One Whiskey, One Sake, and One Beer

Although I am trying to write chronologically, occasionally I remember things out of order and have to skip around in time. We return to my summer as a Canon intern.

In the middle of my summer at Canon, the entire company shut down for two weeks. I freaked out, because no one had warned me about the shut down, and I would not get paid during the break. When I got done freaking out, I decided to focus on what I would do during the break. One of my dorm-mates from Fujigaoka Dormitory, Shige-san, suggested that I come stay with him at his house in Kyoto for a few days. It sounded like a great idea, so I took him up on it.

Shige's family lived in the northern part of Kyoto, which (as I learned many years later from my wife, who is also from Kyoto) is dominated by old families, some with old money, who consider themselves the real Kyotoites and look down on people from the rest of Kyoto. There is a good chance that Shige's family had both an old name and old money, as they owned the second-largest distributor of tea-ceremony goods in Japan, and Shige and I stayed in their "extra" house, which was basically used as a crash pad for their sons when they were back in town. (During my stay in Kyoto, Shige took me to his parents' shop, where he showed me the single most expensive item -- a three-inch long curved piece of bamboo, used as a scoop for powdered green tea, which sold for I don't remember how many thousands of dollars.)

On my first night in Kyoto, Shige's parents took us to a very beautiful kaiseki restaurant. (Kaiseki is Japanese haute cuisine, the food served in the exquisitely arranged bite-sized portions one sees in travel magazine articles about Japanese food.) Unfortunately, I cannot remember the name or location of the restaurant, for I would love to go there again, but I do recall that it was down a small alleyway of polished paving stones lined by bamboo and lit with foot lights, and that inside, there was a small stream running along one wall of our room, under glass, and lit. It was absolutely over-the-top tasteful and understated, if you know what I mean.

I don't remember the restaurant's name or location because of what happened next: I drank a lot. Not enough to be sick or embarrass myself, but enough that my memories of that night 18 years ago are hazy.

We sat down at a low table on the tatami mats next to the little stream, me across from Shige's father, Shige across from his mother. A middle-aged, kimino-clad woman came in, and Shige's father ordered beer. Japanese have a custom of starting with beer because it is perceived as "lighter" than liquor and thus not such a shock to the system; it's warm-up booze. (However, this custom violates the rule I learned in college: Liquor before beer, never fear. Beer before liquor, never sicker. And I saw a lot of sickened people in Japan.)

We had some food, we talked as much as my Japanese would allow about the U.S., Harvard, my impressions of Japan, etc., and then, Shige's father asked me, "Nihonshu ha, suki desu ka?" ("Do you like sake?) We were already drinking beer, and the question sounded rhetorical to me, so I said I did. The kimono-clad waitress reappeared. (I guess Shige's father had buzzed her.) He said something to her. Moments later, she returned with a bottle of sake and several glasses. Now I had two glasses before me, one beer and one sake.

In Japan, it is rude to allow your guest's glass to become empty. So, whenever I drank a sip of either beer or sake, someone would fill up my cup. Because I was raised never to leave food over, every time they filled my cup, I drank it. Then they filled it again. I did not realize that the way to get them to stop filling the cup was to leave it full. (Saying no did not work, because it's actually polite in Japan to refuse what's being offered to you a couple of times, and they merely thought I had good manners.)

After some more food, Shige's father asked me, "Howisskee ha, suki desu ka?" ("Do you like whiskey?") Having learned nothing from the sake question, I said yes (even thought it was not really even true), and soon a bottle of whiskey appeared, along with glasses for the whole party. Now, the table before me was beginning to resemble that John Lee Hooker song -- one whiskey, one sake, and one beer -- and each time I sipped from one glass, it was filled up again.

I don't remember further details about the evening, except that the meal was delicious, I had a great time, Shige's parents were very nice people, and the restaurant itself was one of this most beautiful I have ever been to. But the story has a post-script. Shige's father probably asked me about whiskey to be polite. As an American, I was expected to like whiskey -- just like Americans in the movies -- even though no one I knew at the time drank it (except for my friend Paul O'Brien). I thought of whiskey as an old-fashioned old man's drink. Over the years, many Japanese, like Shige's father, would insist that I drink whiskey with them like a real American, to the point that I developed a taste for it, which I still have.

It's ironic that I had to go to Japan to become a whiskey-drinker.