Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (11 page)

In the movie
Tortilla Soup,
an American retelling of Ang Lee’s classic
Eat Drink Man Woman,
the family comes together at the end to eat the title dish, and during an awkward silence, the Paul Rodriguez character quips, “I just love toppings.” It’s one of my favorite lines in any movie, ever, and to get sentimental about it, people may prefer different toppings, but we’re all udon and sauce underneath.

While we ate, one of the parents asked Andoh what American foods she craved. “Nothing, really,” she replied. “You know, I’ve lived in Japan for almost
fifty years.
” She sounded surprised about it herself.

By the end of our Tokyo summer, I wasn’t missing any American foods either, although I did have a craving for spicy food, which is too rare in Tokyo. I think one lobe of my brain runs on capsaicin. One day I almost stepped in front of a car while leering at an ad for a spicy Middle Eastern sandwich. It’s a good thing I discovered spicy sudachi udon.

A month before our trip,
my friend Henry asked me what I was most looking forward to eating in Japan.

“Where do I begin?” I replied. “There’s ramen, yakitori...”

Henry interrupted me with a look that said, unmistakably, “You are the biggest dork.” I’d been saying the names of common foods in an exaggerated accent, like an American news anchor pronouncing “Nicaragua.”

I did my best to break this annoying habit. Once we got to Tokyo, however, I had to pick up an even stranger habit:
pronouncing English words in a way that would be totally racist back home.

When I studied French in high school, we learned that France has a snooty (even by French standards) government department charged with maintaining the purity of the language and defending it from foreign interlopers like
le meeting
and
faire du camping.
This effort has mostly failed, of course, but there have been occasional successes, like
l’ordinateur
for “computer,” instead of, perhaps,
le computeur.

Japan hasn’t even tried. Japanese is so full of English words, it reads like a bicultural ransom note. Those English words, along with some assorted French, German, Portuguese, and recently borrowed Chinese words, are rendered in katakana. For example, here’s how you say “computer” in Japanese:

コンピューター

which is pronounced “kompyuutaa.”

An English-speaker in Japan will spend a hilarious amount of time saying English words recast in Japanese phonemes. One day I was waiting in line for ice cream with my friend Kate, who speaks Japanese, and asked her which of the many words for “small” I should use when ordering a small cone. I didn’t want to commit the equivalent of walking into a Cleveland Baskin-Robbins and ordering a petite uni-scoop cone.

“I’d just say
sumōru,
” she replied. Sure enough: I asked for a “
sumōru kōn, chokoreito,
” and got exactly what I was after: a small cone, chocolate.

These English loanwords—thousands and thousands of them—sound the way they do because, compared with English, Japanese has a limited range of allowable syllables. I once took a Japanese class and sat next to a guy named Carl. That’s a very hard thing to say in Japanese. There’s no distinction between
r
and
l
, and consonants generally aren’t allowed to cluster. When an English word is imported to Japan, it has to be unpacked, translated into Japanese sounds, and written in
katakana,
the alphabet used for writing foreign words. Carl, at best, turns into
Kaaru.

This unpacking and repacking of words reminded me of something, but I couldn’t figure out what it was until I was watching Iris play with Legos one day. Lego blocks come in a limited number of shapes and colors, but you can build anything with them: a castle, a police station, Mount Rushmore. When you finish and take a step back from your creation, yes, it looks like Abraham Lincoln, but it never stops looking like Legos. English words in Japanese are like that, too. They sound something like the original, but are built from a new toolbox of parts, just like the way Japanese cooks disassembled Western foods and reassembled them in the form of yōshoku.

Throwing around English words with a katakana accent was lots of fun. I tried it any time I didn’t know the name of something in Japanese, with nearly total success. Pancakes?
Pankēki.
Beer?
Bīru.
Culture shock?
Karuchā shokku.

Understanding the response to my request? That’s another story.

Every time I’ve traveled to a non-Anglophone country, it’s been like pulling up to a fast-food drive-through. You give your order and are rewarded with a barrage of incomprehensible static. Please drive forward!

