Read Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo Online
Authors: Matthew Amster-Burton
Warning:
This is more addictive than any YouTube channel.
Additional warning:
These sites are in Japanese, but like other websites you may be familiar with, if you can’t read the language, you’ll have plenty of fun clicking around and looking at the pictures.
Just east of the green
banner marking the entrance to Pretty Good #1 Alley in Nakano, an old man drives a spike into the head of an eel every morning at 9 a.m. He then inserts the tip of his specialized eel knife behind the collarbone and, with the musical rattle of metal on bone, butterflies the fish and removes its backbone.
This is his first eel of the day. He cuts the fillet into four-inch strips and threads them onto skewers. Once the prep is done, he fires up the grill with
binchotan
, an expensive type of clean-burning hardwood charcoal. In Tokyo, “fanning the flames” isn’t just an expression. It’s an actual cooking method, and you can walk past the eel stand any time of the afternoon and get hit with a blast of heat and the aroma of charcoal-grilled eel.
Summer is the time to eat eel in Japan. Even Yoshinoya, the beef-bowl chain, offers an eel bowl special, which sounds as promising as a McDonald’s sea urchin special. On the Day of the Ox, in late July or early August, people all over Japan line up to eat eel. If you eat eel on this sweltering day, it is said, you will be fortified with the stamina to survive the rest of the disgusting Japanese summer. Why eel and not, say, ox? I bet it’s a penis thing.
Eel, at least the freshwater eel called unagi
,
was not having a great summer when we were there. True, any summer in which someone drives a spike into your head is pretty lousy, but unagi has been on the Seafood Watch red list for years, and in 2012 prices skyrocketed, indicating dwindling supply. This is bad. Eels have a complex lifecycle that makes them vulnerable to overfishing. Also, they are kind of dumb and easy to scoop out of rivers in mass quantities. Worse yet, they’re ugly; it’s harder to drum up sympathy for a slimy, snakelike fish than for a majestic whale. Finally, when prepared well, eels are among the most delicious of all fish. They offer the earthiness of catfish; a firm but yielding texture; slippery, edible skin; and the delightful crunch of tiny pin bones. It is hard to make eel sound tasty to someone who hasn’t tried it, but isn’t the same true of oysters, beef tongue, or plenty of smelly and gooey tropical fruits?
So why did I eat it? It was there, it was delicious, and everyone else was eating it. Do I care about sustainability issues? Yes. Did I care enough that I was able to resist the temptation to eat this delicious, endangered fish? No.
Iris and I went to the eel restaurant in early July, just the two of us. We ordered the only thing on the menu,
unaju,
barbecued eel fillet on rice in a lacquer box. There was a young guy working alongside the old man, and he wanted to make sure we understood that each serving was 1800 yen, or about $23. (See? Expensive.) The old man waved his hand at this and said something like, “Let them order their food in peace.” He reheated two skewers of eel fillets over the fire, brushed them with sauce, and then removed the bamboo skewers by twisting each one smartly before sliding it out. The younger guy placed the eel meat atop our rice and then pulled out the world’s coolest cooking utensil. My jaw literally dropped. I looked over at Iris. Her mouth was hanging open, too. The world’s coolest cooking utensil is a sauce ladle. The cup at the end of the handle is a cube with three thin spouts emerging from the side, better to dispense sauce thinly over a wide area. It’s a tiny watering can for sauce—in this case, sweet eel sauce, made from eel bone broth enriched with soy sauce, sugar, and mirin.
Iris and I finished every bite of our eel and rice, paid our $46, and then ran home to tell Laurie about the amazing sauce ladle. Later, I found the ladle for sale at the big DIY store Tokyu Hands (suggested motto: “Get Handsy!”), earning several minutes of hero worship from Iris.
In the days leading up to the Day of the Ox, our local eel place posted a sign inviting people to preorder their eel or, presumably, risk spending the remainder of the summer in a lugubrious pallor. I thought about preordering but decided it would overtax my fragile language abilities, so instead I just sent a cute kid to go buy our eel on the day itself.
Iris headed down the street, her takoyaki coin purse swinging around her neck. She was gone for a long time. Finally, she returned with a beautifully wrapped package. “I made some new friends at the eel place,” she reported. Apparently, eight-year-old American girls don’t come in to buy eel every day. The package contained two eel skewers and two tiny red-capped bottles of eel sauce. I heated the fillets in the toaster oven. Removing the skewers was not nearly as easy as the eel guy had made it look, but eventually I gave it the right dose of elbow grease and placed the eel over rice. Iris poured the sauce into the world’s coolest cooking utensil and sauced our
unadon,
which is what you call eel on rice when it’s not served in a fancy box. It was the perfect lunch, and I can report conclusively that my stamina never flagged for the rest of the summer, except on days of muggy, 88-degree heat—that is, every day.
