Two-hour limit

One of the most impenetrable concepts in Japan was the two-hour limit on restaurant reservations.  If you called a restaurant and reserved a table, you'd be warned that you had to leave after two hours.  And, sure enough, even if you were prepared to order more food, consume more booze, and fatten the restaurant's bottom line, when two hours were up, you'd be given the check and politely told that your time was up.  However, if you simply showed up without bothering to call first, there was no limit on how long you could stay.

Let me explain the absurdity a little further.  Izakayas in Japan were often open till 11:00 p.m. or later, but the mostly after-work crowd would thin out fast after 9:00 p.m., either because people wanted to move to another spot or because they had a long train ride to deepest Chiba or darkest Kanagawa and needed to get home.  There wasn't a "second seating" as there might be in a popular New York restaurant, so no one was lined up waiting for your seat after the initial rush.  You might think that, in a restaurant that was emptying out, but still open for several more hours, they'd be happy for you to continue to eat and drink, especially if you were a large group (the only time I ever bothered to make a reservation).  Not so.  If your reservation started at 7:00 pm, you were out at 9:00, period.  But, just show up with the same group at the same time without any prior warning and the staff would often be too polite to ask you to leave even if you ran right up against closing time.

I only found my way around this conundrum once.  I brought a large group of friends to an izakaya I frequented in Shibuya.  When the two hour mark rolled around, the waiter came up and told us that our reservation was up.  We looked around and found the restaurant was emptying out, with no one waiting.  We'd like to stay longer, I told the waiter.  "I'm so sorry," he responded, "but we have a two-hour limit on reservations."  "Well," I told him, "we want to keep on eating and drinking.  Can you recommend a good place nearby?"

The waiter went and consulted with the manager, who hurriedly came over and said we could stay.  Evidently the prospect of losing money to a competitor awakened the man's capitalist instincts.

Gaijin's Torment: Adjusting to Japanese Food

The day comes for every gaijin in Japan when he or she encounters food that he just can't -- or won't -- swallow. Back in the day, for many gaijin this food item was raw fish (though it's hard to believe this is still the case, when sushi is the first solid food fed to half the children in Manhattan). Though I wasn't yet a fan, I had at least conquered my fear of raw fish by the time I got to Japan, so this wasn't a problem for me.

Nor did I flinch at eating the grasshoppers caramelized in sugar that were once served to me in an izakaya the way that chips or pretzels would be in an American bar. (They were really good.) I happily ate thinly-sliced raw horse meat and was surprised to find the raw chicken sashimi to be delightful. The cod sperm-sac stew I had at a chankonabe restaurant was silky, salty, and perfect on a cold winter night. My yakitori-shop-owning gourmand of a friend, Daisuke, even took me to a famous "hormone" restaurant, where we waited for an hour for a chance to eat pig liver, intestines, uterus and other organ meats completely raw. I'd happily go back there if I ever get the chance.

But I was shocked to that mayonnaise, the French condiment that now symbolizes American cuisine the world over, shows up repeatedly, and unexpectedly, in Japanese cuisine. It coats okonomiyaki (lit. "whatever-you-like" savory hotcakes), covers takoyaki (battered octopus-chunks), and, when people feel compelled to eat some vegetables in an izakaya, serves as the dipping sauce for yasai (veggie) sticks. Mayonnaise is what you put on grilled whole squid or roasted dried squid at the ballgame. And, if a restaurant eschews carrot-ginger or shiso dressing for a green salad, mayo inevitably replaces them. I didn't even know they had mayonnaise in Japan, but when I got there, it was everywhere and on everything.

Corn, which I did not expect to see in Japan either, also appeared where I least expected it. A green salad an in izakaya consisted of a few slices of iceberg lettuce, one wedge of tomato, a sprig of parsley, mayo dressing, and a spoonful of corn kernels. One can imagine the irritation of eating a bunch of corn kernels one-by-one with chopsticks, so they often tended to be left floating around uneaten in the bottom of a bowl of watery mayonnaise. Corn kernels also showed up in the most inappropriate place of all: pizza.

In fact, not only corn defiled pizza in Japan. There was canned tuna, too. Though some Italian restaurants served good brick-oven style pizzas, the New York variety could not be had except through delivery services that charged about $30 for a pie, at a time when the going rate in New York was about $10. And a plain pie could not be had -- except after one picked off all the corn and tuna. Corn and tuna were, in fact, the baseline items for all delivery pizza in Tokyo. You could get corn and squid or tuna and spicy cod roe, or corn and tuna, but you simply could not get a plain pie delivered to your house.

Pepperoni was out of the question.

Aquarium Buffet

There's just one word you need to know when visiting an aquarium in Japan: Oishi-sou.

My first-ever visit to a Japanese aquarium took place in 1991, when my then-girlfriend and I went on an afternoon date to the Sunshine City Aquarium in Ikebukuro, in the northwestern part of Tokyo. Many people are familiar with the hotel-office-residence-shopping center-restaurant-entertainment complexes sometimes called "cities within a city" that have sprung up all over Tokyo in recent years. Some of the better known of these developments are Roppongi Hills, Tokyo Midtown, Shiodome City Center, and Takashimaya Times Square. Sunshine City was the one of the first, if not the first, of these mega-projects to appear on the Tokyo skyline.

The Sunshine City Aquarium sits on the top floor of Sunshine City's main 60-storey tower, a testament to both Japanese engineering (the weight of all that water on such a high floor!) and Bubble Era excess (putting a frickin' aquarium on the top floor of a 60-storey tower!). As an aquarium it was pretty good: nice lighting, lots of cool ocean species, you get the idea.

After paying for our tickets and entering the aquarium, we arrived at the first tank, displaying silvery fish swimming in a school against a machine-made current. Beautiful, I thought. All around me, Japanese visitors pointed excitedly at the tank. Oishi-sou!, one would exclaim gleefully. Oishi-soo da ne!, their companion would enthusiastically agree.

The next tank featured brilliantly red giant Japanese crabs. Wow, huge!, I thought. The Japanese visitors around me consulted with each other agreed that the crabs, too, were Oishi-sou! The squid tank? Oishi-sou! The octopus? Oishi-sou! This continued at practically every tank. Little kids, young couples on dates, middle-aged women, my girlfriend -- all who cast their eyes on the aquatic creatures pronounced them Oishi-sou. By the time I reached the last exhibit, even I was thinking Oishi-sou! when I saw whatever was swimming around there.

Oishi-sou, you see, literally means "looks delicious" -- as in, "Where's the wasabi and soy sauce?! Quick, someone grab that tuna and fillet it for me right now!"

That trip to Sunshine City has forever warped my aquarium-going experience. Now when I go to an aquarium it's impossible for me to shut off the part of my brain that's contemplating the culinary possibilities.

That yellow fin tuna? Sashimi.

That school of shimmering sardines? Pickled in soy sauce.

The Atlantic lobster? Quick, someone boil some water!

Sea worms? Ah, maybe not.