Last week we reported on an extremely dense and delicious nigorizake from Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture. This week we will focus on a Sendai specialty, as well as something else we consumed there.
It is hard to spend any significant amount of time in the city of Sendai without encountering a restaurant specializing in grilled tongue. Indeed, the station building itself has a number of them, one of which is of the highest caliber. Don’t worry. You’ll find it easily. It is the one with the Disneyesque line outside of it.
Typically, such restaurants offer beef tongue sliced thick or thin, rice with an admixture of barley, a clear tongue soup that is occasionally slightly peppery, some pickles, and a small bowl of grated yam (ヤムイモ). We highly recommend this.
Though not exclusively identified with Sendai, we also encountered and enjoyed this plate of raw whale meat. We have eaten whale on many occasions and are especially fond of it uncooked, a state that renders it quite similar to steak tartare. We understand that this is a controversial practice in some quarters, which we find puzzling, indeed. Consumers of whale do not partake of the meat of endangered species, nor, because we prize the meat so much, want to see any species become extinct. Perhaps it is the cinematic image of the whale that motivates the critics, who see the animal through a Free Willy lens. Well, the Willy of the movie was an orca, and, if a recent article appearing in The New York Times has any validity—and we believe it does—such creatures may not be all sweetness and light.
On November 29, 2024, the paper reported on a recently published study in Frontiers in Marine Science. Some orcas are in the habit of attacking whale sharks in quite a brutal manner. Whale sharks are not whales but are sharks, but not of that nasty Jaws variety. “The orcas ram the giant fish from below, flipping them over to induce a catatonic state. They also bite the whale sharks near their genitals, which causes them to bleed out….”1 Ouch! Enough, please. The objective is to obtain the shark’s big liver. Oh, by the way, the whale shark is an endangered species.
Perhaps we are wrong here. Maybe the critics object to the killing of a sentient being. Well, in recent years we have come to realize that there are many such creatures around. In fact, on October 28, 2024, The New York Times ran a story on crows that indicates that these birds hold grudges—sometimes for many years—and avenge slights, and in at least one instance have even run a protection racket. But what do we care?2 We don’t eat crow, in either its feathered form or its metaphorical manifestation.
1Bittel, J., “Killer Whales Hunt and Feast on the Largest Fish on Earth,” The New York Times (November 29, 2024).
2Fuller, T., “If You Think You Can Hold a Grudge, Consider the Crow,” The New York Times (October 29, 2024).
Drinking Japan 