Day 8. 6th day of shvil
Kii-Kutsuura
We have travelled together numerous times over the years and often print or buy tshirts that commemorate the trip. I have about 6 such tshirts going back nearly 20 years in my cupboard at home. While we were eating our lunch at a convenience store at Taisha Grand Shrine the previous day, we spotted a tshirt with the three legged crow on the breast and the words Kumano Kodo embossed on the back. We bought one each and this would be our commemorative shirt of the trip. Now all we needed was the appropriate red carpet gala to show off our couture.
Apparently chefs come from all over Japan to buy fresh tuna in the fish market/auction in the village of Katsuura. Whilst Tokyo has the internationally famous Tsukiji fish market, we weren’t going to Tokyo and seeing the fish market here sounded fascinating. And fascinating it was. We arrived at 6.15 in the morning, elegantly dressed in our newly acquired, black, three legged crow breasted tshirts, to the sight of hundreds of freshly caught tunas displayed on a concrete floor adjacent to the docks. I never knew the difference between an albacore, skipjack, yellowfin, big eye or bluefin, but we saw them all, laid out, ready to be auctioned off at 7 a.m. The bluefin is the largest and most expensive, and on this day, only one specimen had been caught and presented for sale. It was enormous and from a distance we feared that it was perhaps a small whale. We weren’t actually permitted into the sales area and could only view the fish parade from a small distance away and behind a rope mesh. I naughtily snuck in to see this giant fish and it was only when I got within a few feet of it did I see that it was indeed a fish and not a sea mammal. There were other fish on display for sale, such as weird looking sunfish and moonfish, swordfish, marlin, mackerel and a few other varieties that google lens didn’t succeed in identifying.
We didn’t really understand how the auction itself really worked, but there was a spruiker yelling into a microphone, all sorts of people wandering around dropping printed pages onto certain fish and then others dragging fish over to a place where they took them away.
I’m curious how many fish are taken from the sea here every day, how many more are sold at the Tokyo market and I’m assuming other fish markets in Japan? And how many other fish markets sell this quantity of fish every day throughout the world.? It makes me wonder how much longer we can continue to take this quantity of nature’s bounty from the sea.
After breakfast, which of course comprised mostly of fish probably caught and bought that morning, we had some time to peruse around the town before our late morning, four hour train journey back to Osaka.
I have a sort of vow to try any food, especially meat, that I have never had before (except primates, which is just too much like family). I had never eaten whale before and there were a couple of places that had whale sashimi on the menu. I guess I’m glad I’ve eaten it once, but I doubt there will be a second time. I don’t know what I expected, but certainly not the tasteless, lean strips of unattractive meat that I was served.
We have this image of Japanese trains all being super fast and super modern. I guess that this is true between the major cities, but the train from a small coastal village to Osaka, whilst comfortable, was not any more wonderful than any country train anywhere else in the world. In fact, they didn’t even have phone charging outlets, except in the two front seats of the carriage. Why just there and nowhere else? Good question. In any case, when I moved to one such empty seat to charge my phone, I was promptly but courteously scolded by the train conductor to return to the seat that was assigned to me, even though the carriage was at less than 50% occupancy. Rules are rules in Japan.
Osaka
Speaking of rules, we have quite a strict no democracy policy. We run our trips along the lines of a benevolent autocracy. The person planning the trip, or days within the trip, usually Yoni or I, know each of our likes and dislikes, takes it into account and plans accordingly. It’s worked for twenty years and I imagine it will work for another twenty. We do occasionally have democracy days, especially on longer or more intense trips, where a certain amount of time is unplanned and each of us goes off to do as we wish, usually shopping for loved ones back home. You have to let the masses blow off steam. In any case, upon arrival to Osaka we had a democracy afternoon, where after checking into our hotel, we each went off for a few hours until we met to go out for dinner. “Going off” also meant almost an hour in the very “professional” massage chairs in the lobby of the hotel. A real machaya.
Garry also had a longer democracy evening. We had booked ourselves into an all-you-can-eat in ninety minutes, wagyu beef barbecue restaurant for dinner. Whilst there were potatoes on the menu, Garry, a vegetarian for close on fifty years, felt that an hour and a half of sizzling flesh wasn’t something that interested him. Go figure. Yoni has been a pescatarian (and a chicken-wingatarian if the truth be said) for the past few years, but decided, quite intelligently, that this was a meal worthy of breaking his no beef life-style for. He was of course correct.
The rules were quite simple. You cook everything yourself on a griller set into the middle of the table. There is a tablet with about fifteen pages of different meat and vegetables. You had seventy minutes to order via the tablet as often and as much as you wanted and a further twenty minutes to finish everything. In order to prevent over ordering and wastage, whatever is not eaten after your allotted ninety minutes is added to the bill. There was no such risk for us. We ordered and re-ordered a variety of different beef cuts, some chicken wings and pork ribs for variety and even a small order of offal. I don’t believe that the meat was really wagyu, but even if it was just bog-common kobe beef, none of us complained. I can guarantee they didn’t make a penny’s profit out of the $40 each cost.
I have heard stories of the Japanese salaryman, who is punctual, loyal and obedient at work, who goes out and gets shitfaced drunk in order to let off steam. We had such a group of salarypersons next to us in the restaurant. It was a mixed group, who all appeared to be in their mid twenties, dressed in their suits, suggesting that they had come straight from work. They were playing drinking games and getting progressively more raucous as the night went on. I have no way of knowing whether they were all good friends, work associates or what their social bonds were outside of this barbecue meat restaurant. But I can tell you that I didn’t need to understand Japanese to be very aware of a lot of flirting and hormones in the air. I would guess that a few of them were going to get lucky tonight. This seems like a universally human mating ritual that cuts across all cultures, when young adults get drunk together in a fun social setting.
Garry met us after dinner outside the restaurant and we had a nice long stroll back to our hotel. We’d started the day at a fish market in a tranquil fishing village on the coast and finished it wading through throngs of people in the Namba and Dotonbori nightlife districts, in Osaka, Japan’s second largest city.