I’ve walked into the same scenario in Japan, Thailand, and France. (At least the food was better than drive-through quality.) My mouth is pretty good at producing sounds in other languages. I can say the French
r
and the Japanese
r/l
and the Spanish…why is it always the
r
, anyway?

It’s not that people take me for a suave native speaker. My American accent comes with me as if I packed it in my suitcase. But they can tell I’m trying. My attempts to speak are proficient enough that they don’t come across as the usual foreigner’s cry for help:
Please put me out of my misery so we can switch to English, already!

So I ask, confidently, “Where’s the bathroom?” (Incidentally, the most common word for “bathroom” in Japanese is an English loanword:
toire,
derived from, yes, “toilet.”) But if the reply is anything more complicated than a pointed finger, I have to put on my linguistic dunce cap and say, “Sorry, I don’t understand.”

I’m ashamed of this. I love unraveling a mystery, and a language is a box of moving parts. How do they work together? What are the rules and the exceptions?

These puzzle-box aspects of language also, as it happens, had an intuitive appeal to the proto-geeks who invented modern computing. A geek’s got to eat, and as Steven Levy explains in his book
Hackers
, MIT computer scientists fueled their nocturnal coding sessions the same way their counterparts here and abroad do today, with Chinese food.

Chinese food was a system, too, and the hacker curiosity was applied to that system as assiduously as to a new LISP compiler…. They went back loaded with Chinese dictionaries and demanded a Chinese menu. The chef, a Mr. Wong, reluctantly complied, and Gosper, Samson, and the others pored over the menu as if it were an instruction set for a new machine. Samson supplied the translations, which were positively revelatory. What was called “Beef with Tomato” on the English menu had a literal meaning of Barbarian Eggplant Cowpork. “Wonton” had a Chinese equivalent of Cloud Gulp.

In the seventies, Calvin Trillin wrote about his fantasy of eating in New York’s Chinatown accompanied by Mao Tse-Tung. Trillin had no sympathy for Mao’s politics (also, Mao was already dead at the time); he just wanted the Chairman’s help translating the specials written in Chinese and posted on restaurant walls. He should have just brought some hackers from NYU.

Cut to Tokyo. For the first two weeks of our trip, I was in full-on drive-through mode. I couldn’t understand two-word responses. Eventually, the language started to click. As a verbal fusillade approached, I pared off honorific prefixes and verb endings and focused on the key words:
Ah, she said “
nomimono
.” She’s asking me what I want to drink! Also, she’s holding up a glass and gesturing wildly at it
. When I successfully parsed a sentence, it felt like someone threw a fish at me and I filleted it in midair.

I never got good at speaking Japanese and never got better than your average Japanese baby at understanding it. But I managed to pull off one feat that eludes Calvin Trillin and Japanese babies alike: I learned to read.

Japanese has four writing systems.

Let me say that again.
Japanese has four writing systems.
If you want to read and write it fluently, you have to learn four writing systems. This is like being told that if you want to pass the driving test, you will have to build a car from scratch, and that car will have to pass California emissions standards.

Luckily, three of the writing systems are easy. One is the good old Roman alphabet. The other two,
hiragana
and katakana, are easy to learn and easy to recognize. Hiragana is squiggly and cuddly-looking; katakana looks like ninja weapons.

Katakana, as I mentioned, is used to write foreign words. This isn’t its only use, but it’s by far the most common. Learning katakana should be on the to-do list of every traveler to Japan. It takes a week to learn and will allow you to read all sorts of product names, signs, and menu items. Hiragana is not especially useful without its scary big sister,
kanji.

Kanji are the complex characters, originally from China, used for writing most Japanese words. Think of the Chinese side of a Chinese restaurant menu. That’s kanji.

Learning kanji is an ultramarathon of the mind. Students in Japan begin studying kanji in kindergarten and finish, two thousand–plus characters later, in high school. Imagine sitting in high school English class and learning new letters of the alphabet. Thinking about it makes me want to fling spitballs.

