More Blogs about Buildings and Food

It could be anything, really.

I spoke recently about pachinko as being a central fact of walking down the street in Japan.  Fortunately, with an apparent total lack of zoning in Japan, every next place on any street can be a surprise.  The next spot on the street might really be anything, even something other than a pachinko parlor. 

I'm going to be talking for a minute about restaurants.  I think I might have mentioned this earlier, but I want to talk about it a bit more, because really Japan means restaurants.  We might like to think of it as Japanese food, but as Chandler would say, of course over there they just call it "food."

The reason there are so many restaurants all over Japan is pretty much the reason there are so many restaurants in big cities everywhere.  Because it's so mountainous 125 million people in Japan are living on about 25% of the land area.  As a result, the average Japanese family home is less than half the size of the American home.

As a result, the Japanese don't do much in-home entertaining.  In the U.S., TV solved that problem for us.  The Japanese, when they're socializing, often do it at restaurants though.


This one includes the dessert menu

 I love the ingenious way they display their wares.  Elsewhere, we put up menus, which rarely have photos.  The Japanese want to get those salivary glands working before you get into the building, so they put up plastic mock-ups of the possibilities.

They're usually pretty good, believe it or not.  I'm not saying you develop a sudden taste for plastic, and you are rarely fooled into thinking you're looking at the real thing because, of course, the plates and bowls are on their sides facing you and they do still have gravity in Japan. 

But they're showing you a lot about what it is, and even if you don't speak Japanese, there's usually a photo menu in the restaurant to match it up with the window display, and with the help of useful hand gestures including pointing, you often don't need Japanese in most of the restaurants most of the time.  And, if you do have a problem, you can always ask, "Nan desu ka" which in most restaurants means "what is that" but in Indian restaurants, of which there seem to be a lot, it might mean "Is that naan?"

Incidentally, the names of the foods are not always only in Japanese; sometimes they have English too, and even when they're in Japanese script, the name might be something that, if they tell you the Japanese name, you might recognize.  I was just looking at that photo above, for example.  The lower left-hand corner of the bottom shelf, the one that's not apparently a cup of tea, is labeled "Moka furoto."  So, that's a mocha float.  So, that sounds good and now I want a moka furoto.

And Look

I might as well go into this now.  Shop names were one of my favorite parts of looking around the Streets of Japan.  The ones in English, anyway, which is lots of them, and at the Kyoto Station, really most or maybe even all of them. 

When was your smallness got to know?

In case  you didn't catch Soup, below, you might want to check that out.  Notice, Soup isn't in the restaurant trade.  It's more your higher-end, what do they call it, "upscale" women's clothing.  No T-Shirts saying "Its smallness was got to know when it was able to go away to people gently," although goodness knows, maybe that's upscale.  I don't have a great sense of these things (I did, however, sincerely appreciate the fact that the designer of the t-shirt was sufficiently familiar with the intricacies of English grammar not to insert the unwanted apostrophe in "Its").  I also love that the motif is the word "Kind," one of my favorite words.

I could have really spent a day taking photos of shop titles of this kind.  One I took, partly for the plastic-food value and partly for lawyers, or for anyone who knows that it's a subject I taught in law school, is "UCC."  I don't know what it stands for, but it doesn't really have sufficiently broad appeal for me to print it here.

My favorite one, though, was a hair salon kind of right around the corner from me.  You've gathered by now that shop names are not picked primarily for marketing purposes, the way they might be in the U.S.  Nothing like UR BEST produce shop or TAS-T-SWEET ice cream.  No, so often in Japan they just pick a word, and whatever it is seems to do the trick.

I just don't know . . .

That said, I'm not sure they always give the kind of thought they should to some of these names.  This shop I mentioned, well, it would have made me think twice about even going in to check things out.



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