lingqi's Journal: Feburary 12th, 2004

Feburary 12th, 2004 (5:24pm)

I think it's worth noting that due to the BSE scare in the US, Japan has stopped beef import from the US.

This has a little tiny impact that all of the gyu-don (beef-bowl) shops get their beef from the US because of its cheap prices. Consequentially, since the prices cannot be maintained at their current levels, Sukiya has stopped serving gyu-don a few days ago, and yesterday was the last day that gyu-don was served at the more venerable yoshinoya.

Yoshinoya has been serving this stuff for over 100 years (I think it's 105, but maybe 150 - It dates all the way back to the edo period apparently), but finally stopped. People lined up in front of the shops trying to get their last craving satisfied before they had to switch to pork-don instead.

Emotional patrons interviewed on TV talked about how their hand shook as they emotionally gulped down their last bowl of gyu-don.

Now, to get something straight - gyu-don is like the absolute cheapest food you can get at a restaurant, even cheaper than ramen... So it's not like we are talking about something that everybody is eating everyday (though it may appear so to certain segments of society, like college kids). It would be like McD stopped serving big macs (temporarily, even), which, as far as I understand, hardly anyone ever orders because they'd rather have the other more frequently changed menues and tried some of the newer inventions. I guess these staples are like air - taken for granted and missed sorely when they are not around. Nonetheless, I don't understand how one can get to the point of being visibly shaken for something that you know is there but almost never eat (I had ate gyu-don maybe twice in a year), despite it being something that is famous just because it's there.

Television programming also caught up on this and talked about "japanese meat crisis" or somesuch, it all sound hilariously apocolyptic, because after all it's just a very temporary pause in the importing of cheap beef.

The upside of this is that while Japan has stopped importing Tailand and Chinese chicken, it is able to supply the domestic need of poultry - nontheless people are buying very little of it due to bird flu scares, and I am scoring massing amount of chicken at the supermarket for just a tiny bit more than the gas it costs me to get there.

OT question

[heliocentric]

I've had this question for some time, and I was going to post it as a full blown JE by myself, but you never friended me so I know you (probably the best person to answer it) would miss it.

Here are my assumed facts (I've been told these or read them several times in different sources, I do not know how correct they are but they are the basis for the following question)

presumptions:

1. In Japan soy-sauce is called "shoyu."
2. The soy bean did not dictate the name "soy sauce" rather it was the other way arou

Re:OT question

[ObviousGuy]

According to this site, [tokai.or.jp] it's pronounced DaiZu.

But according to this other site, [momonga.org] it's pronounced MaMe.

I'll go out on a limb and say that the correct reading is the first one. That said, in common speech I have heard MaMe used much more often than DaiZu. The term for boiled soy beans (a typical otsumami) is edamame, so mame, though technically covering all beans, is also understood to mean soybeans specifically unless otherwise nuanced.

Re:OT question

[lingqi]

"mame" is the word for "beans" just in general; while the specific beans (i am thinking, soy) that soy sauce is made from is called daizu. In chinese it would be "yellow beans."

anyway it's also the stuff that tofu and soy-milk are made of. on a slightly unrelated note, to make soy-milk, the daizu is processed so there is the soy-milk (which tofu also comes from) and the left-overs (which in china generally gets used as feed, AFAIK), but since the left-over part has a lot of fibre a lot of soy-drink in japa

Talking about the left-overs...

[KNicolson]

The shells - okara - are, as I learnt watching Izumi no Trivia a few weeks back, technically classed as industrial waste! Some factory was chucking them away - fly-tipping? - so they got sued and the result was an "industrial waste" tag, as there was just so much of it.

On the other hand, they said if everyone just ate 15 grammes of okara per day, that would result in zero waste.

Oh, and if you like okara drinks, I hear it is something ridiculously cheap per kilo, so you could buy it raw and make your own s

Meat from America

[ObviousGuy]

I was talking with a couple people who have connections far up the chain at Yoshigyu and it seems that the imported American beef is basically the runoff of the American beef industry. Whatever scraps of fat and gristle that are left after processing a cow are sent to Yoshinoya (and Sukiya, I guess) for little more than the cost of shipping. That's how they are able to keep the prices so low, according to my friends.

It's also the reason why they can't simply switch to Aussie beef, which would be the logi

Re:Meat from America

[lingqi]

Hmm; interesting - I was kind of wondering why they don't switch to australian.

What the heck does the australians do with their beef scraps though? feed them to kangaroos? I don't think the domestic pet-food market is THAT big...

Anyway, gyudon is actually not too bad especially when you mix in a raw egg. definitely worth a try at least once. (at the mean time, there are yoshinoya in CA and China, amongst i am sure many other international locations, so even if japan has problems, you can still find beef d

Re:Meat from America

[EggDye]

Thanks man. You just ruined Gyu-don for me. I guess I really liked beef runoff rice bowls. ;)