“Do you eat squid?” 「イカ、食べられますか？」

My friends.

I hope you are living your best life, and if you’re not, I hope you’re working your way towards it.

I feel obligated to start this post with an apology. I’m sorry. I know that we had a good thing going, some consistency, in the length of my posts. This is why I’m apologizing, because now I’ve gone and written one that is about three times longer. Prior to this, every post had been created in a single, heroic, instantaneous outpouring of spirit – but not this one. As I sat down to write this, time passed, the hour drew late, and I realized that finishing this story in a single sitting would just not be possible. And this distressed me, somewhat. Up until this point, I have never left anything to be come back to and continued the next day, or in a few days, let alone had a work that was pieced together over the span of several sessions, and I think up until this point I had avoided doing this for two reasons, the first being that I was afraid I would lose some consistency, that I would come back to the story having a different feeling or having no idea how to pick it back up again, to find those past threads of thought and start weaving them once more; and the second, that I am a sucker for instant gratification, which is what you get when you start, and complete, something in a single interval of time. I thought about these things, when I realized that this post was going to take more than a single day to complete. At the end of the first day of working on this, I had to end the day knowing that I had not yet finished, and had yet more work to do, and I didn’t like it – but the next day, as I was walking through the school parking lot, J.R.R. Tolkien came to mind, and how he spent a total of seventeen years working on The Lord of the Rings, and I thought, you know, if he can do that.. I can probably spend a few days working on a single post. And there was no other way to do it, as this story just didn’t want to be told in fewer words, and I would not forcibly restrain it. I had also written this one again by hand, meaning it is fully-baked, and so I couldn’t see how long it would be, and am surprised that it’s come out to the length it has (I measure the length by the time WordPress tells me it takes to read my posts). Up until now, they’ve all been at around 15 minutes, and this one’s coming out to 35. And that’s why I’m apologizing! Because I’ve gotten you used to the short and sweet, and am now setting this beast of a post before you, and asking you to read it all. Well, I’m not really asking. You don’t have to read anything I write, obviously, you’re all here by choice. But I want you to feel good about the choice you’ve made, and so I hope you do enjoy it, as long as it is. And I recognize that every word I type in this preface is serving to make an already long story even longer, and so I’ll shut up now, and let you get started..

In the last post, I told you that I had another story for you. About another food that starts with an s. I told you that it was squid. I am not going to do to you what I did with the bowl story, which was to tell you that I had a bowl story, and that I’d tell it to you soon, tell you that it was coming, and to keep putting it off, letting it hang, promising, next time, next time, before eventually conceding that next time was a lie to you and me, and that we both needed to accept that it would be told at an undetermined point in the future, and leave it at that. No, I won’t do that again. That was just as annoying for me as it probably was for you, because I knew that I had made a promise, and the burden of fulfilling it, and the acute awareness that it had not yet been fulfilled, and that each of my subsequent promises became hollower, and flimsier, and the thought of the bowl story started to fill my thoughts, hanging over me and haunting me with visions of an actual bowl over my head.. I won’t make the same mistake. You get the squid story here and now.

It’s also just better to tell it now, while it’s still fresh. In that way, the eating of a squid, and the story about the eating of a squid, are not so different. So, the squid story.. where do we start?

I guess we start with the day. It was Friday. Last Friday. At the time of me writing this, it was last Friday. At the time of typing, it was last last Friday, and incredibly enough, at the time of me posting, it was now last last last Friday. At the time of you reading, it could have been any number of Fridays ago. And none of that really changes anything, does it? I’ll still say it. Friday is a Shoyo day (Shoyo High School), and that means I walk. It takes all but seven minutes to walk to Shoyo High School. On the way there, I go uphill. On the way back, I go down. I make a total of three turns, on this walk, the third being the turn onto Shoyo school grounds. It’s an easy walk. You might imagine, then, that there would not be any need to drive there, and you’re right – yet, for probably the first year of my ALT career, I drove to Shoyo High School. Why? One, I guess, is because I could. When you have a car, you drive places. That’s just how that works. Two, and this was more of an excuse to justify not walking over anything else, is that, on that uphill walk to Shoyo, there are about fifty to one-hundred students, a small student army, marching rank and file along that road; pilgrims making their daily pilgrimage to their temple of learning. By giving up the car, you must become a pilgrim, a priest among the pilgrims. This reason is sufficient to keep at least one of the Shoyo teachers living in my apartment complex, Nagata sensei, and perhaps all, from making the walk to school. “I’d have to walk with the students!” She tells me. There are three other Shoyo teachers in the complex, and, whatever their reasons are, they don’t walk either. I have a fantasy, a mental image that I think would be pretty funny if we played it out, that at least once, one morning, we all met up outside of the building, said, “Morning. You guys ready?” And we all made the pilgrimage together. It would be a spectacle, absolutely. I think we would also build some nice camaraderie. Anyways, horde of students be damned, I started walking, after I had the thought, “Why the hell do I drive?” And it turned out that the decision that thought inspired, the decision to walk, was one of my great decisions. Some dominoes, when you push them over, will knock over one, or a few, maybe a handful of dominoes, as a consequence – and some dominoes will activate Rue-Goldberg machines. This domino was the latter, for the number of interesting things that have happened as a result of my decision to ditch the car were as many as that of taking that first step in the Rue-Goldberg sequence.

