Jap Blog 20th of July 1996

Today we joined four of Iwaoka’s [author's note - interesting Japanese-style apartment car park] friends and drove to Hamamatsu in Shizuoka-ken (prefecture). These people stop at nearly every highway stop. The posted speed limit is 80 km/h but they drove at 130 km/h on the expressway. The toll was 5500 yen. Had eel (unagi) for lunch. Not bad. Then we went to the Suzuki household by the harbour. Shell fishing was the plan. It was possible to get them by hand but the shells and rocks were very sharp, as I found out. Once I started to use the tool designed for shell fishing I had a lot of success. It was like a pitchfork with a steel net to catch and sift with. Twenty eight kai (shellfish) in one go was my best effort, a record no doubt. We even caught a crab, sea urchin and two jellyfish.

Kango Inoguchi, our host, was a good teacher, when it came to shell fishing. He’s 58 and will retire in two years and go to Australia. Funny old guy who spoke a bit of English that he picked up in the navy. He delighted in telling me in English that he liked his wife, Chizuko, because she had “big tits”. There was a huge cook-up for tea. Raw prawn tails, whole cooked prawns, sashimi (which I almost choked on and was so close to throwing up in front of everybody it wasn’t funny), sushi, sake, squid, dried squid, gyoza and kai. Eat, eat, eat. Other family members include Keiko and her boyfriend Kou, Yuko and boyfriend Koji, Susumu (wife), Yuki and son Jujero. I rate Yuko as a 10 (One of those games that we played constantly about rating how pretty Japanese girls were).

Iwaoka’s friends – Toshihiro and Akiko Shimada (another 10), and Yumiko Kitajima and Tsutomu Nakamura. Iwaoka went to bed fairly early because he wanted to leave at 3 am.

- posted by Hammy @ 8:36 am