Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (9 page)

Then again, the drabness of Tokyo goes a long way toward explaining why people here are obsessed with Paris and, more recently, Seattle. Everywhere we went, we saw ads for direct flights to Seattle on ANA airlines. One of the ads showed our neighborhood bookstore.

Any Tokyoite who visits Seattle will, I’m sure, find it more scenic than their hometown. Given time, however, they’ll discover that this matters much less than they think.

Seattle is not an umbrella city. In Seattle, you find tourists by looking under umbrellas. There is more than a little spite underlying the Seattleite’s antipathy to standing under an umbrella. If they’re going to tell us it rains all the time in Seattle, well, dammit, we can repel it with Gore-Tex and a bad attitude. (Actually, as you’re probably tired of hearing by now, it doesn’t rain that much in Seattle.)

Tokyo, meanwhile, sprouts umbrellas like mushrooms at the first threat of rain. The most popular umbrella is made of glossy clear vinyl and sells at convenience stores for 500 yen. We accumulated seven umbrellas: three bought on our first day at the FamilyMart; two that came with our apartment, one that Iris and I bought in Ikebukuro after going out umbrella-less, and a child-sized polka-dot umbrella.

“Actually, we had nine,” Iris interjected. “Two in Hakone.” Oh, right. We spent a rainy day in the mountain resort area of Hakone and left our umbrellas back in Tokyo. More on that later.

It took me weeks to learn how to use an umbrella, and I kept pestering Laurie with Stupid Umbrella Questions and poking people with my umbrella spokes. Luckily, Tokyo is not New York, and people in Tokyo are far too polite to say, “Hey, watch it, fuckface.” Slowly, however, I learned the right moment to furl my umbrella in Pretty Good #1 Alley before entering the covered Nakano Sun Mall. And I got used to repairing my umbrella by stuffing a couple of free-swinging naked spoke ends back into their plastic aglets before setting out.

Nearly every establishment in Tokyo offers either an umbrella stand or umbrella bags outside the entrance. One morning, in a downpour, I walked into the Nakano Starbucks with a dripping umbrella and apologetically asked, “
Kasa wa…?
” (What should I do with my umbrella?) An employee ran to the other entrance and brought me a plastic umbrella bag, which I clumsily slipped over my umbrella. I never came close to mastering the umbrella bag, an impressively wasteful device which works like an umbrella condom and is similarly discarded after use. The bottom few inches of my umbrella always pudged out from the opening of the bag like a muffin top.

Tokyo’s umbrella culture reaches full flower at Shibuya Crossing on a rainy day. Shibuya Crossing is probably the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world, although a claim like that is hard to verify. (Laurie visited what is allegedly Japan’s largest bathroom, a 64-stall behemoth at Venus Fort, a shopping mall designed to resemble Venice and featuring plenty of gaudy statuary and fountains, and a ceiling that mimics the evening sky. Like an American roadside attraction, Japan takes great pleasure in its superlatives.)

In any case, Shibuya Crossing certain
feels
like the busiest. It’s a multiway pedestrian scramble; you’ve probably seen it in photos or in the movie
Lost in Translation.
Every three minutes, the light changes and three thousand pedestrians cross in all directions with amazingly little pushing and shoving, even when you jam three thousand umbrellas into the mix. Cars get trapped in the intersection and pedestrians flow around them like a fluid dynamics simulation. The umbrellas are mostly the clear kombini special, but one in ten is solid color, or striped, or polka dotted, or solid color with two translucent wedges. The slow-moving color umbrellas are like hand-painted frames in a black and white movie. Climb to the second floor of Shibuya Station, or the Starbucks across the street, and you can watch this hypnotic ballet from above.

City life and umbrellas have been partners for a long time, because the modern umbrella is anything but modern: the extendable hub-and-spoke design goes back at least as far as first-century China. You can see this history in the character for “umbrella,” which is perhaps the most pictographic of all the kanji:

傘

Like New York, Tokyo’s climate is tropical only in the summer. I’ve been to Thailand, a truly tropical place, where abundant sunlight and water turn into abundant biomass: plants, elephants, and lots of creepy-crawly things, even in the city.

Tokyo doesn’t have the weather to produce life quite so exuberantly, but feral cats are a serious, albeit cute, problem, and Laurie and Iris were tormented by mosquitoes which found my flesh mostly unappetizing. (I’m pretty sure actual murders have resulted from someone saying, “Well, I don’t have any bites.”) And, like any big city, Tokyo has cockroaches.