Off the top of my head, here’s what I can list. When teachers would ask me how I come to school, a popular question back in the day, I’d tell them, “I walk!” And they would always reply, “You’re so healthy!” This, paired with the fact that I’m munching on a steady diet of nuts, seeds, and raw fruits and vegetables throughout the school day, leads them to think that I am healthy person, and possibly the kin of some small furry mammal or bird. Of course, giving my fellow senseis the impression that I am the epitome of health is great. It is, however, a relatively trivial thing, compared to the number of incredible bug-related discoveries I have made along this walk. You would think that over the course of a seven minute walk through a semi-rural Japanese suburb, there could not be all that many incredible insect-related discoveries to be made; but you would be wrong. On this walk, for example, I saw my first ever ゴマダラカミキリ, that is, a gomadarakamikiri, named after the large white spots that pepper its black back, resembling goma seeds. I saw this enormous black and blue beauty, clambering up one of the tall, thick blades of grass in an undeveloped lot in my neighborhood. The moment I laid eyes on it I froze, whispered “Oh my god..” softly to myself, and ran back to my apartment to get my camera (my good camera – of course I took some precautionary shots with the trusty iPhone). And upon returning, and not seeing it, I was nearly frantic, until at the last moment spotting it trudging around down in the thick bases of the blades. I was a bit late for work that day, but I made up for it by enthusiastically showing anyone who made the mistake of showing me any shimmer of curiosity, any flash of interest in me or my camera that day. “Sensei, I’m so glad you’re here, you’ve got to see this, you must see what I found this morning.” To which the responses were, “Good Steven sensei, good!” (Shota Sensei) “Is it a bug? No, I can’t look.” (Nagata sensei) “Ah, it’s ゴマダラ虫ね.” (gomadaramushi,ne) (Hase sensei). And it was because of this sighting, that when I saw that they had one day cut down the grass in the lot, I was aggrieved, and complained to my neighbor, Tamanaga san, “But what about the kamikiri!”
I also saw a スズメガ (su-zu-meh-ga) (I’m writing this in Japanese because I don’t know the English for it), a brown, feathery, fighter-jet-esque moth, adhered to the sheared dirt wall of the hill that the road cut into, blending in sublimely with a smattering of dying leaves and hanging roots (I don’t say perfectly because I did, after all, see it). And I think the only way I had been able to spot it was that I had now had a trained eye, having had taken in several hungry local boys (voracious, fat, orange and yellow spotted black caterpillars, with sharp, switching tails) and being curious about what they would become, and not having the patience or desire to wait until I could see it for myself, looked up their final form. I ended up raising two different types of caterpillars, last year – and that was an experience that helped to get me through the early days of the corona era, and is a story unto itself. There are several other bug experiences I can name – spotting assassin flies, not knowing at all what they were, only that they were big, menacing, and had white butts, and finding a massive ant den, nested in the side of a vertical, stacked rock wall, with the boundary of the den lined with miniature pink and white flower petals. But, bugs sightings and good impressions aside, there was yet another positive to come out of this seemingly small decision to walk, and it was by far the best – joining the pilgrims.

Every morning, then, unable to section myself off, cloak myself in metal and glass, and dash past them, I was now a part of them, a part of it, that procession – coming up and out of my neighborhood, stepping out onto that perpendicular road, and merging into the flow, joining the uphill march. In the beginning, the students were surprised to see me; so much so that some of them would jump up, put a hand to their chest, and cry out, “Oh, びっくり！” (Surprised!) Although, I suspect this was due less to seeing me, and more to hearing English. The girls in particular are slow walkers, shuffling their feet, carrying on conversations, and I like to keep a brisk pace (I’ve got places to be you know, mainly, the school) and so I would often find myself overtaking them, and tossing out a genki, or sometimes not so genki, “Good morning!” which would so often startle them. Again, whether it was the unexpected sight of Steven sensei, at 8 in the morning, or an unexpected hearing of English in the wild, or the fact that they are shuffling their way to school in a sort of half-dazed stupor, driven by instinct like a zombie to new hunting grounds, and are being shocked back into the world – or a combination of all three (this is probably the answer), I don’t know. Some days, that would be the extent of our interaction, the students’ and I’s; but some days, I would find myself falling into stride with one, or two, or three students, and we would walk together, and have a nice conversation. These have been some of the most relaxed conversations that I have been able to have with the average student. They also give me the chance to connect with students who would otherwise have no engagement with me at all. For most of them, that was a welcome opportunity; but my mind is taking me back to a boy who said the words, “Oh no.” as he saw me and realized I would be walking with him, and talking to him, on the way to school that morning. He was unfortunate enough to be the only one around on the way to school then, and so it happened that he became my buddy for the walk, like it or not, and he didn’t, based on the look on his face and the number of times he would say “Oh, oh no..” after I would ask him a question, or really just say anything at all. That conversation was a struggle for him, and I could actually measure how much of a struggle it was, because he had a habit of repeating my questions, or what he thought were my questions, to himself, in Japanese, which I would understand, and think, “Ah, close!” or “Yikes, not even.” But he tried, which is the only real thing I can ask of any of my students, and I saw him visibly relax when we finally reached the school and parted ways.

