I always like visiting supermarkets when I'm travelling; what is the most simple and mundane of acts when you're at home, once in another country becomes a fascinating adventure that provides unique insights into the local way of life. How and what people eat every day, and how they like to shop and prepare food, is such an embedded aspect of culture, and supermarkets reveal a great deal about it. (This of course applies intranationally as well as internationally, and across socio-cultural as well as geographic borders -- comparing the products available in Waitrose versus Morrisons, or in Hulme Asda versus Burnage Asda, also yields some interesting results!) And there are usually tasty and interesting new food experiences to be had as a result.
The fun multiplies exponentially, though, when not only do you not know what half the products are, nor what or how they are to be cooked or used, but you can't even try to read the directions to figure it out! Let's just say that going to the supermarket instantly became one of my favourite activities on arriving in Japan. Through a combination of practical experimentation (eat it and see), internet research and language learning, I am gradually demystifying the secrets of Life (that's the name of my local supermarket). But there are so many things still to try!
Another pleasing feature of Japanese supermarkets is that, because
there's a lot of emphasis on freshness (most Japanese people go food
shopping every couple of days, rather than once a week, and buy things
just to eat that day or the next), there are a lot of products with
limited shelf life -- and hence, at the end of the day, a lot of about-to-expire-by-tomorrow products reduced to clear. At home we call this "Whoops!" food, after Asda's reduced-to-clear labelling system; here, one of the first few characters I learned to read was
引, because it appears on a lot of doors: "pull". So, Pull-price time: usually from about 5pm at Life.
Clearly I went to the supermarket at the right time tonight, because all of these exciting deli items were 40% pull-price! (Except the onigiri; that was 20%, but as it cost me about 80yen, I'm not too worried.)
What's even more exciting than getting a delicious and varied dinner for just over half-price, though, is that I can now recognise all of the kanji in the names of each dish! But, and this illustrates the complexity and the difficulty of learning to read Japanese, that doesn't necessarily mean I understand what they are, or would be able to ask for them in a restaurant, that is, know how to say them. Let's take a look and see how this works.
Clockwise from top left, we have:
かに 風
味 サラダ 少量
This is probably my best one for reading, as I know the meaning and the pronunciation of all the characters -- and yet I still got it kind of wrong. The first two hiragana are "ka-ni", that means
crab; the next one means
wind, which on its own is "kaze"; then
taste, "aji"; then the katakana (used to 'spell' foreign words, and hence often recognisable as words from sounding them out -- provided the loan language is English, of course!) are "sa-ra-da",
salad. The last two just mean
little and
quantity. So, crab wind-taste(?) salad, small-size: "kani kaze aji sarada"? Except that when you put
"kani" and "kaze" together they become another word that itself means taste, or flavour, and is pronounced "fuumi". Obviously.
九州産ほうれん
草のごま和え
Ok, actually I'm pretty good with this one, but more through knowledge of Japanese food than reading ability. Individually, we have nine ("kyu") - state - product - "ho-u-re-n" - grass - "no" (a particle that indicates possession and also does about a million other things, most of which I don't understand) - "go-ma" - harmony - "e". I happen to know, though, that nine-state is how Kyushu, the southernmost main island of Japan, is written; I also discovered the dish known as "horenso no goma ae", spinach with sesame dressing, at my first-ever Japanese restaurant experience, and have loved it ever since. "Kyushu horensou no goma ae" it is, then.
ずいき
の酢の物
These were one of the first mystery foods I tried from the supermarket deli section, and after trying them, I was still none the wiser as to how to identify them, except as "some sort of delicious pickle". A more experienced friend was able to enlighten me: apparently they are taro stems. Now, however, I can also read the name: "zu-i-ki" no
vinegar no
thing. Here again my general knowledge of Japanese food helps me as much as my rudimentary knowledge of Japanese language: I know that
thing is often "koto", "mono" or sometimes "ji"; I also know that a style of lightly-vinegared cold dish is called "sunomono". Sure enough this is "zuiki no sunomono", and via Google I discover an interesting story about why taro stems are called "zuiki", meaning to
weep for joy. They
are very delicious!
豆腐
ハンバーグ
きのこあんかけ
I've seen these on pull-price before and not bought them; the first time I peered at them, unable to read the packaging, I thought they were some kind of chicken patty. However! The first character I've recently learned (number 1548 in the Heisig RTK 2200, 75% through!) as
bean; the second is
rot. I know, though, from seeing them together in more recognisable contexts, that
bean-rot means tofu.
(Incidentally the Japanese pronunciation is tou-fu. Tofu, 渡仏 [transit-Buddha] means "to go to France". Yes, they have a specific verb for that. What?) Then we have, in katakana, "ha-n-baa-gu", hamburger; and "ki-no-ko-a-n-ka-ke". I know that "kinoko" is a sort of soy bean powder used as seasoned coating, and a bit of Googling tells me that "ankake" is a style of cooking meaning food cooked in a thick starchy sauce. Indeed, not chicken patties at all: these are tofu hamburgers with kinoko, doused in a potato-starch thickened savoury sauce, and very tasty too. I will be buying these again.
伏見唐辛子土佐煮
This is probably the clearest example of how knowing kanji often doesn't help you to read at all! I know every single one of these characters from Heisig and yet have no idea what this says: prostrated-see-T'ang-spicy-child-soil-assistant-boil. Some work with Jisho reveals that prostrated-see is how you write the place name Fushimi, and a T'ang-spicy-child is a capsicum or hot pepper, pronounced "togarashi" (aha! as in shichimi togarashi). Soil-assistant seems to be pronounced "Tosa" but can refer to a number of different things, mostly place names, none of which seem to be particularly associated with boiling ("ni"). So this is Fushimi-togarashi-tosa-ni, but I'm not sure what the last part actually means!
So, there you go. Adventures in food, culture and language, and all at 値引き後価格, price-pull-ki-behind-value-status: "nebiki go kakaku". It's Japanese for Whoops.
One of the places I enjoyed was Masa 14, not far from me on 14th just south of U St. The combination of outdoor deck on a still-sunny autumn day, tasty small plates featuring fusion flavours, and a great selection of Asian-inspired cocktails, was just what I needed to finish the paper I was working on!
