Back in January, in this post, I wrote about Japan’s de facto online price comparison site, kakaku.com. Much like Buy.com and other American equivalents, kakaku is constantly expanding their listings – from all manner of new and used electronics to insurance plans, hotel rates, and sports equipment. Even so, I was surprised to visit their page for the first time in quite a while this morning and find their newest listing: Funeral services.
Link:
http://www.kakaku.com/sougi/
I’ll translate the instructions for you:
STEP 1: Select desired funeral plan and region. Plans available are Cremation Only (I assume there’s a further choice of Regular or Extra Crispy), Family and Relatives, Standard (40 people), Standard (100 people), Company, or Special (musical themed or non-religious themed, etc.). Regions are currently limited to Tokyo and Kanazawa.
STEP 2: Make more detailed choices.
STEP 3: Receive a quote.
Quick! Easy! We’ll only charge you half the price of a new car to think up a special Buddhist name for the afterlife! Yes, I know I will go to hell for writing this. Satan, beware.
On a more serious tip, though, there’s a listing for a place in Tokyo that will burn a body for you for the modest sum of 136,500 yen ($1,250). Something to keep in mind.
Ask C. Buddha: Celebrity Dreams
Jen e-mailed about the newly-created Nick Nolte’s Diary and asked why celebrities are “always writing about dreams and feelings and flowery shit.”
Well Jen, that’s simple. Celebrities are, for the most part, total fucking pansies with a shitload of free time between making horrible movies, getting jasmine-infused honey colonics, and modeling for “charity.” As for the “vivid dreams” which are a trademark of their web writings, celebrities can obviously afford better drugs and booze than the rest of us.
Phuket Breeze
It was a glorious sunset over the mountains and we walked the endless rows of fruitstands and tourist giftshops in search of seafood. As we neared the plaza concentrated with seafood stands, a young man approached and invited us over to one of his tables. Other stall owners caught movement out of the corners of their eyes as they performed various tasks – wiping down tables, setting out plates – and also came over to beg our patronage.
“Cheapcheap!”
“You want snapperfish?”
“You want crab?”
“Good seafood! Best!!”
We were the very first customers of the night in the whole plaza, and we were being greeted accordingly; we quickly became the center of a very large and growing crowd.
“We have freshest fish!”
“Lobster good!”
“Seafood stew!”
We were inundated with the pleas of a dozen business-hungry vendors. What a wonderfully empowering, yet embarassing sensation! How to choose among them all? We listened to more pitches:
“You like Tom Yum soup?”
“We have noodles, sir!”
“Japanese beer!”
“Kon-ni-chiwa!”
In a fit of desperation, the solution suddenly came to me:
“OKAY ALL Y’ALL NEED TO LISTEN UP! THE PERSON WHO CAN JUMP THE HIGHEST GETS OUR PATRONAGE!”
Nobody seemed to understand this brilliant concept, so I demonstrated, hands raised in the air, I started jumping up and down. My, how they got into it.
“HIGHER LADDIES, JUMP HIGHER!”
As the crowd got even larger, filling with jumping bodies wearing aprons and chef’s hats, I glanced sideways at my companions. They both looked kind of shellshocked, and I admit, it felt a bit like being trapped in a House of Pain video.
A real asshole, at this point, would have led his companions away and made everybody feel stupid for performing tricks for free. I, however, was hungry, and judged the winner of the jumping contest on the spot. We ended up having a very mediocre seafood dinner at his stand, so I learned something valuable that day: How a high a person can jump is a poor indicator of their cooking skills. I learn new things every single day, I tell you.
For the next trip somewhere similar, I’ll have to think of a new benchmark. Any suggestions?
Kushiyaki in Shinsekai
Shinsekai means “new world”, and I can only imagine how striking this area must have been when it was new, a long, long time ago. Giant puffer fish(not called fugu in this area) lounge around a dense arrangement of lights, some street looking Japanese people hanging around, dark alleys cutting between the subdivisions on the block, and attractions reminiscent of carnivals in their heyday. Glare and inky darkness create a dystopic atmosphere in Shinsekai, bringing back snippets of Chinatown, Blade Runner, The Replacement Killers, Idoru (William Gibson), and other Noir works. I wonder how the food was in those world’s back alleys- Either Gibson or Stephenson wrote that most of the food available in his Shinsekai-like neighborhood was made of processed krill…
There must be about 10 different joints where they serve kushiyaki (skewered-fried food in the same family as shishkabobs and corndogs, but of different parentage) under the gaze of Tsutenkaku Tower, but the best looking one was the one where all of the locals were waiting to get in, right down this street. A huge counter surrounds the kitchen that runs down the middle of the length of the izakaya. The kushiyaki runs from 80 yen (regular fried pork cutlet and beef tendon- this item isn’t kushiyaki- stewed in a miso stew) to just over 200 yen per skewer (for more expensive stuff). You can sample so much for quite a reasonable price. The majority of the kushiyaki are prepared by frying them in panco, the bread crumbs that are used to coat tonkatsu.