One of the most interesting conversations (if you can call it that, and I think you can) was just recently, with a girl I will call Translator Girl. Translator Girl was walking ahead of me, as we were going home, walking slowly, on the other side of the street, and as I neared her I could hear that she was singing. She was completely oblivious to my presence, until I was about right across the street from her, when she noticed me, giving a little squeak and an embarrassed giggle, and putting her hand over her face. I thought that was cute, and I crossed the street and asked, “What are you singing?” And she pulled up the song on YouTube and played it, and sang a bit. I said, “It’s a nice song. Why is he singing about a cat?” (The song was called neko (cat), and the only thing I really understood from it was that the singer thought his friend had become a cat) And Translator Girl holds up a hand and says, “Sumimasen,” and proceeds to type out a lengthy explanation into Google Translate. And I’m standing there thinking, you know, this is fine, song lyrics are difficult to explain and she wants to get it right. She finishes, and holds up the phone, I read it, nod and say, “Oh, ok!” And then I ask another question. And she again says, “Ah, sumimasen,” in a very soft voice, and goes back to the phone. It was the third time she turned to Google Translate that it dawned on me – I was not going to hear this girl speak any words to me other than sumimasen. And so, from that point, until we got to my apartment, as she was walking to her complex just a bit deeper into the neighborhood past mine, we carried on a conversation in this way. Together, taking a few steps, me, asking a question, us, stopping, her, typing out her response into Translate, holding up the phone, me reading it, acknowledging that I’d read it and understood, and us, taking a few more steps. When we finally reached my apartment, I said, “Well, this is my apartment!” We stop, and I wait for her to type out her goodbye. She holds up the phone, and it reads, “Sorry, I’m shy.” And the final message, “But I really enjoyed walking with you today.” Flash forward to the next week. You would not expect a girl who cannot carry a one-on-one conversation (verbally) with her ALT on a walk home from school to be his ally in the classroom, but she was. That week, I had class with 1-4, the fourth class of first years. A difficult class, unresponsive, apathetic, one of the (fortunately) very few classes I have where trying to get them to answer any question or talk to me in any way is like trying to pull teeth; a class where your “Good morning!” Is met with one good morning in response, and the follow up, “How are you today?” with complete silence. When even the customary, conditioned, introductory “How are you today?” is met with silence.. you’re in for a rough time. As the class dragged on, and my 100% answerable, I-know-you-know-the-answer-questions were met with increasingly greater resistance (What is the driving age in Japan? When can you drink alcohol? When can you vote?) there was one girl willing to speak up, and to my surprise, it was Translator Girl. We had bonded on that walk, her and I, and now, in the middle of this unforgiving lesson, she wasn’t going to let it flounder, not too much. She had my back. I was benefitting from that lesson I had learned early on, through my participation in all the different club activities, festivals, and events – good relationships outside of the classroom translate to good relationships inside the classroom. My walks with the students were even inspiring enough to prompt Ms. Shizuku to write, as her comment on a class’s collection of farewell letters to me, “When I met you on my way to school, I was happy.”

The final of the great things that started to happen when I ditched my car, was the fact that I started seeing my neighbors, the Tamanaga clan, much more frequently. I wrote a bit about Tamanaga san before, my first Tamanaga friend, living in the house across the street, posted up on the hill, in front of my apartment complex. He lives there now with his wife. His son, daughter-in-law, and two grandkids, Yuta and Riku, young bucks around the ages of five and seven (I think, I’m not good with kids ages) were all under the same roof, until maybe a year ago, when they had a new house built a little further up the street (you could throw a rock from one house to the other)(or something less dangerous, but still firm enough, like a marshmallow, or a Nerf football). And the household divided, like a cell that has undergone mitosis. Naoko san, the “Momma san” (Japanese people do say this) is often out in the morning, getting ready to take the younger buck, Yuta, to school, at the same time that I leave for Shoyo, so I often pass by them when they’re coming out of the house, or getting into the car. Sometimes I’ll see Yuta sitting in the passenger side car seat, looking down, and I’ll stand in front of the car and wave until he notices me. Sometimes I’ll catch Naoko san and we’ll have a short conversation, and wish each other a good morning, and I’ll tell Yuta to have a good day. All that good neighborly stuff. On the way back, then, I’ll often run into Riku, who will be walking to or from his house or his grandpa’s, Tamanaga san’s, usually wearing that iconic, bright yellow hat that Japanese schoolchildren wear, and I’ll hey, “Hey Riku.” Sometimes he’ll just say hey, and sometimes he’ll tell me a short story, that I either won’t understand, or won’t understand why he’s telling it to me, but I always appreciate it either way. I can understand him a lot better now – I remember our first hangouts, where he would spew forth enthusiastic torrents of totally unintelligible Japanese, and I would turn to Naoko san, or Tamanaga san, and say something along the lines of, “What is this child saying to me?” And they would often respond with, “Wakarimasen.” Even they did not know. I also often bump into Tamanaga san, out and about, and sometimes Tamanaga san Jr, his son. It feels a bit strange to call him Jr, because he’s younger-middle aged and totally built, almost as wide as he is tall. He has the exact same build as his dad, in that way – they’re both solid squares of power. But I don’t know what else to call him, as I don’t know his first name, having forgotten it like almost every other first name that I’ve only been told one time. This was actually causing me some trouble, when I was first getting to know them, because I was calling them all Tamanaga san, and finally Naoko san said to me, when I asked where Tamanaga san was, “Steven, you can’t call us all Tamanga san. It’s confusing. He is Tamanaga san.” And she pointed to Tamanaga senior. I know all the other names, but not the Dad’s, and someday I will learn his too. But for now, he’s Tamanaga Jr. The only member of the Tamanaga squad that I don’t usually see is the Mrs. Tamanaga (Okusan, wife), at least not out in the street. This all means that, on any given day, if I am going to Shoyo that day, there is a very high probability that I will find a Tamanaga on the way. It’s nice to know your neighbors, to be on friendly terms with the people living around you, to know who’s inhabiting these buildings, who’s tending these gardens. It gives the neighborhood some personality. It makes me wonder what it’d be like to live in a small settler town, where everybody knew everybody, where you couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into people you knew, or what it’d be like to live in an old medieval town, taking your goods to the market, passing everyone by. I imagine some of those little interactions would be welcome, and some would be dreaded, but at least you knew who these people were. Compare that to the gargantuan, multistoried apartment complexes, full of hundreds, if not thousands of people, all living in a space of several thousand or hundred thousand square feet, sectioned off into their own little boxes, all, or many of them, strangers. There are many ways of living, many different kinds of human experience. But to get back to it, last Friday (we are now talking about last Friday again, although it was actually two Fridays ago, or depending on when you’re reading this, possibly many Fridays ago, if you care at all) the Wheel of Tamanagas was spun, and this day it landed on Tamanaga Jr.