It was the latter—just one big guy, not an infestation—that chased Laurie and Iris out of the apartment one morning while I was out writing. Iris ran to the bathroom and hid while Laurie trapped the creature and carried it outside. They went to Mister Donut for comfort food, and that’s where I met up with them, ate a mochi ring doughnut, and heard the rest of the story.

“And then in the Sun Mall, we saw...I think it was a bat,” said Iris.

“I’m sure it was a bird,” I replied. “There’s no way you’re going to see a bat in the middle of the city in the daytime.”

“I guess.”

That afternoon we went to Kiddyland, a toy store in Harajuku specializing in Hello Kitty, Snoopy, and anime characters that haven’t yet arrived in America. While walking down Omotesandō-dōri to the store, Iris pointed and said, “Look!” It was unmistakably a bat, flicking its leathery wings as it soared over the busy street from perch to impromptu perch. A bat in flight looks like a stunt pilot having a very bad day. A group of schoolgirls pointed and screamed.

“That’s the same bat we saw this morning!” said Iris. “It must have followed me.”

I started to say, “I’m sure it’s not,” but thought better of it.

Visitors to Japan are sometimes
surprised to find that tempura, the ubiquitous deep-fried side dish in Japanese-American restaurants, can carry a whole restaurant—even a palatial one like the seven-story Aoi Marushin in Asakusa.

Don’t get me wrong—tempura is served as a side dish in Tokyo, too, especially at soba and udon restaurants. Step into a branch of the Hanamaru Udon chain, and before you select your bowl of noodles you’re confronted with an array of self-serve, a la carte tempura: eggplant, onion, and squash, yes, but also hard-boiled quail eggs on a stick, squid tentacles, or a whole baby octopus. And the way most diners eat their tempura strains the definition of “side dish,” because they plunk the crispy morsels right into their noodle broth. Japanese cooks are expert at frying food to a crisp and equally adept at ruining that crispy perfection through dunking, saucing, and refrigeration. I never learned to appreciate a stone-cold, once-crispy pork cutlet, but I enjoy tempura falling apart in hot soup and eaten at the moment when it has taken on broth but maintains a hint of crispness. The ship has hit the iceberg, but it’s still momentarily afloat.

The way tempura is meant to be enjoyed, however, is at the counter of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant like Tenta in Nakano. Most tempura restaurants tip their hand via the name of the restaurant. The first character in “tempura” is
天
, usually pronounced “ten” and meaning “heavenly.” So tempura restaurants are usually called
ten-
this and
ten-
that. This is unnecessary, since you can smell the frying oil a block away. Good tempura restaurants use sesame oil, either alone or mixed with soybean oil, and it’s the best-smelling frying oil you can imagine. If I were married to a tempura chef, I would encourage her not to shower after work. Perhaps this is what Napoleon meant when he wrote Josephine, “
Ne te lave pas. J’arrive.
” (“Don’t wash. I’ll be home soon.”)

Tenta is not a destination restaurant. It’s a standard neighborhood tempura place, a dive, a bar with eight stools. You come in and order a beer or chūhai, peruse the menu, and tell the chef what you’d like him to fry. The chef at Tenta is a handsome young guy with a round face. He wears a black tenugui to catch the sweat while he works, just one of the many fashions I saw in Tokyo that I’d like to be able to pull off but, Laurie warns, I am the wrong ethnicity. Middle-aged white people enjoy many unfair advantages; the ability to rock brash urban fashion is not one of them.

The chef at Tenta is always smiling, even when he’s just been hit with orders for a dozen different types of tempura, many of which require prep work and unique cooking times. For example, one night I ordered
kisu
(a small whitefish, one of Iris’s favorites), green pepper, shiitake, shrimp, kabocha squash, and lotus root in rapid-fire succession. He didn’t flinch. Before he started cooking, he placed a plate in front of each of us and topped the plates with metal cooling racks so the underside of each piece of tempura would stay crispy. He pulled a length of daikon out of the fridge, grated it on a flat grater, and passed us each a bowl of freshly grated daikon to mix with seasoned soy sauce for dipping. We also had a small plate for gray sea salt.

Tempura chefs mix their batter on the fly. Our guy at Tenta dumped flour into a metal bowl directly from a bag printed with smiling tempura cartoon characters, indicating a low-gluten flour. He added tap water and stirred a few times with chopsticks. Tempura batter is weird stuff: it’s not only still lumpy, but it leaves cliffs of dry flour extending up the sides of the bowl. Overmixing is the enemy of good tempura, because it makes the coating tough and chewy, and a confident tempura chef finishes mixing the batter by dragging your shrimp or eggplant through it. By the time the food is cooked, you’d never guess that its crisp and even exterior came from a batter that looks like boarding school cafeteria oatmeal.

