Gluttony

If you look around really hard enough, you'd realize, like I did, that there actually isn't much of a variety when it comes to food in Ni-hon.

It's just that they are everywhere, and in your face.

Save for the rare few Italian pasta/pizza cafes or burger joints, every other shop sells pretty much the same stuff to everyone. If you really want to live like the locals do, you seriously eat either sushi or ramen, or katsu-don, or curry rice, or simple local cold salad dishes which have become my favorite of late.

And they are really everywhere. It's just a matter of whether you found good or bad sushi.

When it's lunchtime, you could possibly be worse off. Because if you don't bring a lunchbox from home, you're probably reduced to either rice-balls or packed cold soba with chicken or pork from the fridges in the convenience store. If you're lucky, you might get some western-style sandwiches and salads. Which is what's exactly happening to my colleagues here, and which was what exactly happened to me yesterday.

When it's dinner, you could throw in small servings of deep-fried or barbequed or grilled pieces of meat together with your Ni-hon-shu. Otherwise, it's still sushi, or ramen, or rice.

As a Singaporean, you'd probably die of horror if you thought about it this way: imagine you could only choose between wanton mee, or fishball mee, or chicken rice, or western food, or McD's everyday.

But when I thought about it, I really didn't think I would die. In fact, it made me more alive. And then I started fantasizing about living in Japan and eating Japanese food everyday. And then I realized, yeah I might just die too - from gluttony.

I thought also about how the people here are so simple about their food quest. While others might contort their faces with disgust at the thought of eating the same foods everyday, the J-folks take much pride in savoring their rice-balls and simply aim to gain energy for the rest of the day.

After all, when you have food this good, why fuss about the others, or the lack of others?


I actually didn't mean to talk so much about food.

I had only wanted to say, I am so darn happy I actually found that darn awesome kaiten-sushi bar I went to once but three years ago.

And I didn't get lost.