I told you, the man is thick, a walking slab of muscle, and so it was not surprising to find him that day, walking to Tamanaga san’s place, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and looking quite comfortable, even though it couldn’t have been more than fifty degrees Fahrenheit out – although it was sunny. I trailed him for a bit, trying to avoid breathing in too much of the smoke coming off of his cigarette, before catching up to him, giving him a nod and a “こんにちは。” He looks up, replies in kind, and then looks back down. Knowing that this is more of an American greeting than a Japanese one, but not knowing how else to initiate a conversation, I followed up with a “Genkidesuka?” (I say this is more of an American greeting than a Japanese one, because it is similar to saying “How are you?” and that’s just not a typical Japanese greeting, although they certainly do say it. A similar point.. Americans often like to end an interaction with “Have a nice day!” And I would often say this, and I still do say it at times. But after I was once met with total confusion by a cashier at a home improvement store, and was laughed at by one of my coworkers, and was told that “Japanese people don’t really say that,” I have learned. My friend tells me though, that, as a foreigner, I can say it and it’s cute – so I still use it.) Tamanaga Jr, to my genkidesuka, while still looking down, replies, “Genki, genki.” It seems that he’s thinking about something, and a moment later, he looks up and over at me, and says to me, “イカ、食べられますか？” “Do you eat squid?” I don’t know why he’s asking me that now, but I do know that I eat squid, and so I say, “Yes, I do eat squid!” To which he replies, “Chotto matte kudasai.” (Wait a minute). He heads back to his house, with me following behind, and invites me in. I’m standing in the entrance space, admiring pictures of the kiddos posing in some traditional Japanese dress, and the most recent of their artistic creations, and soon he comes back, says, “Sorry for making you wait,” and hands me a plastic bag. And this is how I found myself returning from my walk home from Shoyo, that Friday, with a bag containing one squishy, slimy, freshly-caught, football sized squid.

