The strangest thing I’ve eaten so far,

Now since coming to Japan, I’ve been able to sample a wide variety of food, much of which I didn’t even know was edible. Among these foods are: various sorts of raw fish, bamboo sapling, whole, unshelled shrimp (with legs and head still attached), various previously unknown plant-life that doesn’t exist in the US, octopus (complete with the little suction cup thingies)(only good when it’s fresh), squid, tiny inch-long dried fish mixed with peanuts (not bad, but a little unnerving), and quail eggs (actually quite popular here, good in misso soup). However, up until tonight the strangest the strangest thing that I’ve eaten was raw horse meat (not really very good. Not so good cooked either. I prefer cow meat).

However, tonight I’ve stepped up the level of strangeness. There’s a Japanese family in town that sometimes invites Jenn (the other ALT in my town) and me over for dinner. Today they were celebrating Boy’s Day. On Boys Day you put up these fish shaped tube flags…. Sock flags I guess, they are pretty cool.

This family had a couple of huge fish flags, probably about 12 feet long. So the kids and I ran around with these huge flags for a while, good fun. After this, it was dinner time. Dinner consisted of this egg/bacon/rice dish that was pretty good, and fish, which was delicious. There where two huge fish, each about two feet long. They were presented whole on the serving plate, with head, fins, gills, and skin still attached. This, while a little strange did not really surprise me too much, though the fish staring at me kind freaked me out, and the fish teeth were scary too. It wasn’t too bad since Jenn, bless her heart, turned the fish so that it was facing away from us. To serve this fish, the mother simple took some chopsticks, peeled off the skin and dished out the fish meat, which tasted wonderful. The next thing that happened really took me off guard. The four year old child said something in Japanese to his mother and pointed to the fish head. I, of course, sympathized with the child, because I didn’t like the fish staring at me either. The mother then took her chopsticks and plucked out the fish’s eye….. and put it on the child’s plate. The child then happily picked up the eyeball…. and ate it. This made me a little queasy, but I adverted my eyes and I was okay. The family then informed me that the child loves fish eyes, while they dipped their chopsticks into the eye-socket to fish out extra eyeball meat.

Toward the end of the dinner, the topic of the fish eyes came up again. The mother kindly offered to let me have the other fish eye. After quelling my initial disgust, I made myself except (hey I’m always up to trying new things). She plucked out the other eye and put it on my plate. Then she told me to spit out the pit once I ate all the meat. “The pit!” I exclaimed. So after an internal struggle, the mother again pulled out extra meat from the eye-socket and ate it, reassuring me that it was perfectly safe. So I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and stuck the eyeball into my mouth….. it was really really good! It tasted a little like the sweet underbelly of a lobster. Now if it weren’t for the fact that I had an eyeball in my mouth, I would have really enjoyed it. I spat out the eyeball pit and felt instantly queasy with the thought of what I had just eaten. But, truth be told, if it weren’t for my cultural prejudices, I think the eyeball might be my favorite part of the fish.