Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (6 page)

Tofu is having a bit
of a moment.

Sure, it’s still the butt of hack jokes and the presumed sustenance of sad vegetarians who close their eyes and think of steak. In Japan as in much of Asia, however, people eat tofu because they like it. Iris and I recently had a gaga-for-tofu experience at home in Seattle, and it was all Andrea Nguyen’s fault.

Nguyen is the author of three cookbooks, an authority on Vietnamese food, and a person blessed with the ability to land a book smack in the middle of a current food trend. Her book
Asian Tofu
came out in 2012, and if the title sounds a little weird (what is tofu if not Asian?), it’s a warning: this book celebrates tofu in its natural habitat and doesn’t force it to pose as meat or hide it away in a burrito.

When I received Andrea’s book, I flipped right past the lengthy section on how to make homemade tofu, because I was, like,
please
. Seattle has no shortage of tofu. Even the stuff at Trader Joe’s is pretty good. Then I started reading about tofu skins.

If you already hate tofu, the term “tofu skin” is probably an effective emetic. But this stuff is addictive. You start by making fresh soy milk. I’m not going to soft-pedal how much work this is: you have to soak, grind, squeeze, and simmer dried soybeans. The result is a thick milk entirely unlike the soy milk you get in a box at Whole Foods in the same way Parmigiano-Reggiano is unlike Velveeta.

Then, to make tofu skins (
yuba
in Japanese), you simmer the soy milk gently over low heat until a skin forms on the surface, then pluck it off with your fingers and drape it over a chopstick to dry. It is exactly like the skin that forms on top of pudding, the one George Costanza wanted to market as Pudding Skin Singles. Yuba doesn’t look like much—like a pile of discarded raw chicken skin, honestly. But the texture is toothsome, and with each bite you’re rewarded with the flavor of fresh soy milk. It’s best served with just a few drops of soy sauce and maybe some grated ginger or sliced negi.

“I’m kind of obsessed with tofu skins right now,” said Iris, poking her head into the fridge to grab a round of yuba. Me too.

In Seattle, I had to buy, grind, boil, and otherwise toil for a few sheets of yuba. In Tokyo, I found it at Life Supermarket, sold in a single-serving plastic tub with a foil top. The yuba wasn’t as snappy or flavorful as homemade, but it had that characteristic fresh-soy aroma, which to me smells like a combination of “healthy forest” and “clean baby.” Iris and I ate it greedily. (The yuba, not the baby.)

Yuba isn’t technically tofu, because the soy milk isn’t coagulated. Japanese tofu comes in two basic categories, much like underpants: cotton (
momen
) and silken (
kinugoshi
). Cotton tofu is the kind eaten most commonly in the U.S.; if you buy a package of extra-firm tofu and cut it up for stir-frying, that’s definitely cotton tofu.

Silken tofu is fragile, creamier and more dairy-like than cotton tofu, and it’s the star of my favorite summer tofu dish.
Hiya yakko
is cubes of tofu, usually silken, drizzled with soy sauce and judiciously topped with savory bits: grated ginger or daikon, bonito flakes, negi. It’s popular in Japanese bars and easy to make at home, which I did, with (you will be shocked to hear) tons of fresh negi.

Western food offers a wide variety of flavors and a limited palette of textures. If you grew up in the West, think about how many of your favorite foods are, as in the famous Far Side cartoon, crunchy on the outside with a chewy center.

This particular textural contrast is certainly prized in Japan—witness the ubiquity of tonkatsu and potato croquettes. But the Asian appreciation for textural variety extends into every corner of the spectrum, including some shady areas most Westerners would rather keep well-shaded. As Fuchsia Dunlop writes in her memoir,
Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper:

Texture is the last frontier for Westerners learning to appreciate Chinese food. Cross it, and you’re really inside. But the way there is a wild journey that will bring you face to face with your own prejudices, your childhood fears, perhaps even some Freudian paranoias.