It is unusual in Japan to have one of those food experiences where you wonder “Is it safe and sanitary to eat this?” (unlike the typical uninitiated gaijin question “Isn’t it supposed to be cooked/ not rotting/ dead when they serve it?”). Japan is typically the land where they will thourally package everything at least four different ways and use disposable wetnaps for every meal. Here, in the kushiyaki joints, the dipping sauce is shared in communal troughs with strangers and friends alike. Pools of swirling oil shimmer on top, and other random detritus can be seen floating, suspended in the collodial middle of the sauces thermoclamatic strata, or felt on the bottom by probing the benthosphere.
Like all wonderful late night culinary adventures, this place is best enjoyed over several mugs of beer. Beer tastes better with kushiyaki, and vice versa. And if you have any urge to satisfy your curiosity regarding something you would usually never eat, the beer will help you to go for it, and also serves as something to wash a bad experience past your mouth and into your gut. Using this very method, I was able to overcome killing, cleaning, and eating a live shrimp that quivered as it was digested inside my stomach, eat pig’s feet (the best thing I ate in Okinawa BTW) and other parts of the hog in their recognizable states that are usually reserved for the production of sausage, develop an appreciation for hormone (intestines) and every other type of innard prepared the proper way (I will never like cooked liver or kidneys, ever), and started to crave basashi (horse sashimi), grilled horse meat, and basashi liver. If you are content with eating exclusively out of McDonalds and convenience store food and have a need to use wetnaps before and after every meal, you will probably never understand what I’m talking about.
Oh, and just in case:
*Basashi should be enjoyed by wrapping it in a shiso leaf with paper-thin slices of tamanegi (onion) and dippped into shoyu with shoga (ginger) mixed into it. Wasabi is optional.
*Basashi liver is best enjoyed with paper-thin tamanegi slices dipped into shoyu with a few drops of goma-abura (sesame oil, the reguar stuff), and wasabi is optional.
*Like any other type of food, there is high-quality hormone and low-quality. If you eat bad hormone you will definetely know it, and the same is true of the good stuff because it will taste pretty good.
*Thanks to J for pointing out the mistakes in this entry.
Roadkill in Japan
Have you ever thought that your presence in this world wouldn’t be missed much if you suddenly died? You may be right. Whoever ran over the black cat and just left it there in the middle of my parking lot so all cars coming in or going out would run over it again and again, fuck you.
I wrapped it in my carwash towel and placed it in a nearby caged dumpster; luckily today was trash day.
This roadkill thing really gets to me, though. Roadkill is never cleaned up in Japan. When my pal Gatson’s dad came to visit, he observed this is because “it’s no one’s job to clean up roadkill in Japan, so it just stays there.” Pretty smart guy.
I remember a dachshund that got run over at the exit ramp of a highway in Osaka. The ramp had a traffic light that you almost always needed to stop at, so over the period of six months or so, I got to see this dog corpse in varying stages of decomposition. The most revolting stage was the maggot infestation, which happened fairly early on. Toward the end, it looked like a mummy with two big gaping eyeholes in the dessicated skin still stretched over its skull. The funny thing was that I never caught a whiff of it, even when it must have smelled really ripe, cause that’s just how fucking rank certain parts of Osaka get all year round.
Capoeira
My cousin Nana wanted a cameraphone pic of the Capoeira meet. Here you go, girl.
Shogako Statue
For some reason, I absolutely hate this statue. Lensworthy, though.
Monkey’s Uncle
As in, mean ol’ uncle Pete:
“New” giant ape found in DR Congo
Somewhere, Michael Crichton is raising a glass of wine and thinking, “I told you so.” And I for one give him full props – he even got the country right! It sounds like the primatologist, Shelly Williams, got extremely lucky she didn’t end up like Misulu:
Something struck him lightly in the chest. At first he thought it was an insect but, glancing down at this khaki shirt, he saw a spot of red, and a fleshy bi of red fruit rolled down his shirt to the muddy ground. The damned monkeys were throwing berries. He bent over to pick it up. And then he realized that it was not a piece of fruit at all. It was a human eyeball, crushed and slippery in his fingers, pinkish white with a shred of white optic nerve still attached at the back…
…And he saw Misulu. Misulu lay on his back, in a kind of halo of blood. His skull had been crushed from the sides, the facial bones shattered, the face narrowed and elongated, the mouth open in an obscene yawn, the one remaining eye wide and bulging. The other eye had exploded outward with the force of impact.
Bad, bad monkeys!
Capoeira: Getting Inverted
Yesterday we went to a capoeira meet at the Budokan at Sumiyoshi Taisha in Osaka. We were invited by Adam’s pal from Kumamoto, Luke. We were supposed to meet other friends there, but they ranked because they are weak/married, etc.
Luke is a fascinating man who was born in South Africa and has travelled around the world studying various forms of martial arts. He has the kind of posture, a way of movement, that says: Hardcore. Basically, he was more focused than most of the instructors that showed up for the meet, and that impressed the hell out of me.
This being my first exposure to capoeira (commonly defined as an Afro-Brazilian dance form that incorporates martial arts moves), I brought along my aging camera and did some damage. Check out the extended entry linked below for the rest of the photos.
Van Helsing: Further Thoughts
Come to think of it, the vampires had nice tits, too. Also, the vampire lord looked just like my friend Osaka Bill, with strandy Robert Smith hair and all. I highly recommend this movie to anyone who likes hearing other people snore during $20 million scenes.