I had been in Japan for only a couple of days when Mike, a co-worker, asked me if I would like to visit a nearby mountaintop shrine. Except for a night at the bars, I had been working pretty much nonstop from the time that I had arrived on station, so I certainly welcomed the chance to visit a place more representative of traditional Japan.
Mitake-yama is only a short train ride away from Fussa-shi, so after a train ride, and hike through the town of Mitake, we were soon on our way up the mountain trail to the shrine. It was a hot, muggy late June Sunday afternoon, and a lot of people were making a trip to the shrine in an atmosphere that was most festive.
As we approached the top, I could smell all sorts of food cooking at various little vendor stands. Hungry from the hike, and still a bit hungover from a very late Saturday night, I quickly surveyed my choices. The squid cooking over a charcoal fire smelled good, but wasn't quite what I had in mind. Yaki-tori? -- no, I think I ate my fill of that last night along with way too much biiru. I needed some familiar comfort food to make my system right ... aha!!! HOTDOGS!!! ... YES!!! that's what I needed!
My mouth watering profusely with anticipation, I happily received my hotdog and proceeded to the side of the vendor stand, where there were familiar looking red and yellow plastic squeeze bottles. Being of the belief that ketchup has no place on hotdogs, and that a hotdog isn't a proper hotdog without a generous application of yellow mustard, I grabbed a yellow squeeze bottle. "Be careful!" Mike said, "that mustard is hot".
"No problem, I love hot mustard," I said with utmost confidence while administering a generous application to my dog.
"No Bob, I mean that stuff is really hot!" Seeing the look on my face that probably read 'give me a break here, I'm trying to eat', he just shrugged his shoulders. "Go ahead dummy!!!"
I probably looked like one of those cartoon characters with steam shooting out of his ears and eyes bulging from his face as I bit into a hot dog that I had just covered with what must have been liquid nuclear waste. Mike looked on with a contented look of 'I told you so' as I struggled with a choice of whether to spit it out, and be a spectacle of baka gaijin, or just gut it out and swallow. There were too many families about to go into a fit, so I just stood there, eyes watering, nose running profusely, forcing down what I had bitten off.
At that moment, I realized that a hotdog with ketchup might not be so bad afterall.
--Bob