After the Day of the Ox, every time we walked past the eel place, anyone working there waved and shouted, “Iris!” I realize this is the kind of hey-look-at-us story that sends real travel writers into a lugubrious pallor, but come on, it was great.
In Oishinbo: Izakaya Pub Food, an American reporter wants to impress his boss with his knowledge of Japanese cuisine, so Yamaoka and Kurita take the visiting foreigners to a skewer restaurant in Nakano.
“You must make great yakitori,” says the American boss.
The chef looks stricken. “We don’t do yakitori,” he replies, indicating an anatomical wall chart of the Japanese eel,
Anguilla japonica.
The chef then grills up ten different skewers of eel, including the spine, the liver, the fin, and the guts. (How you get fish guts to stay on a skewer, I do not know.)
Before the trip, I went onto Flickr to look at pictures of Nakano, and I recognized a frame from this Oishinbo book stuck on the window of a building.
That’s odd,
I thought.
Maybe they sell manga. Or maybe some Oishinbo fan went crazy with wheat paste and started posting bills.
It took far too long for me to come to the following realizations:
This prompted two questions:
I found the answers on Tabelog.com, Japan’s answer to Yelp: yes and (fist pump) yes! The restaurant is called Kawajirō, and it’s a seven-minute walk from our apartment, in a tiny Mediterranean-style public square just east of the entrance to Nakano Broadway mall.
Kawajirō is a tiny restaurant, one of the most popular places in Nakano, and the most highly rated on Tabelog. It’s the only restaurant in Nakano where we ever saw people line up. The first time we tried to go there, we failed. We showed up around 6 p.m. and got in line. By 7:30, the line hadn’t moved at all, and so we left and got tempura instead.
Between 6:00 and 7:30, however…
There is a soba noodle shop whose kitchen opens onto the same courtyard as the front door of Kawajirō. The soba chef, tall, bald, and wrinkled, glowered in the doorway, staring at the line of people waiting to get into his rival. His stare was so intense, it was like he was just trying to make us burst into flames. I never saw anybody go into the soba place.
Meanwhile, an old man rode up on a bicycle. People in Tokyo use their bicycles to lug all sorts of parcels: multiple children, groceries, home improvement supplies, and so on. This guy had something on the back of his bike covered by a large sheet of burlap. A saw hung precariously off the side of the bike. The man hopped off his bike and pulled aside the burlap to reveal a large chunk of ice. He sawed off a large brick and carried it into another restaurant, then returned, secured his load, and rode off. In retrospect, I can’t believe we didn’t go to
that
restaurant. If Portland hipsters aren’t making artisan ice deliveries yet, what is wrong with them?
The following night, we lined up thirty minutes before Kawajirō opened. The soba chef was there again, doing his thing. Possibly he died years ago, penniless, and his angry ghost shows up every night looking for revenge.
Finally, we stepped through the bead curtain for the first seating at the bar. (The place is all bar except for one table crammed into the back, and what seemed to be a private upstairs room.) I was nervous about how to order, since I have no idea what the parts of the eel are called in Japanese, but everyone was ordering the set menu, with six assorted skewers, and we did the same. The extremely handsome chef stood at the front of the restaurant tending the grill. He wore a summery but tailored blue button-down and seemed impossible to ruffle, like President Obama. Whenever he needed to salt the food, he held a fistful of loaded-up skewers over the floor and scattered them with sea salt, and as he finished each batch of skewers, he dipped them in sauce and dealt them out to diners like cards.
We ate spiral-wrapped eel meat. We ate guts. We ate liver, which is somehow different from guts. We (mostly Iris) ate two bowls of crispy fried eel backbones. We ate eel meat wrapped around burdock root and eel fin wrapped around garlic chives. We ate smoked eel that tasted like Jewish deli food. I ate better than anyone, because I was the only member of the family willing to try the offal. All of it was precisely like Oishinbo, down to the eel anatomy chart on the wall. It was like stepping into a book,
Neverending Story
–style, and isn’t a Luck Dragon just a big furry eel?
At the end of the meal, we handed over some cash, and the woman behind the counter pulled down a DuckTales cookie can and fished around in it for our change.
