Japan Adventures: Eating Poisonous “Fugu” (and Living to Tell the Story)

Looks mighty pretty, yes?

Um, yeah – pretty and… DEADLY POISONOUS!

Towit:

According to National Geographic:  “Almost all pufferfish [a.k.a. “fugu” in Japan] contain tetrodotoxin, a substance that makes them foul tasting and often lethal to fish.  To humans, tetrodotoxin is deadly, up to 1,200 times more poisonous than cyanide.  There is enough toxin in one pufferfish to kill 30 adult humans, and there is no known antidote.“

A face only a mother could love…

So um, then WHY Dyanne, did you eat it?

Fair question.  In part because… much like a mountain climber is hell-bent on scaling 29,000 ft. Everest, I dare say that – as an avowed foodie who has ingested her fair share of oddball exotic eats around the globe (mopane worms in South Africa, silkworms in Thailand, and roasted crickets in Laos – I’m lookin’ at all of YOU!) the moment I first heard about the precarious wisdom of eating fugu, I was hooked.  Admittedly, my heretical dark-side went on red-alert, and I was cautiously intrigued, and definitely open to an opportunity to try it.

The truth is – while illegal in many parts of the World, in Japan fugu is a highly prized dish that is prepared by licensed, specially trained chefs.  And I dare say, that was good enough for me.  Indeed, in keeping with my penchant for sampling all manner of local cuisine and experiences in my travels (speaking of “puff”, puffing on an apricot-flavored shisha pipe in Egypt springs to mind), I figured – if not whilst I’m in Japan, then when?

Thus, I queried my hostel host in Asakusa for nearby fugu restaurants, and he kindly pointed out two just a few blocks away.  As restaurant dinners in Tokyo can be a bit pricey, I opted to hopefully find a reasonably priced place for lunch on my last day in Japan (lol, I figured if I was going to die of food poisoning in Japan, it wasn’t going to be before I had a chance to visit the famed Tsukiji Fish Market). 😀

The first restaurant I tried wasn’t open for lunch, so I instead peeked into a place a few blocks away that sported a HUGE pufferfish above the entrance.

Happily, it was open (albeit I was the only diner in attendance which gave me a moment’s pause, but hey…).  And even more happily (given my paltry 8-word Japanese vocabulary) they had pictures of all their fugu dishes and the prices were quite reasonable (<$15 for my entire lunch).  So I swiftly ordered a plate of deep-fried fugu tempura plus - throwing all caution to the four winds - an order of raw fugu sashimi.

So how was it, Dyanne – was it delicious enough to be worth the risk?

Um, that would be a nope.  Oh the fugu tempura was nice and crunchy, but turns out – fugu has barely any taste at all.  Still… spiced up with copious dunks in soy sauce – along with the thrill of eating something so hugely dangerous, it was quite tasty.

And certainly memorable.

Now don’t take this as a prescription for flirting with death, but…

I’m surely not advocating that dining on highly poisonous fish should become your habit whence traveling.  But in a larger sense, this little story exemplifies my most ardently embraced life-long philosophy.

I mean, rest assured I most certainly have no death-wish.  Indeed, my present retired life here among the cobbled lanes of my adopted home in Cuenca, Ecuador is honestly pretty darn close to pure bliss.  But what I’m sayin’ (and have long fully embraced at every turn of my life) is:

None of us is going to make it out of here alive, after all.  So arguably it makes for a far more interesting epitaph to take that small calculated risk of kicking the ol’ bucket eating fugu in Tokyo, Japan (or hopping on that rickety bus careening up to that monastery in the Himalayas, or that bitty one-engine plane in the San Blas Islands of Panama, et al), than…

…getting crushed by a stray passing 8-wheeler on the freeway en route to a dentist appointment in Seattle, no?

Furthermore, doing a bit of statistical research, it turns out that more folks die eating raw oysters each year in the U.S. (among my top 3 favorite eats) – than from eating fugu in Japan.  Thus, I rest my case.

And finally, I can’t help but add a most bizarre (and utterly unverified) snippet I unearthed while researching this post:

“The pufferfish is also reported to be one of the main ingredients used in voodoo to turn people into zombies. “

Now I could be wrong, but… I dare say – as I peck these words today, I am neither a zombie, nor dead from sampling one of the globe’s most prized and poisonous li’l Nemos.