Ok, maybe it wasn’t quite football sized – but it wasn’t much smaller. I actually thought, based on the size and weight, it must have been at least two squids. People often give me things – things that I have to cook, things like daikon, and Roman Broccoli, and bowling ball sized citrus fruits, things that I am immediately intimidated at the sight of and would never buy at the store, and I know the people who give such things to me never realize how stressful it is for me. “Oh you know, you just chop it up, add a little so-and-so, it goes great with so-and-so, just do X for 5 minutes, then some Y for 20, and finish with a little Z, and you’re done! And don’t forget to wrap it in wet paper towel! At least, this is what it sounds like to me, when they’re explaining it, and this is in English. In Japanese.. What? What did you want me to add? What am I supposed to do? And for how long? What is this thing even called? Who even are you? In such situations, nine out of ten times, I will fall back on a tried and true tactic – the re-gift. This is one of the top-tier strategies that I have developed for coping with my life in Japan, and is particularly important if you are living that life as a minimalistic, clean-eating, not-cooking human being. The re-gift is a total win-win-win. The person who gave you the gift is happy, the person you end up re-giving it to is happy, and most importantly, you’re happy. That is, as long as you didn’t have to go to any extraordinary lengths to do the regifting. I tried this strategy out with some wasabi packets I had been coming into. I can’t say it was really regifting, because they weren’t gifts, but rather I had bought them, as they came with the Direx sushi I was fond of buying, along with packets of soy sauce, but those I did use. At first, I never thought anything of it. When I didn’t use a packet, I just would empty it out, clean it, and recycle it. But after doing that a few times, I couldn’t help but feel that it was just wasteful, and that there must be someone in this school who would like to have this wasabi packet – I just had to go through the effort of finding them. I am true to my convictions, and so the next time I had a wasabi packet, instead of washing it down the drain, I took it the teachers, starting with, naturally, the English department. I first tried Goto sensei, my tantoshya, who sits right next to me. If she took it, I wouldn’t even have to stand up to get rid of it. I asked if she wanted some wasabi. She was eating onigiri. (Is not usually paired with wasabi). She declined. “Umm, I don’t really eat wasabi with onigiri.” Then, leaning over, and extending my voice to Kawasaki sensei, at the desk one over from Goto sensei, “Kawasaki sensei, wasabi?” He pulls out a packet of his own. “I’ve already got some, thanks.” I now have to stand. I get up, and walk into the larger office (we’ve separated ourselves as a coronavirus preventative measure). I try Hashimoto sensei. “I’m ok.” Hayashi sensei. “I don’t like wasabi. Too spicy.” Finally, Chestnut Mountain. “I’ve already finished my lunch.” Desperate, and having now exhausted the low-hanging fruit, the English department, I turn over to Sanaoka sensei, the tall guy who didn’t laugh at my Kumamon-falling-off-the-train video, and say, “Sanaoka sensei, how about a wasabi packet?” And he laughs. “No, haha. No, no.” This was significantly more difficult than I imagined it would be, and I was now tempted to consider this a failed endeavor, not worth the time, and that I already tried anyway, and this little wasabi packet was destined for the sink, and subsequently the recycle bin – but then, as I walked my way back across the office, I noticed Fujimoto sensei, and I knew I had found my man. You see, Fujimoto sensei is my kouhai. The kouhai senpai relationship is an integral part of Japanese culture and any school-related Japanese anime. It is complex, and yet, it is simple. Kouhais do what senpais tell them. That simple fact, and the fact that I also hardly ever talk to Fujimoto sensei, meant that the chances of him rejecting my wasabi packet were slim to none, regardless of whether he likes wasabi, is allergic to wasabi, or the food that he was now eating was wasabi friendly or not (it wasn’t). I walked over and up to his side, and announced, “Wasabi for you!” And set the wasabi packet on his desk. He looks down at the packet, and, after taking a moment to realize what is happening, that Steven sensei is at his desk not only talking to him but also giving him a packet of Direx sushi wasabi, he replies, “Oh.. thank you!” And it had been done; the re-gift was a success. This was certainly the greatest length that I’ve ever gone to find a use for something so insignificant, out of principle, and was also the only time that I’ve ever abused the senpai kouhai relationship. After that, I made it much easier on myself – I just set the wasabi packets on Goto sensei’s desk, along with some choice motivational words. “Hey, keep up the good work.” Wasabi. “You’re doing great today.” Wasabi. “You rock.” Wasabi. Realistically, all this really meant was that the wasabi packets were being stockpiled in her desk instead of mine, but that didn’t matter. I had done my job, I had passed the burden, I was now relieved of all the responsibility of ownership that came with that packet. I think that at the time of me writing this, it’s safe to say that there are between four and seven packets of Direx sushi wasabi sitting snugly in the top right corner of her desk, unless she’s thrown them out. And I do think she’s even used one before.
So, what I was getting at here.. when I’m given something, especially something that I don’t want or have no idea what to do with, there is a stress. Tamanaga Jr.’s squid fell into the second category, and on any other day, the acquiring of that squid would have been a crisis for me. That Friday, however, it wasn’t, because of, coincidentally, another mollusk; or rather, a girl with the name of a mollusk, Maimai.

