Boogers! They’re what’s for dinner! (In which what could have been said in a paragraph is flogged to death over the course of several pages…)

Having ridden the trains in and around Yokosuka, Yokohama and Tokyo for several months now, a thesis has begun to suggest itself: are the bodily secretions that “the rest” of us normally eschew actually a highly nutritious and delicious type of food? Are the meat and potato lovin’ folk, the vegetarians and the macrobiotic enthusiasts among us missing out? Have we stupidly wiped away our snot, earwax, zit ambrosia and the like, carelessly and wastefully disposing of what are in fact little known gastronomic delights? Is your own body in reality an undiscovered culinary adventure? Are boogers the new comfort food?

I could go on but I might barf—and then start wondering about how barf might taste the second time around. Plus, asking all these questions makes me disturbed. ["Oh my god! I’m pulling a Carrie" – not a Stephen King "Carrie", but rather a Carrie Bradshaw, Sex in the City style of writing-- except the questions I’m asking are not about sex, but about something far more intimate and not so much provocative or titillating as disturbing].

What prompted such a nasty little thesis to rear its head? Well, it has to do with riding the trains, something I do daily as I ply my evil trade. Most times, the trains are so crowded that I view getting a seat as something that happens to other people. Sorta like winning the lottery. So generally I stand, often towering over my standing fellow passengers even when wearing (non-platform!) sneakers. This elevated vantage point is not necessary to observing the goings on during commutes, but it does have its advantages.

And what have I seen? Many things. Many, many things. The first time IT happened I thought that perhaps the perpetrator/diner was putting on a show especially for me – the gaijin/foreigner. A seated young man—really just a boy--in front of whom I was standing, periodically stuffed his index finger into his nose, gave the nostril a good boring out, removed finger, inspected the treasure, and then popped his finger in his mouth. Yum! “That’s really gross!” I thought to myself, and tried to look away. But inevitably I’d find myself furtively checking the kid out, trying to determine if he was some sort of misfit. I confess that I rationalized what I had seen by making judgments based on his appearance and demeanour – pseudo ghetto style, sullen “don’t give a fuck” expression. I comforted myself by thinking that these characteristics were what led him to engage in this kind of behaviour, although somewhere in my mind I knew (or thought I knew) that booger munching was not a hallmark of ghetto-style (pseudo, sullen, “real” or other).

My pathetic attempt to rationalize brazen booger consumption was proved totally wrong a day or so later, when I witnessed a neatly dressed, middle-aged woman doing pretty much the same thing as the boy. Sure, the well-dressed woman’s finger action was not quite as vigourous--more of a delicate probing and testing, as if extracting nectar from a flower. Nonetheless, the end results were the same: cursory inspection followed by consumption. It was done with such nonchalance: she neither sought an audience nor tried to hide her actions from one. I was floored, though thanks to being squeezed in with a million other people on the train car, unable to actually keel over.

In the past few weeks, I’ve witnessed several similar subway snack attacks. I’ve come to think of that first boy as the “herald patch” of my awareness of the existence of booger-gourmands (in the same way that the appearance of a localized rash might signal the start of a nasty case of pityriasis rosea). Now, I can’t help being on the look out. My curiosity has been piqued and these days I willingly forgo a seat if to take it means losing my view of another passenger munching away on his or her snot. The demographic is diverse – young, old, male, female, business-man, office-woman…For all their many differences, these folk have this one thing in common: they like to eat their boogers.

Unsurprisingly, boogers are not for everyone. A smaller subset of people appears to enjoy feasting on earwax. Only twice observed, but even once was a bit much. Same m.o. except pinkie is substituted for index finger and a little more care is taken, perhaps because the message that eardrums are sensitive has been absorbed and no one wants a rupture and an earful of blood while trying to enjoy a waxy “amuse bouche.” Or maybe it’s because the best tasting ear wax is the fresh, gooey stuff and if you dig too hard, you’ll end up with cruddy, stale crumbly, two or three day old ear wax. That old earwax stuff sounds unappetizing even to me.

Not that everyone here is “doing it,” mind you. It would be irresponsible for me to say that, not to mention a lie. But still. What the fuck?! I surfed the trains in New York for over a decade and while I saw many things one might consider strange, simply don’t, er…recall seeing anyone openly eating their boogers (young children aside). In Japan, a place where one is bombarded by free handouts of convenience pack tissues, eating boogers just doesn’t intuitively make sense. I had heard that blowing your nose is considered rude in public. It simply didn’t occur to me that eating your boogers was “daijobou” (okay). So what gives?

Until recently, I hadn’t shared these unscientific observations with anyone. I was hardly sure I had witnessed them at all, and wondered if perhaps I was just seeing what I wanted to see, or more accurately, seeing precisely what I didn’t want to see. However, two nights ago, while enjoying a fabulously cheap--but good--curry dinner with a friend, the subject of booger snacks came up. “Oh yes!” my friend said. “It’s disgusting. I’ve seen it so many times when riding the train.”

We speculated for a few minutes on the why of it all. Is it just a subset of passengers who ride the Keikyu train line? Is it because of the lack of trashcans? Is booger eating, really just a way of recycling--recycling taken to its most fanatical extreme? Is it because you’re not supposed to eat on the train and these people are hungry? [No, that last can’t be it because these people are definitely eating and in all cases, making absolutely no attempt to hide it. Maybe, they’re part of that rare species of Japanese that litter and/or dare to cross the street on a pedestrian Don’t Walk sign: i.e. booger eaters don’t care about the rules and do what they want when they want.]
It was only later, after I’d returned home, that it occurred to me that perhaps my friend and I were over thinking this whole booger problematic; that really there was no problematic at all. The answer could be something sublime in its simplicity: Maybe boogers just plain taste good! Maybe, if it were acceptable to eat on the train, greater numbers of people would be snacking on their boogers. Maybe….

From there, it was but a short leap to the conjecture that boogers and ear wax, and who knows what else(!) might actually be good for you. For now, I’m confining my hypotheses to the health benefits of eating one’s own bodily secretions since to date I have yet to witness anyone actually sharing his or boogers, not even with friends. Also, I feel no compelling need to add scientific backing to every lame guy’s attempt to get a girl to swallow…although it would be interesting to see how said lame guy reacted to the suggestion that he try his own semen (“Dude, you might like it! And hey, it’s good for you!”)

Alas, in the two days since I spoke openly about this topic with my friend, I have not seen anyone eating his or her boogers, earwax or anything else. It’s as if, by daring to speak the activity, I magically made public (or at least train-bound) consumption of bodily secretions cease. Maybe it’s daijobu/okay to observe someone eating boogers on the train but not daijobu to talk about it. Mention it, even once, even in a private tête-à-tête over hot curry, and the word gets out and all booger eating temporarily (?) evaporates. Whatever the reason, I am disappointed. Six times this evening, I witnessed people picking their noses or probing at their ears. I watched four people wiping those more or less wet or crusty secretions that sometimes accumulate in the corners of one’s eye. In each case, I practically held my breath in anticipation of what would come next. And I was disappointed and felt robbed of data when my unwitting subjects didn’t follow through!

I have become a sick, sick soul; someone who may one day start riding the trains without any destination in mind, simply on the off-chance that I will be able to collect more data on my fledgling thesis: “Eating yourself to live. Bodily self-consumption amongst consuming bodies in late, late, late, capitalist society.” I might even try to go back to grad school! Hmmm…wonder if I could get funding to do this? I’d be willing, except baulk at the thought that some form of participant-observation type study might prove necessary.