The Great Japanese Shopping Challenge
All right, it’s a new year, and I’m resolving to make a renewed effort to chronicle the various weirdnesses of Japan while I spend another four and a half months here. Today: grocery stores.
Now that I’m living in the dorms, I have to cook for myself, and let me tell you: cooking may not be my strong suit, but cooking in Japan is the easiest thing in the world compared to the process of actually obtaining the ingredients. Shopping in a Japanese grocery store is a bizarre experience because it’s almost familiar-there are regular shelves, carts (albeit in miniature), freezer sections, meat counters-but at the same time, it’s utterly alien. You wander from shelf to shelf, preceded by your tiny cart, and wonder: why must there be entire aisles dedicated to seaweed, but no cheese visible anywhere in the store? What is the difference between these twenty different kinds of soy sauce? How can I recognize anything when all the containers are in different shapes from what I’m used to, and I don’t know the brand names or the words on the labels? Does this jar contain blackberry jam or fish egg paste?
When I was cooking for myself in Chicago last summer, I never wanted to cook anything that ever, at any time, breathed. This wasn’t out of compassion for animals, but simply out of fear of accidentally giving myself food poisoning, combined with intense confusion over what all the different joints and types of meat are. Even fish was too overwhelming for me. But now I regret that, because shopping for fish in America is easy: you buy it, take it home, and cook it. Not like here, where there’s fish you’re supposed to cook and fish you’re supposed to not cook, and I have no clue which is which. Does it make a difference? If I fry fish that’s meant to be served raw, what’s the worst that can happen-will I just be put on the hit list of the Japanese cuisine police (Iron Chef Special Ops)? Or will I actually die somehow? I think the octopus tentacles are for sashimi, but I’m keeping my distance from those regardless.
Meanwhile, as I roll my little plastic cart between aisles offering soy-sauce-mayo-flavored potato chips on one side and cookies called “Strawberry Omelet” on the other, I am serenaded by the grocery store’s selection of popular songs performed in Japan’s beloved Synthesized Accordion style. I think the stores here are trying to save money (either that, or they just like it) by playing songs in the MIDI format that was popular around, I don’t know, 1995 or something, and always sounds only slightly higher-quality than Super Mario Brothers. Apparently I’m the only one who finds this bizarre, as none of my friends seem to pay any attention. I’ll sidle up to an American student and ask, “Hey, is this actually a soulful MIDI version of ‘I Want It That Way’? It is, right?” And my friend will listen for a second and say, “Huh, you’re right. I didn’t even notice” before going back to her shopping, as I demand helplessly, “How could you possibly not notice?” How can you avoid noticing that Japan’s chosen soundtrack for grocery shopping is lite-radio hits meeting the sound of the early days of the Internet?
Around late November, the selections in most stores changed to Christmas songs, mostly “Last Christmas” for some reason, but also featuring “We Three Kings,” “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas,” and various unbearable songs that sound even worse in MIDI format. One day I was walking from the bookstore section of a large store into the grocery section, and while the bookstore hadn’t changed their music to Christmas carols yet, the grocery store had; as a result, the soundtrack transitioned smoothly from digitized “Uptown Girl” into accordion-style “The Little Drummer Boy” without me even noticing.
When stores do play actual songs with real instrumentals and vocals and everything, they pick really strange ones sometimes. When I bought my cell phone, the store was playing generic instrumental elevator music; I had tuned it out entirely until, with no warning, the music switched into Belle & Sebastian’s “Act of the Apostle.” I had a sudden sensation of being in a coffee shop; then, after three minutes of religious musing were over, the wordless elevator music took over again and continued unabated for the rest of my visit. Another day, I was browsing the nonsensical English T-shirts at a supermarket clothing store when the loudspeakers transitioned unexpectedly from cheery J-pop into the opening drone of the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?”. Which I love, but isn’t there a time and a place? I kept expecting them to fade it out or play a truncated version or something, but no, they played the entire six minutes and forty-seven seconds, up to and including the part that runs:
There’s a club if you’d like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home and you cry and you want to die.