Who is Maimai? Maimai is a friend of my friend Emily, an ALT living in Nishihara, a small village to the south-east of Ozu. Emily and Maimai are best friends, and go on many adventures – in particular, surfing adventures. Being good friends with Emily, it was only a matter of time before I was roped into their adventures, some being fun (camping out on the beach, stuffed toe to head in a tent meant for two, being accused of “manspreading in my sleep”, spending the day being destroyed by giant waves while choking on sea water) – and some not fun (camping out on the beach, trying to spend the freezing night in a tent with no blankets, as I forgot to bring blankets, and that is slowly filling up with water, as I forgot to put that seemingly trivial pyramidal flap called a rain fly on over my tent (“I wonder what this is for?” I at one point asked myself), so I ended up moving to my car, which wasn’t any more comfortable, only less wet, and attempting to sleep, being at regular intervals shocked awake by especially violent shivers, and waking finally to find that the ocean that day is furious, and will not be accepting any surfers who are not willing to drown for their thrill) (I needed at least two weekends to recover from this one).
So, Maimai is adventurous. She is the reason why Emily, and inevitably, I, started going these grueling yet enjoyable weekend camp-surf trips. She is a lover of nature, and the great outdoors, traveling, taiko, and carpentry. She lived and worked in California for a few years, and so, we can actually have lengthy conversations without my brain melting. As the Japanese say, she is very perapera when it comes to English, and a commonly spoken phrase between Emily and I, as we discuss the machinations of the Japanese language and the fascinations of the culture, “We’ll have to ask Maimai.” Her name is actually not Maimai, but Maiko; but I immediately took to calling her Maimai. “Does anyone call you that?” I had asked her, to which she replied, “One of my friends does, but I don’t really like it.” I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out later that maimai is another word for snail, and is made up of two of the same kanji put together, the kanji for dance, 舞舞 In other words, the word for snail is “dance, dance.” Things like this are why I love the Japanese language. Maimai claimed that she doesn’t like being called Maimai, and for awhile her initial response to my use of Maimai would be met with, “Don’t call me that.” But that phased out once she had discovered her retaliation: Sven Sven. Maimai crafted this after Annie, another ALT in the group, living to the east in Aso, the town with the largest active volcano in Japan towering over it (they also have really good milk), and Emily attempted to dub me “Svenny”. It had something to do with my Swedish heritage and the name Sven being a popular Swedish name, and getting a kick out of saying “Sven Svenson”, “Sven”, or “Svenny”; I didn’t understand any of it and I genuinely did not like it, and Maimai picked up on this immediately, and pairing the uncomfortability of Sven with the repetition of Maimai, Sven Sven was born. It has gotten to the point, where, like a dog, or a child, or anything ever that has been named and is aware enough to realize it has a name, I’m now trained to respond to it, automatically, as I did last week, riding my bike home through the center of Ozu, on my home from a day at Ozu High, and I heard “Sven Sven!” called out to me from above. I looked up and saw Maimai standing on a second story balcony, waving with one hand, and holding a hammer with the other. Maimai enjoys carpentry, but she also gets paid to do it, and carpentry was the reason why, along with a proposed exchange (copies of Studio Ghibli movies for Japanese classic novels – she settled on Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s Kumo no Ito) Maimai was coming to visit me, that Friday afternoon. And her coming to visit me, that Friday afternoon, was in turn the reason why I was not, like I would have been on any other day, not in crisis mode, after receiving a slightly-smaller-than-a-football sized squid from Tamanaga Jr. And Maimai did not know it then, but she was my saving grace, my guardian angel, my ace in the hole; because Maimai was going to help me cook this squid.

The rest of this story is essentially a case study in what happens when you give two people of moderate cooking experience and adventurous spirit a squid to cook, and let them go at it. Being the surfer, carpenter, outdoorswoman that she is, I knew that Maimai was not afraid to get her hands dirty – and yet even then I was surprised. Before she had finished replying to my question, “Have you ever cooked a squid before?” (The reply was, “No.”) She had it on the cutting board, already halfway torn apart, body cavity open, and organs spilling everywhere. Before I could finish thinking my next thought, moving on from “How the hell do we start?” to “What the hell do we do with all these guts?” Maimai was saying, “It’s pregnant!” And showing me a hundred tiny golden eggs – like squishy, ovaloid balls of tapioca (my high school girls would not appreciate me making this reference). There are two kinds of people in this world. There are people who, when given a squid to cook, waste no time in tearing it apart; and then there are people who spend more time thinking about how to tear it apart than actually doing it. Typically I am a adherent of the try-it-and-see-what-happens method, but in the face of this squid, not so much, and I suspect that time I dissected a squid in a college Zoology course had something to do with it, for I was trained to look at organisms in a more anatomical sense, than a culinary one. The next thing Maimai shows me, as I’m struggling to collect the copious amount of organs, eggs, and unrecognizables, is the beak, as she hands me a small, black, dense sphere, and says, “The beak!” As I peel back the flesh to get a better look at it, and not a second after I’ve satisfied my curiosity and set it down, I hear Maimai gasp. “すみだ!” (Ink!) I look over and see that, after a particularly aggressive rend, the body cavity is now flooding with black. Our squid is now bleeding ink. Vigorously. As the surgeon cuts, and the blood overflows, so the surgeon requires a quick aide, to clear it out, and give them an unobstructed view. I instantly recognized my role, and I performed it well, moving the squid over underneath the spigot, applying calculated, periodic blasts of cold water, filling up the sink basin with jet black ink. Had we known about the sumi before, we noted, somewhat regretfully, and with all the pragmatism of a surgeon surgeon-assistant team, that we could have saved the ink and used it for calligraphy. But even professionals make mistakes – especially when they’re not professionals, have never even received any training, have never even attempted to do surgery before, let alone on a member of a different species. Maimai was fast, the squid was surprising, and I could hardly keep up, but somehow, at the end of this flurry of slime and dismemberment and evisceration, two things had, like magic, materialized: a cutting board with a heaping mound of tentacles, body flesh, and mantle, and a bowl with everything else; everything else being the hearts (yes, hearts – squids have multiple; three in fact, as genius Google is telling me now – two branchial hearts, on the sides, and one systemic heart, which is central) eggs, gills, stomach.. with the head neatly placed on top, to cap it all off, eyes facing out, scowling eyes that watched us the whole time and said, “If you don’t make me delicious I swear to God..” And I ate those eyes, but not at first. First we had other business to attend to. Sashimi business.

