"Do you like eel?" asked one of my co-workers. "I don't eat anything with a face, remember?" "Oh, but they cut the face off first." This about sums up the general understanding of vegetarianism here in Tokushima. Some people are surprisingly knowledgable, asking me about the fish and chicken stocks used in soups. With the others, though, it's been a lively game of charades meets pictionary explaining every animal that I do not eat to the shocked faces and "wuhhh?" noises of my audience. I think it's part of my job as the token foreigner to be outright strange, which is actually pretty fun. The concept of what constitutes meat really is relative to the culture and the individual, as I was thankfully warned before I left the U.S., and as I discovered when my "no
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