Gourmet Food - Motorcycling Japan

In Ginza the first night we ate at an Izakaya. The owner didn’t want to admit us for fear that we couldn’t speak Japanese or eat his raw squid swimming in black ink. However, some words and a daring bite and we were into our first delicious meal, flushed down with refreshing Nama Beeru.

Being rejected is common and in Japan. You get used to it. Restaurants or hotels may simply be full, or sometimes just wary of any embarrassment serving foreigners. But you'll find that even local patrons are rejected. Once a Sushi-Ya is full, newly arriving guests are turned away and asked to come back another day. The point seems to be to serve those guests that are already in the establishment best.

There's a technique for finding the genuinely good places. More often than not they seat no more than a dozen, see few Westerners enter and do not offer English in any form. But it's wonderful when you slide open a door, move aside the Noren and are greeted by the Chef personally: "Irrashaimase!"

In Sushi-Yas and Izakayas you rarely pay more than Yen 5000 a person, get top attention and meet guests, who may speak English and tell you what and how to eat and drink. In a Sushi-ya in Otaru a patron taught us to gradually increase the intensity of the fish’s texture and taste during a meal, and how to drink Sake.

Sashimi – be it raw tuna, mackerel, scallops, octopus, squid, oysters, sea urchins, sea snails, star fish, slugs or any other unidentified floating object – triggers the most unusual sensations: To the eye it’s moist, colorful, silky, lustrous and sometimes shocking; to the nose it’s oceanic and fresh; to the teeth it’s either soft, chewy or even crunchy; to your palet it’s brackish and raw.

Occaisonally, Sashimi is presented as an art, as absolute perfection. But mostly its plain and straightforward, crude, natural and fresh, though never casual or random. Some say eating Sushi is war, but to me it’s a celebration of the sea and its creatures that have been unfortunate enough to jump in to your plate.

Among the more exciting dishes we had Uni (sea urchin) mixed in scrambled eggs that looked like: “No thank you, I’ve eaten”. But you better dig in if the Inn-owner is sitting next to you, watching every morsel entering your mouth. You may let it slip through your chopsticks a few times, but eventually you swallow it. There was the raw beef in Matsushima, the Chef seared for a second in front of us with a big blowtorch. Or Kajitori (Fin of Blue Marlin) soaked in Jellyfish sauce, that looked like a creature from the movie Alien. You suck the flesh from between the bones, and you can’t refuse it because it’s the speciality of the house. “Two more beers please”.

At Kesenuma, the biggest fishing port in northeren Japan, you’d think they bring in the entire marine life of the North Pacific every morning: hundreds of tons of Tunas, Sharks, Swordfish, Salmon, Scallops, Mackrel and Crab; a bloody spectacle. The auction worth millions Yen proceeds unnoticeable, but the stink of fish-guts gets stuck to your shoes for weeks.

Eating raw food does not stop with fish and beef. In Matsushima, Shikoku, the Lonely Planet asks: “Have you ever thought of eating raw chicken?” When we entered Kushihide Tori Ryori Honten the chef immediately knew we’d come for Ehime Chicken Sashimi. No menu required. To my buddy it seemed unthinkable to eat raw chicken, but here we were in Japan, the only place in the world where you might do such a bizarre thing. It turned out to be okay. The red meat was more tasty than the white, and the jug of Nama-Beeru was not seriously required. We cleaned up our plates. Still, I won’t be looking for Chicken Sashimi too soon again.