Sulfur and salt burned all its soil

Piza with tuna and corn. Not bad eh? It was one of the best pizas I've had in Japan. Nothing close to Partenope's, of course, but I was almost willing to call it "pizza." Or maybe I was just trying to be nice, given the situation.

So here's the story.

On the way back from Miyagi-ken we stopped in a city called Koriyama. The evening before Pastor Heo had asked me "Are you ok stopping over at Koriyama for a couple of hours?" "Yes..." "You know about Koriyama, don't you?" "No..." "In Koriyama the level of radiations is 3 to 5 times higher than the safety threshold" and then he went on telling me numbers of becquerels and God knows what else, but all I could hear was the blood rushing through my veins and my heart drumming. Finally I reemerged: "I have to stop and visit another pastor who has to move his church to another location because of the radiation level in town. He feels alone and I wanted to give him some support. Is it ok if we stop there for a couple of hours?" I did not have the heart to say no to such an awful situation. How many radiations could I absorb in two, three hours? Much less than the people of Koriyama who have no other place to go. In the previous days I had already been rained on; we had drunk tap water most of the time; we had used it to make miso soup and cook, so what difference would a couple of hours make? "We all die once in a lifetime, so just do it" said the little voice inside.

During the trip I heard the word "kosher" in the middle of a long conversation in Korean and I knew exactly what they were talking about.

After a two-hour ride we arrived at Koriyama.

Koriyama looks exactly like every other small Japanese city: really high and low buildings, a mixture of new and old, of real and imitation wood, of single-family houses and small housing complexes; fake Edo Era business stores next to sleek modern ones. The other pastor, Pastor Pak, who would take us for lunch, was waiting for us in the lobby of the fanciest hotel in town, and from there we went to a very cool Italian (sic!) restaurant and bakery where we had to wait online. It took half an hour before we could be seated somewhere, as the place was packed. The whole menu was a feast of shrimp and other treif delicacies, but there was also the piza with tuna and corn. And all you can eat radioactive panini fresh out of the oven and really tasty.

My two companions kept chatting in Korean, and Pastor Heo often translated their conversations. Pastor Pak also every now and then would switch to English for my sake and so during that meal sadly I got myself an education about Koriyama.

There is one part of the city where radiations are really not too high and one where radiations are really high: This latter part of town was where we had to be, of course, and that’s where Pastor Pak's church is. He is looking to relocate it, but not too far away, because he wants to keep his flock.

From the conversation at our table it emerged that everyone in town knows, it is not a secret, but people don't have another option. Young children in town have become increasingly sick, suffering from bleeding, breathing difficulties, lack of energy and other kinds of illnesses that some doctors connect with the high radiation-levels. Other doctors don’t. And everyone is left to their own devise, abandoned by the central government. What could Tokyo do, anyway? Where could they put all 350.000 people? With cash taken from which prefecture’s empty coffers? The enemy is invisible, so in a way it doesn’t exist. Why worry then?

Those who could, left, especially if they had family in another prefecture. According to Pastor Pak 10% of the population has moved. In some cases the working spouse is here, while the other spouse with the children are gone. The foreigners, mostly English teachers, have packed and left unless they had other personal reasons to stay in town.

From the window I saw young, little girls in their school uniforms trot along. They are a common sight in Tokyo too, on their way to and from school in the big city, alone despite their young age. When I see them I usually think of my nephew and niece, who live in a much smaller city but will never enjoy this kind of freedom and I feel envious of them. There, however, all I could feel was pity, sadness and a sense of relief that my nephew and niece are not in Japan. Because God only knows what will be of these 5, 6 y.o. girls with their cute hats and braids, who now wear also a mask as if the flimsy cloth could protect them and their young lungs. On top of the mask many parents have apparently decided to have their children wear always long sleeves and a hat. But what about the water they drink? The food they eat? The soil they walk on? By the way, City Hall has given school principals instructions to scrap the soil in their school yards, 3 to 5 cm to remove the radioactive particles. Now in those very courtyards mounds of soil await the day when they will be buried 3 feet under. Parents of the school pupils did the scraping, of course. The truth unfortunately is that no matter how much they scrap, more radioactive material gets there constantly, and what is already there will not disappear just because they shuffled them around in the court-yard. Unfortunately this plan of removing dirt and burying it under more dirt it’s only a way to feel they are doing something, all they can, to protect their children.