The same goes for Japanese food. For example, I went to a street fair at Nakano Sun Plaza and had a free sample of
warabi mochi.
You may be familiar with
mochi,
sometimes called rice taffy, which is cooked sticky rice pounded into a very thick paste. Warabi mochi is not that. It’s made from bracken starch and is more bouncy and marshmallowy than rice mochi. If you fell off a ledge and landed in a big vat of warabi mochi, you’d be fine, albeit well-dusted with
kinako
(sweetened soybean powder) or matcha. The matcha-dusted warabi mochi I tasted was delicious, and it was still delicious after I’d been chewing it for a couple of minutes, which is rather a common experience in Japan. On the menu at our favorite yakitori place, they list “tender chicken,” just as you’d see in the U.S., but also “chewy chicken.” Each is very much as advertised. The chewy chicken is certainly more flavorful. It is also so chewy that I amassed a wad of half-chewed chewy chicken in the corner of my mouth, like that Japanese video game where a sticky ball rolls around gathering debris and mass. Eventually I had to spit it out in the bathroom.

Or consider the Japanese love of things slimy and sticky. One rainy day, we dashed into a soba restaurant for shelter and lunch. When we stepped inside, two women were vigorously grating
nagaimo
for
tororo soba.
Dear Penthouse Forum: I never thought this would happen to me.

Nagaimo,
Dioscorea opposita,
is a mountain tuber that looks like a daikon that forgot to shave its legs. When you grate it, it turns to a viscous white slime called
tororojiru.
A popular delicacy in Japan is cod or blowfish milt (
shirako
). “Milt” is just a euphemistic word for sperm. But tororojiru, despite hailing from the plant kingdom, is much more semen-like than shirako. At the table next to us, two women were having lunch, dipping their cold soba into a sauce heavy with tororojiru, and slurping away. I’ve also seen a noodle dish combining nagaimo slime with nattō, raw egg, and whatever other gluey stuff happens to be on hand. People eat this stuff not because they’re on
Fear Factor
or because of any nutritional dogma. They simply enjoy it.

I can go part way down this road. For breakfast, I enjoy
on-tama udon
, noodles in a
shōyu
-based sauce topped with a very runny soft-boiled egg. (Shōyu is just the Japanese word for soy sauce, but it has a nice ring, doesn’t it?) Honestly, I considered myself pretty texturally adventurous until I met my nemesis in the form of junsai.

It happened at Ukai Tofu-ya, an upscale tofu restaurant in Shiba Park, near Tokyo Tower. First, try to imagine an upscale tofu restaurant in the U.S., and get all the giggles out of your system. Done? Good. The approach to Ukai is a quintessential Tokyo experience: you emerge from the subway onto a baking-hot boulevard, drag yourself across busy streets and blank walls, and then emerge, suddenly, into a garden out of time, overgrown in a deliberate fashion, an oasis that makes the adjacent brutal urbanism invisible. Ukai is a huge restaurant, but they seat every party out of the line of sight of any other, so for the length of your meal, the place is yours.

If the level of service at a Tokyo doughnut shop is comparable to the best restaurant in most countries, the service at an upscale tofu restaurant is positively disarming. I found myself thanking the waitresses in a girlish whisper for each course: the sashimi, the fried tofu slathered with miso, the perfect little pickles, the single fresh loquat hidden inside a
hōzuki
lantern plant. Then came the cold tofu course. I had come to Ukai to taste the freshest, creamiest tofu Tokyo could serve up, and now it was before me, two lumps of tofu made from Hokkaido soybeans, in a large bowl of kombu dashi with some sort of greens floating in the broth.

I asked about the vegetable. “Junsai,” explained the waitress. She transferred the tofu to a smaller bowl, ladled dashi over it, and then went after every last bit of junsai with a miniature swimming pool net. No one, this gesture implied, would want to miss out on one bit of junsai, although it looked more like thorny prunings than anything edible.

Here is the good news: junsai does not have the texture of woody twigs. It is, however, the most mucilaginous food I can possibly imagine. Okra thinks junsai is too slimy. As Wikipedia understates it:

It is identified by its bright green leaves, small purple flowers that bloom from June through September, and a thick mucilage that covers all of the underwater organs, including the underside of the leaves, stems, and developing buds.

