asazuke (John’s blog)

Life in Japan, food, music, whatever…

Radiobeef and the missing 143 16 August, 2011

Filed under: food & drink,news,politics — johnraff @ 2:42 pm
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This isn’t good. It was about a month ago that the first radioactive beef started showing up in the consumer food chain; at first it was from cattle in the Fukushima area that had been fed rice straw contaminated by the reactor explosion. That was bad enough for the local farmers who had been struggling to get their lives restarted after the earthquake, but it now seems that straw from the danger zone – a major rice-producing area – had been sent to all kinds of places and traces of radioactive caesium have been found in beef from quite different places. This is bound to have an effect on sales of (delicious) Japanese beef, both here and, maybe more importantly, in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan where all kinds of Japanese food has been selling to the newly rich. ($100 apples, anyone?)

More: it now turns out that the Tokyo power company responsible for the Fukushima reactor is unable to trace 143 people who worked on the clear up operation, in order to monitor their radiation exposure. A lot of part-time workers were taken on in a shambling chain of sub-contractors to sub-sub-contractors and the bottom end included homeless people and alcoholics hanging out on the bad side of the railway station waiting for a bit of work from the gangster brokers who came round. They were offered 2 or 3 times the going rate for dangerous work, but nobody seemed to care too much about where they went afterwards. Of course this is just an extreme example of the return to Victorian-era exploitation that capitalists have been organizing on a world-wide level, but this time even token attempts to be concerned for workers’ welfare have broken down.

The Japanese population as a whole are, as you can imagine, less than enthused about repairing nuclear reactors, still less building new ones. Nobody believes the government or power companies when they try to reassure us that everything will be OK. Coming on top of the annual August commemoration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the mood here is very much anti-nuclear. Of course public opinion is fickle, people forget quickly and the nuclear power consortium of electricity companies, big engineering, corrupt public servants, politicians and the media will do their best to fight back. Nuclear energy looks cheaper than renewable alternatives, untill you include all the hidden costs, and there’s lots of palm-greasing cash available. Still, can we allow ourselves some limited optimism that the much-fabled Japanese Consensus is about to be reached, and a major policy switch is coming up?

Fingers crossed (again).

 

Heat 9 July, 2011

Filed under: city,food & drink,seasons — johnraff @ 2:18 pm
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Yes, it’s hot. We’re now out of the Rainy Season and into the summer a good week earlier than usual, and quite as hot and humid as you could want, thank you.

One small consolation, for us at Raffles anyway, is that the heat seems to increase peoples’ desire for a foaming mugfull of well chilled lager (quite understandable) and for some spicy Asian food. The spicy food goes with the beer, and also seems to suit the heat, somehow. The result has been that we’ve been a bit busy the last 2 or 3 weeks and I’ve been quite slack about posting up all the fascinating stuff that’s been going on.

I’ll try a bit harder to keep up but it’s not easy to focus on a sticky afternoon with the temperature approaching 35°C and 60% humidity…

 

Cold Sake 7 June, 2011

Filed under: countryside,food & drink,incidents — johnraff @ 1:11 pm
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This is probably one for the “kids, don’t try this at home” department.

While beer and I have had a long, and generally happy, relationship and I’ve made other friends like wine, awamori and shochu more recently, the Japanese national drink Sake and I don’t get on, at least not cold. Sake can be quite a nice drink to sip warmed up on a cold winter evening, preferably with some traditional Japanese food – some seafood maybe, which is also good when the seawater’s cold. However, take my word for it, Cold Sake is something to be very cautious with. The alcohol in the warmed-up variety seems to enter your bloodstream quickly so you soon feel the effects and can regulate your intake accordingly. When it’s cold though, it’s easy for a beer-drinker like me to just keep glugging it down till it’s too late to ward off the extreme drunkenness to follow. I’ve only drunk cold sake in any quantity three times or so, and each occasion has been one much to regret…

This particular incident happened a year ago at about this time but for whatever reason my notes stayed somewhere in the computer and never got written up. Maybe it was just too embarrassing…

