Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (7 page)

“This isn’t crush hour either,”
complained Iris. We were on the Chūō Rapid, our favorite of Tokyo’s myriad train lines. Its orange-striped cars arrive at platforms 7 and 8 of Nakano Station every three to four minutes, all day, every day, and it could not be more magical if it left from platform 9¾.

Tokyo is a railroad town. It’s hard to say anything about Tokyo trains without resorting to cliches and getting worked up like a fanboy trainspotter. The system is massive: more than one hundred train lines serving nearly nine hundred stations, and you can carry one digital smart card (called
PASMO
or Suica) that opens the gates to all of them. The heart of the system is the Yamanote line, an above-ground circle line with distinctive green-striped cars that look like life-size toy trains. The Yamanote loop takes about an hour to go all the way around and serves most of Tokyo’s most important and best-known stations: Shinjuku, Shibuya, Harajuku, Tokyo, Ueno, and so on.

The Yamanote line carries more passengers per day than the entire London Underground, and it’s where Iris and I first encountered crush hour. White-gloved attendants still work in Tokyo train stations, but they no longer push passengers onto trains, because the passengers have mastered the art of, for lack of a better word, self-cramming. Tokyo straphangers are nothing if not orderly. Marks on the platform indicate where the train doors will alight; passengers line up here, step aside to let people off, then sweep onto the train with a minimum of colliding and sniping.

The other day I was on the bus in Seattle. All the seats were taken, and most passengers had to stand. The bus driver kept exhorting people to move toward the back to make room for more passengers. “There’s no room to move back,” people grumbled. In Tokyo, well, no one complains publicly in the first place, but on any train, no matter how sardined, there’s always room to get cozy and make room for a few more. The first time Iris and I found ourselves in the midst of this Vise-Grip of humanity, her face went from relaxed to terrified to elated in the space of ten seconds. In a crush hour train, hands go up. Surrender. As entertainment, it’s hard to do better for a $2 ticket.

In the midst of this humid press of bodies, those lucky enough to secure a bench seat tend to celebrate by falling asleep. It’s common to look across the train car and see an entire row of people nodding off, like hobos on boxcars, except these are well-dressed, sober professionals of all ages and both sexes, at all times of day. Sleep seems to hunt them down and overtake them. How do they wake up before their stop? I never figured it out. People also sleep in parks. This public narcolepsy is, like a bug-eyed anime doll, both cute and unnerving. Tokyo’s subway sleepers square too well with stereotypes about the Japanese working themselves to death. Then again, I fell asleep on the train a few times myself.

The Chūō line cuts east-west across the circle of the Yamanote, forming the London Underground symbol on the idealized transit map. It’s a busy line, carrying crush loads in certain places at certain times, but mostly it’s just a nice train. Nakano is far enough from the city center that we sometimes even got a seat. I enjoyed the surprisingly comprehensible station and transfer announcements in Japanese and English, and I especially liked the ads. Colorful display ads hawked boring urban stuff like insurance and continuing education and cell phones, but also TV shows like the cop comedy
Beginners
(“BIGINAAZU!”) and the romantic drama
Breathless Summer.
A wholesome-looking middle-aged woman starred in a series of ads for bean-flavored popsicles which focused on their health-giving (which I assume means “constipation-relieving”) properties.

Each train car featured a TV screen built into the side of the car running mostly food ads. Every time I saw the 7-Eleven ad showing a family gathered around the chain’s summer noodle salad, I wanted to be that family, and soon enough, we were. (It was pretty good.) In another ad, a guy in a tuxedo leaned against the counter at McDonald’s. I never quite figured out what was going on there. (The commercials don’t have audio, just closed captioning, thank God.) Everybody bemoans the omnipresence of commercial messages in modern life; I’ve certainly asked why we have to give self-interested marketing goons a captive audience on our public conveyances. Tokyo probably has more commercial messages per square foot than anywhere in America, but you know what? It sure beats Poetry on Buses.

Riding the train in Tokyo isn’t always a picnic. Some of the newer subway lines, like the Oedo line, are dug insanely deep and require descending an unnervingly long series of escalators to get to the platform. Every time we rode one of these subterranean monstrosities, I thought about the Chilean miners.