Yes, junsai is certainly distinctive: each tiny leaf and bud is fully encased in a snot bubble. If you make it through that alive, the texture of the twig itself is snappy, easy to chew, not bad at all by comparison.

And I had a lot of junsai to make it through. I started by dispatching the tofu, which was everything I’d hoped for: creamy, light, and redolent of fresh soy milk. It was the best tofu of my life, and I was about to ruin the memory of it by turning to the junsai. It was like capping off a beautiful wedding with a series of chainsaw murders. I grimaced through each morsel of slime.
This is a beautiful restaurant where people come to eat great food,
I thought to myself.
They wouldn’t deliberately play a trick on me. People pay good money for a hearty serving of junsai.
These mental gymnastics failed to convince me I was eating anything other than pond snot. At one point I really thought I might throw up and get deported.

Reader, I ate all the junsai. When the waitress came over to take my bowl, I smiled and said, “
Oishikatta
.” Delicious. The quiver in my voice was more defeat than awe.

Junsai is a seasonal delicacy. You know how some people annoy you all year by talking about how excited they are for rhubarb or tomato season? If I lived in Japan, I would spend all summer anticipating the end of junsai season.

Having defeated my viscous nemesis, I sat back in my chair at Ukai and relaxed. Now I could enjoy dessert: slimy
kuzu
starch noodles in sugar syrup with pickled apricots.

If the most common knock on tofu is that it is bland, odd-textured, and incapable of starring in visceral food memories, my lunch proved that false. When I think back on the best meals I ate in Tokyo, that creamy tofu keeps insisting on its proper place. Anyone could love tofu.

Junsai, maybe not.

It was probably when Iris
put on her lab coat and prepared to stick a thermometer up a cat’s rectum that it struck me just how much responsibility and freedom kids enjoy in Tokyo.

OK, the cat was fake, but the look of concentration on Iris’s face was genuine. We were at Kidzania, an international chain of theme parks where children work at realistic fake occupations: veterinarians, airline pilots, firefighters, pizza cooks, building maintenance technicians, and dozens of other jobs.

In its dedication to aping all aspects of an activity down to the least enticing, Kidzania is absurd and delightful, and I’m not just talking about cat rectums. Iris wanted to drive a little car. So she got in line at the Kidzania DMV and waited for a full hour to get her license to drive a car which, if it collided with you at full speed, might cause a minor shin bruise. While Iris enjoyed the faithful simulation of modern bureaucratic hell, she watched the gas station attendants receive their training, which had nothing to do with fire safety or pump operations and every thing to do with bowing in unison after dispensing imaginary gasoline.

Finally street legal, Iris got in her car and pulled up to the gas station. The gas jockey curtain call went off without a hitch. Most of the kids at Kidzania were ages five to ten. We stuck around to watch Iris do her thing. Most parents left their kids in the care of the Kidzania attendants, a college-age bunch whose patience with children would be the envy of pediatricians, Disney employees, and actual parents everywhere. Iris also worked as a produce inspector (“We measured the sweetness of the banana with a refractometer!”) and a building maintenance technician, which required her to climb a ladder to the second story of a building, repair a broken window, and rappel down. As a lifelong acrophobe, I would pay theme-park prices not to do this.

A more laid-back children’s paradise can be found at the Ghibli (pronounced “jibbly”) Museum in suburban Mitaka. Studio Ghibli is the production company founded by Hayao Miyazaki, creator of the animated films
Spirited Away, Ponyo,
and the masterpiece
My Neighbor Totoro.

The Ghibli Museum was built as a fanciful pastiche of European styles, an architecture seen in many Miyazaki films. It opened in 2001 but feels much older, partly because the build quality and detail is unreal compared to any theme park architecture you’ve ever seen. Photography is prohibited, and children are encouraged to ditch their parents and explore the place on their own (are you sensing a pattern yet?). Iris spent most of her time climbing on a plush replica of the Cat Bus from
Totoro
and flinging stuffed soot sprites. This will make sense if you’ve seen the movie, and if you haven’t, well, I don’t want to be one of those guys who starts sentences with, “You haven’t seen...?”

