George Curzon and the TEMPLE OF DOOM

+ + W A R N I N G + +
This is a great story, but it’s not for the faint of heart—no pun intended. You have been warned!

Cousin Curzon and a friend were visiting Japan last week in a brief stop on their four month tour of East Asia (they’re currently on the beaches of southern Thailand, lucky punks!). For three days they slept on my floor and I showed them the kickin’ city of Tokyo: the Imperial Palace, downtown Shibuya, drinking in Roppongi, Yasukuni shrine, the Diet building, a night on the town in Shinjuku, and the famous Tsukiji fish market at 6am in the morning.

Yes, the Tsukiji fish market, one of my favorite places in Tokyo. If you arrive early in the morning you can see bidding on enormous tuna and see fresh marine cuisine, such as octopus tentacles, all kinds of shellfish, lobsters and spider crab, eels, and much, much more. (Perhaps I’ll post pictures someday.) After checking out the market for a good hour, we went for breakfast at a local sushi restaurant, open 24 hours a day. Being in the heart of Tsukiji, this restaurant served very fresh fish. Some were served fresh out of the tank.

In my many years in Japan, I have twice eaten fish that was still moving. In one instance I ate sashimi of a small fish that was still trying to breath, i.e. the gills were still moving (despite the fact that the head was severed from the rest of the fish—it was only a nerve reaction). In another instance, I swallowed miniscule fish (1 cm long and translucent) that were swimming around in a vinegary liquid. They are swallowed whole with the vinegar, and you can feel them riggle down the back of the throat.

But I had never seen this.

We were the only foreigners out of perhaps 25 people at the sushi bar. After serving a freshly butchered fish to other customers, the young chef—perhaps hoping to scare or delight his foreign patrons—brought over the heart (still beating) on his knife blade and asked us in Japanese, “do you want it?” I translated, and cousin Curzon’s friend said “Sure!” Next thing I knew we had a beating heart sitting on our sushi plate. And that wasn’t all…

(Remember, that’s my cousin’s friend in the video, not me. He starts work as an equities trader in September, and I guess this was appropriate practice for his new work.)

And his comment shortly after I stopped filming: “Wow, you can feel it beating all the way down…”

And to answer the questions that I know will come, no, this is not common practice in Japan. In fact, I’ve showed this video to several Japanese friends, and not only were they as shocked as you probably are, but no one had ever heard of this happening before.