HOPING FOR CHOCOLATE

I've posted herein on Japan's Vanilla Syndrome before; I suspect that the radical results of yesterday's election will be a political example thereof. After 50 years of political vanilla, with no real suggestion of change regarding all-out public works on concretized rivers, dams up the wazoo and bridges to nowhere; no complaint about politicians being scions of wartime zaibatsu; no sense of impropriety at the revolving door of descendants of prime ministers becoming prime ministers, the Japanese public has by a wide majority selected chocolate, an apparently new political flavor where there was none before.

But is it really a different? Is it truly chocolate? Or is it just dyed vanilla? Mightn't it be like the standard Japanese chocolate cake, i.e., pretty much flavorless cakiness colored brown and declared deliciously chocolate? Japanese ice cream as well has made a skeptic of me; I suspect this will be another political example of the Vanilla Syndrome, to wit:

Taro Aso, the vanilla prime minister, is the grandson of former Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who co-founded the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Aso's wife's father was the late Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki; his sister married into the royal family.

Yukio Hatoyama, the chocolate prime minister and head of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), is the grandson of Ichiro Hatoyama, who was prime minister from 1954-1956 and a co-founder of the LDP. Yukio's father Iichiro served as foreign minister; his younger brother Kunio has served in several ministerial posts in the Aso government.

I wouldn't bet on this being chocolate. It may be called chocolate, it may even look like chocolate; but to an old genuine choice-lover like me it looks a lot like it could be the same old vanilla with just a little coloring.

Let's have a taste and see... any hint of chocolate in there?

+

Things are already changing: Japan's new first lady has traveled on a UFO to Venus!

Funny that didn't come up during the campaign... You have to wonder, though,
about the effect this will have on the nation's extraplanetary policy...

+

She also eats the sun,
and knew Tom Cruise when he was Japanese...


Chocolate is beginning to look like the Rock of Ages...

SO I GO WITH THE CHOCOLATE

We went out on an excursion in the sunny yesterday across the Lake to the splendid Botanical Garden where we had a wondrous walk among the colorful plants and then went off into the hinterland to find some quality soba for lunch but what I want to talk about is ice cream.

So from where I'm eating my soba I can see the ice cream counter at the entrance to the restaurant and I'm looking forward to getting some ice cream after lunch because at a quick side glance on the way in I noted EIGHT ice cream tubs, an unprecedented number of choices for an ice cream counter out in the country, where, if they have a radical two tubs it's usually vanilla on the left and vanilla on the right, in what I call Japan's Vanilla Syndrome (which applies to other aspects of Japan as well, such as its politics); if there's a rare third choice in the middle, it's vanilla too, so it's a long time since I've had any chocolate.

Eight tubs! Be still, my heart! So when I finish I get right up and head over there with no further ado whatsoever, my mind is already filling with darkly sweet visions of cool smoothness welling up from the chocolate depths of the psyche in nirvanal anticipation.

Expertly I note at once that they have Vanilla, what a surprise, then beside that a visually undistinguishable flavor tantalizingly called "Milk," then comes an identically white flavor called "Rich Milk," for the more daring connoisseur, then there's a radical shift to a remotely pink-tinged vanilla item brazenly labeled "Strawberry," then a vanilla with vaguely dusty flecks of a darker something in it, presumptively labeled "Chocolate Chip" - we're getting warmer - then comes a pale kind of mixture called "Green Tea" that I can't really say is green, there's more of a vanilla look to it, then comes "Blueberry," identical in color to a shirt I once planned to wear to Woodstock, but I can't see a single berry; then we cut to the chase! Beside the berryless blue stuff, filling the number 8 spot, there's: empty space, crammed with the absence of superbly flavored chocolate, maybe with roasted almonds in it.

So I go with the absence of chocolate. It's invisible but free. And immediate. Tastes like vanilla.