Right on, Japan. Speaking for myself, nothing inspires me to shop more than a good Morrissey sulk.
Now that I’m living in the dorms, I have to cook for myself, and let me tell you: cooking may not be my strong suit, but cooking in Japan is the easiest thing in the world compared to the process of actually obtaining the ingredients. Shopping in a Japanese grocery store is a bizarre experience because it’s almost familiar-there are regular shelves, carts (albeit in miniature), freezer sections, meat counters-but at the same time, it’s utterly alien. You wander from shelf to shelf, preceded by your tiny cart, and wonder: why must there be entire aisles dedicated to seaweed, but no cheese visible anywhere in the store? What is the difference between these twenty different kinds of soy sauce? How can I recognize anything when all the containers are in different shapes from what I’m used to, and I don’t know the brand names or the words on the labels? Does this jar contain blackberry jam or fish egg paste?
When I was cooking for myself in Chicago last summer, I never wanted to cook anything that ever, at any time, breathed. This wasn’t out of compassion for animals, but simply out of fear of accidentally giving myself food poisoning, combined with intense confusion over what all the different joints and types of meat are. Even fish was too overwhelming for me. But now I regret that, because shopping for fish in America is easy: you buy it, take it home, and cook it. Not like here, where there’s fish you’re supposed to cook and fish you’re supposed to not cook, and I have no clue which is which. Does it make a difference? If I fry fish that’s meant to be served raw, what’s the worst that can happen-will I just be put on the hit list of the Japanese cuisine police (Iron Chef Special Ops)? Or will I actually die somehow? I think the octopus tentacles are for sashimi, but I’m keeping my distance from those regardless.
Meanwhile, as I roll my little plastic cart between aisles offering soy-sauce-mayo-flavored potato chips on one side and cookies called “Strawberry Omelet” on the other, I am serenaded by the grocery store’s selection of popular songs performed in Japan’s beloved Synthesized Accordion style. I think the stores here are trying to save money (either that, or they just like it) by playing songs in the MIDI format that was popular around, I don’t know, 1995 or something, and always sounds only slightly higher-quality than Super Mario Brothers. Apparently I’m the only one who finds this bizarre, as none of my friends seem to pay any attention. I’ll sidle up to an American student and ask, “Hey, is this actually a soulful MIDI version of ‘I Want It That Way’? It is, right?” And my friend will listen for a second and say, “Huh, you’re right. I didn’t even notice” before going back to her shopping, as I demand helplessly, “How could you possibly not notice?” How can you avoid noticing that Japan’s chosen soundtrack for grocery shopping is lite-radio hits meeting the sound of the early days of the Internet?
Around late November, the selections in most stores changed to Christmas songs, mostly “Last Christmas” for some reason, but also featuring “We Three Kings,” “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas,” and various unbearable songs that sound even worse in MIDI format. One day I was walking from the bookstore section of a large store into the grocery section, and while the bookstore hadn’t changed their music to Christmas carols yet, the grocery store had; as a result, the soundtrack transitioned smoothly from digitized “Uptown Girl” into accordion-style “The Little Drummer Boy” without me even noticing.
When stores do play actual songs with real instrumentals and vocals and everything, they pick really strange ones sometimes. When I bought my cell phone, the store was playing generic instrumental elevator music; I had tuned it out entirely until, with no warning, the music switched into Belle & Sebastian’s “Act of the Apostle.” I had a sudden sensation of being in a coffee shop; then, after three minutes of religious musing were over, the wordless elevator music took over again and continued unabated for the rest of my visit. Another day, I was browsing the nonsensical English T-shirts at a supermarket clothing store when the loudspeakers transitioned unexpectedly from cheery J-pop into the opening drone of the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?”. Which I love, but isn’t there a time and a place? I kept expecting them to fade it out or play a truncated version or something, but no, they played the entire six minutes and forty-seven seconds, up to and including the part that runs:
There’s a club if you’d like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home and you cry and you want to die.
Right on, Japan. Speaking for myself, nothing inspires me to shop more than a good Morrissey sulk.