The stories told at our table were in complete dissonance with what was happening around us: customers apparently enjoying relaxed conversations and good, old, Italian-style treif; waiters and waitresses serving one dish after another and pampering the clients, in the usual Japanese way: “More water? Let me change this for you. Another panino?” What else is there to do when you kind of know what life has in store for you and you don’t like the cards fate has dealt you?

What I wouldn’t do for a piza…

And the earth was one language…

When words travel during their journey sometimes their meaning changes, and their original sound has no connection with the new thing they now describe. One of these is the word 'pizza.' In my trips around Japan most times piza (with Japanese spelling) seems to be the safest option so that’s what I end up eating. But that’s what it just is: piza, not pizza.
First there were the two piza in Shikoku, the mothers of all bad piza. After them there were: the piza made of nuked frozen dough, subsequently pressed with a machine and sprinkled with ketchup; the hexagonal-ish piza; the tube piza; the onion piza (with onion and garlic in the dough); the dry piza that had a very large flat rim and only a spoonful of topping at the center.
Thursday evening, after a day that started at 5 am, at around 6 pm I found myself in Kyoto hungry and sleepy, and with not much energy nor desire to go around looking for food. The area where I was staying, not a touristy one and a 20 minutes train ride to downtown, offered four food options only. Guess which plastic food display caught my eye in one of the windows… Piza!!!
Not any piza, a “mountain potato piza.”
As I did not have my camera with me, your eyes won’t feast on the mountain potato piza but, hopefully, its description will be enough to make your mouths water.
Instead of dough there were two thick slices of sandwich bread, roasted on the bottom but watery in the core, covered by a generous layer of grated raw mountain potato, and all topped by a thick coating of melted, golden, slightly crunchy, tasteless cheese.
I ate it, of course.

A meal offering in a pan

Shikoku - part 2

It must have been written in the stars. I bet that had I read my horoscope it would have said something like "In the next couple of days you'll have lots of pizza."

I arrived in Tokushima City early enough to see the town in the day-light. My hotel was above the train tracks and all I had to do to reach the reception was simply to follow a few arrows. But you know I still managed to get lost inside this one building that hosted my room on the 13th floor of the hotel, a 5-story mall, and the hall of the train station.

Since the hotel had several restaurants all with prohibitive prices, I decided to go look for a place to eat dinner outside of the building. So here I am with my colorful knitted yarmulka and my faithful pocket dictionary, entering the local Tokushima Tourist Information Bureau. I always carry my pocket dictionary with me. I love to phrase the questions in Japanese, and I always try to formulate them in a way that requires simply a Yes/No answer or, at the most, that can be answered with an adverb or simple phrase. For some obscure reason the answer is always much, much longer and usually contains words not listed in my 48,000 words pocket dictionary.

The island of Shikoku is the place where Japanese Buddhists go on the "88 Temples pilgrimage" and the trail starts in the outskirts of Tokushima City. I was therefore under the impression that finding shoojin ryori, food for pilgrims, i.e. strictly vegetarian, would be easy. Of course I was wrong but, when I labored on putting together the question "Is there nearby any place where one can eat shoojin ryoori," I didn't know it. To my surprise one of the employees of the Tourist Information Bureau was another gai-jin, so I flung myself at him. To make a long story short, when I told him I needed vegetarian food his answer was: "Well, your best bet is Italian," and printed out a map showing the location of Mariisa - Itaria ryoori (Marisa - Italian Cuisine). Here it is again, my nemesis, Itaria ryoori. Then he asked: "Where are you from?" "Italy." And he, making that heavy aspiration sound that Japanese people do when they are about to disagree, said: "Oh. Then you shouldn't go eat there. It's really bad." 45 minutes later I had worked my way to Mariisa - Itaria ryoori, the last business open in a shopping area with a vaguely Middle Eastern souk flavor. Nobody inside. I told my self "No, it's not because food is bad. It's because it's the middle of the week." Probably it was empty because it was the middle of the week. And because the food was bad.