We had a lot of cooking to do, and we did the easiest of it first, which was, no cooking at all. We ate it raw. Needless to say, after all that disembowlment, (there are an amazing number of words related to destruction, and the destruction of an organism) we were quite hungry. As we worked, Maimai had given me a piece to chew on, and even raw, the squid had plenty of flavor, even a bit of sweetness. However, paired with soy sauce and wasabi, like most other raw, savory delicacies, it’s full flavor potential was unleashed. As with all things that achieve such a level of deliciousness, it was gone too soon, and we were on to the next question – what to do with the rest of the body? There were some bits that were too thick to be eaten raw, comfortably, and that we had to find something to do with, something that did now require some culinary skill. As we enjoyed our hard-won sashimi, Maimai had listed off a few possibilities, and they were all impossible, given the fact that, depending on how many days it’s been since I made my last trip to the grocery store, there are anywhere from one and nine different ingredients in my apartment (excluding spices and Tabasco, of course – you know I keep a well stocked spice shelf). All impossible, that is, except for one. I don’t know what the appropriate cooking-related Italian word to use here is, of the myriad cooking-related Italian words, but it was one of those, plus squid. A little tomato, onion, garlic, butter, and tentacles, and bada-bing-bada-boom, we had ourselves a five-star Italian squid dish. A nice glass of red wine would have complemented it well – but we would have had to finish it quickly, because with our next dish it would not have paired as nicely. For the last dish, as far as dishes go, is where things got interesting. The flesh had now been consumed in its entirety, and what was left? Nothing but the naizou. The guts. And the hearts. And the gills, and the eyes, and the eggs, and.. you get it. Throughout this adventure, Maimai had been asking me, “Should we eat all of it?” And my answer was the same, every time. “Mottainai.” No waste. If it can be consumed, it will be. This did not really stem from a desire to eat squid eyeballs, although there was naturally some curiosity there. As I am an inquisitive person, so I am also an inquisitive eater, and it’s not often I get the opportunity to add something really exotic to the list of interesting things I can say I’ve eaten (some things I’d put on that list: sea urchin (bad) chicken brain (not bad) chicken eyes (bad) jellyfish (neutral) raw horse (good with soy sauce) natto (fermented soybeans, worst)). But the desire to waste nothing was not a matter of hunger, or curiosity, as much as of respect. This squid died so that we could live, and I felt that eating it was the only way to pay it proper respect. Eating all of it. Here Maimai’s knowledge of squid-related recipes came up a bit short, offering only one solution – marinate it and make a soup. Marinate is not a word in either of our cooking vocabularies, but even if it was, we did not have the time, or the ingredients, or the will; and so we did what I do with anything that you don’t boil, microwave, blend, or eat raw – we chopped it up and fried it. Now, here’s a culinary tip for you: How do you know when your squid guts are done cooking? When they smell enough not like squid guts that you can stomach eating them. Another tip? As you cook your squid guts, consider (properly) removing your squid’s ink sac. The choice to do so or not comes down to whether you would prefer your finished product to have a nice grey, grainy, charcoal-like glaze and texture, bathing in a pool of black darkness, or not. And here the difference is, surprisingly, mainly an aesthetic one, as the ink doesn’t much change the flavor profile; or at least, that is what your tongue will tell you, even if your brain finds it hard to believe. Squid organs are surprisingly palatable, although they need some good spicing, as without it are quite bland. The eyes may be hit or miss. If you imagine eating a savory, saltier, but just as explosive cherry tomato, and that sounds alright to you, I’d say go for it, and make sure your mouth is closed when you take that first bite.

In the days following this squidly experience, there were a few things that really struck me. One was how willing Maimai had been to dive, hands first, into the world of squid cooking. There was no fear, there was no hesitation, only swift and decisive action, guided by intuition. There was, to use a phrase Maimai has recently adopted, no dilly-dallying. (and she taught me the Japanese, ザボっている, zabottieru) Maimai operated on a modified version of that old truism, regarding doubt, and working: When in doubt, cook it out. The second thing that I found myself left with was the lingering and acute awareness of having just consumed an entire animal, from head to tentacle tip. Think about it – when was the last time you had, by your own hands, butchered an entire animal, opened it up, laid eyes on its fresh, raw organs, reduced it down to little bits, fried it up, and ate it? Prior to this, I would have answered “Never.” to that question. But all of the meat that we eat starts off this way, as a whole being. And to get to the point where it’s a beautiful red patty, or link, or thigh – it has to go through this process. If not by your hand, by another’s. It’s a whole different way of seeing things, to have squid sashimi served to you at a kaitenzushi restaurant, arriving via conveyor belt, appealingly placed on a small round plate, sitting atop a perfectly sized bit of rice, looking trim and beautiful, as you sit and teach your friends about American dad jokes, versus having squid sashimi served to you at home, served by you, after having just dismantled the whole squid, and hacking off those bits of sashimi yourself. Either the way the end result seems to be the same: they’re both food. And yet, one of them feels much more like food than the other. After feasting on any number of my favorite kaitenzushi sushis, of which there are many, I have never felt inclined to say thank you to the sushi, to neither the fish, the rice, the seaweed, nor the mayonnaise (you might be surprised to hear that there is mayonnaise on sushi – Japanese people like mayonnaise) that make it up. But after eating that squid, I felt, and still feel, a total gratitude towards it. The Native Americans, after a successful hunt of their prey, the bison, and the deer, would pray after a kill, and waste none of the animal’s life, because they felt this too. Logically, conceptually, I know that the piece of squid sashimi that adorns my kaitenzushi sushi at one point came from a living, breathing, inking squid; I know that the shrimp in my ebi fillet was at one point several pink, scuttling shrimp. And yet, I really knew nothing about how it got there, what that process entailed, truly, or how it would make me feel, until I had done it myself – and I will now never look at a piece of squid sashimi the same. I have long thought, if I had to raise, catch, kill, and prepare everything that I ate, how would I eat differently? How would it change me? How would people change, if everyone had to, before they could be allowed to eat a certain animal, hunt and kill one themselves, or see it happen? Should you be allowed to gorge yourself on animal flesh, having never had to yourself face all that was necessary for it to arrive at your plate? Would you want to? In the way that the cooking of this squid did, I wonder how I would change through the experience of butchering, let alone hunting and killing, a pig. Imagination, words, facts, even video – none of it is comparable to lived experience.

