"How Are Japan and the United States Different?"

When I first came to Japan about 10 years ago, a lot of people used to ask me, 'What's different between Japan and the U.S.?' It was always a difficult question to answer, for one because I'd just arrived in Japan, and pretty much everything seemed different.

One different thing that I really liked, though, was that most restaurants had menus with pictures of the food in them. This was a life saver! Well, most of the time it was. One time I did get into a bit of trouble.

I worked at the local City Hall at that time, in the Board of Education. One of my co-workders was a nice young lady from England, Catherine. She really helped me a lot in my first two weeks or so in Japan.

One day she says, 'Hey Mark, why don't we go out for lunch today?' It seemed like a great idea because I was getting sick of the food in the City Hall cafeteria.

So Catherine takes me to the local food court of the local shopping center, and after perusing our choices, we finally settled on a family style restaurant.

Looking over the menu, though I was grateful for the pictures of everything, I was still a little baffled by all the strange dishes. I really wasn't sure I'd be able to eat anything. So I looked for the one dish I knew I liked, having tried it a few times already: curry and rice.

Once Catherine knew what she wanted she called the waitress over. Catherine ordered, and then it was my turn. Using the little bit of Japanese that I'd learned, I cautiously pointed to the picture of curry and said, 'This one, please.'

The waitress hesitated and gave me a strange look. 'This one?' she asked. 'Yes, this one, curry rice,' I repeated.

'This one?' she queried again. 'Yes, this one!' I said again, poking at the picture with my finger. She quickly jotted down my order and ran back to the kitchen.

'That was strange,' I said to Catherine. Well, whatever. And we began chatting about work, life in Japan, et cetera.

A little while later our food came out. The waitress put it on the table and ran away again. Catherine got the soba lunch special, which she eagerly tucked into right away. I got my curry and rice lunch set and noticed immediately that...everything was a little...small.

The portion was much smaller than I expected. The drink was really small too, and it was not green tea as I'd expected, but juice. There was a little French flag toothpick sticking up out of the rice, which I found strange, and the spoon--also super small and made of plastic--had a picture of Miffy the bunny on it! And next to the plate was a little toy race car. Hmmm... Curious...

Yes, I had ordered the kid's meal. Catherine was already turning red and shaking with laughter. When I looked up I saw all the waitresses standing over in the kitchen looking at us, and I noticed that several other customers had noticed my faux pas as well and were staring in amusement. Catherine just laughed and laughed.

Well, I learned two valuable lessons that day. One, you can't always trust the little menu pictures, so you'd better learn the language just to make sure. And two, Japanese waitresses won't tell you you're about to make a fool of yourself, they'll just let you do it!

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