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I Had Cancer and Now I'm Addicted to Japanese Food

During high school, I was diagnosed with cancer just a few months after returning from a trip to Japan. Soon, I found that the only thing that gave me solace from the constant surgeries and chemotherapy was the comfort of Japanese food.
Photo via Flickr user zh3us

It is 11 PM on a Monday night and I am sitting at the bar at Yakitori Taisho, a divey, izakaya-style Japanese joint on St. Mark's Place in lower Manhattan. I call it a bar because there is a cold mug of Sapporo in my hand and the wooden surface in front of me is slick with beer and saké, but really it's more like a counter one might find at an all-night diner. There is a skinny kid in his twenties donning a baggy t-shirt and a towel wrapped around his head delicately flipping skewers on a grill in front of me. A glittery mosaic of Mount Fuji hangs on a wall to my left; a photograph of a buxom Japanese woman in a white bathing suit is to my right.

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A waitress comes over and I order two skewers of yotsumi (chicken chunks), two skewers of tsukune (beef meatball), three skewers of kawa (chicken skin), one skewer of negi (scallion), and one skewer of shishito peppers. I add an order of yaki onigiri, a triangular rice ball glazed in soy sauce and grilled on the barbeque, and another pint of Sapporo to wash it all down. A lonely Japanese pop song is playing on the radio—a woman asking a long-lost lover if he still remembers her after all these years.

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There is a feeling of calm that washes over me whenever I find myself in a place like this, as if I am sliding into a warm bath at the end of a long day. Anxiety leaves me. Loneliness abates. I forget that my gas bill is two months past due, that my student loans are starting to pile up. Japanese food is a comfort to me in a way that the fare of my childhood never was, and I've come to frequent these establishments constantly, even obsessively, as I try to cope with the day-to-day anxieties of adult life. For many Americans, the concept of comfort food conjures up images of mom's home cooking—mashed potatoes and gravy, macaroni and cheese, chicken noodle soup, the classics—but for me, it's tender pieces of yakitori, boiling vats of sukiyaki, steaming bowls of ramen, and endless mountains of sticky white rice.

My soft addiction to Japanese food started in earnest when I was 17. During my senior year of high school, I traveled to Tokyo to stay with a friends' family in Den-en-chōfu, a beautiful suburb in Ōta Ward near the southern edge of the city. This friend had grown up in Japan before coming to the US at the age of ten, and when his parents ultimately decided to move back to Tokyo seven years later, he came to live with me and my family in order to finish out school. This trip was arranged as a showing of gratitude.

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On the way home from the hospital, my cravings would become so urgent that I would make my father pull off to the side of the road whenever I knew a Japanese restaurant was in close proximity.

What I remember best, of course, is the food: the hole-in-the-wall ramen shop we found in Akihabara; the shabu-shabu spot with never-ending plates of thinly sliced rib eye; the soba I ate in snowy Nagano. But more than an introduction to the wonders of Japanese cuisine, my trip to Tokyo marked the last truly joyful, unencumbered experience of my teenage years. I was diagnosed with cancer just a few months after returning from Japan and my life became irrevocably complicated by doctors' appointments, surgeries, and chemotherapy.

During my treatment, I was given steroids to preemptively combat the chemo-induced nausea and loss of appetite. While the medication succeeded in keeping me from puking chemical sludge everywhere, it also produced a ravenous, almost painful hunger in me. On the way home from the hospital, my cravings would become so urgent that I would make my father pull off to the side of the road whenever I knew a Japanese restaurant was in close proximity. These pit stops offered a slight reprieve from the gnawing discomfort of my existence during those months. And today, some seven years in remission from my illness, a good meal at a restaurant like Yakitori Taisho—a strange, crowded hideaway that reminds me so vividly of the izakayas I visited during that trip to Tokyo—can still offer me a similar escape from reality.

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Photo via Flickr user ippei-janine

There is a surprising lack of research available when it comes to the topic of comfort food. In recent memory, only a handful of studies have been conducted with the aim of discovering the actual benefits of consuming these recipes. As good as comfort food tastes, and as much as we may crave it in times of distress, do these dishes really help quell our emotional pain, or is it all just a placebo effect?

In a study published this past February in the scientific journal Appetite, researchers from the University of the South and SUNY-Buffalo found that in certain individuals comfort food does in fact help fight temporary feelings of loneliness.

"It's doing something soothing—it's not just a mental trick that we're playing on ourselves," says Jordan Troisi, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of the South who co-authored the study. "These people are actually feeling less lonely as a consequence of going through this process."

Though there is less evidence to support comfort food's ability to improve other negative emotional states like sadness, fear, and anxiety, loneliness is a feeling uniquely connected to one's relationship with others. Troisi and his colleagues found that a participant's self-identified comfort food helped reduce feelings of loneliness only if that individual had a "secure attachment style" (i.e., solid, healthy relationships with family members and friends).

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"Food seems to serve as a trigger, a reminder of relationship ties. As a consequence, it operates like those relationships do in terms of their capacity to reduce feelings of low social connection," Troisi tells me. "[Comfort foods] have associations with some favorable experience and often, almost all the time, with some social experience as well."

"Whether that association is developed between the time people are four until they're 20, or if it happens from the time they're 21 to 22 and they're on this trip in a foreign country, it doesn't very much matter to us so long as it produces the effect," he adds.

Indeed, my infatuation with Japanese food is rooted not just in flavor, texture, and aroma, but in a specific time and place where I was surrounded by close friends. I was free of worry, busy exploring the surreal, dreamlike world that is Tokyo. Perhaps food is now a way for me to once again tap into that feeling of connectedness and security. The four months it took me to complete chemotherapy were some of the loneliest of my life. Most of my friends had gone off to college and I felt forgotten and defeated. It's not surprising that I would seek solace from that trauma in the memories of better days.

"You're saying Japanese food is what you really want and crave when you feel bad," says Traci Mann, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. "To me that's what comfort food is: the thing that you want when you feel bad. I think that's a thing. That exists. People do have certain things that they crave or want."

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"[But] I don't think comfort food is a thing that has special powers to make you feel better," she continues. "It's like any basic, positive thing."

In 2014, Mann and her colleagues published a study titled "The Myth of Comfort Food" in the scholarly journal Health Psychology. Astronauts were coming back to Earth malnourished and NASA had given the university a grant to figure out a way to make crewmembers eat more while floating through the lonely abyss of outer space. One thought was to give each astronaut a ration of his or her own comfort food.

No amount of yakitori will cure cancer, nor will it beat back every uncomfortable emotion that threatens to rear its ugly head.

To test the hypothesis, researchers made participants in the study feel anxious, sad, and angry by rolling an 18-minute movie reel—a compilation of clips from films like The Hurt Locker, The Amityville Horror, and My Girl. But ultimately the subjects felt better whether they were given their comfort food, a "neutral food" like a granola bar, or no food at all. After a few minutes, participants' moods seemed to bounce back on their own no matter what.

Perhaps in the end it is not Japanese food but time that truly heals all wounds. No amount of yakitori will cure cancer, nor will it beat back every uncomfortable emotion that threatens to rear its ugly head. Still, as far as I can tell, there's no reason not to try.

"That's actually the funny thing in our lab," says Heather Scherschel, a Ph. D. candidate and one of Mann's advisees at the University of Minnesota. Her comfort food, she tells me, is her mother's French onion soup. "We all say, 'Well, even if it's not going to make us feel better, it still tastes really delicious, so why not?"