Punch Perms and Umeboshi -- My First Izakaya Experience

A week or so after I arrived at Canon Fujigaoka Dormitory No. 1, Arai-san, the dormitory manager, prevailed upon my dorm mates to take me out and get to know me. They asked me if I had ever been to an izakaya, and when I asked what that was, they told me it was a "Japanese-style bar." Sounded good to me. We arranged to meet one day after work at the local izakaya, which was half-way between Fujigaoka Station and our dormitory. I knew the place they described from passing it twice a day on my walks uphill both ways to and from the station.

When I arrived, most of the other guys were already there, about six in total. Like every other izakaya I have been to since, it was noisy with the conversation of customers and the shouts of the waiters welcoming guest, thanking departing customers and conveying their orders to the cooks and beer-pullers. (I call them beer-pullers rather than bartenders because Izakaya don't have bars as we know them in the US and don't serve drinks that require bartenders. The drinks menu usually consists of beer, sake, shochu (a spirit made from either potatoes or wheat), chu-hai (shochu mixed in a highball glass with some kind of flavoring), and soft drinks.) I sat down at the table and someone gave me a small glass and poured me a beer from the shared bottle.

Our waiter was a middle-aged man with what looked like a short, neatly-trimmed Afro and much tanner skin than most Japanese. He looked like one of my sports coaches in high school, which is to say, he looked black, but he was clearly Japanese. I struggled to explain his looks to myself, and then came up with a story to make sense of them: he was part African-American, and his father had probably been a serviceman stationed at one of the U.S. military bases in Japan. I asked one of the guys whether he thought the waiter was half-black, and when he asked why, I explained my reasoning. No, he told me, the waiter's hair was curly because he had a panchi paamu ("punch perm"), a permanent wave hairstyle popular in the 1980s and early 1990s with gangsters and some members of the working class, who thought it made them look tough.

The conversation alternated between my dorm-mates peppering me with questions and talking amongst themselves about topics that quickly lost me. Whenever I did understand the conversation and attempted to contribute something, by the time I had translated my comment from English to Japanese inside my head, the conversation had moved on to another topic.

At some point in the evening, the conversation turned to what would become a familiar topic over the years, my level of knowledge and/or comfort with certain Japanese foods. They wanted to know if I ate "raw fish," sushi being considered the ultimate gross-out food for non-Japanese and the real test for how far a foreigner was willing to go in Japanese culture. I told them I did. They tried a few other foodstuffs they thought would be offputting to me, and I had eaten them all. Finally, they asked me if I had ever had an umeboshi. I did not know what an umeboshi was. They tried to explain to me what it was, and even looked it up in my Japanese-English dictionary, to find the translation "pickled plum." A picked plum did not make any more sense to me, so finally they ordered one to see if I would eat it.

The waiter brought a tiny round dish, about two inches across, with a single, reddish shriveled round object that did not look like any plum I had ever seen. They warned me that it was very sour. Good, I said, I love sour foods.

For some reason, even though they knew that I did not know what an umeboshi was, for some reason, it did not occur to them that I would not know how to eat one properly. Evidently, they are considered too sour to eat as-is, and you are meant to take a small piece with chopsticks and use it to flavor something else, like rice. I, however, seeing a grape-sized piece of what they said was a plum, picked up the umeboshi and popped it into my mouth whole. It wasn't that sour.

Everyone at the table gasped.

Thinking I had breached some kind of etiquette, I spit the umeboshi back into the dish.

Then, realizing I had now definitely committed a faux pas, I popped the umeboshi back in my mouth and ate it. Only then did they tell me that it was considered too sour to eat whole and explained how it was supposed to be consumed. They ordered another and showed me.

So, this day featured my introduction to izakaya and umeboshi (and punch perms). I became a huge fan of izakaya dining and would travel across Tokyo to go to a good one.

And I still eat umeboshi whole.