Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (17 page)

This celebration survives very much intact, even though it was canceled for about six decades of the twentieth century due to natural disaster, war, and a Sumida fouled with raw sewage. I guess nobody wants to crowd around a river that smells like poop, no matter how many cans of Sapporo you bring with you.

On the last Saturday in July, the Amster-Burtons made like the Grants and headed over to Asakusa to stake out our spot in Sumida River Park to watch the fireworks. We joined over a million other Tokyoites, mostly twentysomethings relaxing on blue tarps with their friends, drinking beer or canned chuhai, and eating street food. To blend in with the locals (not really), Laurie went to the 100-yen store to buy our blue tarp, which was identified on the packaging as a leisure sheet. “Have sex on a leisure sheet” is totally going on my bucket list, albeit purely because of the linguistic connotation, not because of any beneficial feature of the leisure sheet, an extremely thin $1 sheet of plastic. Just call me Leisure Sheet Larry.

Before heading to Asakusa, we bought picnic food at our local 7-Eleven: assorted rice balls, a couple of menchikatsu patties (seasoned ground beef, breaded and fried), crudités, fresh pineapple, and a bag of chocolate cookies. After we spread out our leisure sheet, I bought a giant kakigōri, the shave ice saturated with lemon, melon, cherry, and other lurid fruit syrups, and we settled in to watch the fashion parade.

Forget Harajuku girls. The Sumida fireworks festival offers the most drool-worthy people watching anywhere. Women, and a few men, put on their best summer yukata and parade up and down the banks of the river, and we saw literally thousands of colorful yukata on thousands of beautiful women. Vendors sold
yakisoba
(stir-fried noodles with meat and vegetables), fried chicken, hot dogs on sticks, and okonomiyaki pancakes, and of course you can’t pass a summer evening in Tokyo without a kyūri, a Japanese cucumber; at festivals they’re briefly marinated with soy sauce and kombu, speared on a chopstick, and kept fresh in lightly salted ice water. To paraphrase George Carlin, if you are a straight man and can watch a woman in a yukata eat a cucumber on a stick without thinking about blow jobs, check your vitals.

I went to the vending machine for water, and when I came back, Iris was gone. “She’s over there,” said Laurie, rolling her eyes. Iris was, indeed, across the path, on the lap of Naoko, who somehow became Iris’s BFF in the space of five minutes. Naoko’s yukata was purple and white striped with pink flowers, and she shared her leisure sheet with Takashi, Yūko, and Hanata, all of whom wore stylish civilian garb. I joined them for a while, and we talked about our favorite foods in halting Japanglish, and I drove Iris nuts in classic Dad fashion by asking her questions in Japanese. “Dada, WHY do you keep talking to me in Japanese?” she wailed. I wasn’t doing it on purpose, I told her; my brain kept jumping tracks. After I left, reported Iris, they went back to talking about sumo and ninjas and snapping cell phone pictures of each other and giggling.

We didn’t get Iris back until after the pyrotechnics were over. Naoko and Hanata took turns hoisting her onto their shoulders for a better view and sometimes carried her off to another section of the park for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Yes, we let tipsy strangers disappear with our daughter into a crowd of a million people.
That
is Tokyo.

The fireworks, you may have gathered, are a bit beside the point. The show is billed as the most retina-scarring over-the-top fireworks extravaganza imaginable. Two barges operated by different companies drop anchor on adjacent stretches of the Sumida and try to outdo each other in size, volume, and style; the actual show lasts over an hour. “Don’t miss the finale,” people kept telling us. Well, we couldn’t see much through the trees, and what we could see, other than the occasional Pokemon-shaped blast, looked a lot like American fireworks, albeit over a longer duration. The SkyTree, illuminated across the river, was more impressive. Of course, I would go back anytime, perhaps after my second term as president.

Places make the best lovers.

—Peter Rees, London city planner, quoted in
Craig Taylor’s
Londoners

Imagine, for a moment, the
life of a happy baby. Mundane details are anything but mundane; every experience is surprising and mostly delightful. You don’t understand how anything works, and you’re constantly trying to decipher the processes, customs, and language that govern your existence. This is frustrating and exhilarating, and every small accomplishment produces a rush of pride and an involuntary smile and giggle.

People around you do their best to make sure you’re well fed, and every food is delicious and novel. You may feel temporary pain, discomfort, or fear, but you don’t yet understand
worry.
You’re wrapped in blankets literal and figurative. The world is not only safe, but also tailored for your arrival.

