dinner with friends

A friend of T's invited us all over for dinner on Saturday. He's Japanese but lived in New York as a child and also attended grad school in New York. T met him at NYU and they played rugby together. He speaks English very well, and his wife speaks well enough, which was great because our Japanese is still pretty much non-existent. Their kids, a boy, 7 , and a girl, 9, study English at school but don't really speak English and so aside from D's hearty "konichiwa!" upon arrival, there was little conversation among the young folk. It wasn't a big deal, they just communicated in the language of Wii. The systems here come with a pack of kiddie games including one where your character runs frantically through a field of tall grass while aliens try to abduct you. They look very serious in this photo but they really had a blast playing together...

Just like at home, the visitors (our boys) helped themselves to the host's toys while he looked on with dismay. We promised him he would get his turn when they all came over for dinner at our place. Or at least we told his parents that and they passed it on. At one point the dad put on a Power Rangers video (in Japanese, of course) and that helped clear the air.

For dinner the kids ate pizza, chicken and potatoes, while the grownups had sushi, delivered. Must check ginsara.jp to see if there is a branch near us. It was fresh and delicious and came on a large round plastic tray: scallop, salmon, tuna, yellowtail, squid, mackerel, eel, egg (tomago) and shrimp. I ate everything except the egg and shrimp and squid. Scallop is my new favorite. Never used to touch it... It's customary to dip the pickled ginger in your soy sauce and eat it on its own. At a casual sushi restaurant it's O.K. to dip it in soy and use it to brush soy onto the fish (according to one local source). We were also advised to flip our sushi pieces upside down when dipping into the soy, rather than saturate the rice, to prevent the whole thing from falling apart. I feel stupid that I didn't think of this before.

For dessert there was fresh fruit, incredibly sweet strawberries and apple slices (our hosts laughed when I said I couldn't believe the fruit) and our friend's wife served small bowls of sweet red bean soup with mochi (I liked it, T did not). Apparently most families buy mochi (a sort of rice taffy) pre-made, in small round cakes, individually packaged. You keep a bag of them in your pantry and then heat them up when you want to eat them. Apparently adding a chocolate or strawberry topping, as they had done at the British School for the kids during shin nen kai, is not traditional, but a new trend. (All sorts of sweets are popular here; you can't walk a half block without seeing a sweet shop of some kind, selling pastries, custards, cakes, etc. etc. Rolled cakes are popular; think yodels only fresh. I saw three creperies walking through Harajuku the other day, and the samples-kiwi, banana, strawberry, etc.--all had big dollops of whipped cream and were streaked with chocolate sauce or caramel. Food shops, even small ones, typically have plastic samples in a display case outside.)

When it was time to leave we all said "domo arigato" (thank you very much) and "mata ne" (which is a friendly "see you again") and bowed a little. The lower you bow (and you're supposed to bow with palms on your thighs and with a straight back) the more honor you are bestowing. But it doesn't feel that formal, it's just nice and polite and friendly, and I have to say I prefer it to the air kisses/cheek kisses that so many Americans are into.

T's friend walked us to the Tokyo Metro stop and helped us figure out the child fare (T and I had our Pasmo cards, which work like debit cards).

The map board at the Yoyogi-Uehara stop on the Chiyoda line, which is close to where our friends live, is all in kanji so it was good to have Ichiro there.