I have been thinking about the people of Japan every since the devastation of the March 11, 2011 earthquake. Every time we went there we always met the nicest people. So polite and accommodating. I just wanted to share some of my journals from our time in japan as well as some photos.
I just dug up a journal from September of 1999. Some Executives from East/West, our Atlantic label affiliate in Japan, had taken us out to dinner. This is a partial journal from that dinner:
I’m sitting in my hotel room at the ANA TOKYO HOTEL, 26 floors up, starting into an overcast Tokyo skyline. Jetlag has hit me hard, and I’ve been waking between 2 and 4 every morning. My room is nice enough, decently sized, and a huge window at the end of the room overlooks downtown. Rain taps on the window. It was hot yesterday, rain today. The gig was great last night, Japanese fans are so great to play in front of. They’re like a microcosm of Japanese society- they’re polite, give you all their attention, and are sincere about it. Anything you say they clap like crazy for- but then it dies off quickly so as not to clap over the next thing you might say. It’s amazing, to hear it, I mean it REALLY gets quiet. It goes from Mark screaming ‘How are you TOKYO…!! and then there’s this giant roar of applause, thick and strong, and then BAM!-
Silence. You could hear a dime drop.
Last night a bunch of us went out. Stan, Rod, Mike and I went to dinner with three executives from East West, our label affiliate in Japan. They took us to a traditional Japanese restaurant and we dined on everything. We sat opposite them. They helped us with the food that came, and instructed us how to do it Japanese style- how much to cook this, that and the other thing.
The starter was fried rice, which all of us ranked among the highest of any dishes, then two forms of salad, one of which was plain leaf lettuce with sesame dressing, very light and good, the other a more shaved salad with bits and pieces of shavings; carrots, lettuce, cabbage and some squid slices thrown in for good measure. Seaweed soup was next, then raw fish that you dipped in some brown sauce. Next up was this beef that looked like uncooked hamburger, handpacked into patties, and it’s raw and you eat it just like that. I did. Then there was KOBE beef. Supposedly in KOBE, Japan, where this special beef comes from, cows are treated to milk and beer and daily massages. Yes. Backrubs and Budweisers- for cows! It’s supposed to keep the meat tender. Whatever they do, it works. They serve it to you raw, in tiny little squares, and you prepare it over a small grill in the middle of the table. You’re only supposed to cook it a minute or two, very rare, anything else they frown upon in a good-natured way. ‘Back to America!’ they tease. I must say I was a tad queasy to eat all the meat as raw as they liked it. But we did, and they smiled, obviously pleased.
They saved the most extravagant stuff till the end. Out came plates of big slabs of bloody meat in filets, thinner than KOBE, and longer. It was cow tongue, which I had, and then the liver and stomach meat came out. The liver was brown and looked do-able but I didn’t mess with it. We were getting pretty conveniently full by then. The stomach looked flat-out gross. It was orange-ish and slimy and bubbly, full of fat, and it probably would have taken me an hour to chew one single bite, which after a moment or two would’ve produced instant horizontal vomiting from me, hitting the executives square in the face with a green blend of everything I just mentioned.
I didn’t mess with the stomach.
Desert was green tea ice cream, I only had a bite. Good dinner. Kobe beef was the best.