This was my world during our Tokyo summer. Like Tokyo Swayze teaching me to cook okonomiyaki, the entire city was my understanding parent. And then, like real babyhood, it was over too fast. We arrived back in Seattle at 9:30 on a Tuesday morning. Both Laurie and Iris had Aoba Ramen broth stains on their shirts.

Iris has a friend in Seattle, Michael, who lives down the block. He’s a smart, introverted kid who likes to start every sentence with “excuse me” and is as adept at dissecting and parrying adult arguments as I was at his age. Whenever he and Iris get together to play, I try to break up the fun before the inevitable dispute over the precise rules of Lego monsters vs. Lego bodybuilders. I always say something stupid like, “Let’s end the play date while it’s still fun.” You can imagine how persuasive this is to two eight-year-olds. They usually respond with something like, “Just ten more hours!”

Now I know exactly how Iris feels, because Tokyo and I ended the play date while it was still fun.

On our first day back, I walked along the left side of the sidewalk, Tokyo-style, and kept bumping into people and murmuring “sumimasen.” Iris looked around our apartment and said, “This feels like a hotel.” Then she revealed that she’d memorized the long Chūō Rapid announcement, in Japanese, that plays as the train approaches Shinjuku: “The next station is Shinjuku. Transfer here for the Yamanote Line, the Saikyō Line, the Shōnan-Shinjuku Line, the Odakyu Line…” She can also do a pitch-perfect impression of the British-accented Shinkansen announcements. We hung Iris’s kakigōri banner on our balcony, but it failed to summon an orderly queue of parched tourists.

My sister-in-law Wendy is a gifted book critic. She loves reading about travel and has been known to call a book onto the carpet for “unacknowledged privilege,” where the author seems blissfully unaware that they are getting away with something. Stories starring a white guy in Asia are, I suspect, especially susceptible to this syndrome. I hope it’s clear that this book is written from a position of acknowledged privilege. For my family, spending a month in Tokyo did not require major sacrifice (well, I did learn a
lot
of kanji), never put us in a dangerous situation, and was basically a way to turn a lot of money into a whole lot of fun and noodles.

When I think about going back to Tokyo, I’m torn. On the one hand, I have a list of restaurants we didn’t make it to, and I’m eager to try the fall and winter specials at Hanamaru Udon (beef and burdock! salt-grilled pork and negi!). For that matter, I’d love to spend a good long time in Tokyo during a season that doesn’t give me weird heat rashes. (My least favorite place to go in Tokyo was the drugstore: nearly every time I went there, it was to ask where they kept something embarrassing.) Iris would like to catch up with Zen so they can fire more make-believe weapons at each other, and I’d like to get to know Akira and Emi better and try out some of the slang I’m learning from Japanese-language Oishinbo, which presumably makes me sound like an office worker from the nineties. Also, did I mention crispy soup dumplings?

Before we visited Tokyo, Laurie was a Japanese food skeptic. She didn’t eat sushi. She was tofuphobic. One day near the end of our trip, she said, “I can’t remember why I ever thought I didn’t like Japanese food.” Now she is a Japanese food snob, observing that Japanese food in Seattle can’t compare to what you can get in Tokyo.

I could go back to Tokyo, but not as a baby. I’d have to grow up and form an adult relationship with the city. Vacation Head is an acute disease. It can last a month, but not forever. Every couple happily married after many years will tell you the same story: it’s even better now than it was at the beginning, but it took a hell of a lot of work to get here. Forging the same kind of relationship with Tokyo that I have with Laurie seems impossible (for one thing, where would I get a wedding ring big enough to put around the SkyTree?). The alternatives—keeping it casual with the occasional visit or just letting our Tokyo summer amber over into memory—are unsatisfying.

This kind of handwringing is going to earn me a seal of unacknowledged privilege, because I realize that anyone who is in a position to even think about these questions should pat himself on the back and go do something nice for someone else. So let’s wrap this up.

The difference between having a relationship with a city and one with a person is that cities are unfailingly polyamorous. Given the means, you can be a Tokyo baby, and I believe you’ll love it as much as we did, even if you defy Iris and never set foot in Nakano.

But seriously, you do
not
need to try pachinko.

Adapted from the Japanese language edition of
Pretty Good Number One
(X-Knowledge, May 2014). For an illustrated version of this afterword, visit
bit.ly/pgnoafter
.