Before dipping anything, though, the chef flicks a few droplets of batter into the hot oil with his metal cooking chopsticks to test the oil temperature. Later, after plunging a shrimp into the oil, he’ll repeat the motion, flicking batter bits onto the frying food to produce what might be called crispy Klingons.

Iris’s favorite item at Tenta is
anago,
sea eel. Unlike its freshwater cousin
unagi,
anago is neither endangered nor expensive. A whole anago at Tenta is about $7.50. I ordered one, and the chef pulled a live eel out of a bucket. It wriggled like, well, an eel. Iris screamed as water droplets flew toward us. The chef managed to wrestle the unruly thing into the sink and knocked it unconscious before driving a spike into its head and filleting it. He unzipped two fillets in seconds. A Provençal saying holds that a fish lives in water and dies in oil; in the world of tempura, a fish can go from watery cradle to oily grave in ten seconds.

Iris loves fried eel meat, dipped in salt, but this is not her favorite part of the anago. After filleting the eel, the chef takes its backbone—
hone
in Japanese
—
ties it in a simple overhand knot, and tosses it into the frying oil. “Hone
,
” he says, presenting it to Iris, who considers it the ultimate in crispy snack food—and this is a kid who considers taco-flavored Doritos a work of genius (OK, so do I).

One night we ordered a
kakiage,
a silly and sublime fried tempura patty. The chef mixes shredded vegetables (carrots, daikon, burdock, onion, or whatever is on hand) and seafood with loose tempura batter in a small bowl and slides it into the oil. He makes it look easy, but I’m sure if I tried it, my patty would disintegrate and head off, cowering, to the four corners of the fryer. The kakiage is served solo or on a small bowl of rice, drizzled with tempura sauce, and it’s light enough to coax apart with chopsticks.

In the U.S., to have a personal relationship with a Japanese chef across the counter, you have to go for sushi. I enjoy sitting at a sushi bar, but there is always the whiff of haute cuisine in the air (or, if you pick the wrong sushi place, the whiff of something worse). You can visit an expensive, artisan tempura counter in Tokyo and order unusual and impeccable seafood, but come on: tempura is fried stuff. You drink frothy mugs of cheap beer and call for more food any time you like. Bacon-wrapped cherry tomatoes on a stick, tempura-fried? Sure, we had that. A bowl of dozens of whole baby sardines, called
shirasu?
Absolutely. (Iris claimed these for herself.) Why aren’t there tempura bars in every city in America?

Like tiny restaurants everywhere in the world, Tenta opens whenever the chef is good and ready. We learned not to plan to go there for dinner at our usual 6 p.m. One night we wandered by around 6:30 and were pleased to find the door open, but when we took our seats at the bar, no chef. There was another customer, however, smoking and reading a newspaper.

About fifteen minutes later, the chef walked in and gave a surprised yelp upon finding people in his restaurant. I assume he was asking himself why he left the door open.

Iris ordered her usual anago, looking forward to the fried backbone like a kid who orders a burger but is really all about the fries. The chef presented the knotted bone to her; she picked it up with her chopsticks and promptly dropped it on the floor. She had the stricken look of a kid who has just dropped her ice cream scoop but hasn’t started to cry yet:
the world sucks.
We all looked down at the eel bone and wondered what to do. “Give it here,” said the chef, in Japanese. I picked the bone up off the floor with my chopsticks and passed it to him. He rinsed it off in the sink, threw it back in the fryer, salted it, and set it on Iris’s cooling rack.

“
Hone,” he said, bowing.

In my neighborhood in Seattle,
I often eat at a Japanese restaurant called Hana. I usually order the beef and onion rice bowl (
gyūdon
) and a couple of pieces of mackerel sushi on the side. The menu also features tempura, udon, soba, salmon teriyaki, gyōza, and a daily bento box.

In Japan, this would be considered the equivalent of a too-many-cooks movie crammed with so many superstars that they didn’t bother writing a script. A restaurant with no specialty is a restaurant with no confidence, no guts. There is no Cheesecake Factory in Japan. (There are many restaurants specializing in guts, better known as
naizō ryōri
.)