“taruzake” is sake that’s been kept in a cedar barrel so the aroma of the wood permeates it. The effect is something like Greek “retsina” wine, though not as fiercely resinous, – quite nice in fact. We were given a “sho” (1.8 litres) of it at T’s nephew’s wedding the other week, and arranged to take it round to Yamada san’s so he could help us drink it. Yamada san lives just down the road from our country place, where he deals in timber. Business hasn’t been too good in recent years and he does a bit of forestry work for the local co-operative to boost his income a bit. In fact young people aren’t interested in that kind of work, so with little competition the money’s not that bad, he says. We suggested he try selling his timber via the internet, as there ought to be a market with people who still want to build traditional Japanese houses, but he says he’d rather be outside listening to the wind than typing at a keyboard. Fair enough.

We found him in the little room attached to his timber yard where he usually passes weekend evenings with friends and a beer or two. A wood stove keeps the place nice and warm all year round with timber offcuts and the like. Yes, even in the hot Japanese Summer! He says the cast iron would rust if it wasn’t kept hot all the time, but he certainly had that room a bit warmer than I would have. Ah well, the conversation flowed and the sake was quite nice in fact. After a while I felt like cooling off a bit and went to sit in an old office chair just outside the door. I must have fallen asleep at that point, because most of what followed I had to learn from T afterwards…

Apparently I fell off the chair and caught my elbow on something, so got quite a nasty gash on it. Yamada san poured some “shochu” on so the alcohol would disinfect the wound. It must have worked, because in a week or so it was well on the way to healing up. I had no idea of any of this at the time though – all I remember is suddenly being very DRUNK, much drunker than I wanted to be, and not happy at all.

T got me home somehow, and the next day I learned where the blood on my pillow and sheets had come from. Ah well it could have been worse – the hangover wasn’t as bad as I deserved, and my elbow got no nasty infection – even so, the evening could have been much more enjoyable than it turned out to be.

The other times? Don’t even ask. My other encounters with Cold Sake were worse than this…

 

 

Raw Beef 20 May, 2011

Filed under: food & drink,news — johnraff @ 2:54 pm
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The Tartars have a lot to answer for. I don’t know if you have “tartare steak” where you live, but minced raw beef, possibly mixed with onion, and topped with a raw egg is a standard menu item in many countries in Europe and America. The story is that the Tartars brought the dish to Europe as part of the Mongolian invasion. I don’t know whether the Tartars are supposed to have invented it themselves or got it from the Mongols, but it’s interesting to note that at the other end of the Mongolian sphere of influence, in East Asia, there are things like steak tartare too. Laos and Thailand have a dish called laap (or larp or laab) which is minced, sometimes raw, meat with herbs and spices, Bali has something called lawar, and Korea has yukhoe. This is definitely raw beef, and there are other elements in Korean culture to suggest Mongolian influences, so yukhoe could well be a Far Eastern version of Tartare steak.

Korean food is popular here in Japan too, especially grilled beef (pulgogi in Korea and yakiniku here) and recently yukke, the Japanese take on yukhoe, has been a very popular side dish. Of course Japan is the land of raw fish, so nobody gets too worried about raw beef – in fact I’ve had beef sashimi a few times and it’s quite good if the beef is of decent quality. That is, until a couple of weeks ago. The last two weeks the TV news has been full of reports about a spate of food poisoning cases at a yakiniku chain, where people had eaten the (very cheap at ¥280) yukke. A lot of people ended up in hospital, and four died. Food poisoning isn’t only about vomiting and diarrhoea.