There is a very common gesture I've seen a lot since I'm here: right hand raised at face level, palm facing down, arm bent at 45 degrees, then the arm moves up and down for a couple of times. This gesture means something like "No. You may not" and I believe that the speed at which the hand moves is proportional to the strength of the negation. After reading the menu at Mariisa I told the waitress that because of my religion I am not allowed to eat most of the things on the menu (let's not talk about the look on her face upon hearing this statement, a mixture of "Why would I care?" "Are you crazy?!" and "Loooooser!!!") and I asked if I could have a pasta with mushroom without shrimp. Hand up and down. Could I have the pasta and beans without the sausage? Hand up and down. Could I have the pasta with tuna without the shrimp? Hand up and down. I don't know if it was a nervous tic, but the poor girl kept shaking her hand up and down, no matter which item on the menu I was asking. I reached the point when I started asking just for the fun of it, inquiring even about items I wouldn't want to eat, to see where the breaking point was, when would she crack and say yes. When I got up to leave she said "pizza" and basically told me that they could make a pizza with anything I wanted. So I ordered pizza with mushroom, cheese (crossing my fingers), onions and tomato sauce. Some 20 minutes later the waitress arrived holding a frying pan and a spatula. My pizza was ready. Voila: fried deep-dish pizza, with a thick layer of a white gooey substance (crossing my fingers didn't really work), a can of mushrooms with much of their water, huge chunks of still raw onion, and sweet sauce. My hand felt this really strong urge to go up and down, but I stopped it and ate my last botched pizza for the day: it was getting late and I did not want to miss a local dance troupe of Awa Odori (this link will teach you much more you ever wanted to know about the Awa Odori).

To read about my Awa Odori experience, you'll have to wait for the next post.

And he ran toward them from the entrance of the tent and bowed to the ground.

Part 1 - Somewhere near Tadotsu

(and yes, it's OK if you don't know where Tadotsu is...)

I'm back to Tokyo after a two-day trip to Shikoku. It was clear from the moment the plane took off that it would be an interesting journey: I was the only non Japanese on the plane, which made it also very easy for my local contacts to spot me at the exit gate.
It turned out that I was the first Italian my contacts had met, even though one of them had lived in the US for some time. I was surprised to find out that even in provincial Shikoku the list of Italian words every one seems to know is the same as the one in the US, just with a slightly different intonation (pasuta, pitsa, Borare, Reonarudo, supagetti, mandorino, Arumani, Besupa). As usual, when the last item on the list is uttered, inevitably comes an uncomfortable silence followed by the question: “And where in Italy are you from?” My answer, “Sicily,” this time was not followed by the usual “Mafia!!” response which, in all honesty, disappointed me. People say “Mafia,” I do my usual schtick and then we move on, or we face another uncomfortable silence. Finally, as if waking up, one of my fellow travelers surprised me with a mostly unusual reaction: “Aru Kapone!!, Aru Kapone!!” pointing a finger to our driver and making a machine-gun sound. Let me render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s: he also knew that Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, and that there is a strait between it and the Boot.

My hosts were very concerned with my lunch, what and where I would eat it. All my local contacts knew about Jews was that we are very finicky eaters, but as soon as they heard I am from Italy the proverbial light went off and they told each other, almost at unison “Itaria ryoori deshoo ka?, Should we have Italian?” Those who know me surely have heard me saying the following at least once: “I don't eat Italian food in restaurants, except pizza.” Not only because if I really crave Italian food I can make it myself, but mainly because it never tastes like mom’s. That “Itaria ryoori” sounded like “doom and destruction” to my ears. We were driving in a narrow road, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by rice pads and Japanese-looking tiny wooden houses. I dreaded the meeting with Italian cuisine as reinterpreted by some Japanese chef in rural Shikoku, but my two hosts were aglow, pleased with their idea, undoubtedly the perfect solution to a very difficult problem.

So ten minutes later there I was in a wide and crowded parking lot, surrounded by rice pads and Japanese-looking tiny wooden houses, walking towards my gallows. On the one side a flower store simply called “Hana-ya, flower shop.” On the other side a gray, three-story, anonymous, concrete building. In front of it a sizable sign read “Dearu Koku - Itaria-ryoori, Dear Coke - Italian cuisine” spelled both in English and in katakana. I told myself: “You knew it would be an adventure, so shut up and go for the ride!” This “suggestion” made it easier to accept my inevitable fate, and entering the dining hall I was much more relaxed and ready to go with the flow. There was something melancholic in the combination of olfactory, visual and tactile stimulation I received from the place, so I won't talk in detail about the mixture of smells that grabbed me at my stomach as we walked in, neither about the sensation of greasy sticky floor, nor about the faded color of the wall-paper, peeling here and there from the walls.