The third thing that struck me was this: I am living in Japan. Of course, I know I’m living in Japan. I’m reminded of this every day, by the thousands of juicy orange spheres (mikans) at the grocery store, by that enormous active volcano spewing ash off in the distance, by the illiteracy. I know I’m in Japan; but there are still some moments that stand out to me as being even more Japanese, as rising above the daily average of Japanese-ness, as extraordinary, distinct moments, that really grab me by the shoulders and shake me and say, “Hey, hi, hello, it’s me, Japan! Still like me?” The earthquakes are good at this too, because they have the power to do it literally. (We had an earthquake in my area here a week ago that was a 4.2. When it started I was home, and I first thought that there was an enormous truck passing outside of my apartment, or a train, but then I remembered that neither of these things would be possible, and so, “Hey, this is an earthquake!”) The squid was not so much of a shoulder grab moment as an earthquake; or say, last week was, where all of the teachers at Ozu High gathered together to watch a live broadcast of the Prime Minister, Suga Hideyoshi, and the Emperor, Naruhito (who, fun fact, most/many Japanese people don’t know the name of, because they typically refer to him as Tennousama, emperor) leading a.. what do you call it.. a kind of national grieving, a memorial service and a reminder that ten years had passed since the Touhoku earthquake, the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that leveled entire cities and triggered the Fukushima meltdown. This was more subtle, but it was another such experience all the same. People just don’t give out fresh squids in Indiana. And while that may seem like a small thing, all of these small things summed up are what equal my life here, and are what make it so interesting to me, and that keep me here, and make me want to stay longer.

The day after our feast, the first thing on my mind was the squid. Maimai and I had wondered how our digestive tracts would handle the squid’s, and mine handled it just fine. I woke up with an empty stomach – the squid was no more. At least, not in the form that you would consider it a squid. It had been eviscerated, macerated, then disintegrated, and was now being absorbed, and re-appropriated, becoming me (or, what was not absorbed, soon to be leaving me). Whether it was destined to be a part of the one who it had fed, or to be recycled back out into the greater ecosystem, where it would all end up eventually, its duty was done; its part was played, and the cycle of life, upheld. For this, along with going the extra mile and giving me a good story, I have to say thank you, squid. I think I also have to say thank you, Maimai, for without you the squid would have brought me considerably more panic, and certainly a less compelling story, and to Tamanaga Jr., for giving me it in the first place. And I think then the only person I’m leaving out is his co-worker, who caught it for us, and thought to give it him.. but if we go down that road, we would also have to thank his friends, who helped him catch it, the captain of the boat he went out on, the makers of said boat, the various crabs and fish that fed the squid..

And the squid story is finished! The end! We did it!

This took a real toll on me. The typing, more so than the writing. I hope you enjoyed it – maybe you’ve been motivated to go out and try cooking up a squid of your own?

For the time being I really have nothing left to say, if you can believe that. I am all written out. But, like I’ve been doing, and want to keep doing, I’d like to leave you with another quote. It just seems like a good way to wrap this business up. I don’t have any quotes related to squids, unfortunately..

This quote is again from Ralph Waldo Emerson (when I first typed this I typed ‘Walph’ and instantly thought of Elmer Fudd). And it’s short, and short is good, right? Easy to remember.

“Power ceases in the instant of repose.”

If I could apply this to the story and make it relevant: “A squid won’t cook itself.”

That’s it! I want to say one more thing – I said that this story wouldn’t be written in less words, and that is true.. but I was encouraged to spend more time working on a piece in part because of all of the good words that I’ve been getting from you all, and without them I don’t know if I would have been so willing to do so. To everyone who’s been reading and enjoying these posts, and has told me so, your words mean a lot to me – and if we ask how much, apparently enough to get me to write almost three times as much as usual. I write with all of you in mind, and it wouldn’t be the same if you weren’t reading it. So thank you!

皆様ありがとうございます！

Until the next! Jya mata ne!