Sukiyaki and Babymetal: What's the Connection?

Click to hear some sample tracks

While manga and anime have been Japan's main popular cultural exports in recent years, Japanese music (J-pop) has had little success abroad, overshadowed by the popularity of Korean (K-pop) acts like BTS and TWICE. One Japanese group has been the exception to this rule though: Babymetal, a Japanese "kawaii metal" idol girl band. While cute (kawaii) female idol dance bands - like AKB48 - are a penny-a-piece in Japan, Babymetal is something rather different, combining the childish, smiling school-girl innocence of typical female J-pop performers with a darker, edgier kind of kawaii (see here for an academic analysis and here for my take on the emergence of "distorted cute"). Babymetal have become the highest charting Japanese band ever both in the UK  and in the US; indeed, they became the first Asian act ever to top Billboard's rock albums chart last year. In 2016, their 2nd album became the first Japanese album to chart on the U.S.Top 40 since Kyu Sakamoto's Sukiyaki and Other Japanese Hits in 1963 - 54 years ago!

However, today's blog is not about Babymetal but about sukiyaki: this back-to-front way of introducing the main topic is a traditional way of developing a narrative in Japanese (originating in classical Chinese) known as kishōtenketsu (起承転結) which involves a sharp twist (ten) part way into the story that shifts to something seemingly unrelated. It is only in the concluson that the two elements are tied together. This style can be seen in poetry, manga, newspapers - both the Yomiuri (Henshū-techō=編集手帳) and the Asahi (Tensei-jingo=天声人語）have daily front-page columns in this style - and even in video game design (most famously in Ninentendo's Super Mario games).

So what is sukiyaki? Simply put, it's a beef hot-pot stew (nabemono=鍋物) which Japanese typically enjoy in the winter around the family dinner table or perhaps at a company end of year party (bōnenkai=忘年会). It's very much a collective eating experience, with members of the group gradually adding the ingredients to the communcal pot and then picking them out when cooked to be eaten with raw egg. Sukiyaki is not really "traditional": like many other things thought to be old it is actually fairly new, an "invented tradition" from the Meiji era (1868-1912) (see here and here for previous posts giving examples of how many so-called "traditions" in Japan are actually relatively modern).

Ingredients tend to vary from region to region but we started off melting beef tallow fat (gyūshi=牛脂) in the pot ❶ and adding thinly sliced beef ❷ (in our case we used marbled Miyazaki wagyū which we ordered using the popular hometown tax donation=furusato nōzei=ふるさと納税) program. After that, we added spring onions (negi) ❸ and then the all-important tare-sauce known as warishita ❹: we used a ready-made bottle from the supermarket but many people make their own by mixing soy-sauce, mirin, and sugar. Next up were the enoki and shiitake mushrooms plus Chinese cabbage (hakusai=白菜) ❺, followed by grilled tofu (yakidōfu=焼き豆腐) ❻, chrysathemum leaves (shungiku=春菊) ❼, and finally starch noodles (kuzukiri=葛切り) ❽ - one alternative for the latter are kon'nyaku noodles (shirataki=白滝). See here for a simple recipe.

If you've got this far, you might be wondering why Kyu Sakamoto's massive hit, Ue o Muite Arukō (Look up and Walk), was called Sukiyaki outside Japan? What has one of the world's best-selling singles of all time, written by a young Japanese student in the sixties trying to hold back tears of frustration after a protest against the Japan-US Security Treaty (AMPO), got to do with Japanese beef hot-pot? The answer is absolutely nothing: it was used only because it was short, catchy, and recognisably Japanese. In this respect, it is refreshing that Babymetal, the Japanese band to finally overtake Sukiyaki in the charts, at least challenge and shake up some of the old tropes and stereotypes about Japan and the Japanese.

The Japanese Bubble Tea Boom: Explaining the Tapioca Tea Craze

Food & Drink may be the most popular tab in this blog - 46 posts to date - but the beverage I'm going to introduce today must be the only one with it's own verb: tapiru. While most older Japanese will have no idea what this means, it was voted by Japan's trend setters - junior high-school (joshi chūgakusei=JC) and high-school girls (joshi kōsei=JK) - as the word of the year in 2018 and was one of the buzzwords of 2019 last year. "Tapi" refers to tapioca while the "ru" is the typical verb ending in Japan; youngsters wanting to grab a tapioca drink might say tapiritai while the activity itself - usually involving taking photogenic pictures good enough to put up on Instagram, a practice known as insta-bae (インスタ映え) - is called tapi-katsu (タピ活) or tapioca-life.

The existence of these words is a reflection of just how massive a social phenomenon the bubble tea industry has become in Japan. While it has only truly exploded in the last few years, the popularity of tapioca pearls has been growing since the early nineties when tapioca coconut milk (タピオカココナッツミルク) dessert became a big hit. This was the first tapioca wave: the second wave (2008) saw the arrival of tapioca tea from Taiwan while the third and most recent wave (2018) is characterised by diversification of blends and flavours led by Taiwanese store Chun Shui Tang (春水堂) and the establishment of Daikanyama (代官山) in Shibuya as a bubble-tea mecca. The boom shows no sign of abating: the July 2019 Taiwan Food Festival held in Yoyogi Park last July, boasting a Tapioca Street, attracted an incredible 150,000 people over two days and tapioca drinks can now be bought not only in speciality shops but also convenience stores and family restaurants. 

Wanting to find out what the fuss was all about, I press-ganged my JK daughter and went to Gong Cha, one of the biggest and most famous Taiwanese tea cafes with 1300 branches worldwide. Ordering itself is quite an ordeal in itself (at least for this old codger): you have to choose (1) size and type of tea (jasmine green, oolong, and black are the staples) either hot or iced, (2) sweetness (amount of syrup), (3) amount of ice (if you chose iced), and (4) up to three toppings (which as well as the obligatory tapioca pearls, also include milk foam, aloe, nata de coco=coconut gel, basil seeds, and grass jelly).

I ordered medium hot jasmine-green tea with just a little syrup and pearls and milk foam for topping (I think) and joined the pick up queue, much like Starbucks. Ordering hot is not very cool apparently because the cup is not transparent thereby losing the chance for a good instammagrable snap showing the black tapioca balls floating in the bottom of the tea. The jasmine/green-tea blend was quite refreshing and the chewiness of the pearls rather unique at first though after sucking up what seemed like a never-ending stream of the things I was feeling quite full and wishing I had ordered a small size. Part of the reason for this may be that tapioca has a negative image for generations of British school children: tapioca pudding ("frog spawn") was a school lunch staple that has been named Britain's most hated school pudding. The Japanese, on the other hand, seem quite enamoured by the chewiness (described as mochimochi-kan in Japanese) which is perhaps not surprising given that the texture is very similar to that other popular Japanese jaw-breaker, mochi or rice-cake, which I covered only very recently in this blog.

But be warned, there's a darker side to the bubble tea boom. A Chinese teenager addicted to the drink was apparently rushed in agony to hospital where they found more than 100 bubble tea pearls stuck to her digestive tract! See here for a Japanese article and here for a short video with some scary x-ray pics. The moral here: chew your tapioca balls slowly if you want to avoid constipation and hospitalisation!