 

Farmlog 8th~9th May 2011 19 May, 2011

Filed under: countryside,food & drink — johnraff @ 2:31 pm
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  • Opened the car boot to load in bags and noticed how much the temperature has just gone up – inside the car the air was nice and cool, without any use of the air conditioner.
  • A beautiful day for speed-trapping, and there they were with their white motobikes, in their favourite spot, hauling in a middle-aged lady.
  • The May sun can be quite fierce – there’s a lot of UV out there too, which you don’t notice because of the cool wind so you can get burnt easily.
  • Wild wisteria out in the hills, azaleas, flowers come out one after another – spring is busy. Busy for us too – trees to be pruned, weeds to be cut, and the field where the chillies will be planted has to be dug up. That last job should have been done last autumn, leaving time now for the other stuff…
  • Got some mustard greens (karashina) at the 100yen stand. These have a nice hotness when raw, or pickled in salt, but are also good stir-fried, when the mustardy taste goes.
  • More and more voices around the house – frogs, a strange mournful bird like an owl an octave higher, another one has a beautiful call with a delicate fall at the end, as if it was speaking Thai… but no uguisu yet.
  • Lots of flies.
  • Dinner outside for the first time – a bit chilly but OK if you sit near the fire.
  • There wasn’t much rain last week, but in the woods behind the house there was one bamboo shoot. I made an Indian pickle with the crunchy part, and T cooked the rest with soy sauce, fish flakes and a couple of sansho leaves. Sansho has a sharp lemony smell but has a strange affinity with freshly dug bamboo shoot. Both seem to have an oddly creamy undertone, if that makes any sense…
  • Min temp 5°C max 24°C
 

Farmlog 24th April 2011 1 May, 2011

Filed under: countryside,food & drink — johnraff @ 1:37 am
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Well my spell back in Britain meant a month since the last trip up to our place in Gifu, and Spring has well and truly arrived. Paddy fields in the area are already filled with water ready for the rice seedlings to be planted. This really has to be my favourite season out here. From late March to early May all kinds of flowers come out one after another and on a warm sunny afternoon it feels like a yet undiscovered corner of paradise. This time, unfortunately, the weather wasn’t with us – wet, cloudy and chilly. Ah well. Maybe better luck next week.

The first warabi (fern shoots) of the season are up, and they’re delicious, although possibly poisonous and carcinogenic… You put wood ash on them, pour on boiling water and leave them overnight. This gets out some of the bitterness. Then just rinse and eat them with a drop of soy sauce, some dried fish flakes and a dab of wasabi. Good. T likes to stew them with chunks of fried tofu, which is OK too. Someone else shares our appreciation for these wild vegetables, and had already picked quite a few before we arrived on Sunday. This annoys T no end, and she put up some notices warning tresspassers and warabi-thieves away. We’ll see if they do any good.

Min. temp. -4°C, max. 20°C (over the last four weeks, remember).

 

Body chemistry or something 20 April, 2011

Filed under: food & drink,places — johnraff @ 1:54 am
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I’ve just got back from three weeks in the UK. It’s the place where I was born and grew up and I love it; the buildings that were intended – in contrast with earthquake-prone Japan – to last for years and years, the green green grass everywhere even in winter, the TV, the humour, the relaxed mixture of cultures you now enjoy, the warm beer, and, yes, even the food.

All that said, I’ve now been living in Japan for 35 years – more than half my life – and my body must have adapted in some way. Maybe it’s the air, maybe the water: I don’t know but this morning my breakfast – the same fruit + yogurt + muesli + pot of tea I was having while in Britain – just tasted so good.

 

Farmlog 1st January ~ 21st February 2011 24 February, 2011

Filed under: countryside,food & drink — johnraff @ 2:27 am
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1st ~ 5th January

  • A cold start to the year, with dire weather forecasts of blizzards that made us put off for a day our departure for a little New Year break in the country. The 1st of January was cold enought to be sure, but it didn’t snow so we made it out OK.
  • Arrived to find the deer had broken down the fence round our vegetable field again, and left droppings everywhere, though there’s nothing left there for them to eat. I didn’t bother fixing the fence this time.
  • A cute little field mouse had been caught in our trap. I hate using that, but we really don’t want these creatures running round our kitchen.
  • Didn’t see any rabbits though. Are they all away on official engagements? 2011 is their year.
  • Anyway we’ve been having a cold spell since Christmas, with clear starry nights when what little warmth you pick up in the daytime soon evaporates off. Time to sit in the kotatsu, eat mikan and watch TV – except that there’s no TV out here so it’s the radio instead, with reports of 40Km traffic jams everywhere. Chuckle and peel another mikan.
  • Managed to get in a bit of tree pruning – the tea bushes have to be clipped or they grow into big trees, taller than me. Spending a couple of hours in some repetitious physical work, the brain is left to its own devices, and tends to reel off some music from the past. This time it started with Sgt. Pepper, which wasn’t so bad, but Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds led into something called Judy in Disguise with Glasses by John Fred and his Playboy Band. Hmm… Remember that?
  • Min. temp. -4°C max. 10°C