There were those moments riding the subway, when I looked up to see all those faces, the young Japanese schoolboys and girls in their blue uniforms, the women carrying bags from Seibu, the men in their suits holding up the
Asahi Shimbun
, the still mysterious characters running up and down the pages; moments when I thought I might actually become part of that country, when I felt at home in ways I have never felt in America.

—David Mura,
Turning Japanese

Americans often ask me whether it’s safe to travel to Japan. I know what they’re afraid of, and I assure them that Japan remains one of the safest countries in the world, and they should take the whole family. But I know that Japan isn’t entirely safe. A traveler could freeze to death indoors, catch a virus, or eat the world’s worst doughnut.

One morning at Mister Donut, Laurie bought a Pon de Ring doughnut with a mysterious fluffy white filling. “It tastes like baked potato,” she said. “I think this is salt on the doughnut, not sugar.”

I looked at the tag. Sure enough, it was a buttered potato doughnut, part of a promotion highlighting regional Japanese flavors. In Tokyo, the other doughnuts in the series included
Koshihikari
(fermented rice paste) and
zundamochi
(sweet edamame paste), both of which were pretty good.

Then there was the Pon de Monja.

Monjayaki is a savory pancake. There’s nothing wrong with a savory pancake, but it should never meet up with a doughnut, any more than a cupcake should be frosted with pesto. The Pon de Monja is dusted with shrimp powder and filled with a fishy jelly studded with cabbage and corn kernels. It looks like the contents of a diaper and tastes like a marathon runner’s shoe. Remember my unpleasant encounter with junsai at Ukai Tofu-ya? I would dive into a pond and slurp it clean of junsai before touching another Pon de Monja.

At the end of 2013, we went back to Tokyo, to the same tiny Nakano apartment. Instead of dark and sweltering, the kitchen was now dark and freezing, which was even worse. It was literally colder in the kitchen than outside the apartment. Are you familiar with the Finnish custom of plunging into an ice-cold pool after a sauna? It was like that every morning. We didn’t even have one of those delightful heated toilet seats, which resulted in a condition I’m surely not the first to call frostbutt.

This was my first time in Japan since the summer of 2012, and I was struggling through my Japanese adolescence, which did not involve schoolgirl uniforms. I’d come to Japan ahead of Laurie and Iris to do research for my next book. I planned to spend a few days in Fukuoka, on the southern island of Kyushu, and then move on to the tundra of Hokkaido and fortify myself with miso ramen. I can’t even imagine how cold a Sapporo apartment is in winter, and I never found out, because shortly after arriving in Fukuoka, I caught a stomach virus and was knocked out for more than a week. Dehydrated and feverish, I went to the emergency room, which was dark and depressing and full of crying babies. The doctor said I had a virus and prescribed unnecessary antibiotics. Just like in America!

When my Shinkansen glided into Tokyo Station after the five-hour ride from Fukuoka, I dragged myself to the Chūō Rapid platform and tumbled into a seat. I was still exhausted and gaunt. Soon, the familiar recorded announcement came on:
“Mamonaku Shinjuku...Yamanote-sen, Saikyō-sen, Shōnan-Shinjuku-line, Odakyu-sen, Keiō-sen...”
I was so glad to be home, I smiled like The Joker. People must have thought I was on something harder than tetracycline.

Iris was out shopping at Life Supermarket when I arrived in Nakano. She came in and said,
“Tadaima.
DADA!” and flung herself at me with such enthusiasm, she almost forgot to take off her shoes.

My appetite didn’t recover for several more days. Iris was especially concerned when I said I was more interested in visiting an onsen than eating anything. I walked through Nakano, past fragrant grilled meat restaurants and ramen shops. I haunted the aisles of Life, incorporeal, a Hogwarts ghost at the holiday banquet.

We spent a day in Yokohama with our friend Shiori, wandering around Chinatown. Iris ate a giant nikuman and a
“UFO-age,”
a fried shrimp and vegetable dumpling shaped like a flying saucer—or a sombrero. Nikuman, the Chinese-style steamed pork buns, are hugely popular in Japan in the winter, available at every convenience store. They’re a snack and a handwarmer. Young people walking around eating steaming nikuman is one of the stereotypical images of Japan in the winter. Really. Rarely is a cliche more satisfying to inhabit.

