Day one in Japan. Affirmative: they do get cows drunk

Today I achieved two long-held ambitions – to go to the Sapporo Snow Festival, and to eat Kobe beef.

More on both later, but suffice to say both were a spectacle. Kobe beef cows, incidentally, really are massaged with beer, but not, as I had always thought, to make the meat all nice and soft and the cows happy. It’s actually because the cows reach an age where they begin to lose weight, and the last few months are highly important to the flavour of the meat, so they feed them beer to get them drunk so they get the munchies and carry on eating! It must be true, I heard it from a Japanese person.

Incidentally, I watched the chef cook the meat – a real teppanyaki work of art – on the hotplate in front of me, and then everyone watched me eat the meat, fumbling with chopsticks and gushing like a nutcase. Well, or like a woman who’s being watched while she eats a £130 piece of meat. With sticks.

Here is a picture of the next meal which I couldn’t eat any of, and a video of the place I woke up this morning. Enjoy!

Minasan oyasuminasai!