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Journal lingqi's Journal: August 25th, 2003 9

Journal by lingqi

August 25th, 2003 (10:08pm)

It has finally been sunny through the weekend. Humid and hot just like what a "real japanese summer" should be like.

Consequentially, my navigational system crapped out from the intense heat inside the car, and is now under repair at the dealer.

That also served well to spoil most of my plans of goin anywhere this weekend.

There was, however, an interesting sushi bar I found. It is hidden away around the intersection of Route 17 bypass and Route 125. The place is just like any other sushi bar, small, a very "lived-in" look, a TV on the far corner showing baseball, etc...

The interesting thing must have been the owner. He realized quite fast that I am not japanese, so he took that opportunity to do two things:

1) chew me out like I am a piece of dumb-sh*t, and
2) basically force me to eat all these sushi recommendations and run up the bill...

I mean, that's sales technique right there! I wish the salesmen in my company can chew out say, HP (or whatever), and then still shove them a few testers worth a couple million a pop.

So anyway - after asking where I lived, to which I replied Gyoda (which is true), he mumbled on about "how is it possible that somebody lives in gyoda and speak such poor japanese, what an idiot, etc" I distinctively heard "baka" somewhere in there, so I am 100% sure about the idiot part.

Then he proceeded to shove me various dishes: snail looking whachamacallits, fish that he said was his favorite (looks like small mackeral) but has no taste, very very sour sea-weed thing, and lots of ice cream.

By the time the second ice cream came, I was basically running away from the counter (in japanese it would be "nigeru"). I even had to temporarily suspend my principle of not eating on the car (brought the last ice cream bar and finished it while escaping from the restaurant's vicinity) - but by then the damage has been done: 3800yen for lunch...

damn...

But seriously though, if I had a company I am definitely hiring this guy as VP of sales.

side note: I heard that when enjoying sushi, you always eat the egg first - reason being that amongst the sushi dishes, only the egg is dependent on the chef's actual skills, while the rest are more dependent on the fish's freshness. Of course, if the chef's skills have no relevance to the majority of the food you will consume, I find it quite pointless to actually examine his / her skill in the first place... but I only regurgitate what I hear.

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August 25th, 2003 More

August 25th, 2003

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  • You could have walked out on him (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pbox ( 146337 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @04:03PM (#6786965) Homepage Journal
    You could have walked out on him, right after his initial comments, sparing him of earning $$. Hopefully that would have been rude enough towards him too.
  • He may have just been berating all Chinese in general.
  • I speak as an undertravelled American with absolutely no experience in Japan but an understanding of what American sushi bar culture says about Japanese sushi bar culture. Consider this a general disclaimer. It's worth noting that "the egg" refers to an egg omelette dish (at least, in the States) and not to the separated yolk of a quail egg, which is also a sushi dish (at least, in the States). The egg omelette (tamago) is supposed to be an exemplar of the chef's skill. The more layers it has, the thinn
    • GRR...I apologize for the bad formatting. If I don't post on Slashdot often enough, I get too used to LiveJournal, which interprets carriage returns as BR tags. Sorry! ;)
    • ahhh. very interesting analysis.

      My understanding is that since you don't have time to prepare the fish during the day, the fish would be filleted all at once (not necessarily the morning, as the fillets can be refrigerated and used the next day(s).

      cutting sushi from fillet isn't particularly... difficult. and when the place get busy you don't have time to make everything fancy anyhow...

      and then you have osaka sushi which are all box-compressed regardless, so the cutting is even out of the question.

      oh we
      • oh well, whatever. you are right that social conventions don't have to (or maybe don't even usually) make sense - but it does make one wonder: why would such a convension come into existance in the beginning?

        Probably because the convention made sense to some group of people at some time in some way. The 'narrative', or the process used to make sense of something, then changed, but people continued to hold onto the practice anyway, since continuity and tradition are comfortable. It might also have been t

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