Read Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo Online
Authors: Matthew Amster-Burton
In my community college Japanese
class, a few months before the trip, we were studying a vocabulary lesson that included the phrase “take a bath,”
ofuro ni hairu.
The professor, who grew up in Kyushu, grew wistful. She liked living in Seattle, she said, but could never get used to the inadequate bathtubs.
Bathing in Japan is an obsession. In the days before private bathtubs, people would bathe at the neighborhood
sentō.
These public baths consist of a bathing area separated into male and female baths by a wall inevitably decorated with a mural of Mount Fuji. In all public baths, you must scrub yourself brain-surgeon clean from head to toe at the shower stations before entering the bath to avoid the spread of cooties.
Modern indoor plumbing and prosperity have conspired to knock off the neighborhood sentō. They still exist but are few in number. We found one in Nakano whose proprietor had posted a handwritten “we’re on vacation” sign; it had the look of a failed restaurant sporting the sad delusion, “Remodeling—back soon!”
A bit of the sentō spirit survives in the home bathroom. Believe it or not, it is possible to enforce the “get clean before getting in the tub” rule at home, because Japanese bathrooms have sloping plastic floors with a drain. The idea is to take the handheld shower sprayer to yourself in front of the sink before getting in the deep tub, whose precious hot water can thereby be shared between successive family members. In practice, wow is this problematic, even setting aside the memoir-inducing indignity of being last in line for the lukewarm, cootie-laden tub. I tried prewashing once and couldn’t figure out how to avoid spraying water all over the dry towels and other toiletries.
Nowadays, people get their public bathing fix at
onsen
(natural hot springs) and communal baths attached to hotels. Our hotel in Asakusa had a pair of large wooden bathtubs on the top floor that switched genders from time to time so everyone could enjoy the views of Sensō-ji temple and the SkyTree. The water was sometimes pleasant and sometimes hot enough to boil lobsters.
We wanted a quintessential Japanese hot (but not too hot) bath experience. So one day we set out on the Shinkansen bound for Hakone. That’s actually an oversimplification. Hakone is a large resort area within the national park that contains Mount Fuji. Getting there and back is more than half the fun. The typical visitor to Hakone travels by
all
of the following modes of transport:
It’s not a weekend getaway; it’s a Bond film. On the day we went, the aerial ropeway and pirate ships were rained out. We should turn back, I said. Who wants to miss out on pirate ships?
“We’re here. Let’s check it out,” said Laurie. So we got on the Hakone Tozan line, a little red two-car train set that climbs 445 meters up a mountain along tracks lined closely on either side with blooming hydrangeas. Based on the description of the Hakone transport loop and the area’s general reputation as an easy tourist destination one hour from Tokyo, I expected Disney-level throngs and gift shops. Not on this rainy day. Like a steep hiking trail, the train tracks zigzagged up the mountain in a series of switchbacks, and at each one, the train came to a stop and the driver walked the length of the car in a formal gait on the way to the booth at the opposite end of the train so we could reverse direction. Whenever the train emerged from a hydrangea corridor, we had a view of the mountain, rimmed with fog.
At the end of the line, the town of Gōra, we ate lunch at a soba place and got on the funicular. I’d never ridden a funicular before and didn’t know exactly what it was other than a funny word. A funicular is a slow-moving tram that ascends an incline so steep that the train cars themselves must be built with supports and beams at unconventional angles. If you took a funicular car and put it on flat ground, it would look like it was leaning over.
We chugged up the hill and got off at a random stop because we noticed a billboard advertising a hotel, and nearly every hotel in Hakone has an onsen open to nonguests for a fee. Except for a woman at the front desk, this place was deserted like a horror movie hotel. I asked if we could use the bath, and she said yes, but...hmm... She pulled out a pad of paper and drew a cartoon of raindrops falling into a pool. That’s OK, we said. I didn’t ask whether the place was haunted or run by the Japanese Norman Bates, but I figure it was one or the other.
The onsen was split into male and female sides, of course, and then subdivided further into indoor and outdoor pools. The outdoor pool, a pastoral composition in concrete and natural stone, was the way to go, a hot bath on a cool day. Yes, we got rained on, which was terrific; they should charge people extra on rainy days. Nobody else was using the onsen, so we could shout back and forth across the corrugated divider. Like, “Hey, Dada, does your indoor pool have a stone bridge!” “Yeah!” “Does your outdoor pool have a big rock in the middle?” “Is your pool haunted?”
(Later, I told my friend Akira about our day in Hakone. “Did you get rained on in the onsen?” he asked. I said yes. He grinned. “I
love
that!”)
