STEAMING POCKETS

Walking down the early morning street in the big city on my first day back at the office in the new year, my mind in that kind of hapless fog it enters when, in all its ancient innocence of having gotten up more or less around dawn for the past ten days, it is one day (for no reason it can truly understand) gotten up very early in the morning and dressed up and put on a train from the clear, bright, quiet countryside and taken off the train into the darkly roaring canyons of a vast Asian metropolis rivered with strangers zipping here and there on errands that appear to involve life and death, my coat pocket soon steaming warm from the Japanese fast-food breakfast I've purchased for myself (I've minimized meat and dairy in my diet for over 40 years now, but "That which is never broken is not a rule" is one of my more adhered-to mottoes, so I got a couple of nice warm steamed meat and curry buns to have for breakfast) and thus it is that I find myself on the way to the office, pockets steaming as I say, meditating upon the comparative qualities of Japanese and American fast foods (Big Macs! Bucket-o-Chicken! Barrel-o-Coke!) and finding therein the very width and breadth and gravity of many of the problems that beset the world today.

Japanese fast foods (I refer to traditional Japanese fast foods here, the modern ones being essentially indistinguishable from those of America, except perhaps in the packaging) tend to be lighter and more natural, involving fewer stages of refinement. The Nikuman, for example, is a fluffy steamed bun cored with a stew of meat and costs less than a dollar. It's hot, fast, tasty, filling, low in calories and easy to find at all hours. (For simplicity, I'm leaving out all the other stuff that dietary pain-in-the-necks like myself often decry, like additives, preservatives, organics etc., also in the firm belief that just about anything is ok-- in fact, quite delicious-- once in a while).

There's no real American equivalent to the Nikuman. Nor is there any real American equivalent to the Taiyaki, another of my street-sold winter favorites, a crispy mold-baked fish-shaped crepe-dough filled with a paste made of sweetened adzuki beans. Warm and tasty, natural winter street food, and the vendor is always interesting. Another favorite is the pebble-roasted yakiimo (baked sweet potato), still sold from singsong trucks that slowly wend the winter nights. Great handwarmers as you eat the steaming and nourishing sweetness. Food built for the air and the season and the body. No American equivalents there either. So I guess there's no comparison after all. Maybe the US could gain something, as it were, from fast food like this.