19 VII 07
for a while not much happened. then i learned that -imminently- a typhoon (hurricane) was about to strafe the islands and my weekend was doomed. so i stayed inside while the weakened storm howled in wild disproportion to the rather slow rain that fell for three days. i drank bourbon and played Super Nintendo. and life was good.
Monday morning was beautiful and clear. the sun revealed his wizened and fire-mustachioed face unto a stark world. the looming towers of Shinjuku were, for once, in fine relief and unshrouded by haze.
and then there was an earthquake.
i honestly didn't even notice the damned thing. i was loading a gel at the time, a ritual requiring a level of focus and dexterity just this side of cha-no-yu. our French postdoc Sebastien ran in ten or so minutes later, excited and a little freaked out, and asked if i'd felt it. apparently it was a slow-wave (but substantial!) lateral movement. hey, i was off in my own little world of constant podcast bombardment and molecular biology. bleh.
apparently, and the situation is revealed to be orders of magnitude more grim by the day, a nuclear plant near the (distant from Tokyo) epicenter suffered damage and a couple/several hundred barrels of nuclear waste tipped over and much spilled into the sea. um. oops. Homer Simpson at the helm once again.
we had a BBQ party on the roof last night, a delicious affair of vegetables, fish and beef on a MacGuyvered assemblage of cooking apparatus. we drank beer, talked about Jun (old Inoue-sama), and the relative merits of blonde and dark-haired American actresses. also, we agree that Bill Murray is pretty much king of kings.
this morning, i met up with Sato-sensei and my best friend at the lab, the hilarious Yaguchi-san, and we finally made the long-promised and even more delayed trip to the world famous Tsukiji fish market. now, everyone and their uninteresting grandmother uses the phrase "world famous" to describe their bathtub gin, or pralines they sell out of wheelbarrows, or their particular flavor of erotic massage. but this is the real deal - probably the most renowned fish market in the world. certainly in all of Asia.
after a cross-city subway ride, we alighted on (to steal the London tube phrase) the Tsukiji station. there was the faintest aroma - i hesitate to say odor - of seafood in the air. i'd been told by John back home that there was no smell at all, and after five minutes that was true. Tsukiji is an immense complex of sundry markets, the largest of which is the fish... emporium. gotta mix it up here, folks, bear with me. i'm working on uploading photos this evening, but will describe the scene.
Tsukiji is a colossal, rather low-ceilinged warehouse covering endless cramped lanes of The Sea's Bounty. it is a psychotic cornucopia of colors and classes (the taxonomic variety). fully 1/3 of everything there, an inverted Noah's Ark, is alive, making Tsukiji a de facto really, really depressing aquarium. fish opercula pulse gently in the air, timidly waving goodbye to life. cheeky mussels, huge mollusks probably rendered thusly by the agency of spilled radioactive waste squirted jets of water six feet across the aisle. madmen on mechanized kart-platform hybrids called tare scream by on the major avenues, heedless of humans ground beneath their wheels.
you wouldn't believe the things we saw. severed and discarded tuna heads as large as those of lions - their baseball-sized eyes sold separately as a superior source of collagen to keep an oneichan's skin supple. wild and tangled phalanxes of technicolor octopuses (correctly "octopodes", never "octopi" - The More You Know ~*) bearing beaks and suckers in frozen dissent. bizarre tunicate colonies i can imagine no one eating, fishes of all sizes, stripes and colors, Giant Enemy Crabs, living prawns the size of lobsters, you name it.
watching men process immense bluefin tuna is a spectacle. they literally go to work with power tools and katana-like implements to render the fish, which can be worth over $10,000 each. the alleys run with blood and water.
i anticipated this and still wore sandals. not a great move.
the tuna meat was deep, deep crimson, almost purple in parts. however.... now and then we encountered a different type of meat in similarly immense blocks, like succulent masonry. Yaguchi-san turned back with a grin and i knew what was coming. "ah, whale meat!" yes, those scientifically harvested minkes were represented in force throughout the market in various forms - thin packaged slices, bricks, and grisly charnel houses. i'll post a photo of the latter for your enjoyment.
we searched and searched but came up empty on sharks and rays. they only had dried, skinned and packaged ray fins (i think they were skate). a disappointment considering how many i'd seen in Barcelona off La Rambla.
ate a very, very early lunch nearby - a meal that i think was called kaisedon. many different types of thin sushi and other weird animals and eggs over a bowl of rice. good stuff.
finished the trip at a Shinto shrine honoring... i swear to god (any god), the fish we just ate. i have a photo of a massive stone inscribed with "sushi [some kanji]". there was a separate shrine for shrimp, for anglerfish, and others. so friggin' intense.
and then i went back to work and life was boring again. i've plotted out the rest of the trip though, and it's almost nonstop action from here on out. birthday is next Wednesday - i'm assembling a massive international crew to go out for AYCD karaoke.
i'm taking requests.