On the way back down the mountain, we stopped off at the Hakone Open-Air Museum, a sculpture garden featuring a lot of sculptures you’re not allowed to climb and one you are. That one is a massive raindrop of heavy-duty netting called the Woods of Net. Children (adults are, infuriatingly, not allowed) enter through holes in the bottom and get lost inside. Iris spent an hour exploring every cranny of the thing while singing a song that went, “Stuffing kids in a sack / Run away and don’t come back.”
We got back onto the little mountain train to find an infestation of schoolgirls, dozens of them, in matching uniforms, their heavy leather backpacks monopolizing the luggage racks. Iris could not have been happier if the train had been full of stuffed animals. She planted herself between two girls, and they started playing international hand-slapping games and talking rapidly in Japanese, English, and a hastily-invented pidgin. Twenty minutes later, it was time to say a tearful
sayōnara
with six hundred hugs. I was thinking,
Damn, there are so many of these schoolgirls; would anyone really notice if we brought just two of them home to be Iris’s big sisters?
Later I asked Iris what they had talked about on the train. “You know, what stuff we liked and didn’t like,” she replied.
“What kind of stuff?”
She shrugged. “The usual stuff. Cats. Airplanes. Snakes.”
But you don’t have to leave Tokyo to visit a perfectly good onsen. Oedo Onsen Monogatari is an onsen theme park on the island of Odaiba in Tokyo Bay. I realize I’ve said this over and over again, but if you hear about a destination in Tokyo (other than Tokyo Disney) that sounds like a tourist-clogged disaster area, give it a chance.
Monogatari is an onsen for people who don’t want to go far or don’t have a lot of onsen experience. It has plenty of English signs and a well-implemented Old Tokyo aesthetic. You sign in at the front desk and choose a
yukata
, a summery cotton kimono, to wear throughout the grounds. All of your worldly possessions and cares go into a locker, and you put on an electronic wristband to keep track of your purchases, which add up quickly. It’s like house arrest, with noodles.
Before heading to our respective baths, Laurie, Iris, and I went to the food court and got lunch. I loved this food court, not because the food was especially good (although it was seventeen times better than the average American food court) but because it was such a perfect microcosm of the Japanese dining landscape. There were three noodle stands (udon, soba, and ramen), a sushi stand, a dessert shop selling soft-serve sundaes with fruit jelly and mochi dumplings, and a Korean stand specializing in rice dishes. I went straight for the Korean place and got myself a
dolsot bibimbap,
a hot stone bowl of rice topped with beef, assorted vegetables, and Korean hot sauce. Laurie and Iris returned with ramen and gyōza, and we sat together in the main hall in our yukata.
Because Monogatari draws plenty of international tourists with no prior yukata experience, it’s a great place to see yukata wardrobe malfunctions. Inevitably, however, the offenders are more likely to be elderly Belgians than Janet Jackson. I committed a few myself. You’re supposed to wear underwear beneath your yukata in the common areas; you’re absolutely not allowed to wear anything more than a towel on your head in the sex-segregated bathing areas. If you look up Monogatari online, you will find American tourists complaining about how they didn’t realize they would have to get
totally naked
to visit this onsen. And think of the children!
After lunch we went to have our feet nibbled by hundreds of tiny fish. Then, after that—just kidding, I’ll explain. The onsen offers a skin treatment where you dip your feet into a shallow pool stocked with
Garra rufa,
also known as doctor fish, which perform primitive exfoliation by slurping dead skin off your feet with their tiny jaws. This is illegal in most U.S. states, where health authorities believe that sharing fish between customers is as sanitary as sharing unsterilized tattoo needles. I find this reasoning persuasive. Naturally, we all went and joined a random stranger at the fish pool.
I’d heard of this fish treatment before, probably from a “hey, you’ve got to see this” link passed around online, and somehow I had the idea that it involved the occasional wayward fish sidling up to your foot. Try dozens, hundreds, all gnawing simultaneously. You can feel the little bites. At first it provoked an deep-seated piranha fear which I quelled by sitting still, taking deep breaths, and telling myself I had nothing to worry about other than blood-borne diseases. After that, it proved quite relaxing, although I did give up before my allotted fifteen minutes and went back to the painful reflexology pool where you walk around barefoot on jagged rocks. My feet are still baby soft, but when I need my next treatment, I’ll post to Craigslist.
Need feet nibbled. Will pay.
Finally, bathtime. In my view, the purpose of civilization is to avoid wet socks, so I brought along an extra pair in case of locker room puddles. Just before striding naked into the men’s bath, I noticed that this was unnecessary. A vending machine sold socks, underwear, toothbrushes, and other locker room essentials. Before getting into the bath proper, I dumped a couple of buckets of hot water over my head from a fountain designed for this purpose. I wondered how many times I’d have to do this before it felt like anything other than the payoff to a slapstick routine.
