(no subject)

I ran out of rice this week, am on the verge of running out of shôyu, and have been out of furikake for quite some time. Since I can't get any of those at the nearby supermarkets (well, I can get rice, but not short-grain of any sort of quality), I went up to H&Y. They're a Korean supermarket, but they carry a lot of Japanese stuff, too, and they've got a good enough selection that I usually go there instead of literally driving across the island to a true Japanese grocery. Plus, they have amazing sushi.

The first thing I saw upon entering was a sign that said they were having a stock-up sale on all Japanese items, followed by an encouragement to take advantage of this sale, since it's likely that products from Japan will either be going up in price or just plain unavailable soon due to supply problems. The sign concluded by cheerfully stating that all their products had come in before the earthquake and tsunami, so no need to worry about contamination!

And, I dunno, somehow that just sort of brought it all home to me. It made it personal in a way the Japanese disaster hasn't been, really. My amily in Japan all live around Hiroshima, in southwest Japan, so they weren't directly in harm's way. And we're not terribly close to them, either — I think I was in middle school the last time I saw any of them, and only four years old the time before that. I'm not even sure how I'm related to them, only that it's through my maternal grandpa, somehow, and may involve half-brothers in some way. So I did my grocery shopping, making all sorts of horrible little calculations like, "should I buy nori today? I should, since it's harvested in such a limited area, and it binds up iodine like no one's business."

Overall, the most depressing grocery shopping trip I think I've ever had.