Being away from Japan for a long time can make a gaijin and his son yearn for real Japanese food. Last night we started wandering around downtown San Diego to see what we could find, and ended up at a nice place called Kiyo’s Japanese Restaurant in the Gaslamp Quarter. I was immediately impressed because the place was run by actual Japanese people from Japan and not Koreans, which is usually what you find when eating sushi in the States. (A major complaint Koreans have about the Japanese is that they like the spicy pickled cabbage called kimchee almost as much as Koreans do and “pretend that kimchee is really from Japan,” which hurts their national pride. It’s kind of ironic that the vast majority of sushi you’re likely to eat outside of Japan will be prepared by Koreans.) Though we’d come in for the sushi, my son opted to have Teriyaki Chicken instead, saying, “I’ve never seen this, and want to tell my friends back home about it.” It’s an odd fact about Japan that teriyaki is not that common inside Japan, though the flavoring is used on certain foods like yakitori chicken on a stick without the teriyaki name. It’s similar to the way French demi-glace sauce is extremely famous in Japan as one of the basic flavorings of Western cooking, yet it’s not nearly as common in France proper. Perhaps we should label this strange phenomenon of foods becoming more famous outside their home countries, “the Teriyaki Effect.”
Teriyaki Chicken is actually rare in Japan.
