So I’ve been in Japan for two months and I am getting a little melancholy over the fact that my time here is more than half way over. How can this be??  Cody and I are in Narita overnight, with a flight to San Francisco tomorrow to see our new nephew. After our visit with family we are headed back to Tanegashima until the satellite launch. Because my brain functions are stunted during travel, I’m offering a smattering of random photos to hopefully hold you over until I can do words again.

Spicy ramen at our favorite place near our hotel.

The mural at our favorite burger/jerk chicken restaurant: The Stepping Lion.

Jerk chicken platter at the Stepping Lion.

Japan is apparently the land of mammoth carrots. Potatoes on the left, onions on the right.

Fried rice and katsukare (curry with fried pork) at my OTHER favorite lunch spot in Minamitane. Fourteen dollars for everything in the photo.

Remember how I said KFC is real popular here?

New Year’s performance that is sort of a cross between Christmas caroling and trick-or-treating, but with drums and dancing and chanting and men dressed in kimonos. Very cute.

I really really like it here, you guys.

On Christmas/my birthday I woke up in our rustic little cabin on monkey island, walked out the door, and saw a rainbow. Not a bad way to start the best day of the year.

Determined to make the most of the culinary situation in town, we set out in the morning in search of french toast. Our target restaurant was scheduled to open at 9:00, so we planned accordingly, but they were closed for the holiday – much to our dismay. By the time we actually found a breakfast place that was open, we were starving and willing to eat anything put in front of us.

Which turned out to be a good thing. Salad, ham, and egg is a pretty typical “western” style breakfast in this area, but the spaghetti, fried chicken, and potato salad were unexpected.

After breakfast we wandered the town and found a cute Yakushima dog to pet.

Then we drove into the mountains and spotted a few Japanese deer. To me, they look like American deer chopped off at the knees.

That one is just a little bigger than Murdock.

Even though our hikes were basically rained out, the clouds made for some nice, moody lighting.

Dinner was pizza. Durn good pizza at a restaurant I’m going to write more about later.

The guy who makes the pizza on Yakushima also makes his own bread and oh dear. Such bread. It was better than most of of the European style bread I’ve had in America.

I flitted off in the afternoon for a massage at a fancy hotel and, while I was having my shoulders pinched and kneaded, Cody and our traveling buddies put together an impromptu party for me. With candles! I was genuinely surprised and maybe got a little misty-eyed but played it off super cool like I do. After cake we watched a Charlie Brown Christmas and, truth be told, I didn’t feel a twinge of homesickness all day.

No place like a cabin on an island for the holidays.

I’m kind of embarrassed I haven’t written more about the food I’ve been eating. Because I have been EATING. I want to do these places justice though, so be patient with me plz. Ok, so lets begin: one of my favorite restaurants in the town of Minamitane is Sama Sama. I have no idea what Sama Sama means, but when I hear it, I think of yakitori.

This is a plate of mixed yakitori shio (chicken skewers seasoned with salt…somehow they taste like more than the sum of their parts). If you’ve watched “The Mind of a Chef” season one with David Chang on Netflix, you know what the first skewer on the left is: a painstakingly unraveled chicken wing. The next is chicken with green onion, then a dark meat skewer, a thin-sliced pork belly skewer, and the last is white meat with wasabi. The Japanese word for what these are is oishii (meaning delicious). Oishii is one of the first words I learned in Japanese and I use it all. the. time.

That’s Masa-san, the cook/owner grilling some yakitori on the left, and a close-up of his handiwork on the right. Are you guys seeing how atmospheric this place is? It’s cozy and feels like every piece of it has been sort of, I don’t know, collected? The fact that it’s run entirely by two people helps too.

Breaded and deep-fried Camembert cheese. Yup.

All the salads in Japan are awesome. The national obsession with freshness is really highlighted in salads: no brown edges or soggy bits here. Sliced pork and sesame dressing on top.

This is yakitori tare (pronounced ta-ray) – similar to the yakitori shio, but topped with a sweet, brown sauce called tare which is sort of similarish to teriyaki. I should probably look that up.

That up there is a Korean style green onion and cheese pancake, cut into wedges. Nice and crispy on one side, cheesy on the other.

