A.A. Gill Looks at Japan Once Again

[Mulboyne]

A.A. Gill is at it again. Best known for his earlier rant on Japan, he has thrown a few more hand grenades into his latest London restaurant review.

...Japan is the only country I’ve ever been to that wants tourists not to understand what they are looking at. It thinks people who aren’t born Japanese are psychologically, intellectually, spiritually and aesthetically incapable of understanding their culture. Each time you are confronted by seven rocks in gravel, two lilies in a pot, a dwarf Christmas tree, a bedroom without a bed or a limerick without a joke, a polite little local will say “Sorry, very Japanese, difficult to explain”, which translates as: “You are too cretinously oafish and hairy to comprehend the finer feelings that are needed to admire this teapot in all its sublime simplicity.” To respond, smile with as much patronage as you can muster and say: “Yes, it’s a pity you’ll never know what your decorative plagiarised trinket civilisation looks like through sophisticated western eyes.”
...The one area where we really do have to doff our bowlers to the children of the rising sun is in the kitchen. No community goes to the same neurotic and aesthetic lengths for lunch as the Japanese. Japan’s is a fish- and rice-based cuisine. A Japanese person may go for months without eating meat. There are plenty of communities that survive on staple fish, but I can’t think of one as numerous, advanced or ravenous...Although I admire Japanese food, I can’t warm to it. I rarely yearn for it, and can barely raise an eyebrow over particularly fatty belly tuna. It’s never going to be my soul food...But Japanese food has become the Lego of urban eating out, and as the maki rolls grow fatter and sloppier and more like seaweed wraps, and the sushi gets additional mayo and bacon, I respect it less and less.
...[A]nother inexplicable thing about the Japanese — they think it’s disgusting if you eat because you’re hungry. Having a public appetite is like having sex with a dolphin in your mother’s bed on Cherry Blossom Day, so the haiku goes...more...

[Captain Japan]

[ichigo partygirl]

IM confused did he like the food or not??? Or did he just sit down with the chopsticks up his ass....

[james]