Tokamachi Bumpkins

Before I came to this rural area of Japan, it was described to me as the "Kentucky of Japan", likening it to a backwoods, country bumpkin area of America. Now, trying not to stereotype Appalachia or Niigata country folk, I put that idea in the back of my head. But yesterday, it resurfaced...

I went to my super small, super backwoods mountain school with 11 students (Nonaka elementary, the one with the tiny blue smurf-like principal). After my awesome class, I was shooting the breeze with the crazy toothless office lady and the smurf man. The topic of strange Japanese foods came up and I told them that I had eaten some strange stuff lately, including raw horse. As usual per any conversation with a Japanese person, I also had to divulge what Japanese food repulses me. "Natto and uni!" I said (Natto is dung-smelling rotten fermented soy bean poison, and uni is raw sea urchin).

"How about tanuki?" they asked. Tanuki? People eat those? I had to do a double take. "You mean those rat-like raccoon dogs that run around the woods at night?" I asked (they are essentially the weird forest vermin of Japan).

"Yup! Some people eat those around here!" they confirmed. It was the first time I had heard about it, and I found out that it seems to only be people in this backcountry area of Niigata that do it. "Only Tokamachi people eat them, the mountain people like us!" I realized that it's exactly like the legend that backcountry folk in Kentucky and West Virginia hunt and grill squirrels.

"Yah, we hunt them and then grill them!" said the toothless old office lady, making a shooting gesture. She slapped me on the back and said "Let's have a barbecue someday!"

Itadakimasu.