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Published: October 23rd 2018
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Tokyo Day 2: The next day consisted of another full day tour with visits to museums and more shrines. Fran wandered off at one shrine and we assumed she was lost forever. But she ended up taking a selfie in front of a place at the shrine so we could find her. Pretty clever. The museums were interesting but were all about antiquity or western art. In the afternoon we visited a huge department store, Takashimaya. What I noticed was how many people worked there. Each department had probably four times the sales people as a comparable store in the US. They all seemed very knowledgeable about their wares. And it’s not just the stores. In the hotels, the museums, the restaurants, at the airport; everywhere it seemed that there were more people working than were needed. Yes, the service was fantastic but how could Japan afford any of this, the perfect maintenance, the well-dressed people, the full employment which is visible everywhere, the hundreds, maybe thousands of new high rise apartments and office buildings, the clean streets, the modern airport, all of this signs of a very wealthy country? And yet we read about Japan’s twenty years of a stagnation
and their severe demographic problems. It just doesn’t add up for me. I’m sure it’s more than a little researchable. Maybe it has something to do with the Japanese people being willing to bring their garbage home with them.
That night we went to a restaurant that was supposed to be one thing but it was something else. Too complicated to explain. But what we got when we finally found it; it was in a mall, was a very sophisticated Beni Hana without the showmanship and with high quality food. Our chef prepared a Waygu steak on a sizzling platter, along with vegetables and rice. This was real Japanese Waygu beef, where the cows are happy and get regular massages, fattened up by who knows what before being slaughtered, hung upside down and butchered. The short happy life of a Waygu cow. What we get to eat is a tender, fatty, chunk of meat. Marbling is not a good description. The fat was infused throughout making the meat appear pink rather than red and white. As our chef cooked the meat he kept scraping the fat from the grill, again and again; an unbelievable amount of fat. I’m getting
a little nauseous writing this. I need to take a break. . . . . . . . Ok, I’m back. It tasted delicious actually, like a combination of steak and foie gras. It was extraordinarily rich. One bite would have been sufficient. The vegetables, on the other hand, turned out great as they were cooked in the fat that kept rendering from the happy cow. We washed it all down with beer, Premium Beer at that. Pretty good beer. We declined dessert as we were in a mall and had a hankering for ice cream and so we paid and headed out through the mall in search of chocolate. There was a pastry shop, a dozen specialty food shops, candy stores, even a cigar shop, but no ice cream. In fact, we haven't seen ice cream. What kind of cuisine doesn't have ice cream? By the time we got back to the hotel, I was feeling it and it wasn't the beer. Oh oh.
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