Itadakimas! - Natto

I've decided that since there are so many awesome foods here in Japan, my little blog here needs a whole segment dedicated to covering this area of my adventure. I've named it "Itadakimas!" (ee-tah-dah-kee-mah-su) which in Japan you say right before eating.

I feel like this segment needs some consistency, some structure. So, for each food, there will be three sections. What it is, what it tastes/smells like and my personal satisfaction rating. The first two are pretty self explanatory, but the last one, which i will call "I Will Stop Eating This...", will have only a few select answers. Which will be (in decreasing order): "When My Stomach Bursts", "After Seconds", "When I Leave Japan", "After This One Time" and "Before It Touches My Plate".

Anyways! Enough formalities! On with the new segment. This week it's...

Natto
(Nah-toe)

What it is:
Natto is a very unique Japanese food that is typically eaten on rice at breakfast. Functionally, it's soybeans that have been fermented, but aesthetically it looks like what your mouth feels like if you fell asleep without drinking water the day before when you were eating flour by the handful. It's gooey, stringy stuff with lumpy, whole soybeans.

Taste and smell:
Before eating it, i was warned that it was an acquired taste, that i could stop eating it if i wanted to. It was built up to be this really potent stuff, but when it hit my tongue, it wasn't that bad. It kinda had this strong earthy side to it, with perhaps a mild coffee flavour in there somewhere. It was very subtly sweet, too. Perhaps the most difficult thing to overcome, though, is it's mucus-y texture.

I'll Stop Eating This:
When I Leave Japan.