Japanese Restaurants

Thanks for all the positive feedback on my blog!  I appreciate it.  I do feel I must qualify my statement about being able to order food in a Japanese restaurant.  The truth is, just about anyone can do it.  Most of the Japanese restaurants we have seen have not only pictorial menus but plastic “samples” by the entrance or in the lobby.  Really, a monkey could probably point and be served.  What I meant was I can order food politely with manners at a Japanese restaurant.

The Japanese are a very polite and reserved group of people.  If a Japanese person came to your door, even if you were friends, they wouldn’t automatically enter when you opened the door.  You must invite them to enter.  Also, if you had a party with drinks sitting on the counter for everyone you would have to ask them to take one.  As a result, in Japanese, there is more than one kind of “please” and different levels of “thank-you.”  So even just pointing to a picture on the menu there is a polite way to do so.  It seems the Japanese people I have encountered have really appreciated the effort, even if we are speaking broken Japanese.

Backstory:  there is an orientation class that you are required to take when you arrive here in Sasebo.  It is four days total with the first two days being mandatory.  The first day and a half is all about the different departments on base—what is available, what is expected of you, and what not to do.  (The not to do is drink and drive.  The limit here is 0.03 as compared with the 0.08 in the US.  And in Japan, the passenger can get just as much punishment as the driver who gets popped for DUI—prison or a fine.  No warnings here.)  The second half of the second day is the cultural part.  This is taught by a hilarious seventy-year-old(?) Japanese woman named Eriko who has been working on the base for 20 years.  She has this laugh, which sounds fake (and maybe it is) but you can’t help but laugh too.  In about three hours she taught us basic phrases, the vowel sounds, how to count, the monetary system, some Kanji symbols, how to eat with chopsticks and we even saw a movie on the different types of noodles (Udon, Soba, Ramen, etc.) and how to eat them (slurping guided by chopsticks).  That’s when I learned the difference between the please where you are offering something, dozo, as in “please take my toll money,” and the please where you want something, kudasai, as in “I would like a Cherry Coke, please.”

So Matt took this class when he arrived in April, the two days including the Eriko cultural program but he missed the optional third day (tour) and then on the fourth day got to take the driving class and test and earned his Japanese license.  The first time we (as a family) went out to eat off base was at a chain family restaurant on the Ginza, which is the shopping area before I took the class.  The Ginza is blocks long of pedestrian-only streets full of shops, restaurants and whatever.  There is even a Starbucks (only one, surprisingly) and a McDonald’s.  We ate at a place called Restaurant Gyuemon.  The first thing I noticed was it had a smoking section.  It’s virtually impossible to find a restaurant in America these days that you can smoke in that I never even considered that would be an issue.  Luckily we were tucked away in a corner away from any smoke but I’ll have to keep that in the back of my mind for the future.  We were seated and the waitress brought us (small) glasses of water right away and then left.  Your choice to drink in Japanese restaurants is water.  Matt said he went to a fast-food restaurant once and they had pitchers of water and tea that you served yourself.  If you want a soda you have to go to a vending machine, of which there are plenty—nearly one at every corner.  Anyway, we studied our picture menus and gave the kids the food we packed.  (By this time it was well after 12:30pm which is late for lunch at the Rich house and the kids were in no mood to be brave.) 

We waited for the waitress but she never came back to check on us.  We waited some more and watched her help guests at tables near us, but never came back to check on us.  Finally, Matt tried pressing a button on a wooden half-sphere that was on our table and she arrived nearly instantaneously to take our order.  We had no idea there was a waitress paging system but now we know for next time. 

Matt’s food arrived in a reasonable time but unlike in the US where the kitchen/servers time everything to come out together, they serve it when they get it and my food didn’t arrive until after Matt had finished his lunch,

which he started eating when the kids were finishing theirs.  So by the time I could begin eating, Leah and Aaron were ready to go.  So my first dining experience wasn’t the worst, but it wasn’t wonderful either.

I did take Eriko’s tour which culminated with a stop at Aeon, the mega-shopping store in Sasebo.  It is five or six different levels with a bakery and grocery store on the bottom, clothing on the second level and the third level, the only place I got to see because I had Leah and Aaron with me, was the toy store, the food court, the arcade and the book store.  Eriko purposely took us there because not only were there many different eating choices for everyone at lunch but there were many opportunities for us to practice our, “Kore kudasai,” or “I would like to buy this.”  Leah and Aaron were thrilled to see McDonald’s and they each had a Happy Meal. 

In Japan, you can get a hamburger, cheeseburger, chicken McNugget or pancake Happy Meal.  Instead of the tiny fries and apples that the US Happy Meals include, one has a choice between fries (regular “small” size) or corn.  An odd choice I thought—I mean who chooses pancakes and corn?  The kids were happy but we won’t be doing that often.  The two Happy Meals were 900 yen, or about $11.25.  I can’t remember how much two Happy Meals cost in the States but I know it is less than $10.00.  (Even the Subway on the Navy base has the “$5 Footlongs for $7.50.) 

While the kids ate their McDonalds I went a couple of counters down to some random noodle place and got some vegetable noodle soup.  It was huge but once you just eat the noodles and the vegetables and not the broth, it doesn’t seem to be as much (but I still didn’t finish it).  I don’t know what kind of noodles there were—they were spaghetti-like but I did my best to slurp them while guiding them with my chopsticks.  (Luckily we were all pretty good with chopsticks before we even came to Japan.)  What I didn’t think of was this steaming hot bowl of soup and halfway through lunch I was sweating and uncomfortable and I couldn’t figure out why because the kids were fine.  I finally figured out it was a side effect of leaning over the enormous soup bowl slurping away like a local.

Since this was a food court and not a sit-down restaurant, I also had to figure out what to do with the tray et al because my soup was in a regular stoneware bowl, as was my ladle/spoon.  My chopsticks were even the nice polished wooden ones you keep in your home as opposed to the disposable pull-apart kind you get when you order Chinese take-out food.  I finally figured out that each little restaurant counter had an area to return your tray and dishes, except for McDonald’s (where trash is trash).

So that’s been my dining off-base experiences.  We don’t eat out much because it can be expensive, and frankly, we don’t have the time.  We have one car which Matt usually has and he easily works 12 hour days (including the commute).  It’s just as well—another good habit to reinforce:  eating out less.