I am convinced that the same crack that is put in the curry sauce must be sprinkled over the pickle jar as well, because I could never stop coming back for more.
And what establishment was guaranteed to be offering curry, everywhere in Japan and nearly 24 hours a day? Coco-ichi Curry House. This was a squat structure adorned with yellow signs and flashing lights, advertising curry so brazenly that you could never miss it. Coco-ichi didn't just offer the standard beef curry - no, you could get squid rings, fermented soy beans, eggplant, mountain vegetables, all manner of pork and beef parts. Best were their seasonal specials - dumplings, kimchi, asparagus and tomato. Power curry was featured in the summer - add special ingredients to your curry to "power up" when the heat makes you sleepy!
The curry place combined my favorite parts of dining in Japan: seat yourself wherever, and the waitstaff is immediately upon you. No wait times here; the menu and water and jar of pickles arrive within seconds of your entrance. The menu had a picture for each and every dish, so there was no confusion; what is more, your dish was infinitely customizable. There were tables for spiciness - no charge for mild and slightly hot, but 10 cents more for each level of spiciness, each described as graphically as possible ("your nose runs", "your ears are ringing", "your head will explode"). Want more or less rice? The price is adjusted accordingly. Do you want to add cheese or a serving of squid or a side of vegetables to your pork rind curry? Each is individually priced.
When you have figured out your curry concoction, there's no shouting to the staff as in other restaurants. In Japan, the waiter does not come back automatically, and it was a painful and hungry few months before I figured out the trick of shouting across the restaurant at them. The curry place did not make you engage in such uncouth behavior, however: there is a button on your table. Press it, and it sends a wireless signal to a signboard above the cash register, lighting up your table number. Within seconds, the staff is back. "What can I do for you?" They are infinitely attentive, but only when you want them to be. When the curry comes, it is enough for three meals and only costs around $6; this, in Japan, is nearly unheard of. The check is left on the table and you can go up front to pay it. They let you split up the bill between your parties, without any fuss. They shout for you to come again when you leave, bowing and yelling.
The staff may have engaged in the ridiculously polite Japanese that fast-food restaurants seem to love, but they weren't quite as plastic and cookie-cutter as the McDonald's staff I had encountered. The Coco-ichi waiters all seemed vaguely delinquent, a little too old or a little too scruffy or a little too unpolished to really be working there. There was some element of deviancy about the place, from the pigtailed managers down to the bespectacled busboys.
And the best thing about Coco-ichi? They take their curry seriously: for the enjoyment of everyone, and so as not to ruin the taste or smell or texture of anyone's $6 curry, no smoking allowed. And as anyone who's lived in Japan and come out of a bar with their watch smelling like smoke will know, that is truly a great thing.