Samurai Taniyama Yujiro, Japan Broadcasting . net Corporation Food Fighter/Reporter
The tap water of Adelaide tasted like mud, if not excrement back in the 1980s. Fabulously brownish, it surely was. Wine from Barossa valley, even for a Gaijin primary school-kid degenerate like myself not only tasted better, but was by far safer.
I was merely 8 years of age when our family proudly invaded South Australia. Mr. Bobby Hawke was Prime Minister, and everyday on TV was the world-famous ‘Knight Rider’.
Food poisoning buoyantly greeted me with open arms, I remember as if it had happened yesterday. At a local supermarket near Glenelg beach (where we first settled, temporarily), the local food industry unshamefully launched a Pearl Harbor like sneak attack – by duping the highly curious (and ignoramus)) Asian adolescents with this mysterious local aphrodisiac called ‘Cordial’.
“This must be an Oishi Australian orange juice”, giggled my sister.
“This looks like a tasty local apple juice”, chucked my brother.
The animated newcomers from the strange land of Nippon skipped back home, then in a blink of an eye poured and gobbled down big glasses of juu-suu (juice). A crocodile death trap it was, as the three of us all instantaneously puked the ‘superlatively condensed & artificially colored sugar-mud“.
Nobody had lectured the three Gaijins that you had to dilute the Spanish fly. Nobody. Besides, none of us could read or write Anglo-Saxon tongue.
‘The finest chocolate in Kangaroo country’
Devastated and humiliated, the presumptuous 8 year old nonchalantly returned to the food store the following day in order to retaliate. An act of self-defense it probably was.
“This time I’m gonna make it right. Shame on Aussie bullies fooling me with rotten foodies!”, boasted the irascible Nippon Gaijin school kid. However, as the prudent reader may have already reckoned, I had beautifully ended up buying a big jar of ‘chocolate paste’ domestically known as Vegemite.
What happened afterwards is a pure history.
Forty years after that World (food) War 3, the former deceived- adolescent recently had an unthinkable chance to retry the unthinkable. Thanks to the genial Gaijin tourist Annie-G from Sydney, the dinner was ready.
Mr. Yujiro and the Chocolate Factory.
Purportedly and proudly made by koala and kookaburra meat since 1923, I can now emphatically claim that the treacherous chocolate is perhaps the finest invention by Mrs. DownUnder. Perfect with butter.
Um….btw catholic ladies and gentlemen, do they still sell that vicious aphrodisiac over there?!
Retribution, obviously is yet unfinished!
Bow.
