Soy Australiano

Ten yen for admission to the museum. Ten yen. Equivalent to about ten Australian cents. Nothing in Japan cost ten yen. I wondered why they charged admission at all. With the number of visitors entering the museum each day the revenue was barely enough to purchase a bottle of Pocari Sweat from a vending machine. That was before you even considered operational costs. I looked up at the air conditioner blowing chilling winds into my sweaty face. My ten yen was barely enough to cover the building’s energy costs for five minutes. And that was before I even considered the salary of the lady running the ticket desk. They would be losing more money by employing someone to collect the ten yen admission than they would if they didn’t charge admission altogether.

I continued to ponder the business decisions of the Usukuchi Soy Sauce Museum as I made my way through it, the saline soy odour floating thinly in the air. I was in Tatsuno, a twenty minute train ride from downtown Himeji. I spent a few days in Himeji. I explored the city’s famous surviving castle, plodding my way through the castle grounds, reenacting scenes as Sean Connery in ‘You Only Live Twice.’ I weathered the heat and explored the bamboo forest and koi ponds of Koko-en gardens. I attended the city zoo. I watched a lion, zebra, hippopotamus and giraffe for a while and started thinking about whether they were planning an escape to Madagascar.

However after some time in the city I made my way to the quieter town of Tatsuno, eventually stumbling into the Soy Sauce Museum. After paying the questionable entrance fee, I sat down to watch the museum’s introduction video. Played entirely in Japanese, the video experience for me presented more like an agricultural commercial, filled with stock footage of rice paddies, rolling pastures and mounds of sea salt. I gathered that soybeans, wheat and rice were used in the soy sauce making process but that was all. I looked down at the welcome brochure I had been given and realised that it too was in Japanese and so my experience of the museum was one enjoyed simply at a preschool level.

A young Japanese family sat across from me, the only other participants adding to the ten yen pile that day. Their faces were confused by the sight of me. They looked unsure as to why a non-speaker was enjoying a documentary on the history of light-coloured soy sauce so much. Or maybe they were just confused as to why I was in a soy sauce museum or in the town of Tatsuno altogether.