Shiori took us to an amusement park where Iris screamed her way through a roller coaster and a log flume ride. It was getting late for dinner, and we chose a tonkatsu place near the train station. I ordered a set meal with a small pork cutlet, and I made my way around the tray, tasting the pork, pickles, rice, cabbage, and soup. I ground black sesame seeds in a tiny mortar and pestle and stirred in tonkatsu sauce. I ate until everything was gone, and then I scavenged Iris’s cabbage and pickles. I was back!

After that, I made a concerted effort to regain the weight I’d lost while sick. This was as challenging as getting drunk at Oktoberfest. Iris’s birthday is December 30, and she planned an ambitious day of eating: breakfast at Mister Donut (chocolate ring, not Pon de Monja), soup dumplings for lunch, a birthday tart from Aigre-Douce. And for dinner, Iris’s new obsession: Kurazushi.

Robots make sushi

Step across the threshold of Kurazushi and enter a hyperkinetic, computerized future ruled by children. It’s a delightful arcade game of a restaurant, lunch meets Tron. And to Japanese families, it’s completely ordinary. I will tell you about Kurazushi in detail, and you won’t believe me. That’s fine. I’m not sure if I believe me, either.

Kurazushi (along with its nearly identical competitors Sushirō and Kappazushi) is a conveyor belt sushi chain. As at any kaitenzushi restaurant, plates go by on a conveyor belt. Everybody ignores them, however, in favor of the iPad mounted at each seat.

The iPad runs an app that turns it into a touchscreen menu. You browse through the categories of food (fish, shellfish, specials, tempura, desserts) and tap the photo of the item you’d like to order. There are well over a hundred options.

A minute or two later, your screen dings and displays a notification, and the sushi you ordered comes zooming along on a special express lane conveyor belt and stops directly in front of you. Iris, Laurie, and I all agreed: this is the greatest thing that can possibly happen in a restaurant. Way better than the waiter bringing you an engagement ring. They don’t even
have
waiters at Kurazushi. Want tea? Powdered tea, cups, and a hot water dispenser are right in front of you. Beer? Walk over to the refrigerator, pull out a chilled glass, and dispense your own draft beer from the adjacent tap.

I learned about Kurazushi from a wonderful book,
Sushi: Its Unknown Varieties and History,
by an author who goes by the peculiar pseudonym Hikari Dept. (It doesn’t make sense in Japanese, either.) We met Hikari, a pleasant retired fellow in his fifties, for lunch at Kurazushi. He taught us how to navigate the touchscreen interface. We ate sushi of amberjack fed in part on sudachi, the tiny little citrus fruit, which is said to give the flesh a pleasant citrus flavor. (I didn’t notice.) Hikari recommended a Korean-inspired piece of sushi combining spicy minced tuna and soft-cooked egg, which was fantastic.

Behind the electronic magic of Kurazushi and its brethren is a rather beautiful story, told in Hikari’s book. These restaurants are unimaginably efficient, with rates of food waste below 5 percent, achieved through information technology and automation. People order the sushi from a computer, and then robots make it and send it out. The money saved goes toward improving food quality. At Kurazushi, the sushi isn’t world-class, but it’s much better than a lot of sushi I’ve eaten in the U.S. at many times the price.

Oh yeah, the price: every plate at Kurazushi is $1.

Iris enjoyed the sushi just fine, especially the steak sushi with lemon, but she was really in it for the prizes. After you finish each plate of food at Kurazushi, you slide the plate into a slot, which increments the running tally of plates consumed. At any time you can check the iPad screen and see how much you owe (and how hungry you were).

It’s not just a slot, however: it’s a slot
machine.
After every five plates, the screen is taken over by a brief cartoon battle between good and evil. If good wins (as it does about 25 percent of the time, just like in real life), a plastic gachapon toy capsule rolls down a track and into the waiting hand of the kid at your table. And every table has one or more kids, smearing the iPad with greasy tempura fingers, ordering more, more, more.

Meanwhile, the plates ride a hidden water slide back to the kitchen, where they’re collected and washed by robots. I really wanted to visit the kitchen at Kurazushi, but it probably requires a special invitation, and can’t possibly live up to my imagination anyway.

On our first visit, Iris failed to win a prize. “I brought you one just in case,” said Hikari, producing a capsule from his pocket. It contained an egg sushi–shaped gummy eraser. After this, of course, Iris was determined to win a Kurazushi prize, even if it meant eating a hundred pieces of sushi. We had to go back, and we had to win. I’m never letting her anywhere near Vegas.

