Japan is great, but it defeated me

It’s great having toilets with warm seats that shoot water up your bum until you need somewhere to throw up. After eating two kilos of raw, vengeful tuna, I was leaning over a hotel loo in Osaka and all I wanted was to rest my clammy forehead on a cold plastic seat.

Six hours earlier, I had watched a man carve up a metre-long bluefin tuna on Dotonbori Street. It appeared very much still alive, apart from the limp way its mouth fell open when the fishmonger turned it upright on its belly. ‘Very, very fresh!’ he hollered, whacking it to bits. ‘Very, very, very delicious!’ I took his word, like the tourist sucker I am, and ate an entire bowl filled with chunks of chutoro and kamatoro, and 13 more pieces of nigiri.

My inability to stomach the basic, simplest, most elegant Japanese food filled me with shame. Anthony Bourdain (passé as it’s become to idolise him, I still do) wanted sushi for his last meal, to get shot ‘KGB-style’ at the hinoki wood counter of Sukiyabashi Jiro in Toyko.