What Do Our Neighbors from Different Cultures Eat to Feel Better? #00

What kind of food do you want to eat when you are feeling down or exhausted?
Do you have comfort food for such times?

I am Natsume Aono, a freelance writer working on a  project  "What Do Our Neighbors from Different  Cultures Eat to Feel Better?",  where I interview people from abroad living and working  in Japan about how they are doing here with a focus on their eating habits and daily cooking.
(The photo above is a bento I prepared for the first interview in Dec 2019. It shows some of my comfort food: rice balls of Japanese mixed rice with burdock root and chicken, Japanese omelette, and boiled broccoli cooked with fish stock, soy sauce and grated ginger.）

This project originally started as a column in a Japanese-language literary magazine, mal”01 (the first issue published in Mar.2020) and mal"02 ( the second issue published in Apr.2021).

http://tonarimachicafe.jp/contents/books.html

http://tonarimachicafe.jp/contents/BOOKS2.html

I have been interviewing people from abroad since then, and wanted to make this project my life's work, so I started to look for media where I can publish these interviews regularly,  and I finally found "note" as a platform to publish them on.

Before posting these interviews, let me start with my own story.

A story about when I had become a " Gaikokujin", a foreigner for the first time,  when I was a high school exchange student in the US thirty years ago.

I cannot imagine how I could decide to do it by myself and lived  there for a year, even though I could not speak English that much. But I was excited rather than worried at that time.

My American host family welcomed me and we went to "Pizza Hut" for my first dinner in the US.
The next day I had cereal with milk for breakfast (a huge one gallon plastic bottle astonished me), a hotdog for lunch at a school cafeteria and a Filet-O-Fish and French fries for supper ( I felt they were a little more salty than those served at McDonald's in Japan).

At first, I enjoyed them a lot as I thought  they were just something like festival food served only on special occasions.

However, I soon found out  that they were daily American dishes.

I said "I would like to eat vegetables" ( I could say at least that in my poor English) to my host mother. She was always so nice as to buy some vegetables for me on her way back home from work. She often baked them in an oven  or we made a salad together.
She also showed me how to eat artichoke which she ate for the first time when she was also a student studying abroad  in Switzerland.
She actually helped me a lot, but even so, I could not help feeling uneasy.

I badly wanted to have a bowl of warm rice with hot miso soup with a bunch of chopped fresh Negi in it,  but I could not express my feeling to her in English. Besides, as is often the case in the US, you cannot go anywhere without a car, so I had no idea what to do about my problem by myself.

My host parents must have kindly worried about me looking so sad day by day.
They found a rice cooker somewhere and brought it back for me one day, then drove me to the biggest supermarket in the area.
We bought a bag of Californian rice there.
I also found a pack of sesame seeds in the baking section.
I was almost crying when my host mother came up with a bottle of "Kikkoman's Soy Sauce".
We got some avocados as well and made an avocado rice bowl for dinner.

It was just rice with avocado with sprinkled sesame and soy sauce, and I am sure that my host family would not have been so delighted with it, but for me for that time, it was something sublime.

After a while, I  somehow got  used to those American foods, so I became to be able to enjoy it again, and every now and then, I  crave something like a Peanuts Butter & Jelly Sandwich or a Grilled Cheese Sandwich.

But I cooked rice whenever I caught a  cold or felt run down because I came to miss Japanese food then.

I believe our feelings are deeply connected with what we eat or what we have been eating.

Nowadays we see more and more foreign people working in Japan at  many different places like convenience stores, nursing homes and so on, but there seem to be limited opportunities for us Japanese to get to know about them.

Many questions came to my mind:
What is it like to live as a "Gaikokujin", a foreigner in this country?
"Is everything OK with you?"
"Are people here nice to you?"
"Are you eating food that makes you happy?"

I wonder if there is somebody like me, missing my home country's food, or someone like my host mother in the US trying to find soy sauce for me.

I always have these questions on my mind whenever I see people here from abroad, but it has been difficult for me to actually ask them.

In this series of interviews, I try to ask such questions.
I hope through the joy of eating we can come closer.

For the first interview,  I went to visit Ms.Wong from Hong Kong living in Tokyo.
She showed me how to cook a rice soup with chicken, ginger, and Negi----the dish she cooks when she catches a cold or misses home.