A Week Ago Tomorrow

Last Thursday Chieko and I celebrated the 1 year anniversary of our marriage! Actually, we didn't really celebrate it at the time since we were busy wrapping up the school term, and knowing things would be slower this week we opted to put off the proper festivities. So tonight we went out and had an extravagant dinner, and by extravagant, I mean meat.

Beef is not a major part of the diet here. People don't generally eat steaks either, so when you do eat meat it's usually in the form of a McDonald's hamburger, or maybe a few meager strips of beef on top of a bowl of rice. In the supermarket, a steak we would pay no more than $5 for in the States costs anywhere from $15-$20 here.

The beef here is probably better quality though. In fact, up until recently Japan wasn't allowing US beef to be imported for fear of Mad Cow Disease and our loop-hole riddled, lobby softened, government regulated beef industry. US beef is being imported once again to Japan, but people here are scared to eat it. What you usually see for sale is beef from Australia and Japan.

Japanese beef is pretty good. They don't seem to have the massive, overcrowded cattle ranches we do in America, and my impression is that cows are better cared for here before they end up in our mouths. The best beef is prized for having marbled fat throughout, which makes it extremely tender, buttery, and melt in your mouth beefy goodness.

While Chieko and I have found beef heaven in a local steak house, we rolled the dice tonight and tried a new place that doesn't specialize in steaks per se, but in yakinikku. These are Korean style restaurants where you sit around a table and barbecue your own meat, which comes in bite size portions. This is nice because while you don't get the mass quantity of an actual steak, but you get to eat meat from all different parts of the cow.

We were escorted to our own small tatami room with a BBQ pit-thingy in the middle. This one was gas powered, but other places I've been to actually put a pot of hot coals on the table. The gas is a bit preferable only because you can adjust the level of heat it's putting out, whereas with the coals you end up sweating it out pretty good by the time you're done eating.



Then came the meat. I forget what this was, but the long, cube shaped pieces were the highlight of the evening.



Then onto the BBQ for a few minutes, eat, and repeat.

At some point they brought us beef sashimi. There's something inherently wrong in my mind with eating raw meat, but Chieko, who routinely eats MUCH weirder stuff, had no issues making this disappear.

I have a lot more pictures of other dishes we consumed, but you can only look at so many pictures of meat, and with the level of girth I have attained this evening, I don't necessarily feel like reliving this meal.

I was surprised this style of restaurant hasn't become more popular in America, but then it occurred to me that pretty much everyone has a grill and easy access to meat, so there's no real point in it. I'm sure in America somebody would end up catching themselves on fire and suing the restaurant for a bunch of money anyway. I think one of the reasons that I love yakinikku restaurants so much, besides the meat, is that BBQ-ing is such a big part of American culture, which is pretty much absent from Japan. Sometime I just need the pleasure of cooking meat over an open flame.

So congratulations to Chieko and I! We've made it through the first year, with many more to come. あいしてる　ちえこさん！