ChatGPT Is a Japanese Internet Degen, or: How Fried Chicken Sent Me Down a Tokenizer Rabbit Hole — Theo Steiner

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This is a story about AI unwittingly becoming a Japanese netizen, fried chicken and not realizing what you have until you’re about to lose it.<br>For reasons beyond my comprehension, the company I work for decided to jump on the back-to-office hype train and will require us to come in thrice a week going forward.<br>When I first signed, right out of university, I briefly pictured myself living one of those grainy filter digital nomad instagram stories - pushing to github right from a van parked on a tropical beach with sand on my feet and damp saltiness holding up my hair.<br>But since I don’t surf, and also enjoy the comforts of running water far too much to consider trading in my Tokyo apartment for a camper parked by the sea, the instagram story I had dreamt up faded from my mind after 24 hours without ever being posted to reality.<br>And don’t get me wrong - I thoroughly enjoyed the yurt-less life of the last few years. Having a place to call home seems to fit me quite well and Tokyo has treated me wonderfully. It’s just that being forced to be physically present in the office closes the door to that flat white slurping, privileged nomad style of life.<br>Humans are weird that way. A door closing hurts even if you never seriously considered going through it.<br>A “pick your own adventure” turns into a plain old story when its decision tree turns unary.<br>So with the door slowly swinging shut, I panicked and impulse bought plane tickets to said sandy beach.<br>Miyazaki is a prefecture on Kyūshū, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, that is famous for surfing, tropical climate and really expensive perfect mangos.<br>What destination could be more fitting for my petite digital nomad midlife crisis?<br>Since I don’t surf and mangos are out of season, I picked another local delicacy as the main objective of my trip: Chicken Nanban. （チキン南蛮）<br>Legend has it that a culinary pioneer from Miyazaki in search of a killer dish to make folks crave chicken breast came up with this heart attack inducing indulgence.<br>See - back in Shōwa Japan, restaurants weren’t able to just buy the chicken parts they needed from the butcher, but instead had to get the whole bird.<br>Since people in miracle economy Japan were not yet chasing body builder physiques, they allegedly much preferred the intense flavor of the thigh meat over the lean breast.<br>This posed a problem for our entrepreneurial young lad from mango-land as chickens, and I hope supermarket generation folks still know this biology fact, have equally as many thighs as breasts.<br>Since inventing social media to make people so self conscious about their bodies that they would become so health conscious that they would happily eat chicken breast boiled in water was a bit out of reach for smartphone-less rural Japan, he took the inverse approach and simply made the breast less healthy by first deep battering and deep frying the meat, before drenching in sweet & sour vinegar marinade and then slathering it with mayo-based tartar sauce.<br>I don’t think I have to really spell it out, but this newly developed cholesterol projectile didn’t miss its target in the slightest as people would soon come in droves to queue up in front of his restaurant in central Miyazaki City.<br>You might wonder how my attempt at working from the beach led to this deep fry deep dive, but it turns out that even digital nomads have to eat - and since I’m a big chicken nanban fan ever since I first tried it and instantly gained five pounds at eighteen years old - I made it my side quest to stuff my face with as much tartar sauce as my body could possibly handle (and then a little bit more).<br>If you’re disgusted at this barbaric pilgrimage, now would be the time to explain to you that the “nanban” of “chicken nanban” literally means barbarian - so I am only doing as I’m told here.<br>So picture me sitting on the second floor of the legendary “Ogura Honten” where vinegar marinated fried chicken was first married with the forbidden goodness that is tartar sauce. The interior is that of a classic Japanese “youshoku-ya” (western style restaurant), a bit dated, with red and white checkered table cloths, and if you breathe in hard enough you can still make out the lingering remnants of a time where it was completely normal to smoke where you ate.<br>As gushing rivers of drool pool in my mouth in anticipation of the chicken I just ordered, I can’t contain my excitement and bombard ChatGPT on my phone with questions about the dish I am so eagerly awaiting.<br>meIs Ogura really the birthplace of チキン南蛮？

chappyShort answer: Ogura is not the original birthplace of Chicken Nanban itself — but it is the birthplace of the tartar-sauce version that’s famous today. 🍗😄<br>Here’s the historical breakdown:<br>🐔 Where Chicken Nanban actually originated<br>The dish first appeared in Nobeoka City (in northern Miyazaki Prefecture) in the...