A few days ago, my wife Masumi decided we should go to one of her favorite cafés for a special Saturday lunch. She certainly deserved a weekend reward for her hard work — and her job has been especially stressful the last few weeks — teaching music at an elementary school in nearby Inagawa.
This was the lunch set for that particular day at Café Arbour.
Let me be entirely candid. There are many ingredients in this meal I don’t recognize. There are many ingredients you certainly would never find in a typical American lunch: jellyfish, daikon (radish), koyadofu, soumen, sansyo (Japanese pepper), to name a few.
But isn’t that the point? Isn’t that part of the incredible journey of discovery intrinsic to marrying into and living in a completely different culture?
In a way, I end up with the best of two worlds. We still enjoy Western foods — or the best semblance of favorites from the West which are available here — quite regularly, either by my efforts in the kitchen or by going to any number of area restaurants. But I also get to sample, taste, experience and savor a whole new range of cuisine. And trust me, when you get deep into “traditional” Japanese food — as exemplified by our special lunch at Café Arbour — you end up discovering flavors I never could have imagined before. Some take getting some used to, while others are amazing from the get-go.
Let me give a truly unique example of how this cross-cultural pollinization can work.
Anyone remember this Mother Goose poem? . . .
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper;
A peck of pickled pepper Peter Piper picked.
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper,
Where’s the peck of pickled pepper Peter Piper picked?
I can’t say this piece of doggerel ever inspired in me anything particular profound. And I frankly assumed that ‘pickled pepper’ was a nonsensical phrase chosen for its alliteration.
But . . . I was SO WRONG!
At our lunch, right there for the taking — and admittedly they were delicious! (in a peppery pickled sort of way) — were . . . [drumroll] . . . are you ready? . . .
And that, folks, is how bridges are built between lands and cultures separated by history and thousands of miles of geography!
