Fish 102

Last night I went to the kaiten-sushi place next door for dinner; it's only 100 yen a plate on Wednesdays (as opposed to the 120 yen on normal days) so I make it in there for a meal most Wednesday evenings before I go to conversation class (English conversation, not Japanese conversation) (teaching conversation class, not attending it...despite what some say I'm already able to converse fairly capably in English). Kaiten sushi means "sushi on a conveyor belt." As far as I can tell, kaiten is a word which means revolving, and is the same as in kaiten-nage, the aikido move, where it means "this is the one where you spin the other guy around ass over tailbone when you throw him."

There are a million different kinds of sushi that come by on the conveyor belt and a million more that they don't put out until you ask for them. There used to be a guy there named Ito san who would make me two ebi-zushi plates the second he saw me locking up my bike outside. I'm a regular! Ebi means shrimp, by the way. And sushi here, to review, means nigiri sushi, the hunk-o-fish-on-rice kind, usually two to a plate unless you get something like "enormous shrimp zushi" or "entire side of an eel zushi." You can also get maki-sushi, meaning rolls (I particularly like the ebi-fry makizushi, which has deep fried shrimp and some Japanese mayo in the middle, though these days I'm trying to cut down on the "fry" portion of my diet to conserve my girlish figure).

Ito san changed sushi shops just after Christmas but there's still my friend Daisuke at the one by my house. Daisuke and I talk every time I go in, but always in whispers over the counter while he cuts and packs the sushi. We have to whisper because, he'll whisper to me, the other guy behind the counter is the boss, and he doesn't like the chefs talking to the customers. This cannot possibly be true. The space that the two men share is a little smaller than the last Manhattan elevator you rode in if you crumpled it at the bottom of the shaft and turned it on its side, and there's no way that the boss doesn't notice us talking to each other when we whisper over the counter: we might as well be shouting at the top of our lungs. Plus, why would he mind? Customer relations are like a quarter of the strength of any business: you've got location, location, location, and customer relations.

And seriously, I am like the #1 one customer to have good relations with. I'm like a celebrity around here! This sushi place is in the district that has my biggest school–the families of some 500 kids all live around here, and their kids all love seeing me outside of class; if this is my regular place, then this is where the kids want to go, not to the other kaiten-suchi place in plain sight down the road. And everyone else loves to come share a few words too. The old ladies all want to know which kinds of sushi I can eat and which ones gross me out (the ones filled with natto gross me out, thanks), the old men want to know why I don't drink sake while I'm eating (because it's too expensive at the sushi bar and because it's a bit déclassé and because it's Wednesday afternoon at 5:00 and I have to teach English class in an hour). And lots of them want to try out their English; can it be a bad thing to have one of your chefs be demonstrably conversant with the celebrity foreign teacher?