At her birthday dinner, Iris had the focused eyes of the serious gambler. Every time I lifted a piece of sushi, Iris swiped the plate and slammed it into the return slot. Eventually, after 25 plates, she won a tuna sushi cell phone charm with the Kurazushi logo. She couldn’t have been happier if the machine had spewed forth a fistful of Fukuzawas.

This was not Iris’s first gachapon of the day. Earlier, she took 1000 yen to Nakano Broadway and bought herself a trove of plastic capsules. Her favorite was a magnetic cheerleader who now clings, prone, to our refrigerator door, panties peeking out from below her skirt. The suggestive nature of this is completely lost on Iris.

Hot mess

My recovery was occasionally helped along by linguistic mishaps. On Iris’s birthday, for example, I attempted to order twelve soup dumplings but ordered twenty by mistake. For an English speaker, the distinction between twelve and twenty is subtle. It’s a good thing I wasn’t trying to order eighteen dumplings, because the distinction between eighteen and eighty is equally subtle. Later, I asked Iris what her favorite meal of the trip was. “The twenty soupies,” she said.

Because my Japanese was much better this time around, I got into more conversations with people, which meant more opportunities for misunderstandings. I popped into Tenta, our favorite tempura place, and asked whether they were open on New Year’s Eve. “Sure, we open at six,” I heard, but what they’d actually said was, “We’re open until six.” We showed up at 6:30 to find the restaurant closing down. Iris was near tears. So we detoured to a chain tempura place where Iris ate half a dozen tempura shrimp and I had a beautiful seafood kakiage-don, shrimp and squid and onions and greens fried into a golden patty and served on rice. In Tokyo, plan B is never much of a disappointment.

Private karaoke rooms are becoming more popular in America, but they’re still uncommon outside of major cities. Seattle only got its first Japanese-style karaoke spot, Rock Box, a couple of years ago, and children aren’t allowed.

In Tokyo, karaoke chains are everywhere, and kids are welcome. As soon as Iris heard this, she couldn’t talk about anything else. We met up with Akira and Emi, who got married last year and are expecting a baby, and piled into a room at the local Big Echo chain, where Iris was amazed to find all of her favorite songs. I was less surprised, since all of Iris’s favorite songs are from
Les Miserables.
Do you hear the people sing? I did.

Emi sang a couple of Japanese pop songs, neither of which I’d ever heard before. Both songs were dangerously catchy and had lyrics about train stations, which seemed like an odd coincidence until I realized that life in Japan is vignettes connected by train rides.

“I am TOTALLY having my 21st birthday party at Rock Box!” said Iris. Only eleven years away!

After karaoke, we went for dinner at Penguin Village, where the same Patrick Swayze lookalike was waiting tables. On our previous visit, after ordering our squid and octopus okonomiyaki, I’d noticed a menu item on the wall: 肉肉肉天, or “niku-niku-niku-ten.” Okonomiyaki with meat, meat, and more meat. The Meat Lover’s Pizza of okonomiyaki. I shared the funny name with Iris, who wailed, “Why didn’t we order
that?
“ At least once a month after that, for the following eighteen months, Iris reminded me that “we should have ordered that niku-niku-niku okonimyaki.”

This time, we ordered it. It actually came with four meats: strips of pork belly and a scoop each of ground beef, chicken, and pork. We fried up the assorted meats on the tabletop griddle and stirred them back into our batter before making the pancake. This time I formed and flipped the pancake confidently—so confidently that a large chunk tried to run away and had to be coaxed back into a reunion with the mothership. A four-meat okonomiyaki sounds like a gimmick, but this was one tasty gimmick.

Meanwhile, Akira and Emi were cooking a monjayaki with
mentaiko
(spicy pollock roe) and cheese. I’d never eaten monjayaki (except in doughnut form) or even seen one made, and Iris and I were fascinated when Akira formed a ring of batter and poured liquid into the center, where it seethed like an erupting volcano.

Mark Robinson is right: monjayaki is a big mucusy pancake. It looks like something you’d find in an alley behind a dive bar, and it’s so runny it can’t be eaten with chopsticks. Diners tuck in using
miniature spatulas.
It’s also delicious, especially the crusty browned cheese bits. It was so good I almost forgot about the Pon de Monja. Okay, only a severe head trauma could make me forget the Pon de Monja, and with my luck, I’d wake up and say, “I don’t remember my name, but there was this doughnut....”