Fresh Fish

Be everywhere, do everything, and never fail to astonish the customer.

- Macy's Motto

A captive customer is a wonderful thing to have. It’s actually better than having a rich uncle who never forgets your birthday or Christmas. A captive customer is better because every time your captive customer has a headache, he comes to you for advice and aspirin. After you give him advice and aspirin, your captive customer goes away happy and never forgets to pay the bill that you send for the aspirin, the advice, and the surcharge fee for interruption of normal business services. I always thought a captive customer was a myth promoted by people who didn’t have to work for a living. However, there was this time, when I found out what a captive customer is, and how annoying a captive customer can be.

To set the stage, you have to imagine that you’ve been up ‘till 1 a.m. the night before in a Japanese bar acquiring the most incredibly bad hangover ever to grace the planet. Put in personal terms, I had arrived at the hotel barely in a condition to find the bed over the floor. Then, before I could properly settle into a good REM sleep, the stinking alarm went off at 6 a.m. I got up just about the time the wall stopped spinning, with about 45 minutes to shower, shave, put on my one and only wool three piece suit, and somehow, arrived at the train station at 6:45 a.m. so that I could be escorted to the airport for a flight to the Japanese city of Fukuoka. By some amazing state of grace, which today I claim is the raw strength of youth, I managed to show up at the appointed train station at the appointed time while several different Excedrin headaches contested for control over the inside of my skull. My keeper at that time was an engineer named Iijima, who’s English surpassed my Japanese by several thousand words. The only problem I had in understanding him came from a previous unfortunate exchange where we’d been discussing a particular kind of flower. In fact, it was a lily. At least, in English it was a lily. I’ve long since forgotten the Japanese word for lily. There is one problem with a lily to a native Japanese speaker. The Japanese language has no sound for the letter “L”. So, a native Japanese speaker will pronounce an “L” like an “R.” Mr. Iijima and I had spent a rather hectic time in a garden, each with our language dictionaries trying to understand what the other called this flower. Finally, as we reached some consensus on the flower, I looked up the word I’d been offered and said with surprise, “Oh! It’s a lily!!” Iijima looked at me with surprise and said, “Reary?” And I said, “Yes it’s really a lily!!” He looked puzzled and said, “It’s reary a riry?” I looked confused and lapsing in a moment of total non-conformity said, “Yes it’s really a riry.” I don’t think either of us knew exactly what was being said at that point, but we figured out that we were stuck on some kind of “L” problem and burst out laughing.

It was this same Mr. Iijima who met me at the train station and escorted me onto a 747 for the trip to the southernmost island of Japan, to the city of Fukuoka. Now Mr. Iijima had been with us at the bar the night before, and rather than take a 15 minute cab ride home the night before, and a 20 minute subway ride to the station in the morning, he had a full 90 minute train ride each direction, God willing that a train bothered to go to his home city at 1:30 a.m. I figure he thrived on the 2 or 3 hours of sleep he’d had the night before, whereas I was almost to the point where if my head split open spilling the dissolved remnants of my brain on the station catwalks, it would be a complete and total joyous relief. We sat on the plane, watching the nose camera giving pictures of the runway, and patiently waited for the stewardess to bring me some kind of green tea, which I thankfully used to inhale a half dozen ineffectual aspirin. Iijima watched me in silence for a while, and then asked, “How are you this morning Grenn-san.” My face split an attempt at a smile, which probably looked like I was about to bite him, and I think I grunted out a paragraph or two that sounded a lot like the word, “fine.” After about half an hour of flight, I turned to Iijima who was studying some notes for the upcoming meeting and asked, “Do Japanese have a sense of humor?” He thought about it for a long time and finally answered, “No, we are serious all the time.” I knew at that point what it meant to die and go to hell.

By the time the plane landed, I felt like there was a reasonable chance that I’d live through the day, until that is, I stepped outside of the plane. Fukuoka is a nice city of about 1.2 million souls nestled in a bay on the southern island of Kyushu. This is a semi-tropical city. At the time I arrived, it was probably 80 degrees outside with relative humidity in the 90 percentile. I may have mentioned that I’m from Minnesota, where at the same time of year, February, the temperature is known to not reach up to zero degrees for weeks on end. In Minnesota, it is the height of prudence to wear a wool three piece suit when venturing out doors, along with major amounts of goose down stuffed in nylon wrapped around for good measure. Stupid me. I hadn’t purchased a nice lightweight silk suit for the trip. The heat hit like the backside of a broom and almost knocked me back into the 747 where the temperature was a more suitable 55 degrees. Being good hosts, Iijima and the rest of our team guided me to a company limousine where the air-conditioning was turned to high for my comfort. As we drove away from the airport to our destination, Iijima looked at me and asked, “You know Grenn-san that Fukuoka is very famous for sea foods. What would you like for dinner tonight?” I answered as only I could at a time like that, “Surprise me.” Iijima smiled.

