by Anna Kunnecke
Understandably, Tokyo residents are worried about fire. Train stations have big billboards proclaiming its danger; kids are taught early to turn off the stove at the valve at the first tremor of an earthquake; our earnest building staff test the piercing fire alarms more often than I am convinced is strictly necessary. When we went out for yakiniku, I remembered why.
It had been a long week. Two tired parents and one cranky girl--none of us were up for cooking. We settled in at our table and they brought over the great tub o' fire. This is literally a big iron bowl full of coals that fits neatly into the round hole in the center of the table. Yakiniku with a grabby little kid is a special way for anxious parents to torture themselves, but even with lots of warnings and dire consequences foretold if she got too close to the glowing coals, it turned out that the fiery cairn itself was enough to inspire total respect in our little hoodlum.
The plates of raw meat came fast and we did our dance with tongs and long chopsticks, draping, turning, dipping, and burning our mouths. As the bits of meat got hot and sizzled, drops of fat would drip onto the coals, causing a little storm of sparks to erupt. My daughter was mesmerized. "Ooooh! Sparks!" she would exclaim, each and every time. It suddenly struck me that here we were, the archetypal family, huddled around fire, poking meat with sticks. Sanitized, commercialized, and safety-fied as it may be, it seems to me that the yakiniku table is basically a modernized urban version of the campfire.
Minus the songs. And the marshmallows. And the mosquitoes.
Not that I'm complaining. This is just about as much fire as I can handle in my life. And I liked that for my daughter it connected the word 'fire' to something more tangible than the candles we light. All of our scary stories about candles and fire and terribleburningthings aren't nearly as effective as one evening spent around an intensely hot bowl of actual smoking burning stuff. I'm happy for her to have a controlled version of fire to get some of that extremely useful and irreplaceable ouch-they-weren't-kidding-when-they-said-don't-touch biofeedback.
Since so few four-year-olds are allowed to play with matches out on the street anymore (these crazy over-protective modern parents), there isn't much reality to those big red trucks their kindergarten teachers take them to see. And so intense curiosity sometimes gets channeled into experiments like trying to light candles in your mother's closet or setting off firecrackers in the yard, leading to charred clothes and the wrath of the entire neighborhood. (Really. Both those things happened to a friend of mine within the course of a year. It was quite a year.)
So I have a suggestion. Instead of those Hi-No-Yojin marches the neighborhood associations are always trying to guilt-trip people into joining, which involve marching and banging gongs and bells and chanting "let's be careful of fire," I think they should just take the whole ward out for yakiniku. Let everybody grill up some tasty morsels, down a few icy jokki of beer, and at a crucial moment, stop, point at the coals and say, "People. Just remember: it's very, very hot." I think that should do the trick.
Understandably, Tokyo residents are worried about fire. Train stations have big billboards proclaiming its danger; kids are taught early to turn off the stove at the valve at the first tremor of an earthquake; our earnest building staff test the piercing fire alarms more often than I am convinced is strictly necessary. When we went out for yakiniku, I remembered why.
It had been a long week. Two tired parents and one cranky girl--none of us were up for cooking. We settled in at our table and they brought over the great tub o' fire. This is literally a big iron bowl full of coals that fits neatly into the round hole in the center of the table. Yakiniku with a grabby little kid is a special way for anxious parents to torture themselves, but even with lots of warnings and dire consequences foretold if she got too close to the glowing coals, it turned out that the fiery cairn itself was enough to inspire total respect in our little hoodlum.
The plates of raw meat came fast and we did our dance with tongs and long chopsticks, draping, turning, dipping, and burning our mouths. As the bits of meat got hot and sizzled, drops of fat would drip onto the coals, causing a little storm of sparks to erupt. My daughter was mesmerized. "Ooooh! Sparks!" she would exclaim, each and every time. It suddenly struck me that here we were, the archetypal family, huddled around fire, poking meat with sticks. Sanitized, commercialized, and safety-fied as it may be, it seems to me that the yakiniku table is basically a modernized urban version of the campfire.
Minus the songs. And the marshmallows. And the mosquitoes.
Not that I'm complaining. This is just about as much fire as I can handle in my life. And I liked that for my daughter it connected the word 'fire' to something more tangible than the candles we light. All of our scary stories about candles and fire and terribleburningthings aren't nearly as effective as one evening spent around an intensely hot bowl of actual smoking burning stuff. I'm happy for her to have a controlled version of fire to get some of that extremely useful and irreplaceable ouch-they-weren't-kidding-when-they-said-don't-touch biofeedback.
Since so few four-year-olds are allowed to play with matches out on the street anymore (these crazy over-protective modern parents), there isn't much reality to those big red trucks their kindergarten teachers take them to see. And so intense curiosity sometimes gets channeled into experiments like trying to light candles in your mother's closet or setting off firecrackers in the yard, leading to charred clothes and the wrath of the entire neighborhood. (Really. Both those things happened to a friend of mine within the course of a year. It was quite a year.)
So I have a suggestion. Instead of those Hi-No-Yojin marches the neighborhood associations are always trying to guilt-trip people into joining, which involve marching and banging gongs and bells and chanting "let's be careful of fire," I think they should just take the whole ward out for yakiniku. Let everybody grill up some tasty morsels, down a few icy jokki of beer, and at a crucial moment, stop, point at the coals and say, "People. Just remember: it's very, very hot." I think that should do the trick.
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