Shopping for food in Japan is a lot like a game of consumable Russian Roulette for someone who doesn’t really know how to read Japanese. Add in the fact that some seafood makes me fantastically ill, and shopping becomes a health hazardous wonder. Nevertheless, I do it almost every day and I am rather proud of the fact that the majority of what I have purchased has not made me sick.
Now the longer I live in Japan, the less likely I am to buy something I can’t eat, something that really makes my life easier day by day. When I first arrived in Japan, I would walk into the store and only buy things I had either eaten in America or in Korea. Shin Ramen soon became the corner stone of my diet because it was cheap and more importantly because I knew what it was. There are very few things more disappointing than opening a container of instant ramen and finding miniature shrimp wandering about, making a mockery of your oceanic impairment.
As fun as eating instant spice ramen and grilled cheese sandwiches for every meal was, I knew I couldn’t possibly keep eating the same thing for ever. So I ventured out a little. I bought vegetables and fruits because they were easily recognizable in their natural state, although the cucumbers seem unreasonably small and the apples look unnaturally big. I also started buying things packaged in clear plastic like meat and nuts. I even eventually worked up the nerve to buy stuff that didn’t come in clear packaging as long as it had a very detailed picture of what it was. Most of the time that worked out well. Although the times when the packaging misrepresented its contents were far more amusing. For example, when you think you are buying flavored rice mix and you end up with a lot of riceless powder. Or you think you’re buying happy children’s candy and you end up with something that tastes like chalk.
It wasn’t until I inherited a second-hand refrigerator that smelled like someone had been hiding a dead clown in it for months, that I became more daring in my shopping expenditures. Normally, I would not have accepted the generous gift of a funky smelling fridge, but the refrigerator in my apartment smelled like a zombie’s foot and it honestly had no idea what I was buying most of the time and I decided that all food and it sounded like it was going to explode in the very near future. So I took the stinky fridge over the stinky time-bomb fridge.
Not knowing much about stink removal, I called my mom and asked her what to do.
“Lemon juice or vinegar should do it,” she said.
“Cool,” I said. “I’ll use both.”
Her response came after a brief, concerned pause. “You should really only use one or the other.”
Although my mom probably had a good point, I decided to use both anyways. So I went to the store and found lemons rather easily. The vinegar wasn’t quite as easy. There was a whole isle of bottles that looked like they could possibly be vinegar and I didn’t really want to accidently wash my fridge with something that would make the smell worse. I stared at the bottles for a good five minutes before I discovered the stock-boy putting soy sauce on the shelf behind me.
It was a little bit embarrassing seeing him standing just a few feet from where I was. As most of my friends know, I have developed the odd habit of talking to grocery store items. It was something that started when I was working in Korea. I would stare at boxes for hours trying to figure out which one had the product I wanted in it, before getting frustrated and scolding them, “What are you? Why can’t you tell me what you are? Your picture of a tap-dancing bear is useless to me. What does that even mean? Are you bear food are or you food in the shape of a bear? As far as I’m concerned only one of you is consumable and I am not a bear.”
This usually brought fits of laughter from my friends who unfortunately weren’t always with me when I was shopping, since when I was shopping alone, people just looked at me with concern for the weird foreigner who was talking to boxes of laundry detergent.
The longer I lived abroad, the calmer my conversations with grocery store items became. Eventually evolving to the mere question, “What are you?” and the statement, “I am suspicious of your contents.” I also became less concerned with what spectators thought of me. I figure as far as they know, it’s normal to hold conversations with inanimate objects.
Nevertheless, it was a little awkward having questioned random bottles of liquid before approaching the stock-boy. But it had to be done and I pulled out my dictionary and looked up vinegar before approaching him.
“Sumimasen (Excuse me),” I said. “Suu (Vinegar)?”
The boy, who was probably still in high school looked at me scared for a while before walking over to the wall of bottles I had been staring at and saying something.
“Ano (Umm),” he said. Then he looked at me really concerned for a moment.
“Suu,” I said again and in case my pronunciation was really off, I showed him the word in the dictionary.
“Ano,” he said again followed by a long and complex sentence that I couldn’t understand at all.
“Sumimasen,” I said again. “Nihongo wakarimasen. (I don’t understand Japanese)”
Once again the stock-boy looked scared.
“Sho-sho matte kudasai. (Please wait a moment.)”
The boy ran off and I assumed it was never to return. So I continued to stare at the bottles hoping that one of them would magically provide an answer.
To my great surprise, the boy returned and pointed at about seventy-five percent of the bottles on the shelves.
“Suu?” I asked again. There were at least fifteen different bottles he had pointed at.
“Hai,” he said before he just kept talking.
My plan of pretending what I was saying was ruined when he ended his last sentence in question form and I did not have any way of answering. Luckily, I didn’t have to. A woman came up next to me and said, “Is there a problem?”
“I need vinegar,” I said. “And I don’t know which one.”
“What kind of vinegar?” she asked.
I wanted to say fridge-cleaning vinegar but even in America that would sound weird, so I lied.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The recipe only say vinegar.”
“Then buy that one,” she said. “It’s really cheap and just as good as any thing else.”
I thanked the woman and the stock-boy for helping me out and bought the vinegar, cleaned my fridge, and enjoyed the smell of lemon salad dressing every time I took food from its frozen house.
After my vinegar encounter, I became bolder with my food choices. I had in the meantime learned hiragana, katakana, and some kanji. The hiragana help me discover which foods had Japanese names which usually means that they were probably something I would have no idea how to cook. Katakana help me discover which foods were foreign foods made by Japanese companies as opposed to the foreign foods imported from other countries.
The kanji remained useless since to this day I only know the kanji for bookstore, horse, and being troubled. Being troubled is my favorite since a friend told me that it was a man in a box and such a person is bound to be troubled since he is indeed stuck in a box. There is probably some brilliant story as to why this man is stuck in a box, but that doesn’t make him edible. Nor do I find a horse or a bookstore to be attractive items on a menu. So anything that has a kanji name is a food that’s beyond my recognition in Japan.
Nevertheless I continue to buy food and I continue to eat it and I enjoy the little adventures I have along the way.
