Omu Raisu

The manager here at the guesthouse has been really nice to me.  She took me out to dinner for the second time on Tuesday.  The first time was one of my first evenings in Matsuyama, the first time I was on my own for dinner.  She took me in her little car to a sushi place where the food travels around a central island on a little conveyor belt.  This second time she took me out to eat udon, somewhere south of the city along Highway 11.  Communication is difficult, but I'm doing a little better.  I managed to ask her some meaningful questions and understand the answers.  I found out that she is from Miyazaki in southern Kyushu, that she works at the guest house every day, and that she doesn't drink alcohol.  I also told her about my schedule, how I'm going to Tokyo and Osaka and Korea, and that we can't stay in the guesthouse once Erma arrives because they don't have any doubles available.

This doesn't sound like much, but the conversation was slow and halting enough that it took up pretty much all of dinner.

One last thing she asked me when she dropped me off was what time I wanted breakfast.  This was unusual -- breakfast has always been at 7:30, and if you arrive a little late, it doesn't matter.  Your tray is waiting for you, and she makes up the soup and green tea only after you've arrived.  But, she explained, she wanted to make me omu raisu, and so she needed to know exactly when to have it ready.

Omu raisu is a borrowing from English omelette-rice, and I tend to think of it as Japanese fast food -- the sort of awful Western-inspired cuisine that one should generally avoid if there some real Japanese food around as an alternative.  Roughly analagous to a buttered hot dog and Lipton tea bag in a Hong Kong eatery.

But when I showed up for breakfast what was on the table looked pretty good:

That salad consists of four cherry tomatoes and raw onion.  Lately there hasn't been any cabbage, just lots of sliced fresh raw onion.  It's actually pretty good, not too strong at all.

The manager made it clear that I was to eat my omelette with the spoon, not the chopsticks.  Then she brought out the soup, which was in a cute little two-handled cup instead of the usual Japanese lacquerware bowl.

The soup also was made mostly of egg.

I was just about to start eating, when she realized she'd forgotten something, and rushed over to decorate my omelette with a squiggle of ketchup, in the traditional manner.

As I said, I think of omu raisu as pretty lousy, cheap, late-night diner food.  But this was pretty good.  In fact, it looked and tasted a lot like a breakfast burrito.

I asked if that meat was beef.  She said yes -- that it's usually chicken, but for me she made beef instead.  I don't know if this was a reference to me being American or not.

As the meal progressed, it got more and more Western.  For some reason she brought out a slice of cake.

And then a few minutes later, a cup of coffee:

Meanwhile, on the TV, I saw the recap of the previous night's World Cup game, in which Japan had lost to Portugal in one of those stupid overtime sudden death penalty kick competitions.

There were lots of crowd reaction shots when the Japanese player Yuichi Komano missed the shot that would cost Japan the game and the chance to continue in the tournament.

And then they had interviews with the coach and the players.

Still, the Japanese team had gone deeper into a World Cup than any previous Japanese team had.  When the broadcast ended, the manager looked at me and said gravely: Yoku gambarimashita.  It was true, they had done well for themselves.