Soy Sauce

The other week a elementary student missed my class because she had to go on a field trip. When I found out where she went, I felt bad for her. I think there would be tons of places for kids to go, maybe a whale blubber factory, or a geisha training class. This poor girl got stuck going to a soy sauce factory.

I go to Japanese class once a week. I am not learning much (due to my complete lack of interest) but I feel like I am being productive, so I continue to go. The class is given by the community center and only costs $10 a month, I m losing money by not going (actually, that arguement only seems to work when talking about drinking beer in Czech). As it is a community center class, they also want to introduce us to Japan and all things related to it. We were told that there was a field trip planned, can you guess where we went?

After an hour or so train ride that consisted of people trying to speak Japanese to me before giving up and using their broken English (which is pretty good) to talk with me or just moved on to someone else, we arrived at the Kikkoman Soy Sauce factory.

The town smelled of soy sauce, and looked like a sad little area whose day had long since passed. We made our way into the building pausing along the way for many group pictures. When we got inside we were greeted by a large soy sauce server thing and the gift shop which sold horrible soy sauce candies. I thought about buying some, but after having a sample quickly changed my mind. If you want to recreat the experience, just put a small marble and a spoonful of soy sauce in your mouth and swish it around for a few minutes. Yum.


Everyone was soon ushered into a small theater where we got to watch the miracle of soy sauce making. The movie was more scary than interesting, but I did learn that 100% of soy sauce making material comes from North America.

I hit a button by accident and cut off the best/scariest part of the whole movie

After the movie we got the grand tour which was basically walking through cream painted hallways of nothingness.

The creaminess is blinding

I did get to see some bits and pieces of the soy sauce making process, but none of it was running at the time, so it was just looking at a big machine doing nothing. I was hoping to see some assembly line magic: smooth, glistening virgin plastic bottles flying down the line, empty one second, filled tagged and ready to ship the next. No such luck.

The only real positive about the entire trip (if you don't count the free bottle of soy sauce) was that I got to better know the cute Filipina girl who is in a different class.

Yay! Free stuff!

The class "shufus" (housewives)