They have these mini table grills you can order to grill your own meat over Japanese white binchotan coal. Masa-san fills them with hot coals and sets a lava stone on top to use as the grilling surface. This one’s being used on some duck.

Masa-san torching some marinated mackerel, table-side.

These things are out of control. Chicken wings that have been carefully slit open and stuffed with gyoza filling.

Deep fried chicken. Wing. Gyoza.

Bottles of sake and Masa-san. This place has basically charmed my face off, and Masa san is a great cook. If you ever go to Tanegashima, head to Sama Sama and eat all the things. Actually, if you’re anywhere within a thousand-mile radius of Tanegashima it would be very much worth the trip to eat at Sama Sama. Just go, ok?

Americans are obsessed with food lately. So much that we devour books and shows about food almost as much as creatively repurposed corn products. I, for one, recently read the French food culture book “French Kids Eat Everything” and it, combined with a few lines from an Alton Brown podcast, (more food media there, consumed unselfconsciously) fueled a bout of introspection that led me to…an opinion (yikes).

American food culture has been turning more toward the slow, the simple, and the real, and for this I’m very happy. In this process, the car as a location for eating has been stigmatized. French people, in their great food-centric culture, as I read in “French Kids Eat Everything” hold sacred the act of eating at the table.  They also would probably not eat a sandwich from a wrapper, and would never ever eat in a car. This strict devotion to proper meal time with chairs and tables and cutlery is part of the reason French people are, on average, healthier than Americans. Alton added his voice to my brain stew by expressing some sadness over the common occurrence of Americans eating at desks and in cars and the infrequency of eating as families at tables – a sentiment I can agree with. But America is geographically huge, and our drive thru culture evolved as a response to the fact that many Americans have to spend a lot of time in their cars. And lots of us don’t have time to cook before or after (or during) our big commutes, but that’s another can of worms.

While  I’ll admit that most drive through food is nutritionally deplorable and exemplar of our nations obsession with fatty, salty, fast, and cheap, there are things worth preserving in drive through culture. The fast-food hamburger as perfected by In-N-Out for example, or the ideal fountain coke with just the right amount of bubbles, which can be found only in paper cup with plastic lid.

So here it is: I love a drive thru. And while I get that frequenting fast food places is bad for our waistlines and probably our minds and family dynamics, I don’t get the all or nothing mentality that seems to be necessary with every American fad. Let’s apply some Cookie Monster moderation to the drive thru – make it a “sometimes” thing.

Eating is about more than consuming fuel anyway, it’s about connecting. And some of the best conversations of my life have taken place in cars parked in drive-through parking lots, late at night, over a bag of paper-wrapped tacos. I don’t know what it is about sitting side by side in a parked car and sharing fried food, but it inspires camaraderie and honesty like few other situations do. Eating at a table is for polite conversation and wholesome family bonding. Drive through parking lots are for confessionals,  making confidantes out of mere friends, and talking through big choices. French fries and burritos grease the wheels of truth and bond us like bandits. Your teen won’t talk to you? Take them to Sonic at 1am and see what happens. Worried about your best friend? Buy her a chocolate shake and let her spill her guts in the safety of your company.

Should we all be eating fast food a lot less? Clearly. But is eating in a car  every now and then something to be sad or, even more American, feel guilty about? I don’t think so.

(P.S. Thanks to Caroline and Jordan for modeling the awkwardness of posing for a car-dining picture. And for not getting mad at me for using your pretty faces without permission. K?)

Yakushima, aka Monkey Island, is gorgeous, even in the rain. So when hiking seemed like a bad idea, we went for a drive.

Up in the mountains we saw something.

Are those…?

This is where I begin hyperventilating. Stop. The. Car.

Casual regard from an actual wild monkey. Get ready for a monkey photo overload.

And while I was distracted taking pictures of this guy, adorably contemplating his fingernails, something happened.

EEEEEP.

Documentation of once-in-lifetime event.

Just a wild monkey on our side view mirror.

Grooming, or showing off?

Meanwhile, this guy is about to fall asleep on top of his post.

Are they toes? Or fingers?

Big M, little m, what begins with M?

Monkeys. The answer is monkeys.

Monkeys everywhere. And I’m rendered incoherent by the photos almost as much as the real thing. Hence the babbling. But MONKEYS.