“Tokyo on One Cliche a Day”

Oh, those wacky Japanese. They eat whale meat. They love comic books. They sleep off their sake buzz in hotel rooms the size of refrigerators. And they host loads of Western writers who love to write about such wacky things. The latest is Seth Stevenson, who recently filed a week’s worth of dispatches from Tokyo for Slate’s Well-Traveled feature. No deeper cultural insights here. Just some corny laughs. “[I]f you’re still hung up on the whale, you should know that you can get horse sashimi here,” Stevenson writes. “I have not eaten horse sashimi, but if I do, I am planning this exchange: I take a bite of horse, cough, clear throat, cough. Companion: ‘Something wrong with your throat?’ Me: ‘Just a little horse.’”

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