Last Friday, my fellow PiAer, Roya, and I went to a nearby restaurant for what we thought was going to be some ordinary local hospitality. A week before, Roya had told a restaurant owner that she loved udon, thick noodle version of ramen, and mochi, the Japanese rice snack that gets mashed into a gooey ball.
Everything is going as well as you'd expect. A little awkward silences when we don't understand what's being said in Japanese, a history on various strains of rice, you know, normal conversation stuff. The udon is delicious and we get to the mochi part. Friends of the restaurant owners arrive to help with the mochi making and it seems like this is turning into some big undertaking. We are just making racks and racks of mochi.
BOOM! Yakage News Team on the scene! Someone told someone who told someone to get in touch with the local television station that two foreigners were interested in Japanese culture. That sounds like a great 7 o'clock special! So a reporter showed up with a big ol' video camera on his shoulder to get some quality footage. Not even in Japan for a month and I'm getting my face on TV. At the end of the night, the owner asked us to sign our names on his wall. So we've forever left our mark on that place.
When it comes to Japanese culture, sometimes when you express interest in something, the person who gets complimented goes a little overboard. "I like udon and mochi" seems like a harmless statement, unless you make it to the owner of an udon restaurant who makes mochi on the side. Now we got about 8 people coming in for 4 hours on a Friday night to show us how to make mochi. AND! A reporter comes. It's hard for me to tell sometimes whether they are genuinely happy to share something of their culture with us, or if it's more like they feel obligated to do it and do it on a grand scale.
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