The other day I was having lunch with my family and my wife gave me a cup of “coffee jelly.” Coffee jelly — which is a sweet gelatin dessert made with coffee, just like it sounds — is one of those Japanese foods that sounds weird when you first hear about it, but it’s really good. When I went to eat my coffee jelly, I turned the cup upside down and broke the little plastic piece there that lets air into the cup, so that the gelatin would fall down onto the plate, but my family looked at me when I did this. “Dad, I didn’t know you were pucchin-ha,” my son said, a word formed from pucchin which is the sound of the little plastic tab braking, and ha which means “faction.” My son explained to me that he was mazemaze-ha (mah-zay mah-zay-hah) or “mixing in the cup faction” while my daughter adheres to the principles of thesonomama-ha or “just eat it normally in the cup faction.” Many other foods get organized along similar lines. For example, when I eat fried eggs, I dabble a bit of soy sauce over them, making me shoyu-ha or “soy sauce faction,” but everyone else in my family is sauce-ha (tonkatsu sauce faction), preferring that heavenly Bull-Dog sauce instead. Which one are you?
How a person eats their “coffee jelly” can be quite complex.