Later that night, as we were falling asleep...
Iris:
Those were some good eel bones.
Me:
You said it.
Iris:
That was a funny “cash register.”
Me:
You’re doing air quotes again, aren’t you?
When you go to Asakusa you feel that you have shaken off tomorrow’s work.
—Saitō Ryokū
Asakusa has always been one
of the easiest Tokyo neighborhoods to love and one that has fascinated Western tourists. Edward Seidensticker’s idiosyncratic (that is, cranky) history,
Tokyo from Edo to Shōwa,
is essentially a five hundred–page lament about how Asakusa isn’t what it used to be before the fire of 1923.
Don’t believe a word of it. Asakusa’s striking Kaminarimon (“thunder”) Gate still deserves to be the gateway to Tokyo for any visitor. You can wander the streets south of Sensō-ji temple for hours, darting in and out of the gaudy tourist arcade called Nakamise-dōri, get delightfully lost, load up on souvenirs, and stop off for conveyor belt sushi or tempura (an Asakusa specialty) or an izakaya meal whenever you like.
Asakusa is in the old part of Tokyo, the low city (
shitamachi
), and it’s full of faithfully reconstructed historical buildings—reconstructed because Asakusa was destroyed in both 1923 and 1945. Iris loves the place, especially the crowded Nakamise, where she loads up on freshly made rice crackers (
osembei
) and all sorts of unspeakable trinkets: stuffed animals, keychains, stuffed animal keychains. “Asakusa is kind to foreigners...and especially to foreign children,” writes Seidensticker. Iris could have told you that.
Not to be outdone in the cuteness department, I bought a purple sleeve for my
PASMO
transit card. Running perpendicular to Nakamise is a covered shopping arcade called Shin Nakamise-dōri (“New Nakamise”), lined with restaurants and more interesting shops. It’s also fun to walk just behind the Nakamise stalls, parallel to the chaos but infinitely quieter, and find the knife shops and stationery stores, the wagashi sweet shops and quirky restaurants like the one specializing in
kamameshi,
steamed rice with flavorings in a little iron pot, a bit like Korean bibimbap.
Walk around Asakusa in the early morning, and you’ll see the city yawning and waking up. Few shops, even bakeries and cafes, open in Tokyo before 10 a.m. Visiting insomniacs end up at the Starbucks on Kaminarimon-dōri, which opens at 7 and serves the
hōjicha
latte, a low-caffeine but still addictive beverage of smoky roasted tea and steamed milk.
One day I walked down the covered arcade and stopped into a spice shop called Yagembori, which has specialized in shichimi tōgarashi since 1625. The man behind the counter, a stocky young guy with a mustache, hadn’t been working there quite that long.
Shichimi tōgarashi is a blend of seven spices, with ground red chile always prominent. What makes it different from any old chile powder are the other six players: nori flakes, something tangy like dried lemon peel, Sichuan peppercorns (called
sanshō
in Japanese), sesame, hemp seed, and so on. You can buy a little red jar of shichimi tōgarashi at any Japanese grocery, and it will cost a couple of bucks and improve any noodle dish, soup, or beef bowl.
At Yagembori, however, every employee is a professional spice blender. If you have the linguistic chops, you can tell them to throw in a little more sesame or whatever your pleasure. If, like me, you lack the chops, you can just say “spicy.” In any case, the counter man scoops individual spices from seven trays into a wooden bowl, stirs it vigorously, and holds it under your nose. You, the customer, swoon. A freshly-mixed packet of Yagembori spice blend is 500 yen, less than a jar of McCormick cinnamon.
At home in Nakano, Iris, who recoils at all things spicy, kept daintily sprinkling shichimi tōgarashi on her rice and eating it two grains at a time. She made me tell and retell the story of how I bought the spice mixture from a grinning shopkeeper who mixed up custom spice blends on the spot. Like so many diners these days, she likes her food to come with a story.
Tokyo has a gaudy replica of the Eiffel Tower called Tokyo Tower. Constructed in 1958, Tokyo Tower is red and white and looks less like a beloved landmark and more like one of those TV towers you don’t want too near your house lest it interfere with your reception. (We didn’t have cable when I was growing up, and I’m still bitter.)
Japan has always appropriated its favorite foreign symbols and structures. There are Statue of Liberty replicas all over the country, and one of the most popular attractions for domestic tourists is a faithfully recreated Dutch village called Huis Ten Bosch.