Chinese characters are often described as pictographic. A few of them are, like rain (
雨
), mouth (
口
), rice field (
田
), woman (
女
), and mother (
母
, which theoretically looks like breasts if you turn your head sideways; was this the original emoticon?). The rest are intricate assortments of symbols that have little or nothing to do with the concept denoted by the character. For example,
新
means “new.” Why? Who knows? Kanji are properly known as
ideographs,
not pictographs, because each one represents an idea, and because learning them makes you feel like an ideot. (Sorry.)

Now, I don’t mean to hold myself out as a Kevin Costner-like folk hero who charmed the natives with his knowledge of their impenetrable writing system. I didn’t actually learn enough kanji to read a book. Essentially, I cheated, and I did so in a way that highlights one of the most bizarre features of an ideographic writing system: understanding without reading.

To attack the kanji, I used a controversial book called
Remembering the Kanji,
by James Heisig. RTK, as it is known by its adherents (a fringe group of international businesspeople, manga geeks, and guys looking to meet Japanese girls), teaches kanji via mnemonic stories. You take all the little bits and pieces in each character and arrange them into a vignette—preferably something violent or sexy, like all good mnemonics. By the end of the book, you’ve learned the meaning of all the common kanji—
but none of the pronunciations.
(Each kanji can have multiple, totally unrelated pronunciations; most have at least two.)

And that’s where I found myself when we arrived in Tokyo. I could read hundreds or thousands of words in the sense of understanding their meaning, but without the slightest idea of how to pronounce them. (English pronunciation is notoriously difficult, but this is another category altogether.) It turns out that this level of functional (il)literacy, while not ideal, is extremely handy. If you’re looking for the south exit and see a sign that says
南口
(“south mouth”), who cares if you can actually pronounce it?

Most important, I could read menus, including izakaya menus, which are generally posted on vertical wooden strips on the wall of the restaurant. I wasn’t fast, but I was good enough. If I couldn’t pronounce, I could point. (The names of many ingredients and dishes are written in hiragana or katakana, which made navigating a menu even easier.)

One delightful side effect of an ideographic writing system is that there is no need for a distinction between words and symbols. In English we call our money “dollars” but usually write it as $. In Japanese, the word for “yen” and the symbol are one and the same:
円
. So it goes for tin cans (
缶
), men’s and women’s bathrooms (
男
and
女
), paper (
紙
), books (
本
), and ice (
氷
). The last is just the kanji for water (
水
) with a tiny extra shard to tell you it’s frozen.

I’m a long way from learning how to pronounce most kanji and understanding the myriad ways they combine into words, and I still think it’s the most annoying writing system ever devised. The more time I spend with these characters, however, the more I start to resemble the female lead at the beginning of a romantic comedy:
That writing system is so annoying! Why can’t I stop thinking about it? Probably because it’s just so annoying. It’s not that I’m in
love
with kanji or anything.

At the beginning of our
trip, we met up with a friend from Seattle, traveling with his teenage daughter, and he regaled us with tales of sushi meals. As he told it, it sounded like they’d made their way through Honshu, mouths agape like baleen whales, vacuuming up sushi wherever they found it: an unexpected piece of beef sushi high in the Japanese Alps, a blowout
omakase
meal in Shibuya, and many others.

Well, sorry, Bruce. I ate very little sushi in Tokyo. I didn’t try for a reservation at the Michelin three-star restaurant run by Jiro Ono and featured in the documentary
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
, or the restaurant run by Jiro’s son, or any of his competitors who wish they were in a movie but have to settle for the fact that people will pay $350 and up to eat their sushi.

