Currry Kuri Mix

In Tokyo I was staying with my aunt, uncle and cousin in this nice little district called Ikegami. Whilst it was part of Tokyo, one of the most frantic cities in existance, the immediate area around the station extending to a few minutes away to the temple, had an extremely 'small town' feel to it - something I definitely wouldn't have expected. As a result, my aunt and uncle would frequnelty bump in to people they knew and as a result, I met a lot of random Japanese people. There was one family in particular who various members of owned certain shops on this small little street. One was a Japanese sweet store (where we given this strange but rather tasty plain jelly like thing, covered in cane sugar - definitely a new one for the taste-buds), another was a curry restaurant and I forget what the other two were. At least, I think there were two. The curry restaurant was owned by the son of the sweet shop owner, who ran that shop with his sister. I think. Probably mistaken somewhere.

Anyway, my aunt took Alex and I to the curry restaurant one day. She chose this day in particular because she had been invited to sort of help fill up the restaurant as it was being filmed for a sort of 'dining in Tokyo' program that was played on Japanese telly. We were all slightly more dressed up than usual (I say that, in my case I just kept my hair tied back and wore a shirt... I was still sporting a bit of a hobo beard) just so that Alex and I particularly didn't look as Western-styled-lack-of-appearance-effort-making* as usual.

*Absolutely ridiculous use of hyfenating, I realise. But it conveys the point, almost. Basically, one thing you become incredibly aware of in Japan, if you are a Westerner, is that they are an incredibly fashion conscious group of people. Everyone (sweeping generalisation) has designer clothes and styled hair. If you're walking around with long bushy hair, sporting fuzz all around your face and wearing jeans and a Megadeth t-shirt, you're certainly going to stand out more than you would if you had dyed brown hair spiked up in a variety of ways, a tailored shirt and some Louis Vuitton related accessories. Everyone had brown hair. Seriously.

It wasn't a huge restaurant, but it was nice and quite cosy. We were ushered by my aunt's restaurant owning friends in to the last remaining table in the corner, and took our seats. At the time, there were some local monks-in-training from the temple up the road eating their meals and being interviewed by the camera crew (who could barely fit properly in the restaurant, mind, with their ginormous equipment). There were two slightly more experienced monks with short, jet black hair eating, one of them just finishing off being interviewed. Sitting opposite them on their table was a less experienced monk, symbolised by his shaved head (or so I was told). All throughout his interview with the camera crew, his seniors kept giggling loudly at his answers - he got quite embarassed by the end of it, I'm pretty sure he wasn't saying anything funny. They were just being monk-hazers. To our surprise, my aunt and I were interviewed too. My aunt being Indian, it sort of made sense that they asked her what she thought about the curry being served (Indian blood makes you the authority on curry). Of course, having lived in Japan for years and consequently being fluent in the language, the interview went smoothly for her. They insisted on interviewing me due to the half-Indianness apparently also making me a vague authority on curry. Cue awkward interview. Every question I was asked was responded by me blankly staring, awaiting a summary translation from my aunt. Then my deliberately short English answers were translated by my aunt to the TV crew, her effectively acting as an interpreter (and a very good one). I was asked what I thought of the curry, to which I basically said it was good, and what I was doing in Japan. They asked me places I intended to see on my travels, and were quite surprised by some of my options, specifically Okayama, but this was later explained to me why (in fact I later realised why - I'll detail why later). Anyway, so the interview finished, we continued chowing down on curry. We were told it was quite unlikely our clip would be used, which was understandable, and if it was, it'd be a short little snippet. Now this was at the very beginning of my trip (the first week of it, in fact), so around May 15th ish. The show wasn't to be on until the evening of June 21st, the very day I actually left Japan, so understandably the entire thing had left my mind.

Fast forward to yesterday, and I get an email from my aunt saying we were actually on the show! (The perceptive ones amongst you might realise that my aunt had taken her time to notify me of this development, but let's be fair it's not really that important [...important enough to make a lengthy blog entry about, mind you]). Apparently there was a close up of my aunt and I, and a bit of our interviews. How bizarre. After it aired, my aunt received a lot of phone calls and emails from friends (presumably to be like "oh my God, you're on TV!" sort of thing). So yeah. In Japan for 6 weeks and I manage to get myself on the box within the first week. I could make some kind of joke about being big in Japan, but that'd just be a lie.
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On that note, I feel I should dispell a certain rumour about Japan. They're not all small people, in fact that's just a gross misinterpretation perpetrated by presumably tall people. I named this blog 'Big In Japan' as I made it before I went there, hoping to finally feel vaguely tall (I am a tad below average height in Britain land), but no! I was disappointed to discover that most Japanese dudes aren't smaller than me - I'm basically average height there. The only properly small people in Japan are the old ones with crooked backs, presumably caused by years of rice-farming labour, or so I was told. I've never seen anything like that before actually, a lot of senior Japanese citizens have bent backs - it must be quite the strain for them, poor people.

Uh... yeah. Curry put me on telly.