Monogatari offers a variety of indoor and outdoor pools at different temperatures and with different features, like a whirlpool bath (for some reason, this one was always full of Belgians), a cooling bath, and allegedly beneficial mineral baths, including one called the silk bath where a milky white mineral diffuses softly into the water. I walked to the outdoor area, wrapped my towel around my head, and eased into a stone-lined tub. I closed my eyes, made a beatific face like a Calgon commercial, and immediately confronted the existential challenge of the onsen: to really enjoy it, you have to be surrounded by people you want to talk to or be very comfortable with your own thoughts. I was neither. I tried all the baths in impatient succession and then went and got some vanilla soft-serve with mochi dumplings and hot fudge.
Iris and Laurie, meanwhile, spent the rest of the afternoon lounging in the baths. Afterwards, Laurie deadpanned, “I think the women’s baths were probably more aesthetically pleasing than the men’s.”
“Yeah, I’d have to agree with that,” I said. The women’s baths, I am told, feature outdoor barrels of water to climb into, big enough for one person or a mother and child. That, and
dozens of naked ladies.
Pan-fried dumplings have been among
Iris’s favorite foods since she was less than one year old and I had to chop them into tiny bites so she wouldn’t choke on them. A pan-fried dumpling (
gyōza, guo tie,
potsticker, whatever you want to call it) is the most perfect food. At home I fill them with pork and bok choy, ginger and scallions, and assorted seasonings from my Asian sauce collection. My friend Molly once wrote that the inside of my fridge looks like an Asian supermarket; I took this as the highest of compliments.
Back home in Seattle, Iris and I have gone dumpling scouting in restaurants and in our grocer’s freezer case. We are not fussy. We had a fling with some Safeway brand dumplings spiked with crunchy lotus root. We often split an order of bargain-basement dumplings at this Sichuan hole in the wall in Seattle’s Chinatown, twenty dumplings for $5. Put it in a wrapper and pan-fry it, and I will eat it. Iris feels the same way: she’s a green vegetable skeptic (“Actually, I’m an all vegetable skeptic,” Iris informed me), but she’ll eat her weight in bok choy if it’s part of a dumpling.
So it is with a heavy heart that I must report that the dumplings of Tokyo are mostly lousy. I should have known, because Oishinbo devotes a whole episode to the problem, but Yamaoka is a lot pickier than I am about junk food. Here, though, he was right. Unlike cheap noodles, ice cream bars, and convenience-store curry, most gyōza in Tokyo aren’t worth eating. The filling tends to be simultaneously bland and too garlicky, and the frying is haphazard.
Any dumplings are better than none, however, and sometimes I ordered a plate of them with my noodles just because I liked having dumplings near me, but eating gyōza in Tokyo mostly provoked in me the most tiresome of food nerd platitudes:
I can make this better at home.
Believe me, I did not say this often in Tokyo. (Iris was kind enough to agree with me about the superiority of my homemade dumplings, but she isn’t down on the dumplings of Tokyo the way I am. She’s still never met a dumpling she didn’t like.)
That’s the bad news. The good news is that we found the most ridiculous dumpling experience an hour outside Tokyo and the greatest pan-fried dumplings of our lives ten minutes from our apartment.
In Oishinbo: Ramen and Gyōza, Yamaoka and the gang are on an assignment to help a lonely gyōza chef find a new recipe and true love. While investigating, they have lunch at a dumpling restaurant that boasts “100 types of gyōza” on the sign. (Incidentally, a cute thing about Japanese restaurant chains is that they often put the word “chain” in the name, like, “Gyōza Chain Hanasaki.”) They eat dumplings with fillings like garlic-miso, flaked salmon, and Chinese roast pork. Even grumpy Yamaoka had to admit the dumplings were pretty good.
Could such a place be real? Almost. On one boiling hot day, we sat down in a restaurant serving seventy-four types of gyōza, some of which made the fillings mentioned in Oishinbo sound downright normal. The restaurant, however, was not in Tokyo.
Utsunomiya is an ordinary city of half a million, an hour north of Tokyo on the Tōhoku Shinkansen line. It has no particular tourist attractions, and any foreign tourists heading that direction are probably more interested in the beautiful mountain town of Nikko. A few years ago, Utsunomiya’s city booster types, as boosters do, went looking around for something about the city to promote. Poring over official statistics, they found that Utsunomiyans eat more gyōza per capita than people of any other city in Japan. “Aha!” said the boosters. “Let it be known far and wide that we are the City of Dumplings.”
So, in the early nineties, Utsunomiya went on a gyōza-related development binge. This is not a joke at all. The city boasts a statue of Venus emerging from a gyōza wrapper, which is only
one of many
gyōza-themed statues throughout the downtown area, most of them depicting the dumpling-headed mascot of a particular chain. The dumpling madness begins in the train station, where souvenir shops sell plush stuffed gyōza, frozen gyōza, books about gyōza. A tourist poster plastered everywhere shows thirty-nine of the city’s most famous dumplings, crispy-side up. (I especially like the ones where the shaggy crispy layer extends beyond the edge of the dumpling itself, like a skirt.)
