Prison Japan -- Japanese Prison Food

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PRISON JAPAN / day five

FRIDAY, MAY 19, 2007 ---- Japanese Prison Food.
A LOT of people love Japanese food... but how about Japanese prison food, would you like to eat it, and is it as healthy as the stuff they serve in school lunches here? In western jails the old standard fare of yore was bread and water; in Japanese jails of today you can expect to be dished up water and rice, with side servings of salty fish and veg, little yellow things made of egg, and perhaps a scrap of dry spaghetti. Interestingly, the rice will be cold, and the water hot. Like the worst bento box in the dodgiest konbini you have ever seen, served stale. Damned inedible stuff, especially when you are new to the Inside, and all clenched up in the belly. I couldn't eat anything the first day I was in, but by the second week I was actually looking forward to supper, just for the break in the monotony that it offered. I had spent all afternoon reading and re-reading and re-re-reading my South Australian lifestyle and property magazine, ogling all the dining review pictures. Lush pictures of fine seafood and roast beef and red wine and French cheeses and Thai curries which I shared around to all the lads, getting every mouth in the cell watering. Then it was our turn to get fed, and the reality was hot water, cold rice, and dry salty fish and Japanese mountain veg. In the end, I managed to convince myself that the squalid gunk I was eating was actually a feast. It took some effort, but it was possible. Let's hand it to the power of the imagination!

Gross indeed, but nobody goes to prison for the food. One trick we developed in our cell was to dump the rice into the hot water (called oyu in Japanese) to warm it up and make it a little easier to swallow. Nobody goes to prison for the food: but there are some unintended benefits to be gained, if you find yourself in jail. Take weight loss, for example. It is also a good chance to go cold turkey and detox your bod of all your chemical dependencies. While I was inside I convinced myself that the ryuuchijou diet was nutritionally balanced because, this being Japan, the authorities wouldn't want anyone going unhealthy on their watch. Perhaps this was an optimistic hope. It didn't take me to long to return to my nutritionally unbalanced ways upon my release. Actually, the first meal I ate after being let out at the end of May 2007 was a microwaved karubonara pasta bento I picked up at a convenience store on the edge of the Keiyo Dori megahighway, on my way home. Pepper, synthetic noodles, raw eggs and bacon... what a change to the tedium of prison fare! RECENT POSTS // girl hunting

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I had a stomachache for hours after that. As Maniac High explained later, my innards were obviously not used to food so rich, after two weeks of subsisting on prison food. I also received a monster hangover the next morning after my release, and this was no doubt due to my body losing its tolerance to alcohol. It took a little while to rebuild my tolerance.

Paris Hilton has revealed she was discharged from prison because she was suffering from claustrophobia. The hotel heiress developed the condition as well as panic attacks after being placed in solitary confinement in a tiny cell on the special needs wing of a California jail.

I don't know if my own recent bout of panic attacks stem from my time inside, but I can fully understand Hilton's claustrophobia. Being in prison feels like you're the inhabitant of some hypothetical two dimensional universe -- everything feels thin, paper thin, with no depth, and totally transparent. . Not exactly free to see Nga just yet, but at least free to start saving for it. By the end of the year I had repaid my debts and accumulated enough capital, to make my flight. Air China was the cheapest option I could afford.

If you ever have the misfortune to find yourself in a Japanese detention center, here is the daily routine you might be expected to endure (based on my experience at the Kitazawa Police Station).

6:30am: Wake up time. Early mornings were always my favorite time in lock up as you were in bed and sleeping serves as a kind of escape. Mind you, if you they brought someone in at 2am it would get so noisy it felt like trying to sleep in a hospital reception room (with no earplugs.) And all those guards marching around keys jangling and boots creaking on the floor... it did my head in. A few seconds before 6:30am, the air-conditioning sprung into life, and shortly afterwards the lights came on. You've got a minute or so to jump to your feet, roll up your bedding, and wait for your turn to carry it all to the store room down the hall. On the way down the corridor, you're supposed to greet other detainees or detainers with an "Ohayo gozaimasu!" ("Good morning!) Within 3 or 4 minutes the police were there putting the cuffs on me. They took me to the Kitazawa Police Station where I was to stay for the next 2 weeks. The police also arrested Menace, the New Zealander.

Menace the TV and porn star
on Japanese TV in 2006
One of the first things the police asked me, on my maiden day of questioning at Kitazawa Police Station on May 14, was "have you ever taken any illegal drugs?" I replied no automatically, and the police didn't pursue the matter any further -- but had they bothered to do a simple blood test, I would have been cactus. The truth of the matter is, Menace and I had been smoking hash fairly brazenly on the long night before our hard arrest, and I was in fact stoned when they raced me by squad car, sirens blazing, to the imposing five-storey edifice of the police station. I was stoned and drunk and giddy as the police led me, cuffed, through the long and bustling corridors, past a room where some kind of crowd control simulation was taking place -- I could hear women screaming, cops shouting: "Stay back! stay back!" Bizarre stuff, especially when you are off your head, and I said to the policeman who was escorting me: "Omoshiroi!" ("It's interesting!") Taking me for a smartass, the policeman replied: "Omoshirokunai yo!" ("It's not interesting at all!") He misread me -- I wasn't being a smartass, I was genuinely interested, and felt like a tourist observing my own arrest (or an undercover reporter.) I was, however, stoned, and if the cops had known that, my fate would have been grim indeed. If Menace had still been carrying his lump of hash when we were nabbed, we both would have been in trouble. We had been smoking all night, in the toilets at a Shimokitazawa billiards hall, out on the streets with a bunch of Nepali parasites.

Read the complete Prison Japan chronicles:

PRISON JAPAN... PRISON PLANET.
Contact the author Rob Sullivan at coderot@gmail.com. All comments will be published at the bottom of this page. Anticopyright October 2007.
For a Japanese language guide to Japanese lockup, click here.

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