We were told by a very polite hostess that the place was full and we had to wait “nijippungurai, around 20 minutes.” For a second I thought that it was an eternity to be stuck there and hoped that my two companions would not agree to this delay in our work schedule for the day, but after a quick powwow they decided it was OK, so they gave the hostess my name to put us in the waiting list, and asked for the menu.

Remember, I was going with the flow, so when they got excited reading on the menu Shichiriaana pitsa, Sicilian pizza, I also got all excited. Because of our unbecoming reaction we incurred in the hostess’ angry looks, at which one of my companions explained: “Kare-wa Shichiria-jin desu! Kare-wa Shichiria-jin desu! He’s Sicilian! He’s Sicilian!” After dropping her jaw and exclaiming: “Hontoooooo!? Reeeeally?!” the hostess started bowing down to me. Not just head-bowing. Not even upper-body-30-degree bowing. Rather full-blown-upper-body-90 -degree bowing. Not once, not twice, but I lost track of how many times she did.

When she finally got over herself, she called someone else to replace her and made a very polite, measured gesture inviting us to follow her. We went downstairs to the lower hall that wasn’t open up to that moment, and accompanying her words with another hand gesture she said that we could sit anywhere we wanted. At that point I knew exactly what I would have had for lunch that day: shichiriaana pitsa, no matter what was on it.

As she listed the ingredients of the pizza my mouth was getting all watery: mozzarella, tomato sauce, eggplants and… salmon, all foods I love. Not really the ingredients for Sicilian pizza but at least there was no pork. Moreover the fact that she had mentioned the eggplants somehow reassured me that at least the eggplants would be Sicilian style (one centimeter cubes, fried in olive oil, and then simmered in tomato sauce).

For Americans, Sicilian pizza is the one and a half inch tall chewy dough I have never been able to swallow. For Sicilians, Sicilian pizza (which, by the way, we call spincione), is a 3-quarter of an inch oily dough, loaded with fresh tomato sauce, roasted bread crumbs, pecorino cheese, anchovies, sliced onions, oregano, and capers and olives buried inside. For me it is my mom and her sisters kneading the dough at the beginning of the spring, and spreading it in large old pans blackened by the smoke of the wood oven, and myself and my cousins pushing capers and olives deep inside the dough. Shichiriaana pitsa was none of this.

In much less than the 20 minutes she had told us at first, my shichiriaana pitsa and my companions’ two pastas were on our table. The sauce was fine. The mozzarella, was motsarera, a processed yellowish cheese; the salmon, tiny lozenges of lox; the eggplants, thin, raw, pungent slices. This extremely heterogeneous mixture of stuff was symmetrically arranged over a round, machine-pressed, crunchy piece of dough that tasted like shmurah matza (which I happen to love, so I lucked out!). I ate all of it, making loud sounds of approval, continuously saying “Oishii! Delicious!” and giving thumbs up to our hostess, who was standing there silently at our disposal.

Later that day, on the train ride from Tadotsu to the next stop of the journey, Tokushima city, I couldn’t help but thinking about those people’s reaction to the fact that I'm Sicilian, and about the discomfort it caused me. Discomfort because of my ambivalent feelings about being Italian and, the even more mixed feelings about being Sicilian; about my pride for Italy and Sicily of the past, and my loathing for Italy and Sicily of today. But, given that I have to come up with two derashot for this Shabbat, this will have to be the subject of another blog entry at some point later on.

Three “Babel Moments” that happened during this one day at Tadotsu:

1. The “Aru Kapone! Aru Kapone!” mentioned above.
2. “Creap,” the name of a coffee creamer served with coffee at Dearu Koku, clearly a contraction of “cream powder” and pronounced as “creep.”
3. “Let's shit together,” a highly unlikely suggestion during a very formal meeting. I should remember in future that many Japanese pronounce “see, sea, si” as “shee, shea, shi.”

Dearu Koku

From the top:

The ８月２５日(火) Tue 8/25 menu that set in motion the whole Dearu Koku incident told in the blog entry above. The fourth line from the bottom is the nefarious Shichiriaana pitsa. Not worth the money.

The hostess of the Dearu Koku, proudly displaying their Shichiriaana pitsa. I swear, taking this picture was not my idea.