ジョージ「日本の塩はスペインの塩にくらべるとまずいですね」
私「そうですね。99％まで精選された塩化ナトリウムですからね」
ジョージ「まじり気を嫌うのは、いかにも日本人らしいですね」
Seisen Suru
Jooji: Nihon no shio wa supein no shio ni kuraberu to mazui desu ne.
Watashi: Soo desu ne. 99% made seisen sareta enka natoriumu desu kara ne.
Jooji: Majiri ke wo kirau no wa, ikanimo nihonjin rashii desu ne.
George: Compared to the salt in Spain, Japan's salt certainly doesn't taste very good.
Me: I agree and it's because Japanese salt is so carefully selected that it's really not even salt but simply 99% sodium chloride.
George: To be afraid of impurities seems so Japanese.
* * *
Seisen means to pay minute attention to something; to choose the very best. The passive form is seisen sareru.
Do you ever worry about the taste of salt? Or do you think salt tastes the same all over the world? If you answered yes to the second question, I'm afraid
your sense of taste is practically nonexistent (ajionchi). As in this week's conversation, Japanese "salt" is really simply sodium chloride; more a chemical than one of nature's gifts. And though one can find stores selling various brands of salt, in reality inside they are all the same.
When I was a child salt was not as fine-grained as it is today-if one wasn't careful it would even harden. Somewhere along the way, however, every grain has become the same white "perfection."
A member of a now privatized monopoly corporation: "We've been trying hard for a long time to get rid of impurities and yatto kono yd ni seisen sareta shio ga dekiru yoo ni natta no desu (now finally, we've been able to produce this carefully selected salt)." To be fair, today's salt is much more pleasing to the eye than it used to be.But-and this is the crux of the problem - isn't salt something to eat and not something to look at? And seisen shita kekka oishiku natta deshoo ka (has this careful selection really resulted in an improved taste?). With apologies to the man from the monopoly, the answer is clearly, "No!" As George said above, Spain's salt is much better tasting than Japan's. It tastes of the sun and the sea and if you put a shellfish into a large lump of Spanish salt with the same consistency as seawater it will stick its tongue out in about 30 minutes and begin crawling about.
Though George was only joking when he sarcastically said that the state of Japanese salt "seemed so Japanese," there really is no way I can deny the truth of his comment. If you go to a supermarket you can see row upon row of cucumbers and tomatoes which have been hand-picked for their length and shape (nagasa ya katachi de seisen sareta). When one thinks about it, though, how is it that food which is not made in a factory turns out so uniform, all the same size? It's not supposed to happen that way, is it? Of course not. The big ones which received too much sun, the small ones which received too little, and the tomatoes with a funny shape were all thrown out.
To think that the same kind of "picking and choosing" goes on with regard to human beings is frightening, and yet true. Students applying to national universities are weeded out according to their scores on "The First Scholastic Apptitude Selective Examination for National Universities" (Kyootsuu ichiji shiken de seisen saremasu). Students must sit for examinations in five subjects (Japanese, math, social studies, English, and science) and receive high scores in all subjects. What happens if a person is strong in literature but weak in physics or math? Simple. They don't get in. I'm afraid that as long as Japanese society sorts people with such a fine-toothed comb (subete no mono wo seisen shiteiru), the chances of someone really unique turning up aren't very promising.