Goya and Natto

I've eaten myself into a corner. And I'm not sure how to eat myself back out of it again.

Japanese food, for a Westerner, is extremely strange. When I first got here, I barely ate anything: I ate rice balls, and crisps, and plain noodles. In a restaurant, I'd eat edamame beans, and ask for pizza. Regardless of whether or not they served pizza. I was - frankly - convinced for a long time that I'd probably starve to death, or over-pizza myself into a coma. And for a while it looked like that might happen; I dropped two stone in the first six months, and got to a stage where even the smell of cheese and tomato did bad things to my stomach.

Needless to say - from glancing at my stomach as I type - I didn't starve to death. In fact, I've since learnt to love traditional Japanese food so much that - far from missing British food - when I go home to England, I crave the things I left behind in Nichinan. Things that made no sense to me a year ago I'm suddenly ravenous for: green tea, umeshu, rice, sushi, sashimi, tofu, yaki soba, miso soup, sesame, coffee jelly. When I landed in England after eight months away, I quite fancied beans on toast. When I landed in Kyushu after two weeks away, the first thing I did was head straight to a Japanese restaurant in the airport and gorge myself on soy-marinated fish.

There are two things, however, that are - without exception - controversial foods in Japan. Foods that spark debate between Japanese people themselves: will make the most openminded Japanese housewives glare at you, and make the sweetest Japanese children pretend to vomit on the floor.

The first is natto. It's essentially the soya bean - which is the basis of almost every single Japanese dish (soy sauce, tofu, edamame) - except that it's fermented. Like blue cheese, and with the same sort of mouldy, off taste. It comes in little packets, and when you mix it it immediately froths and becomes stringy and sticky: covered in a cheesy, runny, glue like matter. A smelly, cheesy, mould like matter. It's very healthy - nobody argues that - but a large proportion of Japanese people think it's revolting. And almost every single foreigner does. In fact, it's one of the first questions any foreigner gets asked: "Do you eat natto?" A sort of culinary cultural initiation. Like black pudding in Scotland, or my mum's roast dinner in England.

I love natto, thank God. I love blue cheese, I love Marmite, I love olives, and so a mouldy bean is right down my street. Which makes me, apparently, an honorary Japanese citizen. "You're more Japanese than I am," a Japanese friend told me yesterday. "I wouldn't touch that stuff if you paid me. It is very, very, very disgusting."

The second controversial food, however, I do not love. The second, I do not love so much that I find it difficult to touch it without gagging. And - having only tasted it recently - I finally know why every single child in Yokohama, when asked what they hated in the world, told me that it was this.

And this - the most debated over food in Japan - is a vegetable called goya.


It looks harmless: a frilly kind of dark green cucumber. Cut up, it even looks quite pretty. Healthy. Lacy, even. Like a dressed up piece of salad. It tastes, however, like acid. It is so bitter, and so strong, that one mouthful will last a few days: eating away at your tongue until you never want to eat anything else ever again. Burning through your taste buds until they've given up completely and committed mass suicide.

And - through politeness - I am now being forcefed this revolting plant by Baba, who thinks I love it.

It's my fault. She offered me a tiny bit, cooked by her own fair hand, so I ate it, tried not to grimace, and said "wow, it's delicious!" Because that's what you say when somebody cooks you food.
"You like it?" she said in - I realised too late - surprise. "Excellent!"
And she turned up twenty minutes later with a pot of it. Wanted to watch me eat all of it. All of the acid plant from hell which tastes like it came from another planet, simply because they didn't want it near them anymore.
"Eat!" she demands. "Eat more! More! You are tall girl!"
And so I stood there, and I ate the thing I hate more than anything else in the world, and I tried not to cry. I smiled, and I nodded, and then swallowed the nasty gunk down, and I told her it's lovely. Because I have no idea how to tell her it's disgusting without showing her that I lied in the first place.

"Well?" she said when I'd finished the last mouthful. "Good?"
"Great!" I told her, hoping I could puke it back up when I was back inside my house.
"Brilliant," she answered, smiling. "Because I absolutely hate the stuff and my husband makes me cook it all the time."

Three days in a row, she's brought me goya. Three days in a row I've been forced to eat it, and forced to swallow it. And I'm starting to hide behind the curtains whenever I see a pot in her hand, because - honestly - I'd rather eat my own hand.

In learning to love Japanese food, I've opened my culinary experiences wide open: I've discovered a cuisine I adore.

I've also discovered goya.

And when I eventually leave Japan, this is not something I'll be packing to take home with me. Although I'm not quite sure how to tell Baba that.