23rd ~ 24th January

  • We missed last week because of the snow, which did come eventually and made it not really worth the effort of driving out. It’s now largely melted, but it’s still quite cold enough, thank you.
  • Still, Sunday was nice and sunny and the speed police were enjoying a day’s fine-gathering. We passed three different people who’d been caught.
  • Another mouse in the ChuToruMan.
  • That evening we had yose-nabe – “leftovers pot”? Nabe is always good on a cold winter evening anyway, and we also had one of my favourite salads – sashimi tuna with avocado, in a soy sauce and wasabi dressing.
  • Unfortunately I could hardly taste it because of a nasty cold. All January has been cold and dry – perfect for viruses apparently – and there’s a lot of influenza around so I should be glad to get off with a cold I suppose.
  • There were more fresh deer droppings on the snow, then on Monday afternoon more snow. We got out of there and headed back to the city.
  • Min. temp. -7°C max. 4°C

6th ~ 7th February

  • It’s milder this week, but cloudy, and the snow is half-melted. Sometimes a big chunk suddenly falls off the roof. Further north, where they get several metres of snow at a time, this is serious, and people have already been killed by snow falling off their roofs.
  • The well is almost empty – it hasn’t rained much lately – and after filling up the bath the taps start to make spluttering sounds as the pump gets air mixed in.
  • Nabe again – no complaints there, and this time it’s crab. “Watari gani” would be blue swimmer crabs I suppose? Anyway I think it’s one of the tastiest crabs – fiddly to eat with not all that much meat, but excellent crab flavour for stewpots and curries. Crab curry’s pretty good! Mackeral sashimi along with our nabe, also good. Mackeral’s not the first fish that springs to mind for sashimi but in the Autumn and Winter it’s oily and tasty. Often pickled in vinegar like pickled herring – that’s good too. The only thing to watch is the most expensive fresh-caught variety, which can have a nasty parasitic worm in it. Squid get them too. Freezing kills the worm, so the cheaper frozen fish is a better bet here. Raffles standard white wine (from Chilli) went well with all this.
  • No mice in the trap this week, but plenty of deer footprints and droppings, and a big hole which must have been dug by wild boar. Shouldn’t they be hibernating now?
  • Min. temp. -7°C max. 7°C

13th ~ 14th February

  • More Winter. Just cold.
  • No deer this week.
  • Sat in the kotatsu getting the papers ready for our yearly tax return. The tax man has no terror for us, as we aren’t making any money to tax…
  • More snow on Monday, but the days are getting longer – Spring won’t be long.
  • Min. temp. -4°C max. 7°C

20th ~ 21st February

  • Sunday is quite mild, but strangely hazy. It must be very high cloud because we could still see big distant snow-covered mountains in several directions from each bridge we crossed, including Mount Ontake.
  • In the supermarket on the way, everything is going up – vegetables especially.
  • Round the corner after the fish and meat sections is a whole shelf of different kinds of natto, then a kimchee area. I can eat, and enjoy, almost any food (had half a sheep’s head, including the eyeball, while waiting for a bus in Turkey) but natto is one of the few things I don’t relish. It’s soy beans which, after cooking, have been wrapped in straw and left to go all slimy and disgusting. Very good for you apparently. The other day on TV they were showing an Inuit delecacy of baby seagulls which had been left to rot (sorry, ferment) in a pit for a few months. I might pass on that too, in case you were planning to invite me for dinner. Also those big Witchety Grubs they eat in Australia. Leaving such things aside, I’ll enjoy any variety of raw sea creatures or whatever else turns up on a table in Japan. Except natto.
  • Kimchee on the other hand is great. This is a Korean import: Chinese Cabbage fermented with chilli powder, garlic, chives, carrot, apple, some kind of fishy flavour… It’s much better than it sounds.
  • A few years ago there was a little boom for tempe. That’s maybe Indonesia’s answer to natto, but much nicer. It’s also fermented by a mould, but it’s firm and dry – not slimy at all. Good fried with chillies and Indonesian sweet soy sauce. For a while you could buy it anywhere, but there’s no sign of it now.
  • After a coffee there was time for a little pottering around outside before it got dark at six. (The days are getting longer!) Finally fixed that deer net, and burnt some old papers.
  • Although there’s still a chilly wind, Monday was nice and sunny and I clipped some more tea bushes. There are still quite a few left though.
  • Min. temp.-5°C max. 12°C
 