Riding the Shinkansen, however, is literally a picnic. Every Shinkansen trip departing Tokyo originates at Tokyo Station, an imposing Renaissance-style building whose main facade somehow survived World War II. Inside, uniformed workers push metal carts stacked with mysterious cardboard boxes up and down the corridors. It’s not luggage. Eventually, Laurie figured out that they’re delivering bento boxes to the dozens of shops selling them.

Ekiben
(“train station bento”) are a tradition as old as train travel in Japan. While eating on subways and commuter trains in Tokyo is a bad act, eating on the intercity bullet train is celebrated. There’s a hierarchy of bento quality. The kiosks on the train station platforms sell the cheapest and lowest-quality bento, although applying the term “lowest-quality” to any food in Japan is an unfair slur. I’ve certainly enjoyed these bargain ekiben, which usually contain rice (often decorated with a single umeboshi
,
said to prevent spoilage and resemble the Japanese flag), pickles, some kind of cooked vegetable or salad, and a main dish like cold fried chicken or tonkatsu or ginger pork or dried fish.

As you get farther from the tracks, the bento become more varied, expensive, and exquisite. If you’re feeling flush, you can step outside the station and into a department store, where the basement food halls sell impeccable bento for $30 and up.

My favorite place to shop for train food at Tokyo Station, however, is the deli complex inside the station, which offers a wide variety of bento, plus individual items so you can build your own deconstructed bento, which is what I did on this trip. I bought a box of hot nikuman, which are like those fluffy white steamed Chinese pork buns but with a seasoned ground pork filling instead of gooey barbecued pork, and a plastic tub of assorted root vegetables: kabocha squash, carrots, taro, bamboo shoots, lotus root, burdock, and more, all perfectly cooked and seasoned. Iris had a tonkatsu bento, and Laurie had a fried chicken one that also featured potato salad. She described the combination as “sort of American and totally Japanese.”

Another popular train food is the
katsu-sando,
or tonkatsu sandwich, which is a cold pork cutlet with tonkatsu sauce on crustless white bread. I’ve never been into American cold sandwiches, but sometimes I get a katsu-sando craving.

My stomach hasn’t quite come around to the idea of eating lunch while shooting down the track at 180 miles per hour. Most people find the Shinkansen’s tracks so highly polished and the trains so aerodynamic and hermetically enclosed that speed is only an idea. My middle ears have never been entirely cooperative, and I find a Shinkansen ride more like being shot out of a cannon. This is not a complaint. It’s the bullet train, for God’s sake; I want to feel at least a
little
queasy.

About an hour into the ride, we caught a ten-second glimpse of the peak of Mount Fuji, naked of snow in the summertime, and then clouds drew a modest cloak over the mountain and it was gone. That was our only Fuji view of the entire trip. This is also as it should be. Tokyoites, I think, enjoy complaining about not being able to see Mount Fuji much more than they would enjoy being able to see it all the time. Seattleites have the same relationship with the sun.

My favorite part of the Shinkansen experience has nothing to do with food and doesn’t even require getting on the train. Stand on the platform in a small town station, and soon an express train will come screaming through at full speed, in and out of the station in five seconds without stopping. The train gives off an earsplitting insect hum. It seems like you’re watching something physically impossible, like a person lifting a house, or hearing a joke so funny the laughter threatens to rip you apart, and then, with a puff of air, it’s over.

When I was in high school, my friends and I sometimes got bored enough to drive out to the airport to watch planes take off. If it had been a Shinkansen platform, we never would have come home.

Immediately after the war, underworld gangs opened markets at all three of the mouths [of Shinjuku train station], west, south, and east. Traces of that at Westmouth yet survive, in the cluster of one and two-story “barracks” known popularly and affectionately as Piss Alley (Shomben Yokochō). It would much prefer that the public call it Chicken Alley, for skewered chicken is, along with alcohol, the commodity it chiefly purveys, but the public does not oblige.

—Edward Seidensticker,
Tokyo from Edo to Shōwa

Our yakitori story begins, in
fact, at Piss Alley.

