I. The First Mistake Was Thinking Language Would Hold Everything Still
I didn’t arrive in Nagasaki and Sasebo expecting confusion. I arrived expecting eventual clarity, the kind you get when you assume that unfamiliar things are only temporarily unlabelled. Food is usually like that in daily life. You don’t always know a new dish immediately, but you assume it can be named, filed, and retrieved later. That assumption is so normal it feels invisible until it stops working.
What I encountered instead was a steady refusal of the world to stay inside the level of naming I was operating at. I could see the food, I could taste it, I could remember it, but I could not reliably anchor it in language in a way that allowed return. The words I was given were often too broad to be useful for repetition. “Fish.” “Vegetables.” “Seasonal dish.” These were not wrong answers. They were just insufficient ones for the task I was trying to perform, which was not understanding, but retrieval.
At the time, I didn’t recognize that distinction. I thought I was missing vocabulary. I thought the solution was simply to learn more names.
So I escalated the problem to something I assumed would be more precise: scientific naming.
That didn’t solve it either.
Because scientific classification didn’t behave the way I expected it to behave. It didn’t separate everything I felt was different. Carrots—Western, Japanese, heirloom, red, thin, dense—collapsed into Daucus carota subsp. sativus. Sweet potatoes, regardless of their texture or culinary identity, remained Ipomoea batatas. The system underneath language was not multiplying distinctions in the way my experience suggested it should.
That was the first rupture. Not confusion, but compression.
II. Cultivars, Categories, and the Collapse of Everyday Precision
The second stage of learning came when I realized I was looking for the wrong level of difference. I was searching at the species level when the meaningful variation was happening at the level of cultivation, selection, and cultural usage. That is where the concept of the cultivar became unavoidable, because it explained why something could feel completely different while still being biologically the same.
A carrot is not a single object in the way I had been treating it. It is a branching outcome of human selection over time. The kintoki carrot, for example, used in Japanese cuisine, especially in Kyoto traditions, is still part of the same species as the Western orange supermarket carrot, yet it behaves differently in texture, color, and culinary role. The difference is not biological separation; it is agricultural intention layered over time.
Once that idea settled, the memory of the meals in Kyushu began to reorganize itself. What I had experienced as “unknown vegetables” started to resolve into structured variation. Not mystery, but multiplicity. Not absence of knowledge, but presence of a system I had not been trained to read at that resolution.
And that’s when something else became visible: English does not consistently preserve cultivar-level detail unless there is cultural pressure to do so. Some terms survive—daikon, kabocha, shiitake—because they enter culinary circulation as distinct objects. Others collapse into general categories like “vegetables,” “greens,” or “root vegetables,” not because the distinction does not exist, but because it is not required for everyday communication.
What I had experienced as loss of information was actually a selective compression of information based on assumed need.
III. Sansai, Season, and the Second Layer of Disappearing Detail
The deeper I reconstructed the experience, the more I realized that a significant portion of what I had eaten was not even part of the cultivated agricultural layer I was initially focusing on. In rural Kyushu, especially in regions like Nagasaki and Sasebo, food systems include a strong presence of sansai, or mountain vegetables. These are not industrial crops in the conventional sense. They are seasonal, partially wild, and closely tied to local ecological cycles.
Plants like warabi (Pteridium aquilinum), fuki (Petasites japonicus), yomogi (Artemisia princeps), nanohana (Brassica rapa subsp. oleifera), and takenoko (bamboo shoots, typically Phyllostachys spp.) do not behave like standardized supermarket vegetables. They emerge according to season, geography, and environmental conditions, and they are often embedded in cultural practices that assume familiarity rather than explanation.
What made this difficult at the time was not the absence of these names in Japanese. It was the way translation often collapses them into broader categories when moving into English. “Seasonal vegetables” becomes a catch-all phrase that hides the internal structure entirely. That phrase is not incorrect, but it is structurally incomplete for anyone trying to reconstruct a specific eating experience later.
So I was not dealing with unknown food. I was dealing with known food that had been compressed for communication.
IV. The Real Problem Was Not Naming, but Retrieval
The turning point in understanding came much later, when I realized my original intention was not linguistic. I was not asking for names in the abstract. I was trying to solve a very practical problem: how do I get this again?
That shifts everything. Because naming is not just classification at that point. It becomes a retrieval system. A label is only useful if it survives time, context, and translation in a way that allows the same object or experience to be re-accessed.
So when I was told “fish,” I was not being given a useful retrieval key. Inside the kitchen, there was almost certainly a specific species—salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.), mackerel (Scomber japonicus), sea bream (Pagrus major), or something local and seasonal—but what reached me was a compressed category that functioned for immediate communication, not future reconstruction.
The same applied to vegetables. “Daikon” was already one of the few terms that survived that compression intact. But beyond that, I was often given labels that were not designed to function as precise re-ordering tools. They were designed to function as descriptions of availability, not catalogs of identity.
And that is where the frustration lived. Not in not knowing what I ate, but in not being able to return to it.
Appendix: The Border Problem Between Language, Biology, and Everyday Use
What I eventually had to understand is that this is not a failure of Japanese, or English, or scientific naming. It is a structural mismatch between three systems that operate at different levels of resolution.
Biology operates at a classification level that is stable but not aligned with lived culinary distinction. Species like Daucus carota or Ipomoea batatas do not reflect the sensory and cultural variation that food experience actually depends on. Biology is precise, but it is not oriented around human repetition of meals.
Cultural naming systems operate at a different level entirely. In Japan, terms like daikon, kintoki ninjin, shungiku, or warabi preserve distinctions that matter within that culinary tradition. English does the same in its own way, but not always at the same granularity, especially outside specialized or imported food contexts. Both systems compress and expand depending on need.
Then there is translation, which sits at the boundary between these systems. Translation does not aim for maximal precision. It aims for functional equivalence. That means it often collapses multiple distinct items into a single communicable category when the receiver is not expected to require fine-grained differentiation for action. “Fish” is sufficient if the goal is to serve fish. “Vegetables” is sufficient if the goal is to describe a side dish category.
The problem arises when a person is operating at a different intention than the system assumes. I was not trying to consume and move on. I was trying to build a path back. That requires stable, specific, cross-context identifiers. And those are not always provided at the point of service, even when they exist upstream in the kitchen or in biological classification.
So what I experienced was not missing knowledge. It was a gap between levels of description: biological, culinary, and communicative. The food existed at full resolution. The language I received did not always carry that resolution forward in a reusable form.
And that is why it took so long to reconstruct what I had already eaten. Not because it was unknown. But because it was never fully encoded in a way that survived the journey into memory as something I could reliably return to.ro
