In Narita on our way to lunch after visiting an elementary school, my group in Japan passed a shop that specialized in eels. I didn't think much of it, and glanced at the signs that said うあぎ(unagi, or eels) with a painted eel squirming around the hiragana. The air was hot and it hung in heavy clouds around me--I was eager to get to my destination. Hunger was digging a hollow pit in my stomach, walking 10 miles a day was a big change from my mostly sedentary life back in America. After lunch (fried vegetables and shrimp, tea, rice and various pickled veggies) I felt reinvigorated despite my aching feet. I noticed my surroundings and soaked up and increasing amount of small details: a small, intricate sake bowl nestled in between two larger ones in a shop window, the glowing smiles of a high school couple newly in love, a cat pouting in an alley that couldn't be more than a foot wide.
I'd eaten cooked eel in America before, in a sushi restaurant called Kaji. It closed a few years ago, and I recently learned the name and the kanji on the front of the restaurant meant fire. The word didn't mean cooking fire, it was the type of fire that burned down forests and destroyed buildings. I chuckled to myself when I learned that. Had the people who had chosen the name gone beyond an English-Japanese dictionary? Who owned the restaurant when it was in its prime? Did they know the difference? If so, did they care? The eel was tender and drowned in a sweetened soy sauce.
When we walked back to the high school we came from, I noticed the eel shop more closely. A few people ahead of me had stopped to watch something. The group was mostly foreigners, and something in the shop was causing quite a commotion.
"Oh look, he's skinning eels." My Japanese teacher said nonchalantly. He'd been to Japan many times and must be familiar with this. I took one look and was instantly captivated.
A man perched on a small wooden stool. His features were worn with age and bent in concentration. His movements were swift and methodical, as if he'd been doing this for years. He probably had. Despite the slab of wood he was working on being stained a deep red, his white uniform sleeves only had a few speckles of bright red blood at the cuff. His stomach and chest were completely white, and it created a stark contrast to what he was doing. To the right of him, nearly completely out of sight, was a five gallon bucket overflowing with eel heads. He held a nail and a bloodied knife that he wiped clean with a cloth between each eel.
The man grabbed an eel out of a bucket of churning water on his left. Other eels flashed pieces of their bodies above the surface and continued to tangle themselves deeper into the water, seemingly unaware of their imminent death. The single eel in his hand squirmed as it rose into the humid air, thrashing slightly with the shock of being out of the water. When it was set onto the table, its sleek black body was quickly covered in blood. Almost as soon as it hit the table, a nail was driven through the eel's head and into a hole in the wood. The eel writhed violently and opened and closed its mouth in panic. In one swift motion the man smoothed the eel's body flat with his hand, his knife following and flaying it open all the way to the tail. The eel's body jerked and wiggled slightly and its mouth opened and closed frantically. The man opened the eel, scooped out its intestines and cut out its spine. The head was chopped off and thrown in the bucket, and the fresh eel filets were tossed into a pile on top of the huge wooden slab.
He grabbed another eel as if it was nothing. I watched intently, the knot in my stomach feeling like twisting eels. Suddenly I realized words had been tumbling out of my mouth the whole time. "Gross! He's just skinning all those eels! Just like it's nothing! Its mouth! Look, oh my God it's still alive!" I needed to look away but I couldn't. My teacher and another girl from my group were taking videos, amazed at the man's efficiency. They seemed to have only fleeting empathy for the eels, who only died once their vital organs were ripped from their splayed bodies. Are all mass-produced meat products prepared like this?
Yet when I went back to America, and even in Japan, I ate steaks, ordered fried pork cutlets, ate sushi, went to a yakiniku restaurant. The eels made me want to be a vegetarian only for a moment: the separation between cow and packaged steak was too large for me to give empathy.
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