Actually, it begins at our Nakano apartment. One night around bedtime (living in what was basically a one-room apartment meant we almost always went to sleep at the same time), I said good night to Laurie and Iris and headed out into Tokyo. I hopped the express train to Shinjuku, still full of bodies at 9 p.m. and still running every four minutes. I stepped off the train, out of the station and into a warren of chicken shacks that would now prefer that the public call it Omoide Yokochō, or Memory Alley. I’d bet a large bottle of Sapporo that everybody still calls it Piss Alley.

Piss Alley is actually two perpendicular alleys. Tourists and salarymen weave around each other and through clouds of fragrant meat smoke. As I strolled through, I looked for a free seat at a counter and finally took one. “You speak Japanese?” asked the cook. “I don’t speak any English.”

“That’s cool,” I said. I did not actually say that. I said, “
Daijōbu desu
,” which is pronounced “dye-jobe-dess” and is perhaps the single most useful phrase in Japanese after “
sumimasen
,” (“I’m sorry.”) Daijōbu desu means I’m OK, it’s OK, that’s fine, don’t worry about it. I said it with confidence despite the fact that I did not, technically, speak Japanese as well as a two-year-old. There were two white guys already at the counter. I figured I could get away with it.

I’d come to Piss Alley to eat chicken, drink beer, and piss in an alley. I only managed one, because (a) I was kidding about pissing in an alley, and (b) I happened to sit down at a pork restaurant. I ordered a bottle of lager, a skewer of pork with negi, and a skewer of zucchini. “Where are you guys from?” I asked the Westerners.

“Belgium,” said one.

“Bulgaria,” said the other.

It’s probably good that I didn’t reply, “Those are two different places?” or “You guys must love that Bulgarian drinkable yogurt,” because each of these guys weighed about two of me. They worked for a Japanese company, but didn’t want to talk about exactly what they did, because that’s what you talk about at work, not during pork and beer hour. They asked me how long I’d been in Japan. “A week,” I said. This provoked much laughter. They’d been in the country for over two years and didn’t seem too happy about it.

The food was excellent and the beer cold. I finished, marveling at how much flavor a cook can coax out with a little salt, pepper, and hot charcoal. Sure, it’s easy to make pork taste good, but the zucchini was also charred, juicy, and irresistible. I wandered around the alley a little more and then out among the skyscrapers and department stores of Shinjuku, thinking about the words of William Gibson. “Shinjuku at night is one of the most deliriously beautiful places in the world,” he wrote, “and somehow the silliest of all beautiful places—and the combination is sheer delight.”

Yakitori is also sheer delight. On our first trip to Japan, Iris and I went to dinner at a tavern—an
izakaya—
that was part of a national chain and situated invitingly on the bank of the Sumida River in Asakusa. The restaurant had a picture menu, which was a good thing, since neither of us could read any Japanese at the time. Despite the pictures, I managed to order poorly. A chain izakaya is not the place to order sushi, and to drink, I ordered what I thought was a small bottle of sake but turned out to be a small bottle of sake accompanied by a giant bottle of beer. Iris thought this was so hilarious that she still brings it up, three years later.

In retrospect, I’m not sure why I considered unexpected beer a problem, but the place was smoky and not especially welcoming, and Iris was in the mood for tonkatsu but couldn’t find any on the menu. She flipped through for a while and then said, “I want
that.
”

“Looks good to me,” I said. It was some kind of chicken on a stick. When I ordered it, the waiter asked if we wanted
shio
or
tare.
This much I could understand. Shio is salt; tare is a rich, sweet sauce made from reduced soy sauce, mirin, and simmered chicken parts. It’s a common choice in yakitori places; tare is the safe option, since anything tastes good with sweetened soy sauce. Salt is for when you really want to see what the grill master can do.

Here we went with tare. Soon the waiter brought two skewers, each loaded up with tiny, glistening bites of chicken. We each took a bite and shared an astonished stare: this was the best chicken we’d ever tasted, and we had absolutely no idea what chicken part we were eating.

Later we figured out that it was
bonjiri
(sometimes written
bonchiri
). In English, it’s called chicken tail or, more memorably, the Pope’s Nose, a fatty gland usually discarded when prepping a chicken for Western-style cooking. We ordered two more plates of the stuff.