I did have several sushi meals, including one
omakase
(chef’s choice) dinner at a well-regarded neighborhood joint where the meal ended with a lovely miso soup full of meaty fish bones. And, of course, we went for
kaitenzushi
, conveyor belt sushi, where the food travels around on a motor-driven belt. I’ve been taking Iris for conveyor belt sushi since she was three; there’s a popular chain in Seattle that caters to children by stocking the belt with things like cream puffs and miniature doughnuts and fried chicken. At Tokyo chains like Sushi-Go-Round, it’s all sushi and beer. Oh, and I loved seeing colorful pieces of
nigiri
sushi, fingers of rice topped with a slice of fish, individually wrapped in cellophane for sale at the deli in the basement of Nakano Broadway.

Every time I ate sushi in Tokyo, however, it reminded me of Seattle. The number one question people asked us when they learned where we were from was, “Do people eat Japanese food in Seattle?” And I would explain, every time, that in Seattle, Japanese food is synonymous with sushi. Some people had heard of this phenomenon. Most found it perplexing, as if American food had taken root abroad but only in the form of lobster rolls. (I got big laughs by adding that the entire city of Seattle has about five ramen shops and one udon shop.)

Seattle does a pretty good job with sushi. Our hometown sushi hero, Shiro Kashiba, studied under Jiro Ono, and his eponymous restaurant, Shiro’s, is world-class. We also have plenty of good, cheap sushi. Every time I had sushi in Tokyo, it felt like a wasted meal, not because there was anything wrong with the food but because Tokyo is packed with amazing food unavailable within four thousand miles of Seattle.

This is grumpy, I know, and to be a stickler, I probably should have gone to one of the famous $350 places to see what the fuss is about, although for the same price I could visit thirty-five ramen shops. But I did have one memorable only-in-Japan meal of raw fish and rice. It happened at 8 a.m.

Tsukiji is Tokyo’s fish market and also the Tokyo
of
fish markets: bigger and fresher than everyone else put together. It’s a popular tourist attraction, but it greets visitors with a Goofus and Gallant–style cartoon plaque showing you how not to behave, followed by a walk through a loading area where you’ll star in a life-sized game of Frogger, dodging forklifts and little trucks shuffling coolers of snapper, tuna, octopus, shellfish, and ugly, tasty things with no English names.

We woke Iris up at 6:30 a.m. to head to Tsukiji, a dire trip across town on the most depressing of Tokyo’s subway lines. By the time we got there, Iris was hungry and cranky and not exactly in the mood for sushi. A shopkeeper noticed her morning face and offered a solution in the form of
monaka,
a Japanese ice cream treat of vanilla ice cream sandwiched between waffle-like cookie layers. It’s the least messy ice cream treat in the pantheon, so naturally Iris pried it open to get at the good stuff and ended up with sticky digits. The shopkeeper, smiling, invited Iris into the back of her shop so she could wash her hands.

Thus fortified, we wandered aimlessly around Tsukiji, squinting at a map and at the displays of seaweed, knives, tea, and utensils. (The actual fish is sold in the inner market, which comes to life around 3 a.m.) We circled past the two famous sushi counters (Dai and Daiwa) and their queues of bloodshot tourists, settling on a place specializing in
kaisendon,
sashimi rice bowls. If you’re familiar with
chirashizushi,
with various types of fish scattered over a bowl of rice, kaisendon is similar. I ordered a fatty tuna bowl; Laurie ordered salmon; and Iris ordered the one cooked dish on the menu, gigantic fried shrimp (
ō-ebi
furai
). Even post-ice cream, she wasn’t ready for raw fish, but heads-and-all shrimp? No problem.

Eating at Tsukiji is more about the atmosphere than the food, although the ruby slices of fish and well-seasoned sushi rice were more than adequate. The place was as glamorous as a New York coffeeshop, with a half-assed Hawaiian decor and gruff counterman pouring bottomless cups of hot barley tea. I enjoyed watching Laurie power through a bowl of sashimi, one of her least-favorite foods, and then say, “Well, I ate sushi for breakfast at Tsukiji fish market. Didn’t I?” I’m not sure what character flaw makes me relish this sort of thing; analyze away. I also like watching Jews eat bacon.