Fresh shrimp

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

- Stephen Leacock

Product discrimination is a very fine art. When two companies package sheets of soft folding tissues, perfect for blowing one’s nose when attacked by some retrovirus, it is hard with a fever of 103 to tell which package should be purchased. In fact, there may be no difference between the two packages. Sometimes, the difference between two products is a word that has a confusing meaning.

It was a dark and stormy night in the semi-tropical city of Tokyo. I was stuck there for several weeks with two of my engineers engaged in one of the many “oh by the way” projects that we had been summoned to perform. This evening was a Saturday evening, and our erstwhile bosses were out visiting their families for that four-hour Saturday evening period of the week where the wife reminds the husband how many children they have and what their names are and how to tell each from the other. We, on the other hand, were on our own, in search of a dinner that wouldn’t hold too many surprises for us.

To be an English speaking person in Tokyo is not all bad. To graduate from high school, the average Japanese has to study a 2,000 word English vocabulary. While few will claim to speak English, most will understand some English. Having been raised in the United States, most of us never had the exercise of learning a new kanji character each day since the first grade. Thus the street signs of Japan have this distinctly foreign and unintelligible look to them. However, if you start studying Japanese, you soon discover that the signs are really not so hard to figure out, especially the ones that advertise restaurants. Now I’m not suggesting that your average business traveler could swiftly tell the difference between an insurance office and a brothel, but I do contend that you could, within minutes, know the difference between a sushi restaurant and a Chinese restaurant. Every good Japanese restaurant has a display window in the front of the establishment that has a picture of the foods that are served inside. Only the blind would have difficulty finding food in Japan.

On this particular night, we were depending upon my weak knowledge of Japanese and the handy Japanese-English pocket guide that followed me everywhere. We had left the grounds of the New Otani hotel near the imperial gardens and had headed towards the nearest collection of buildings in search of…. Food.

If you are the boss in overseas travel, your employees tend to expect you to know what you’re doing. If you’re a Japanese boss, you are given a stern lecture by management, before you leave, that if one of your underlings comes to harm while on a foreign trip, you are responsible for their life, their family, their debts, and if need be, their burial. In the U.S. the boss is responsible for getting the tickets and making sure that everyone has a current passport. I was a somewhat better boss than most. I would actually try to make sure that my people had a good time on these trips. After all, spending 25 hours in transit followed by 18-hour workdays for two weeks is quite a shock to most people. It doesn’t cost much to be kind occasionally. So tonight, they asked me to find something different.

After wandering the streets for about an hour, with stops every few minutes while I referred to the Kanji guide, we settled on this nice little ground level restaurant that seemed to specialize in cooking at the table with these massive built in grills. Tonight, we would have something cooked. My fellow travelers, Tom and Dan settled across the table from me while I tried to figure out the menu we’d been handed. After a few moments, the waitress returned with an abbreviated short menu printed in English. Finding that only somewhat less difficult to understand than the Japanese language menu, we felt we had enough confidence to place our orders.

There was, however, one item, which is worthy of this whole discussion. Listed on the menu, was a list that looked like this:

. . . . .

Scallop ¥600

Oyster ¥800

Shrimp ¥700

Fresh shrimp ¥800

Crab ¥900

. . . . .

When it comes to product discrimination, one could ask, what is the difference between shrimp and fresh shrimp. Remember, you are in Japan at this point where a hunk of seafood that is more than 24 hours old is considered stale and inedible. Being the enterprising souls that we felt we were, we ordered one shrimp, and one fresh shrimp.

This style of restaurant is one of my favorite styles. The food comes to you on these little tiny dishes with bowls of flavoring sauces, and you with whatever finesse you can muster, cook whatever you like, however you like it done. Our waitress brought us our order, four pieces each on the plate of the best scallops I’ve ever had, some so-so oysters, little tiny tuna nuggets, and a dish each of shrimp, and fresh shrimp. She was careful to point out that the blue fringed dish was the shrimp, and the green-fringed dish was the fresh shrimp. Other than that, they looked the same. Each of us took a shrimp in our chopstick, dipped it into a barbeque sauce, and broiled it on the grill. They were delicious. Then, each of us took a fresh shrimp in our chopstick, dipped it into a barbeque sauce, and broiled it on the grill. The difference between the shrimp and the fresh shrimp was immediately obvious. The fresh shrimp was still alive and tried to escape from the grill. What an amazing difference one word can make in product discrimination.