Sushi for Christmas 10 January, 2011

Filed under: city,food & drink — johnraff @ 7:29 pm
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This goes back thirty years or so, but a couple of minutes from the English school I used to teach at was a little sushi shop in the corner of a local market. The owner was a friendly guy who made good sushi and every day he had a lunchtime special for ¥380 that used whatever was in season at the fish market that day and made a great lunch. I used to drop in quite often. At that time there were little privately owned sushi shops everywhere, just like izakaya and yakitori places, but gradually the big companies moved in; they can buy in bulk and prepare stuff in big food factories so, as our local sushi lunch guy complained one day, there was no way that people like him could compete. A lot of places went out of business, but his solution was to move up, up-market. He bought the best fish at the market every day, however much it cost, and charged prices to match. Although he was still in the corner of this scruffy little market it was now hard to leave there without spending ¥10,000 or more, and the only people who could afford to eat there were yakuza.

And that’s how things are now – there are cheap, cheap chain sushi places where you can take the kids, and really expensive places. Having tasted decent sushi you don’t feel like MacSushi, and really can’t afford to go to the good places any more… what a drag. However, the other day when we were thinking of going out for dinner at Christmas and all the French restaurants were either too expensive or booked up T found a sushi shop via the internet that didn’t look too bad, and was just a short bike ride away from our house. In fact it was really OK – one of a “chain” of two, occupying a previous coffee shop and completely lacking the sterile gleam of those shiny new chain places, and not expensive at all. Not everything was fantastic, but most of the sushi was pretty good, and the two of us ate our fill, along with drinks (beer, sake and shochu), for about ¥7,000 total which seemed quite reasonable. So those corner sushi shops haven’t completely died out after all!

 

Fast Booze 29 August, 2010

Filed under: city,food & drink — johnraff @ 1:55 am
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In contrast with the binge-drinking youth of Britain I’ve been reading about, young Japanese have been leaving beer and cars behind lately, much to the dispair of Kirin and Toyota among others. I don’t know what they’re spending their money on – the fact is they haven’t really got any money these days, with only crummy dead-end type jobs on offer when they graduate… When Japanese youngsters do go out for a drink these days it’s often sweet alco-pop things they drink, not the bitter ice-cold golden nectar that goes so well with the Summer heat here, and they’ll be drinking it in the cheapest places they can find.

Just lately there’s been an outbreak of chain establishments where everything is ¥280. Food, drinks, everything. Maybe with the yen at the ridiculous current rate of 85 or so to the US dollar that doesn’t sound too cheap to you but usually a beer is around ¥500 ( ¥550 at Raffles’ ) so ¥280 for a jug of draught beer (not happoshu ) is pretty good for a start. The food’s not disgusting either – food processing technology has been got down to a fine art – though nothing to write home about and not huge portions. With profit margins cut right down, they have to sell a lot of stuff to make the business viable so need to keep people coming in at a fast rate. The branch near us is usually pretty full, and pretty noisy.

More recently a rival has started up where everything is ¥250 – they cut their costs even further by having customers come to the counter to collect everything. The overall effect is pretty much like McDonalds, but if that’s your idea of an evening out…

Fast Booze – you saw it here first OK?

 

 
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