I Love the Smell of Filet o' Fish in the Morning

During my internship, I left my dorm at 7:00 a.m. to make it to work on time, and because eating before I left home would leave me hungry long before the noon lunch break, I took to eating after I arrived in the neighborhood of the office. After paying $18 for pancakes at a hotel restaurant one morning, I resolved to look for other options.

Near the end of my commute were several fast food chains, running from Morinaga to McDonald's. I soon discovered that McDonald's served reasonable pancakes at a reasonable price, and it became my regular stop each morning. Unlike in the U.S., the pancakes were cooked to order and brought to your table when they were done, which was never more than about 5 minutes. The pancakes always came with a deep bow and an apology for having made you wait so long.

Although McDonald's offered a full breakfast menu of pancakes, Egg McMuffins, etc., I noticed after a while that the only people who ordered breakfast items were me and the foreign tourists who wandered in from a nearby hotel -- probably after they saw the $18 pancakes in the hotel restaurant. The Japanese always bought items from the regular menu, like Filet o' Fish. I wondered whether this was just particular to McDonald's, but when I went to Morinaga, it didn't even have a breakfast menu. It just hawked the regular menu of burgers all day long.

The idea of fish -- especially Filet o' Fish -- in the morning made my stomach turn, and I thought the Japanese salarymen breakfasting on them to be utterly bizarre. It was only after some time in Japan that I realized that Japanese cuisine recognizes no distinction between breakfast and the other meals. A traditional Japanese breakfast, such as you might get in a ryokan inn, contains fish, pickles, rice, miso soup, and other things you'd eat during the rest of the day. Eventually, as a result of going to Korea and seeing kimchi in the breakfast buffet, it dawned on me that people throughout the world eat the same things all day long, and the idea that you don't eat breakfast for dinner and vice-versa (all-day breakfast at diners notwithstanding) may be a uniquely Western idea.

We were the weird ones, not the Japanese.

Nearly 20 years later, I love Japanese breakfast, especially the grilled fish. Since Japanese breakfasts are much more labor-intensive than Western ones, I rarely get to eat them, but I relish them every time.

The idea of a Filet o' Fish for breakfast, however, still turns my stomach.