Today I had dinner at the closest equivalent to a waffle house or 24 hour diner in Japan: the Yoshinoya beefbowl restaurant. Yoshinoya is a chain of beefbowl restaurants that can be found pretty much anywhere in Japan. All the restaurants are open 24 hours a day, and the food is cheap and decent. Beefbowl is essentially beef and some cooked onions on top of cooked rice, and, to me at least, it's a surprisingly satisfying meal. It's mentioned quite frequently in Rumiko Takahashi's Urusei Yatsura, my favorite of her works. For those of you who aren't so familiar with her manga, it's the one with Lum. Ironically, you can't actually eat a beefbowl at Yoshinoya anymore. For a long time, it was due to the Japanese embargo on American beef, but it looks like they're still not using American beef, even though the Japanese government has OKed it for import. Instead you can eat a porkbowl or a kimchee porkbowl, which are both still pretty tasty. They still have beef bowl written on the orange sign outside every store, which seems a little disingenuous. What makes Yoshinoya such a great place to eat isn't so much the food, but the clientele. You see, because it's so cheap, Yoshinoya seems to be the restaurant of choice for the blue collar folk of Japan. You see people here you don't ordinarily see other places, at least, not for any length of time. Delivery men and factory workers still in uniforms, high school students, motorcycle punks, and young men who look like gangsters, are gangsters, or probably want to be gangsters all congregate there, along with the more common kinds of people you see in Japan. As I was entering the restaurant today, I met one of my former students from Nanchu, who seems to have become (or maybe always was) a bosozoku, or motorcycle gang member. He drove off on his motorcycle after he answered my usual question of 'How are you?' with the rote 'I'm fine, than you, and you?' I tried to compliment his bike, but I don't know if he understood me.