I have to say this at the beginning, just because I think it’s so funny – Hama-yoooooooosh! I know it’s not funny to anyone else, but I’ve gotten really into saying “yosh” in all manner of Japanese situations (long ‘o’ sound). It’s a sort of casual exhortation like “Here we go!” or “Let’s do this thing!” You know why I like it? Old guys say it in the bathroom a lot. Women don’t believe this when I tell them, but it’s all too normal for a guy to sidle up to the urinal, unzip, extract, and let out a solid “Yosh!” “Alright boys, get ‘er done!” I know what you’re thinking, and yes, I say that in the toilet all the time. It’s an essential complement to a high-fibber diet. Hamayoshi, meanwhile, looks a bit like a shack out in the woods. Or a duck blind. Which is handy, because
that’s what they do here – they go out and shoot things. Evidently it’s expensive at night, because the feature is duck stew (or duck shabu / nabe, more properly). For lunch, the low ceilinged room is just crowded with guys eating boring plate lunch sets.
On the other walls they have drawings of fish, and empty abalone shells.
Booooooring plate lunch. I only went here to see what it was like, maybe worth going back at night or not. They kinda admit that the lunch is boring and just to kill time / make a few extra yen – they were almost out of everything when we got there at 12:15, and then even gave us a discount for coming ‘late’ in the day. Maybe the discount was because we didn’t have any choice beyond boiled fish? This is mackerel boiled in sweet soy sauce, but that’s never a bad thing. The boiling liquid (not soup; you’d regret drinking it, but if you were weird and foreign you could put it on your rice and enjoy it) was very, very dark and strong, so much so that I put it on my rice.
One interesting feature here is the all-you-can-eat pickled plums. More properly, these should be “all you can take before you bow to social pressure”, because there isn’t a jar for each table, so you have to take them all at once before the waitress comes to ask for the crock back. This means you screw up your courage to take a lot up front, or else you work up the nerve to ask the waitress for another go at it. That said, she was very nice, telling Preacher and I over and over again that we could get refills of rice or soup.
So….duck stew at night? I didn’t check the pricing, but I kinda think not. I’d eat the grilled bear at Matagi first.