For its latest architectural insanity, however, Tokyo has built something homegrown, ambitious, and mostly just plain huge. The Tokyo SkyTree looks nothing like the Eiffel Tower; it looks like the place a comic book supervillain would mount his death ray. At 634 meters, it’s the world’s second-tallest freestanding structure after (naturally) a building in Dubai.
When Iris and I stayed in Asakusa in 2010, there was no SkyTree. More to the point, there was no SkyTree merchandise. The shopping arcade of Nakamise-dōri has always been Tokyo’s gateway to kitschy merchandise, but now it’s all SkyTree water bottles, SkyTree cell phone charms, SkyTree hand towels, SkyTree milk caramels. I would bet a hundred dollars you can buy a SkyTree dildo.
One morning I set out into Asakusa at 6 a.m. It was a Saturday, and the streets were empty except for old men strolling and beautiful women bicycling. I wandered along Dembo-in street, just south of the Sensō-ji temple complex, and came to a narrow lane lavishly decorated with streamers in all colors—actually, just the most saturated ones. I couldn’t figure out what they were celebrating until I turned around and saw the SkyTree, visible all the way to its base, framed by the cavalcade of corkscrews.
Of course I snapped a picture. But it’s hard to find a place to stand in this neighborhood where you
can’t
see the SkyTree. It is so out of scale, its design so space-age, that it looks fake, like a plastic model from a 100-yen store.
Usually such a soaring monument is considered an out-of-character pimple for a few years before gaining grudging acceptance and later adulation from people who tell you they loved it all along. When the Eiffel Tower was under construction, Parisian notables considered it a ruinous eyesore. In Seattle, we have a Frank Gehry-designed museum called the Experience Music Project, which looks like brightly colored oatmeal dropped from a height. It’s not well-liked, but give it time. As Stewart Brand says in his book
How Buildings Learn,
there are no unloved 100-year-old buildings.
The SkyTree, however, skipped right over its gawky adolescence: locals love it. For two months after it opened in May 2012, tickets were available only by advance purchase to people with Japanese-issued bank cards. It sold out every day. When I talked to people about the SkyTree, they smiled. There was none of the reflexive Japanese “oh, that thing” modesty. The SkyTree stands for the proposition that Japan can still build cool stuff.
I love the SkyTree, too. For something so big, it’s playful, almost cuddly, and the builders found a great place to stick it. Er, that didn’t sound right. What I mean is: when you come into the city from Narita Airport, you
will
get an eyeful of SkyTree. “Welcome to Tokyo,” it says. “Here’s something you certainly won’t see anywhere else.”
In mid-July, the SkyTree started selling same-day tickets to anyone with 2000 yen to spare. Iris and I rode over to SkyTree station on the newly rechristened Tōbu SkyTree line (formerly the Isesaki line). It was a cloudy day—zero chance of a Fuji sighting—and there was no line. The elevator whisked us up 350 meters in seconds. The walls of the SkyTree elevator are opaque and inlaid with brightly colored LED designs. As an acrophobia sufferer, I support this design decision. When we got out on the Tembo Deck, I let Iris wander around while I stayed back from the windows and breathed deeply. Eventually, I was able to peer westward at the view of Asakusa, of Ueno Park, Nakano, and, lurking invisibly behind a wall of suspended water vapor as thick as pudding, Mount Fuji.
I was ready to head home for some comforting udon after ten seconds. However, once you’re up on the Tembo Deck, you can drop (maybe “drop” is the wrong word) an additional 1000 yen to go 100 meters higher, to the Tembo Galleria.
If you’re going to do this thing, go all the way,
it taunts. Iris talked me into it. This one is a glass elevator, with views through the floor and ceiling. I looked up into the elevator shaft and thought about
Die Hard.
On Tembo Galleria deck, you emerge at 445 meters and walk the last 5 meters on a sloping pathway curled around the circumference of the structure. You can see this observation deck from the ground, and it looks like a raised eyebrow. It’s the SkyTree’s most endearing feature; no fascist would construct anything so quirky.
This is exactly what a cranky acrophobe would say, but you don’t have to go up the SkyTree to enjoy it. Tokyo is more impressive from the ground than from the air.
Sometimes it’s especially impressive below-ground,
I thought, as Iris and I finally caught the train to Nakano and stepped into our favorite basement udon restaurant for steaming bowls of noodles.
Walk fifteen minutes west of Kaminarimon Gate, and you’ll see a giant chef’s head growing out of a building. This marks the entrance to Kappabashi-dōri, the restaurant supply district.
