I am stood at the Family Mart counter at 8:14pm asking for three pieces of spicy chicken, and the lass behind the register has stopped functioning. Not slowed down. Stopped. This is the fundamental crisis of buying hot food at a Japanese convenience store: the machine that lives inside the poor sod at the counter simply has not been programmed with a routine for a foreigner who is genuinely, biologically hungry.

"Spicy chicken, mitsu kudasai." Three. A number. A small one, frankly. And yet.

"MITSU!?"

There it is. The bikkuri face. The full reboot. She says it back to me with the wide-eyed, jaw-slack disbelief of a woman who has just watched me pull the pin out of a grenade and start eating it. Three pieces of boneless fried chicken the size of a fifty-pence coin each. That is the atrocity I have committed. Not two. Not one, nibbled sadly on the walk home like a Japanese salaryman pretending he isn't ravenous. Three. And the whole fucking shop has to have a little sit down about it.

Why ordering hot food at a Japanese convenience store breaks the machine

Here is the thing they will never tell you in the bloody guidebooks. The konbini hot food case is not designed to feed a person. It is designed to feed a gesture. One piece of chicken, one nikuman, one lonely little famichiki, consumed as a shameful punctuation mark between one obligation and the next. The portion is not a meal. It is an apology for having a body.

And so when I, a fully grown adult man of some size and appetite, roll up and ask for the same item three fucking times in a single breath, I have violated the sacred arithmetic. The counter goes quiet. The tongs hover. Somewhere in the back a fax machine spontaneously prints an incident report. She looks at me the way you'd look at a dog that just ordered a taxi.

And I've had it. I've had it with the theatre of it. Because we both know what's happening here. She heard me. My Japanese was fine. "Mitsu" is not a difficult word; it is one of the first fifteen words anyone learns. The MITSU!? is not confusion. It is a moral objection. It is the sound of a woman who genuinely cannot compute that a person might want enough food to stop being hungry, dressed up as a hearing problem so nobody has to be rude about it. Absolute clowns, the lot of the system that trained them to do this.

The maths of a hungry foreigner

Let's be honest, because nobody at Family Mart will be. Three pieces of that spicy chicken is not a feast. Three pieces is a starter. Three pieces is what a normal-sized human eats while deciding what he's actually going to have for dinner. If I'm being truthful, three isn't even enough, and I've ordered three only because I've been conditioned, over thirteen fucking years in this country, to pre-shrink my own hunger so the lass at the till doesn't short-circuit.

That's the bit that makes me want to scream into the oden tank. I have made myself smaller. I have learned to order like a nervous sparrow to avoid the bikkuri face, and the tossers still give me the bikkuri face. There is no winning. Order one, you're conforming to the tatemae. Order two, mild surprise but still sacrificing being starving. Order three, and you have apparently declared war on the concept of moderation and personally insulted the woman's ancestors going back nine generations.

For fuck's sake. It's chicken. It's fried, tepid, vaguely spicy chicken from a heated glass box next to the door where the students buy their energy drinks. I am not asking for the recipe. I am not asking her to explain the kuuki. I am asking for three of the small brown things, and I would like to not be treated like I've announced a coup while I do it.

So she bags them. Eventually. Three pieces, wrapped with the reverence of a bloody organ transplant, handed over with a face that says she'll be telling this story to her sugar daddy at the love hotel tonight. And I take my three sad little chickens out into the Tokyo night, still hungry, and I do the only rational thing a healthy adult can do. I walk to the other Family Mart two hundred metres up the road and order three more, so nobody has to watch a man eat six.