Yakitori is a beak-to-tail approach to chicken. OK, not literally beaks, but common choices at a yakitori place include thigh meat, breast meat, wings, heart, liver, and cartilage. The true test of a yakitori cook, I think, is chicken skin. To thread the skin onto skewers at the proper density and then grill it until juicy but neither overcooked (dry and crusty) or undercooked (unspeakable) requires serious skill.

“I wish we could go somewhere with an English menu so I know what I’m ordering,” said Laurie.

“Doubtful,” I replied. But I could understand not wanting to leave all the ordering in the hands of, well, me. There was a fifties throwback sexism to it (“And
she’ll
have...”), but more to the point, who knows when I might order something weird like chicken skin on a stick?

Laurie got her wish at a yakitori place in Nakano that ended up becoming one of our favorite restaurants. It’s a chain restaurant whose actual name is Akiyoshi, but I called it Yakitori Stadium, and Laurie and Iris, picking up on a mistranslation on the English menu, called it Yakitorino. I’ll call it that, too, because it’s fun to say. The menu was a double-sided laminated (that is, sauce-proof) sheet with Japanese on one side and English on the other.

Diners at Yakitorino sit at a U-shaped wooden counter around the grill, and as the cook finishes grilling each order of skewers, a waiter delivers the food to a heated metal shelf just above the counter. It’s a great gimmick. The food is rushed to you as soon as it finishes cooking, and since your fellow customers are eating two feet away on either side, it’s easy to spy on and steal their orders. (Order the same thing, I mean, not swipe their skewers, although I certainly thought about it.) When you finish nibbling all the chicken off a skewer, you drop the empty into a black plastic cup, giving a real-time tally of how many you’ve demolished.

Actually, Laurie only sort of got her wish for an English menu, because once Iris got her hands on the menu, she took charge. “
Negima onegai shimasu,
” she’d say, putting her finger to her lower lip the same way I do when deciding what to order. Negima is the single most popular yakitori skewer, chunks of chicken thigh meat interspersed with lengths of sliced negi.

Charcoal-grilled negi becomes amazingly tender, and the layers slide apart with a nudge of the tooth. Negima is sometimes made in the U.S. with scallions in place of negi, and it’s not the same. In general, as much as I like scallions, they make a poor substitute for negi; they’re smaller and the flavor is more oniony. American leeks are too tough. I guess the only substitute for negi is dreaming about negi like a nostalgic doofus.

Laurie and I ordered
chūhai
to drink. Short for “
shōchū
highball,” chūhai is cheap vodka-like liquor with club soda and often lemon or other fruit flavoring. It’s a tall, icy drink, not very strong, perfect for summer. Anyone serious about drinking would dismiss chūhai as being identical to wine coolers, but every drink has its proper context, and a fizzy, unchallenging, lightly alcoholic drink on a hot summer night is hard to beat—especially with salty food.

At Iris’s direction, we enjoyed all sorts of skewered bits. While most yakitori places serve various cuts of chicken and a few vegetables, the menu at Yakitorino was all over the place, and nearly everything was good: breaded and fried beef cubes on a stick; fried lotus root; pork jowl with miso;
shishitō
peppers. But Iris and Laurie’s single favorite dish at Yakitorino was neither meat nor vegetable and was not served on a stick. “If you’d really left the ordering up to me,” Iris said to me recently, “we would have had nothing but
yaki onigiri.
”

Yaki onigiri are plain, triangular rice balls (no fillings or nori wrapper) cooked on a hot charcoal grill and brushed with soy sauce or miso. The sauce on the outside caramelizes as the rice becomes charred and crispy and gives off an aroma of popcorn. The interior of the ball heats up and drinks in just a hint of sauce. It is a riot of flavor and texture made with two completely ordinary ingredients.

Iris and I have decided that if we were going to open a Japanese restaurant, it would be a yakitori place, which Iris has dubbed Yakitori Ding-Dong. “You would cook and I would serve,” she told me. Which is silly, since I don’t know any more about making yakitori than she does, but maybe the knowledge is contained in a master chef’s sweaty tenugui. Hand-me-downs, anyone?