Last night I went out for a few drinks with my insurance agent and his brother.

My insurance agent, Hiro, is in his early thirties, he has a wife and a one year old son. He helped me get rid of the deathbox of a car that was left to me once the plates expired, and he helped me find and purchase the killer scooter that I can currently be found zipping around on. His Brother is a 26 year old college student, he was abroad getting a degree from North Carolina, and he is back for a few months. Both speak pretty damn fine English. We went to this small, all wooden, traditional Japanese hole in the wall that was down an alley in Toyama City, it was a really cool place, as these out-of-the-way joints tend to be. Early in the night he turned to me and said "you had better tell me now anythings that you don't like." I said I would try anything. He laughed, and fired off a ripid order of four or five different dishes that we could munch on while we drank our beers. One of them turned out to be a slimy radish thing that was all right, another turned out to be some "fisherman food" junk that almost made me barf, etc. etc. We ate while we drank, and we talked about this and that.

Anyway, about two beers and three or so shots of sake later the next dish comes out. It looks red and mushy, clearly a meat of some type.

"What is this?" I ask.
"Try it."
"Ok, but what is it?"
"Meat."
"I can see that, what type of meat though?"
"You can just try it."

So I look at Hiro with a wary eye, shrug, and eat it. It tastes salty, but clean and not even that fishy. I would go so far as to say that I halfway enjoyed it. A bit later, Hiro, a bit drunk, looks at me and smiles.

"Ok, you know that stuff," he says, pointing at the red mush, "its not just meat."
"What was it?" I ask, warily.
"Whale."
"Whale? You mean to tell me I just ate Baby Beluga?"
"What?"
"Baby Beluga."
"No, it's not Beluga. It's a big whale."
"Nevermind."

I guess Raffi never made it over the pacific.

He then turned to me again, pointing at another dish: Raw cow liver covered in sunflower oil.

"This liver, it is cho-umae."
"What's that mean?"
"Well, umae mean great, or cool, or somethings like that."
"And what about cho?"
"Fucking."
"Excuse me?"
"Cho means fucking."
"Fucking?"
"Yes. Like 'fucking cool'"
"Oh, I see. An emphasis."

Conversations like this are part of the reason why I love this country.