Aho Vs Baka

Schism
Differences between Kansai and Kanto are slight but numerous enough that in Japan's collective unconscious the country is thought to be split along a linguistic and dietary fault-line whose epicentre is Nagoya. Most people have heard a few tidbits about the perceived differences between east and west Japan; Kanto tatami mats are smaller and it's people more sophisitcated, whereas Kansai-jin tend to be kinder towards foreigners, funny, entrepreneurial and food-lovers. While it's not easy to separate the myth from the facts, some of the differences aren't just perceptual. The electricity supply in the east and west of Japan varies due to competition between Tokyo Electric Lamp Company and Osaka Electric Light Company during the burgeoning years of the power supply industry. I set out to find out what Kansai residents thought was dividing Japan. It turns out the answer boils down to the letter "S".

Stupidity
One common story goes that once upon a time an academic investigation found that the word aho ("stupid") has a playful nuance in Kansai and that baka ("stupid") is considered quite harsh. Supposedly the reverse is true in Kanto. Some say that aho is acceptable in Kansai because a large number of TV comics hail from Osaka and that if you're not a Kansai comedian you'd be better throwing around baka with reckless abandon instead.

This has all the qualities of a truism in the sense that it's not entirely true. In reality a lot of the impact comes down to context and manner of speaking, but it's a nice story and those are usually the ones that catch on. Less famously, in the linguistic no-man's-land of Nagoya the word tawake is the insult of choice. It derives from the Japanese for "to divide a rice field", and comes from an age in which a person who shared that most valuable of possessions would have been considered truly stupid.

Salt
Nagoya is the front line of the war for control of your tastebuds too. Across Japan udon is served with a sauce called dashi that falls into two types. Usukuchi ("weak tasting") is the lighter coloured dashi favoured in Kansai. It has a slightly fishier flavour than it's Kanto iteration due the katsuo ("bonito") with which it's made. Kanto on the other hand has a penchant for koikuchi ("strong tasting") which is darker and made with a larger serving of soy sauce.

This tendency has filtered down from traditional dishes to more recent abomina... I mean creations such as dehydrated noodles. The ubiquitous "Cup Noodle" and its grotesque hoard of malformed offspring are said to be saltier on the far side of Nagoya, although the packaging is the same.

Soy sauce
Shoyuu was originally made entirely with soybeans but now it's made from a half soybean and half wheat mix, which makes it salty and sharp but cheaper to produce in massive quantities. The 100% soybean version is now called "tamari", is smoother and richer in taste and is often served with yakiniku (a "meat" stew in a rich, sweet sauce eaten from a bowl containing raw egg) in more upmarket restaurants. In general it is believed Kyo-ryori ("Kyoto style cuisine") restaurants are more likely to offer usukuchi shouyu to avoid overpowering and coloring their dishes.

Swine
The English word "meat" is a dangerously vague and is never to be trusted when found on jars or menus. When Marx said "question everything" I have no doubt that he meant we should ask from exactly which part of which animal does "meat" come? In Kansai however, niku ("meat") is used almost interchangeably with "beef". However, those cunning Kanto-jin can't be trusted not the meddle with the sanctity of our beloved yakiniku or kare-raisu (the Japanese bastardisation of "curry and rice") either. Both are understood to be beef dishes in Kansai, but readers should beware that they will most likely be duped with pork when they order these staples east of the border.

Most surmise this porky preference must have been due to lack of land for cattle in the more developed North-eastern areas. This is perhaps supported by the notion that it seems to be only Kanto where pork is the standard implication of the term oniku. In Kansai it's not uncommon for people to ridicule the supposedly urbane and street-smart Kanto-jin for their preference for pork because, to non-Kanto-jin eyes at least, pork is cheaper and less desirable than beef.

Satsumaage
The ubiquitous oden (those unnatural brownish shapes languishing in the dark water next to the counter in your local conbini) includes satsumaage ("deep fried fish paste"), which is round and dark in Kansai. In Kanto it is still made with fish paste but once battered is rectangular, white and melts in the mouth. Who knew fish paste could be so varied?

Another key ingredient of oden as far as Kansai denizens are concerned is chikuwa (meaning "bamboo ring") which is a tube-like food product made from ground fish, salt, sugar, monosodium glutamate and egg white. Given that wretch-inducing list of ingredients (few great dishes can be described as "tube-like") you wouldn't think changing the recipe would be such a bad thing, but those ker-azy Kanto-jin have counterfeited their own Frankenstein-esque mockery of the original called chikuwabu. Although you may have believed oden to be a largely ichthyological adventure for the tastebuds, chikuwabu is blasphemously NOT made from fish but from wheat, water and salt, after which it is made to look like its Kansai counterpart. This is, predictably enough, put down to a one-time lack of the necessary raw materials and human ingenuity did the rest. Ingenuinity FTW.

Samurai Standing on Stairs
It is often said that on Kanto escalators people stand to the left and walkers pass on the right and that in the Kansai region the opposite is true. In reality I've found that most people alternate to create a new extreme sport I like to call "the late for work slalom" or alternatively they stand right in the middle in a pose called "baachan obliviousness".

According to the Japan foundation of Sydney, "One theory to explain this is that in Tokyo, the samurai preferred to stay on the left, where they could draw their swords more easily, while in Osaka the merchants preferred to be on the right, to protect their belongings carried in their right hand"*. This sounds convincing for the millisecond before you remember that when the samurai were drawing swords, escalators were pretty thin on the ground. Ah, but they DID have stairs! I hear you cry. True, but standing motionless on the right side of a staircase was unlikely to have made you popular with your tono-sama either.

• http://www.jpf.org.au/06_newsletter/hitokuchi_3new.pdf