There are over two hundred gyōza restaurants in Utsunomiya. I wonder if it’s too late to convince the notoriously suggestible Seattle City Council to play catch-up and launch our own gyōza initiative: an exhibit at the Pacific Science Center with a cutaway view of the interior of the gyōza; Pike Place Market fish guys retrained to throw gyōza; and a dumpling eating contest between the two mayors. Our mayor is a big guy, but who knows? Maybe theirs is that little guy who can eat fifty-five hot dogs.
We planned an Utsunomiya gyōza crawl, but when we emerged from the train station into 92-degree weather, we abandoned the idea and just went to the place with (Iris counted) seventy-four types of gyōza, including yogurt, coffee, tea, chocolate, liver, mochi, squid-octopus, sausage, curry, and whale. You can order a whole plate of your favorite variety or a sampler platter; we ordered a sampler (no whale) with a small order of regular pork gyōza as insurance.
The dumplings didn’t come with labels, so we were left to guess at their identities. The salted fish roe and curry were easy to pick out, as was the sausage, which had a tiny hot dog inside. After polishing off the sampler, we asked for a plate of yuba gyōza, filled with the tofu skin Iris and I like to make at home. I went spelunking inside the dumplings and found that the pork filling was wrapped in yuba; the snap of fresh yuba was missing, but the dumplings were excellent.
I regret missing out on the chocolate gyōza. I don't regret missing out on the whale, yogurt, or Doritos Locos gyōza.
In one of my favorite books of food essays,
The Importance of Lunch,
John Allemang talks about the day his favorite Greek deli “improved” its baklava with a drizzle of chocolate. Allemang likes chocolate as much as the next guy, but do we have to put in on
everything?
I thought about this anecdote the first time we ordered lunch at our local soup dumpling restaurant in Nakano. The restaurant, whose name in English is something like “Granddaughter’s Shanghai Grilled Soup Dumplings,” is a tiny, efficient place which I will call GSD for short.
A soup dumpling is a little marvel of engineering. Called
xiao long bao
in Chinese,
shōronpō
in Japanese, and “soupies” by Iris, soup dumplings consist of silky dough wrapped around a minced pork or crab filling. The filling is mixed with chilled gelatinous broth which turns back into soup when the dumplings are steamed. Eating a soup dumpling requires practice. Pop the whole thing in your mouth and fry your tongue; bite it in the wrong place and watch the soup dribble onto your lap.
The reason I thought about chocolate baklava is because GSD pan-fries its soup dumplings. A steamed soup dumpling is perfect just the way it is. Must we pan-fry
everything?
Based on the available evidence, the answer is yes. Pan-fried soup dumplings are bigger and heartier than the steamed variety and more plump with hot soup. No, that’s too understated. I’m exploding with love and soup and I have to tell the world: pan-fried soupies are
amazing.
The dumplings are served in groups of four, just enough for lunch for one adult or a growing eight-year-old. They’re topped with a sprinkle of sesame and scallion. You can mix up a dipping sauce from the dispensers of soy sauce, black vinegar, and chile oil at the table, but I found it unnecessary. Like a slice of pizza, a pan-fried soup dumpling is a complete experience wrapped in dough. Lift a dumpling with your spoon, poke it with a chopstick, press your lips to the puncture wound, and slurp out the soup. (This will come in handy if I’m ever bitten by a soup snake.) No matter how much you extract, there always seems to be a little more broth pooling within as you eat your way through the meaty filling and crispy underside. Then you get to start again, until, too soon, your dumplings are gone.
We never saw anyone working at GSD other than the two women who run the place. At any given time, one is filling the dumplings and the other is minding the purpose-built cast iron griddles. Each griddle’s slightly convex top looks like the cooking apparatus at a Mongolian grill restaurant but is recessed into a cylinder and topped with a wooden lid for steaming.
Other customers often ordered a set lunch with dumplings and the rice porridge called congee (
okayu
in Japanese), but we spotted
kyūri
on the giant picture menu on the wall on our first visit, and that became our regular side. One of the proprietors smashed the cucumber to pieces with the dull edge of a cleaver and seasoned it with salt and raw garlic. Later I found a similar recipe in a Fuchsia Dunlop cookbook; she calls it “smacked cucumber,” which is exactly it: smacked to order.
Probably I’m harping on this point, but if GSD were transplanted to Seattle, it would land instantly on everybody’s ten-best list. In Tokyo, it is merely a neighborhood dumpling restaurant that earns average marks on the online review sites.