Christmas in Kobe

We've been in Japan for over four months now, and we've reached the point where the words 'roast chicken' can induce at the very least a glassy expression accompanied by wistful foody reverie, and at worst mild catatonia. With seemingly every cultural dish under the sun within a half-mile radius of where we live, we just cannot manage to track down a good, old-fashioned English roast.

Our friends have employed search engines, scoured phone books and even e-mailed the British embassy (which was very sweet of Chikako - thank you!) and the best they could turn up was an '007 Evening' in Osaka, some 30 minutes away on a very fast train. Such, it would seem, is the general disdain held for English food in these parts.

So Christmas dinner for the Wises this year was beef teppanyaki on the 6th floor of a building in downtown Sannomiya. With nary a gravy boat or brussel sprout in sight.

Christmas in Kobe is pretty much like any other day in Kobe. Which is pretty weird from a Western point of view. ALL the shops are open, most of them selling the Japanese version of 'Karisumusu Cako' - a relatively lightweight little number made of sponge cake and cream and topped with strawberries.

What is even more strange is the almost digital way in which Christmas just disappears. By Boxing Day all semblance of festivities - merchandise, decorations, great swathes of blue LED lights (make a note that they will be in your shops next year - the future may be bright, but the future is blue, not orange...), even the bloody cakes, all just disappear into thin air, to be replaced by New Year celebratory items of a more oriental flavour.

Not that Jack was particularly phased by any of this general strangeness. He took his second Christmas in his stride, wondering what all the fuss was about...

COMING SOON! It's been commented on that Jack hasn't featured too much on this blog, so over the upcoming holiday (yes, we do get one, eventually...) I will put together a Jack Special and introduce you all to... Anpan Man! (to be continued..)

Putting Blackpool in the Shade

Every year since 1995, Kobe has staged an illumination festival as a memorial to the lives lost in the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. The Luminarie attracts on average a staggering 4.5 million people, which is one million more than attend our own venerated luminous event, Blackpool Illuminations, which lasts over two months. It's the equivalent of the entire population of where we live - Northern Ireland - going three times. And it's so impressive, it's probably worth going to three times.

Every evening for two weeks just before Christmas, roads around the downtown Motomachi district are cordoned off and an army of hired hands with flashing batons shepherd the many thousands of visitors towards a street decorated with an estimated 200,000 light bulbs.

The Italian designers responsible for the Luminarie use a street in the more up-market shopping district of Kobe to create a kind of baroque tunnel of light, giving it a festive tweak with specially commissioned orchestral music. Locals complain about the excessive crowding, but on a cool, clear night we found that the mass of spectators moved fluidly and it was not particularly overbearing. I felt a little out of place carrying a camera - with so many 4-zillion-megapixel mobile phones in evidence it seemed more than a little old-fashioned.

The Luminarie culminates in the park outside the Kobe City Hall. Here there is another impressive pavillion of arches and light and the inevitable 'yatai' - market stalls selling among other things the even more inevitable takoyaki, a truly repellent fried dumpling made of batter and fried octopus. The only redeeming feature of the many, many takoyaki vendors in Kobe is that they all seem to employ the same cartoon octopus featured in that fantastic episode of The Simpsons - 'Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo*'.

Tacky , or even takoyaki, though it is, it doesn't plumb the depths of the some of the life-threatening fayre on offer last time I went to Blackpool a few years back. Although we could probably make a small fortune over here importing 'Kiss Me Quick' hats...

* never shown in Japan, apparently, on account of the scene where Homer hurls the Emperor of Japan into a pile of used "sumo thongs". For those of you have seen this episode it is hard to think of any part of it that is NOT offensive to the Japanese.

Live from Kobe... it's the Quiz of the Week!

Your chance to win a bottle of sake! All you have to do is guess what this is - snapped while wandering around Kitano. First correct answer (not from Japan) wins a bottle of Kobe's famous rice-based brew.

And the correct answer - mailed in by Mr Huckfield in Coventry - is that the somewhat grotesque tableau above is composed of the drying fins of the blowfish, also known as the puffer fish, but known around these parts as the fugu (literally 'river pig'). Although the fugu itself is already something of a delicacy, apparently the Japanese also like to lightly toast the fins and infuse them in hot sake.

The fugu is a deeply unattractive fish, although much more famous for its amazing toxicity. Its organs are loaded with a neuro-toxin over a thousand times deadlier than cyanide, and the little fellow is thought to be responsible for around 100 deaths a year in Japan, although admittedly these tend to be in rural backwaters.

It is alleged that the same toxin present in the fugu is the main ingredient in voodoo zombie potions, something given credence by reports that in certain regions of Japan people leave the body of a fugu eater lying beside his own coffin for three days before burying it. If the body doesn't decompose, it isn't dead.

Chefs have to be specially trained and licensed to prepare and cook fugu. There is a written and practical test; apparently only a quarter of applicants pass the written test, and the practical test includes eating the fish that has been prepared. Perhaps not surprisingly, I couldn't find any statistics on how many fail that practical test.