Our first stop was a restaurant for lunch. It is important to understand that many Japanese believe that a good sweat is much healthier than air-conditioning, so it is relatively rare to find air-conditioning even though it’s readily available. To support the idea of cooling, many Japanese will drink a hot beverage, usually a green tea, and then wave a fan in the more natural form of evaporative cooling used by land animals since they crawled out of the mud some 300 million years ago. I however, am a more highly evolved creature. I don’t sweat enough to cool a sock for a ken-doll. I found myself in a crowded restaurant, with an ambient temperature of about 85 degrees, no ventilation, drinking hot tea, wearing a three-piece suit, hung over, and can you wonder that I didn’t feel too good? In fact, things that had recently seemed clear to me, like windows and doorframes, started getting fuzzy. I spent some time with my English-Japanese dictionary and managed to convey that my vision was getting blurry and that this was not a good sign of prime health. Iijima responded by handing me a mint and suggesting I take a walk. I took a mint and took a walk. The walk, it turned out, was an excellent idea, for only a few yards from the restaurant was a hardware store with an active display of various air-conditioners that the less traditional Japanese could put in their homes. I found one that removed the most BTU and simply stood in front of it dropping therms as fast as the Freon cooled airflow could remove them. Too soon, it was time to go, and we piled back into the company limousine for our visit to the captive customer, the Fukuoka police department as it turned out. I looked back longingly at the hardware store display and promised myself, if I ever had a chance, I’d come back and buy that floor model for my very own.

This captive customer, the prefecture police department of Fukuoka had purchased almost everything in the world from my host, which was the NEC Corporation, known at this time as Nihon Denki (which meant Japan Electric). If there was an electron to be moved, it was housed in a box with an NEC label on it, and then handed to the customer in Fukuoka for payment. One of the most wonderful things NEC had sold to this captive customer was a large mainframe computer called an ACOS. In this day, a mainframe computer was the height of sophistication and engineering, and to pamper these multi-million dollar toys, massive amounts of air-conditioning were required to keep them from prematurely failing in the midst of their daily chores. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only room in the entire city of Fukuoka that had air-conditioning was the computer center where the ACOS was housed. Had I previously mentioned in this narrative that I was hung over, and over dressed and exceedingly hot? I spent an hour in that room asking every conceivable question about the computer, its use, how it worked, why the colors on the console were green, what that button did, how many pounds it weighed, you get the picture? They literally had to push me out of the room to get on to the meeting.

Ahh, the meeting. This was my whole purpose in making this trip. For reasons that I’ll never understand, I was the guest of honor, the American who had made the trip from Minnesota who was going to do some kind of software magic that would rid this fair city of crime and make it a safer place for humankind. I was introduced to my interpreter at the door, a gentleman who had been imprisoned by the British during the second world war, who had such a thick cockney accent that I didn’t understand a word of English that he spoke. Sadly, he didn’t understand a word of my English either with my southwest U.S. dialect. To this day, I believe the meeting would have gone far better if I hadn’t had this particular translator, but it was an honor to have one, even though neither of us had a clue what the other was saying. He escorted me into a large meeting room where about 30 people were arranged in a circle. Since everyone smoked, some smoking two or three cigarettes at a time, the room was stuffy, and hot, and way over in the corner opposite me, perhaps 50 feet away, someone had cracked a window and put in a small 5 inch desk fan to encourage air circulation in the room. I sat in my chair next to my interpreter and started wondering if removing my clothes would be considered a normal behavior for a guest from Minnesota.

The meeting droned on and on and on, as all meetings of 10 or more people do. It was followed by presentation after presentation with my interpreter occasionally mumbling things like “jolly well put” and “good show” amidst a mumble of other words that I couldn’t quite place. It was somewhat refreshing to sit there in that big plush leather chair, watching that fan turn way far away in that corner, until I noticed that I was still hot and had suddenly ceased sweating completely. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered the symptoms of classic heat stroke. This, I began to think to myself, is the end. I will simply fold into this chair, and no one will notice, and when they leave, I will slowly desiccate into a brown leathery form that will be indistinguishable from the leather of the chair. I will never be seen or heard from again and will spend the rest of my physical days on this earth supporting the overheated buttocks of strangers who’ve never been in an air-conditioned room. On the verge of becoming one with the chair, a semblance of sanity hit me. I leaned over to my translator and whispered. “I need water. I need salt. Now.” Amazingly, he looked surprised like he understood. He signaled one of the girls who always stand around meetings like this, who rushed over and took my order for water and salt. A few minutes later she returned with a small 6-ounce glass of water, and a small silver tray with a neat pile of salt in the center and a small spoon to the side. I spooned the salt into my mouth and drained the water and waited to see if I was going to lose consciousness or not. The answer, was… not. As I waited for the outcome, my interpreter leaned over to me and said, “You speak now.” I stood up, and with the certainty that no one in the room would understand a word I said, and the greater certainty that my interpreter would say what I should have said, I entered into a speech that probably resembled the jabberwocky in complete logical consistency and flow. I think I was there to discuss how a certain kind of statistical analysis would help implement preventative crime intervention programs, but as best I can tell, I rambled about the weather in Minnesota, the high price of Freon in Japan, and the wonderful climate that had been shown to me in the computer room a short time ago. I then said something like “thank you” and the room burst into applause. They had never seen a Minnesotan in a three-piece suit survive such a meeting before and my guess is the applause was a tribute to my survival to that point. I looked at my interpreter and asked in all seriousness, “What did I say?” To which he replied in all seriousness, “I have no idea.” At that point, I decided I love a captive customer.