Iris was also obsessed with the Totoro zoetrope. A zoetrope is an optical illusion invented, I think, to torture writers, in that I could go on for six pages trying to describe a zoetrope, and you’d still have no idea what I was talking about. Watch three seconds of a zoetrope video on YouTube, however, and you’ll say, “Oh, it’s one of those things.”

After a couple of hours at both Kidzania and Ghibli, I got restless. This is partly because I have a short attention span; Laurie would have stayed at the Ghibli Museum for days, and I’m pretty sure we could have dropped Iris off at Kidzania and picked her up the following summer as an actual licensed veterinarian. But I was eager to get back to the main attraction. Creating a safe and entertaining theme park where kids can run wild and parent-free is a nice achievement. Creating a city of 35 million where they can do the same is unparalleled in the history of the world.

Tokyo is clean, glistening, and functional. Its parks and playgrounds are the opposite: strewn with cigarette butts and other litter, equipped with rusty eighties play equipment, and chronically underused. There is a park near our apartment, on the way to the laundromat, that consists of a pair of uneven bars, a drinking fountain, and an ashtray on a packed-dirt surface. Adults sometimes use it for morning calisthenics, but not often.

My theory is that Tokyo parks are ugly and neglected because they’re unnecessary. In America, adults go to parks to relax in semitranquil surroundings, and children go there to play. In Tokyo, adults relax at shrines and bathhouses. And where do children play? In the street, of course.

Given a street to play in, kids will never choose a park. The park is blocks away, and we want to play
right now.
In most of America, playing in the street is assumed to be suicidal. When I was growing up in Portland, Oregon, in the eighties, we lived on a quiet residential street on the outskirts of town, and my brothers and I played in the street when we could get away with it, but my most vivid memory of street play is my dad getting into a shouting match with a crazy driver who almost plowed into us as he screamed down the street in his Mercedes. We used to say “go play in traffic” to mean “go fuck yourself.”

On our street in Nakano, playing in the street is just what kids do. It’s assumed to be safe because it is safe. Residential streets in Nakano are narrow and don’t have sidewalks. Cars are welcome, and pedestrians and bikes are expected to get out of the way to let them pass, but the cars slink along so slowly, it’s as if they’re embarrassed.

Immediately after we moved in, Iris met Zen, who lived in our building and who was every inch the word “boy” in human form. Zen was five and spoke no English other than “hello!” and “see you!” Iris spoke very little Japanese. This, of course, didn’t interfere with their play at all. Minutes after meeting, they stole tomato stakes from Zen’s parents’ garden and started fencing. They played tag; they played baseball; they shot each other with plastic or imaginary guns; they sprayed each other with the hose. At any time of day, Zen would appear below our balcony, yelling “IRIS-CHAN!” or ring our doorbell six hundred times. One night, to Iris’s delight, he set off a bunch of fireworks in the alley. Naming him “Zen” was presumably wishful thinking.

Summoned by Zen, Iris would run out to play in the street. If Iris didn’t feel like playing, Zen would bellow her name for ten minutes before giving up. I’m glad I rarely had to intervene in this relationship, because Zen found my broken Japanese hilarious. Anything I said, he would repeat like it was the funniest thing ever, probably because I said something like, “Iris Zen play very good, yes? But we go dinnering now.”

Zen had a little sidekick named Kōtarō. I never heard him speak. He always seemed to be standing just behind Zen and to the side, grinning like a maniac. If they were characters in a comic, Zen would be the mouth and Kōtarō the muscle. Admittedly, Kōtarō weighed about forty pounds, but he had the attitude down. There were also a couple of girls who lived across the street and came out to play sometimes. American parents who bemoan the rise of the play date and the demise of spontaneous play should visit Japan. Many aspects of suburban Tokyo life are ripped from wistful American memoirs and Richard Scarry books. One morning we walked with Zen and his mother to kindergarten, and shopkeepers and people on the street kept hailing us to say good morning. One man leaned out of his store to say, “
Zen, bōshi wa doko desu ka?”
Zen, where’s your hat? His mother half-smiled and held up the hat.