Kappabashi is written up in most guidebooks as the place to buy the plastic food you see in restaurant windows. This is true, and it’s also true that plastic food costs a lot more than real food, which seems only fair, since it’s rather more durable. A plate of plastic noodles, for example, costs about $60; a plate of real noodles is more like $6.
But Kappabashi is much more than plastic food. Anything cool you’ve seen in or around a Tokyo restaurant is for sale here, and you’ll recognize tableware, utensils, and more from your meals out. One shop specializes in noren, the curtains flapping in front of restaurant doorways. In summer, many shops sell everything you need to set up your own kakigōri stand: the ice-shaving machine, the syrups and their dispenser, the flower-shaped plastic cups, and the light blue kakigōri advertising banner, emblazoned with the kanji for ice:
氷
. A store selling plastic sushi also sold a $200 wall clock with twelve pieces of nigiri sushi instead of numerals.
We even found a shop selling ramen ticket machines. You use the ticket machine in front of the store to select which ticket machine you want to buy. Just kidding.
Most Kappabashi business is wholesale, but retail customers are welcome at every store we visited. My friend Neil is a pastry chef, and he asked us to look for heavy-duty molds for baking
canelé,
an obscure French pastry. They were easy to find and inexpensive, and Neil marveled at the quality. I spent a long time in a store selling Korean tableware, including a huge selection of stone bowls for making dolsot bibimbap
,
rice with assorted toppings served in a deadly hot stone bowl that crisps the bottom of the rice.
Probably our favorite shop on Kappabashi, however, was Hashito, which sells only chopsticks, from giant sacks of disposable
waribashi
at pennies per unit to handmade artisan pairs for $200 and up.
Before our first trip to Japan, I tried and failed to teach Iris to use chopsticks. We watched YouTube videos and bought snazzy Korean teaching chopsticks with finger loops and rests. No dice; Iris made it through with forks and fingers and the confidence that meant, as a cute American kid, she could get away with the most savage displays of sloppy eating.
Before our month in Tokyo, I gave Iris a pair of kid-sized chopsticks (no loops or training wheels) and a bowl of star anise (easy to pick up) and told her she had to practice for at least five minutes every day before playing video games. There was plenty of grumbling, and it worked. Iris arrived in Tokyo a fluent chopstick user. In a couple of years, I’m going to teach her to drive by turning her loose on
Grand Theft Auto.
In Oishinbo: Japanese Cuisine, a teenage girl who has traveled abroad decides that chopsticks are barbaric and that silverware equals civilization. Yamaoka and Kurita take her to visit an artisan who demonstrates the arduous process of making handmade cedar chopsticks. The scene is classically paced (“And now they’re done, right?” “Ha ha, not quite yet,” ten times), and the girl predictably flings her knife and fork aside by the end. The most expensive chopsticks at Hashito, like high-quality Japanese products in general, are like the ones in Oishinbo: plain and humble, not heavily ornamented. Japanese knives are like this, too; you can certainly buy flashy Damascus steel knives with quilted cocobolo wood handles, but real cooks spend just as much or more on knives that look perfectly ordinary but feel extraordinary.
Iris, who is not known for the subtlety of her aesthetic, bought a pair of chopsticks capped with semiprecious stones. I didn’t buy any fancy chopsticks, because I remembered the following scene in Oishinbo, in which Yamaoka and the gang break in their new artisan sticks at a rustic meal. As they finish up, the villain Kaibara Yūzan, who is somehow always invited to these things, demands to see everybody’s chopsticks and berates them for eating like cavemen, specifically, letting a whole inch of their chopsticks become food-stained, rather than just the very tips. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.
We were not the first Western tourists to fall in love with Asakusa. A couple from the U.S. spent the summer in Tokyo in 1879. Their names were Ulysses and Julia Grant. The former first couple traveled around Japan but were especially taken with Tokyo and in particular with the low city area around the Sumida River, which runs alongside Asakusa.
In late July, the Grants joined the rest of the city in celebrating the “opening of the Sumida.” Like many festivals in Japan, this one involves setting off a shitload of fireworks and stuffing your face with street food, which is usually rare in Tokyo but proliferates wherever people celebrate outdoors. Seidensticker reports:
The general viewed it in comfort from an aristocratic villa, it being a day when there were still such villas on the river.... Fireworks and crowds got rained upon. All manner of pyrotechnical glories were arranged in red, white, and blue. The general indicated great admiration.... On the whole, the city seems to have loved the general and the general the city.