Tsuri

So, the majority of my Japanese friends might share their birthdates with my parents, but they sure know how to take you out for a totally satisfying day. Those kind of days seem few and far between once you start working. As a kid, a Saturday would be.. - rise early, meet your friends, climb trees, spend a few hours splashing in a pool, eat watermelon and hotdogs for lunch, mission around the back streets poking things with sticks, ride around on bikes, and before you know it, the sun is setting and you have to go home, because darkness is your natural curfew. And you return grudingly, but with the full satisfaction of having had A DAY.









Saturday was like that. I woke up after yet again not having slept enough. Hiro picked us up in his big, white, legendary van and we made the 2-hour drive to Yonago with fishing rods in the back, me chattering away with the mindlessness of the sleep-deprived. We stopped in Yonago for an early lunch at a fish market, where I ate a plate of the most amazing raw sea creatures - raw octopus, squid, three kinds of fish, sazae (turban shell) and a vicious-looking soup with half a pregnant crab clawing it's way out. We washed it down with one-cup sake from Kyoto, while being pleasantly harrased by a strange little man with tiny hands and long, yellow nails who was telling us about Jusco stores and Korean massages in toothless, incomprehensible Japanese. And stalked us all the way to the toilet to give us a complimentary bag of tiny mikans (citrus fruit).


A beautiful drive up a typical Japanese mountain road (as wide as one small car and winding madly between bamboo forests and moss-covered trees), and we reached our destination - a tiny seaside town with 20 houses, a deserted pier, and tiny squid fishing boats with names in kanji characters written on the sides. Hiro started setting up the three fishing rods, which I looked at incredulously, but after trying it for myself, I was squealing in delight and talking to the fish I caught, apologising as I ripped the hooks out of their bony mouths.


There was this game we played at birthday parties as a kid, right after vroteier and before pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. I forget the intricacies of the game, but it involved a makeshift fishing rod with a magnet at the end, and a school of paper fish on the floor with paperclips attached. Fishing for aji (spanish mackerel) was like that - you literally dip your six-hook fishing line with shrimp-bait-bag at the end into the water, and pull it up seconds later with a tiny fish (or two or three or four) hooked and struggling. Hippies, don't fret - as Kurt Cobain said: "it's okay to eat fish, cause they don't have any feelings".



We did this, struggling against a wind that reminded me of Cape Town's fiercest south-east, laughing like children, and packed up as the sun started its descent. We stopped at the peninsula and had coffee at a lighthouse, watching clouds over the grey water (which would influence my dreams later on, as I dreamt an apocalypse where the clouds came crashing down into the ocean).

We arrived in Niimi in the dark, where Hiro sliced our catch into sashimi (raw fish slices) and decapitated and de-gutted the rest, fried it in batter, and served with rice and miso soup (thanks Tara). Nothing quite beats eating something that you caught yourself.

Satisfied in so many ways, I walked down to my apartment, feeling that I had.. A Day.