It was now time for dinner. I was sweating again, and there was a breeze, and the temperature was now in the high 70s, and I could loosen my tie, and I actually thought I’d live through the day. What I hadn’t remembered was what I had said in the car when Iijima had asked, “What would you like for dinner?” Do you remember what I had said? I had said, “Surprise me.”

So off we went in search of dinner. In Japan, a restaurant is rarely in a building by itself. A restaurant is often found above or below something in a large building or building complex. We entered what in the U.S. would have resembled a large bank building and then walked down three flights of stairs into a cool basement restaurant where we sat on traditional tatami mats and prepared for a relaxing celebratory dinner. As I sat, the waitress brought me a glass of water, and then two more as I seemed to absorb each one within seconds. Iijima smiled at me with that typical Japanese smile that is lacking major dental care and said, “This is special restaurant.” I didn’t care, I had water, I was alive, and my tie was on the ground next to me. I managed a weak smile back and asked, “So what’s for dinner?” Iijima smiled at me and said, “Fish.”

Eating in Japan is often done without a chair. A small cushion is often used and you sit on the floor next to a table that is about 18 inches off the ground. It’s really easy to get used to that kind of eating style, and it’s hard to break the habit when you return to more western countries. However, sitting on the floor at a McDonalds to eat a big Mac and fries would probably get you arrested rather than respected for your internationalism. It makes you chummier to eat this way, and, it makes you closer in some sense to your food. Another thing about Japanese dining is that it tends to be lots of small dishes served in a series to give a sense of a banquet than can last literally for hours. Our first dish was a small porcelain cup filled with the standard Japanese seaweed in vinegar. Most Americans would think of it as soaked green thread. It’s quite good actually, provided you don’t chew. This preceded the main course.

The main course was brought in with great fan fair. You must picture this scene, a table with 6 adult males, one of them a foreigner, me, seated around a rectangular table on the floor of a small semi closed room in the basement of a bank building in a city of 1.2 million people living by the sea. Into this room, walks the waiter, carrying an extremely ornate wooden bowl perhaps three feet long by 2 feet wide. The bowl is carved monkey pod, and is carved in the shape of a fish, with each of the intricate details of the scale and fins clearly chiseled with great care. In the center of the bowl was a massive pile of crushed ice on to which had been piled the bodies of fish, on top of which were the thin slices of the fish, the sashimi, which were our meal. In Japan, eating raw foods, even fish, is a normal and actually quite appetizing thing. As the bowl was placed in the table, even I, the boy from Minnesota, was getting hungry and this looked pretty good. I reached for a piece of sashimi with my chopstick, and then noticed something, the fish underneath was looking back, and its mouth was opening and closing. Iijima looked at me and said, “This is very fresh fish.”

The thoughts that pass through your mind at a time like that, especially given the events of the last 24 hours are really very few. There’s nothing left to protest with. Nothing. I was totally drained. I ate some very fresh fish. After a while, the fish on the ice stopped moving, and I could start thinking that they weren’t so fresh anymore. The waiter returned after a few minutes and took the monkey pod bowl away and passed out small bowls of little round things. I asked the only question you should never ask when dining in Japan. I asked, “What is it?” Iijima looked at me in his fatherly broken toothed way and said, “Remember fish that was just here?” I nodded. He said, “This is son of fish.” Son of fish wasn’t too bad, as long as you don’t think about that little squirt that jets out of the eggs when you bite down.

I felt sure I could live through any meal at this point when the waiter brought in what distinctly looked like the heads of the fish. I didn’t bother to ask this time, it was the heads of the fish, only cooked this time. We dined on the cheeks which it turns out were quite good. Then the next course found its way to us. Somehow, they had extracted the complete skeleton of the fish, and deep-fried it into a delicious crunchy delicacy. Each of us got our own skeleton to dine on. And last but not least was the final course, which was a big bowl of soup for each of us, containing of course, whatever part of the fish we hadn’t previously eaten. In one sense, it was probably the most ecological meal I’ve ever eaten.

Of one thing I am certain. The captive customer paid for that meal.