odd

hi.

my name is mike. actually, my full legal name is michael tadashi tanaka. for those who are familiar with the japanese language, one may recognize that my middle name and last name are very japanese. for those who have studied the japanese language, they may recognize that tanaka is the smith of japanese names. those that don’t know me would not be terribly suprised to find that i am a second generation japanese guy.

so imagine my surprise when my mom suggested that she wanted to go to ariyake for her birthday dinner. ariayake is the close cousin of the miyake restaurant, famous in palo alto for the sake bomb disco light celebrations. ariyake is a heavily americanized japanese restaurant that serves novelty sushi rolls like the lewinsky roll or the clinton roll. it’s almost embarassing to have to go to this place and call it a nice place for dinner for my mom’s birthday.

but she wanted to go there, so we went.

my dad orders a bunch of sushi for the family and then at the end of the order my mom adds to the waiter, “and get me nabeyaki udon.”

wait…we ordered all this sushi and you don’t want any? oh man.

when the sushi came, she commented, “wow, what kind of sushi is that? it looks really…strange.”

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