As summer comes rolling in, festivals start making the rounds and that means food. If it can be crammed on a stick and cooked on a sheet of metal, you can generally find it on offer. Here, you see a young man sweating it out grilling sticks of beef at the Koenji Awaodori festival. It looks and smells good, but a closer look at the raw business shows just how bad it is for you:
Japanese people are always telling me that American food is just so much fattier than Japanese food, but this meat looks anything but lean. It smells good, but it looks like artery poison. Also, frankly, this stuff just sits out in the open in sweltering summer heat while hundreds of people mill around (talking, coughing, touching things they shouldn't), insects do their business, and hands have nowhere to be washed.
