Dear Sir,
Konnichiwa! How are you doing today?
This year, my wife and I spent several days wandering around Tokyo. It was such an overwhelming experience that I thought I should write and let you know how I felt. I hope you get to read this letter during your term as Prime Minister because it seems that every time the National Diet of Japan has a party, your colleagues seem to forget their age and indulge in that favourite party game of musical chairs.
It baffles me how the word “diet” can even exist in Japan, let alone be part of the name of your country’s legislature. After all, your countrymen seem to have discovered the means of eating anything and everything that lives and breathes in the oceans, rivers and lakes. This includes seaweed, sea urchins, the lethal fugu1, and everybody’s all-time favourite, shirako2. How can one possibly diet here? It’s impossible, unthinkable and unachievable! Oh, and by the way, will your countrymen please stop killing whales?!
While we are on the topic of seafood, my wife and I woke up at an ungodly 5am on our first morning in your fascinating city just to witness the tuna auction at Tsukiji Market. While Tsukiji is the largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world, I didn’t know that this is also where Japanese racecar drivers are secretly trained! Potential drivers are made to drive a fish mover, a tractor-like vehicle with the engine in front and a ramp at the back for loading the carcasses. The objective is to pick up the fish or seafood from the trucks, and get to the auction in the shortest possible time. If they manage not to kill any tourists along the way, they get a pat on the back and a smiley pin-up badge.
There are some amazing little restaurants in and around the market, but having breakfast in one of them was one of the most stressful meal experiences I have ever encountered! Having decided on a restaurant, my wife and I joined a queue of about 50 people shepherded by a Japanese matriarch whose bark belied her thin and frail frame. She made everyone stand in a snaking line within the small shopfront area, shoving customers so close to one another that we all soon became BFFs3, added each other as Facebook friends and started following each other’s Twitter feeds.
Adding to the chaos was the fact that the restaurant itself had only ten seats, and it was such a squeeze inside that any movement was inadvertently an indecent proposal. We were expected to enter, place our order as 50 sets of hungry eyes stared us down from outside the restaurant, eat as if we were late for a meeting with our CEO, then leave the money on the table and try not to molest anyone on our way out.
We also found our modesty severely compromised during rush hour in Tokyo, which started at 7am and lasted all the way until midnight. Your government laments the fact that Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, but perhaps that’s not necessarily a bad thing? Imagine all the social problems you would have to deal with if Tokyo had India’s birth rate. Everyone would be living in capsule apartments, or in their cars because of massive traffic jams; claustrophobia would be on the rise; prices of milk powder would rival caviar; goldfish sashimi would be the predominant offering on menus because there would be a shortage of tuna, and passengers would have to parachute into Tokyo because the runways at Narita Airport would be too congested. Passengers on trains would also be packed so tightly even sardines in a can would have more space!
While on the topic of train rides, there was one instance when the train we were travelling on experienced a delay due to wind. I know Japanese are very polite by nature, but how improper for someone to break wind on the train and cause a delay! How difficult can it be to wait till one disembarks from the train? Perhaps a campaign is needed to educate passengers on proper etiquette on the train? If your government needs assistance to run such a campaign, please ask the politicians in my country who are famous for implementing campaigns for everything from encouraging people to having more unprotected sex (i.e. have more babies) to improving our accuracy in the toilets!
We were grateful that during our stay we felt it safe to walk around on our own (now that Godzilla has been silenced by Ultraman), and from time to time we saw policemen patrolling the streets. That’s all well and good, but I have to say that law enforcement for crimes of fashion is severely lacking in your country… or rather, non-existent!
While walking around in Harajuku, I was warped to Nursery Rhyme Street. Within five minutes, I met a couple of Little Bo Peeps who had unceremoniously dumped their crooks, given up on finding their sheep and were out shopping instead. Then there was Little Miss Muffet, who had gotten quite sick of eating her curds and whey and was out looking for some fresh tako balls. And Mary Mary, on the contrary, had left her gardening duties and was on the way to the nightclubs in Roppongi!
How they escaped from the storybooks is another matter for your National Police Agency to investigate, but the greater crimes must surely be the most gruesome murders ever known to man or fish — pre-meditated murders that take place every night at the sushi bars in and around your city. I am of course speaking of death by sashimi, an art perfected by generations and generations of sushi masters, perhaps pioneered by a fisherman who ran out of firewood on one fateful day and decided he was too lazy to gather some.
On our final night, my wife and I stopped by a sushi restaurant in Narita, and witnessed firsthand how a victim was first knocked senseless, gutted of its internal organs, then slowly regained its senses only to find itself skewered and smiling diners feasting on its flesh. The crustaceans didn’t have it any better, having their heads ripped off and their still-flapping bodies topped on a bed of rice. If you need video evidence, I have it!
I hope you manage to stay in office long enough until my next visit, and we can sit down over a bottle of sake and I will try my best not to turn everyone deaf with my rendition of that Japanese pop classic, ‘Sukiyaki’. Our stay in Japan lasted a mere ten days. It was carefully planned to coincide with the equally short blooming period of the sakura trees, but it went by faster than the coy glance of an apprentice geisha. But our memories, like a hangover after five sake bombs, will last for a long, long time to come.
Arigato gozaimasu!
1 Puffer fish
2 Cod fish sperm sacs
3 Best Friends Forever