Like many people in the neighborhood, Zen’s parents are avid vegetable gardeners, and they kept us supplied with homegrown cucumbers. Supermarket cucumbers in Japan are superb; just-picked cucumbers are revelatory. Plus, they come with the free spectacle of opening the door to Zen with a cucumber in each hand, sheepishly offering them forth. Is there any facial expression more universal than
my parents are making me do this embarrassing thing
?

Laurie bought Zen’s family a gift to thank them for all the cucumbers: a cucumber-print
tenugui
hand cloth, meticulously gift-wrapped. She gave it to Iris and said, “Would you please take this to Zen and make sure he gives it to his parents?” Iris shrugged at the idea of trying to make Zen do anything, but she took the gift bag and headed downstairs.

About ten minutes later, we came down and followed a trail of torn wrapping paper to find Zen in the street, the cucumber tenugui draped around his neck, totally pimped out, shouting commands to Kōtarō and exhorting Iris to blow off dinner and come play instead.

Children in Japan are free to do much more than simply play in the street. You see unaccompanied minors on the train constantly, usually girls in their navy blue school uniforms heading to or from school, or evening cram school, or activities. Not just thirteen-year-olds, but plenty of street-smart eight-year-olds riding and walking fearlessly through the world’s busiest train system.

Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid moved with his family to Tokyo in the nineties. Shortly after they arrived, his daughter begged him to let her and her friend, both ten years old, go to Tokyo Disneyland. Sure thing, said Reid, who promptly called the friend’s mom and offered to chaperone the outing. “Huh?” said the perplexed mom. He ended up letting the kids go solo, which is what his daughter had been asking for all along. The kids had a great time, certainly more so than if
Dad
had come along.

Parents in Tokyo aren’t afraid of crime or car accidents, and they have little reason to be. The largest city in the world is also among the safest. I’m among the least crime-obsessed Americans I know, but in Tokyo even I had to slip into a different mindset. Worrying about being the victim of a crime in Tokyo is a waste of mental energy on par with worrying about being struck by lightning, and slowly you begin to realize how many of our decisions are circumscribed by the probability that someone is going to interfere with us. Wouldn’t it be nice to leave our computers unattended at a cafe, carry around plenty of cash, and send our eight-year-olds to pick up a bunch of leeks? (Oddly, bike theft is common in Japan, but nobody uses U-locks.)

The Japanese know that sending their kids out unaccompanied is an exceptional privilege, and they made a popular TV show about it. On
First Errands
, extremely young kids are sent out, under the eye of a camera crew, on implausible errands. A two-year-old girl goes to the supermarket for milk and gyōza sauce. The bag is too heavy for her to carry, so she drags it along the ground, and the milk carton bursts open and starts leaking. (Every episode of
First Errands
features a moment where any parent watching the show will burst into tears.) Sobbing, the girl returns to the store, and the folks at the service desk help her tape up the milk and send her home to her parents.

So we started sending Iris and her coin purse to Life Supermarket. We told her she could stop for water at Vending Machine Corner and buy herself a treat at the store. You’ve never seen a kid more proud than Iris returning from her first solo visit to Life with a plastic-wrapped tray of fruit. “And I brought back 2 yen in change,” she reported. The fruit tray featured an apple, a grapefruit, an orange, a kiwi, and some fake paper leaves. I would never have bought a fruit tray, which is exactly the point.
Dad
wasn’t there to say something dumb like, “We can choose our
own
fruit assortment.”

We sent Iris to Life a couple of times a week, mostly for vegetables. She often bought herself a package of Hi-Chew or Choco Baby candy. Soon she started arguing that she could easily go to Aigre-Douce, our favorite patisserie, by herself, too. “I know
exactly
how to get there,” said Iris. “Chūō Rapid to Shinjuku, change to the Yamanote line, get off at Mejiro, walk down Mejiro-dōri...” And I’m sure she was right, but we were too American to let her try it. Given another couple of months, though, I’m sure we would have relented.