journal features

mmmmm sushi

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2005.08.10

I was walking home (through Panic crossing, though I remained calm (or as calm as I get, at any rate)) and I thought "where shall I eat dinner"* and thought of the small sushi place near my hotel. Then I thought, "nah, I'm sick of sushi".

That thought brought me to a halt (yes, in the middle of Panic crossing - bad gaijin!). Realizing that there is no such thing as 'sick of sushi', I made a bee-line for the place. And to my delight they were in top form, not only serving up particularly good stuff (their quality is variable, but tonight everything was fresh, and they even had natto!) but trotting out quite a bit of my personal favourite; saba.

I gorged on a quick 11 plates of sushi (including three of saba) and paid less than $CA25.

*I am reminded of the immortal words of one of my all-too-mortal heroes. It was Douglas Adams who went through the progression of feeding one's self. In primitive society, we ask "what can we eat". In agrarian society we ask, "how shall we eat it?" In decadent modern society, we ask "where shall we have dinner?" Well, those weren't his words, but I couldn't find the actual text online. Stupid Inter Nets.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)