Mountain Whales and Raccoon Soup



Soviet SuKhoi 7 Interceptor

I was on my first visit to Asia in February, 1973, when I touched down at Kadena AFB on the southern island of Okinawa.  A nineteen day tdy assignment (temporary duty) during which I was apparently expected to do nothing except drink the local beer  and sake, and contribute my meager savings to the Wing's poker gods.  In fairness, the local boys who were borrowing our plane to fly recon missions over North Viet Nam would happily have let us fly with them, but the impeccable logic of rejecting their pleasantly profferred if not pleasingly received offer was, to my mind, fairly straightforward--What kind of imbecile would volunteer to fly an unarmed Boeing 707 across a war zone where they had missiles, AAA guns, MiG 23's and SuKhoi 7's just looking for a way to impress the local girls with tales of the Americans they've shot down, captured, tortured, etc.  I may exaggerate here, but only slightly. 

But that February, 1973, trip to Japan was important for my future life for several reasons, only one of which is interesting.  It was on this trip that I ate my first bite of Chinese food! or of Japanese food!  And an oriental foods fanatic was born.  At first, I bravely tried to eat like the locals with chopsticks, and was none too successful.  It wasn't until I stared down the process (and got some coaching from some guys stationed there) that I grasped the infinite simplicity of these wonderful little tools. (Hint: think of chopsticks as extensions of the fingers.)

Over the next 30 years, I was to go to Japan more than 100 times, and I visited places like Kyoto with it's Kinkaku-Ji and the snow that falls upward, Tokyo's Meiji Temple where I saw a full-blown Shinto wedding ceremony, Nara,the ancient capital of Japan where I saw a 1,000 year old arrow, and innumerable restaurants all over the country from 4-chair huts to 400-chair unagi-only eateries.


Getting personally close to a Japanese can take a long time and lots of patience.  Americans are nearly overwhelming in their (our) personal presence, and our demeanor comes across to the average Japanese as boorish, arrogant, entitled, and generally off-putting.  The Japanese heart, they say, is fragile and so is protected by many layers of stalwart defense; while the American heart is itself nearly impenetrable, but readily accessible to the most casual acquaintance.  I was lucky enough to have developed a few of these deeper personal relationships over the years, and I have revelled in the fact that I was able, ultimately, to be accepted on the basis of who I am, rather than on who I appear to be.  American businessmen who cannot overcome this problem do not last long in business with Japanese, so there's probably a Darwinian aspect to this for me, but that's pretty much farther off point than I'm usually willing to go here.


One of the two closest personal friends I have (I still communicate with them regularly) is a professor at Keio University in Tokyo.  Itakura-san, an inveterate chain-smoker, very early in our relationship set himself on a quest which I feared might become his downfall:  He decided he would find and get me to try a Japanese food that I didn't like and would thereafter refuse to eat.  He knew that the second part of his challenge would be relatively easy, but that the first part would be difficult in the extreme.


He tried the simple things first.  Osaka shrimp extracted from boiling water at the exact moment of their death and then popped into the mouth and swallowed so that you and the shrimp can both experience the transition together (I personally never felt this "transition,"  but the shrimp were damned good).  Delicate and unbelievably flavored fugu shashimi, a dish so expensive and so dangerous that, when done correctly can be ecstacy and when done incorrectly, can spell death.  That Itakura-san and his entourage refused to eat anything, but focused solely on my reaction to the deadly blowfish speaks volumes.  They were not waiting for me to die, of course, but were waiting for me to experience the slight neurologic twinge that release of the neurotoxins in the blowfish cause in the mouth of the consumer so that they could experience it vicariously.  He tried a special freshwater eel that lives in a single stream in a northern section of Tokyo and that are edible only 3-4 months of the year.  He tried variations of shabu-shabu.  He tried almost everthing.


Oddly, he never tried sukiyaki which is my least favorite Japanese dish and probably the most recognized truly Japanese dish in America.  (Ever the purest, I will point out to the naive among us that knife-throwing Beni-Hana is an American/Hawaiian dish which is disdainfully called "hibachi style" in Japan.  Few Japanese eat food in this style and those who do so have only done it since its import from America.  If you are on a business trip to Japan and they serve you dinner in this style, you have just been "dissed."


But ultimately, he got around to inoshishi.  Mountain Whale.  

Mountain whale - inoshishi

The Japanese are a clever group of people who, like the Russians, learned to comply with the decrees of the emperors and shoguns in their faraway capitals while not too severely disrupting their own lives.  At about the time of the shogunate of the first Tokugawa (around 400 years ago) the leadership of Japan converted to Buddhism and along with that adopted many Buddhist proscriptions to be the new law--including a modified vegetarianism.  Meat was declared off-limits, but birds, fish, fruits, vegetables, nuts, etc. were acceptable.  For many of the rural mountain dwellers who lived far from Edo (Tokyo) this new set of rules presented a problem.  Being vegetarian was fine, but they couldn't live without their local delicacy--wild boar.  A solution that was Solomonic in its simplicity was quickly implemented:  the wild boar, it turned out, was actually a whale!  a (reclassifed) Mountain Whale! and as a whale--close enough to a fish to count in this little verbal joust--it was fair game for the strict vegetarian who wanted to please Buddha, please the Shogun, and please his belly.  He could be content and compliant without pissing off the pope, so to speak.

Itakura-san was certain he had found the winner.  Sadly for him, he was wrong about the Mountain Whale...but he was right in the location...he had found the restaurant where, after years of trying he could throw up his hands in a cry of victory.  The wild boar was astonishingly good...just the right moisture in a delicate rack of ribs, a savory barbecue-style sauce that was light but enhanced the boar's flavor, and a presentation that succeeded in convincing me that we were still in Japan, albeit in the far mountains, but that this was not your standard bento box meal. 

The ultimate worst possible Japanese dish? It was the soup served as a side to the boar...a raccoon soup.  The guys struggled with their digital translators to come upwith the word "raccoon" for this animal, but I will assure you that the meat, the broth, and the stench from this wretched dish did not deserve to be on the same table as the inoshishi. 

I conceded Itakura-san's victory, and we proceeded to get ritually sloshed on summer sake.  I'm not sure Itakura-san has ever learned that I have a near infinite capacity for cold sake, and that my bodymass of 88 kilos is capable of processing far more alcohol than his 55 kilos.  But then, why would I give up a betting advantage like that?