女子会 - Ladies' Night

Riiiiight....I get you.

Mrs T took me on a tour of Max Value supermarket in Kutchan. I'd never really been taken around a supermarket by a Japanese housewife before - i.e. someone in the know about grocery shopping. She explained to me what was tasty and what was not - how to pick out the best bulb of Japanese ginger and how to eat it (sliced raw on top of Soumen. Obviously). How to cook Horumon (um... some kind of cow and/or pig innards), chicken hearts and sliced cow tongue. She explained how it's better to buy fish from the '生’ or 'fresh' section and slice it to make sashimi, rather than get ready-made sashimi, which loses its flavour as soon as it's cut. The many mysteries of the Japanese fish section (what the hell is that weird yellowy-egg stew anyway?) were made clear to me. For instance, the yellowy-egg thing should be eaten cold on rice. The purple seaweed is purple because it's been pickled in a special sauce. Never buy pre-frozen fish, even if it's cheaper. Always buy fresh scallops. She introduced me to いももち or potato mochi and explained to me that you can actually eat those strange leaves you're often served in izakayas:

Yeah, you can eat the leaf.... It's called shiso.

Finally, she brought me to the sweets section. 'Do you eat sweets she said?' 'Um,' I said. 'Actually... I like chocolate.' 'Right,' she said, 'Aha,' she said. And proceeded to buy me three boxes.

fun times with the girls

In the evening, Mr T was off to play golf and drink with his golfing buddies. So, I was brought along to a 女子会 or a ladies' night. There were four of us together, sitting in an empty European-style cafe, drinking Moscow Mules. One of the women was a small, smartly-dressed lady in her sixties who had been to Germany on several occasions and who loved German classical music. The other, a skiing instructor, was in her thirties, wore a fleece and cargo-pants and had a tanned, rosy complexion. I noticed the way they spoke to my homestay mother, using the politest Japanese, and seeming a little ill-at-ease at first. It occurred to me then that she is, in fact, the wife of their landlord, and that they had been summoned to a ladies' night by her as a kind of social duty. In the same way that, in Japan, students are summoned to go for dinner with their professors as a matter of course, or an employee is made to go out drinking on a Friday night with his boss.

Still, after a beer and another moscow mule, the evening lightened up, and the ski instructor described her exploits (off-piste down Youtei-San...) and the upright, retired lover of Classical music ended up explaining to me that I ought to marry before I was twenty-seven. (Why twenty-seven?)

When we arrived home, we were greeted by the amazing sound of Mr T's deep, satisfied snoring.