Ultraspecialized restaurants are becoming popular in the U.S. in the form of food trucks. With a few exceptions like summer street fair fare and roasted sweet potato trucks and fishcake stew (
oden
) carts in winter, Japan doesn’t really do street food. Instead, they do tiny and otherwise one-track restaurants.

How specialized do restaurants get in Japan? Every weekday at lunchtime, people queue up on a side street just south of Ningyōchō Station, in an old Tokyo neighborhood. They’re waiting to get into Tamahide, a restaurant that (at lunchtime) serves one dish,
oyakodon.
Written with the characters for “parent” and “child,” oyakodon is a runny chicken omelet (get it?) served over rice. There are very few ingredients to this dish: chicken, egg, and rice, soy sauce, mirin, and sugar. There is no vegetarian version, no low-carb salad version, no side dishes other than a tiny dish of pickles perched atop the lid of your bowl. If you’re not in the mood for diced chicken meat, however, you can order the dish with chicken liver or ground chicken.

When you make it to the front of the line at Tamahide, you are relieved of your shoes and given a claim tag for them. When I was a kid, I hated wearing shoes more than anything, and I am still deeply skeptical of them. Every time a nice restaurant in Tokyo told me I
had
to take off my shoes, it was a nostalgic thrill.

Diners sit at low communal tables, the kind with the well underneath, not the kind designed to put foreigners’ legs to sleep. I joined a pair of middle-aged Japanese women visiting Tokyo and a young guy in summer business attire (white shirt, black slacks) who gave off an unmistakable “don’t bother me while I’m eating my chicken” vibe. He ordered the chicken liver bowl, wolfed it down, and dashed out. As in many restaurants, at Tamahide you order and pay at the front before sitting down and leave when you’re finished. Japanese restaurants, in general, have carefully eliminated the most stressful elements of eating in restaurants: deciding what to order from a lengthy menu, waiting for the check, tipping, grumpy waiters, oversized portions, wearing shoes (maybe that last one is just me).

A uniformed waitress set down my oyakodon. I took the lid off the red lacquer bowl and inhaled. You eat oyakodon with a spoon, not chopsticks, because eating runny egg and rice with chopsticks would be like a Mr. Bean gag. After the sulky businessman left, the two women and I tried some conversation. I said, “This oyakodon is delicious, isn’t it?” but I couldn’t understand their response. I told them I was from Seattle and tried to explain that I was in Tokyo for one month; instead, I said, “It’s January in Tokyo.”

The oyakadon
is
delicious. It’s perfectly representative of the subtler side of Japanese food, not the guts side. I dipped my spoon through the omelet and pulled up a scrag of egg, a cube of chicken, and a clump of rice. It was one of those predestined combinations, like shrimp and grits, rounded out perfectly by the hint of soy sauce.

I finished my rice bowl and pickles, said goodbye to my fellow tourists, and had an unwelcome reunion with my shoes in the foyer. Someday I'll come back to Tamahide for dinner, when the restaurant switches its one menu item from oyakodon to
Shamo sukiyaki,
a hot pot dish made with thinly sliced chicken.

Other than chicken and rice, you’ll find Tokyo restaurants specializing in fried pork cutlets, curry rice, ramen, udon, soba, gyōza, beef tongue, tempura, takoyaki, yakitori, Korean-style grilled beef, sushi, okonomiyaki, mixed rice dishes, fried chicken, and dozens of other dishes. Furthermore, even if you know something about Japanese food, it’s common to come across a restaurant whose menu or plastic food display indicates that it specializes in a particular food you’ve never seen before and can’t quite decipher.

Out of this tradition of single-purpose restaurants, Japan has created homegrown fast-food chains. McDonald’s and KFC exist in Tokyo but are outnumbered by Japanese chains like Yoshinoya (beef-and-rice bowl), CoCo Ichiban (curry rice), Hanamaru Udon, Gindaco (takoyaki), Lotteria (burgers), Tenya (tempura), Freshness Burger, Ringer Hut (Nagasaki-style noodles), and Mister Donut (pizza) (just kidding). Since the Japanese are generally slim and healthy and I don’t know how to read a Japanese newspaper, it was unclear to me whether Japan’s fast-food chains are blamed for every social ill, but it seems like it would be hard to pin a high suicide rate on Mister Donut.

Frankly, I couldn’t always figure out whether we were eating at a chain restaurant or not. We only realized our favorite yakitori restaurant, Akiyoshi, was a chain after I Googled it. I’m still not clear on the status of Tatsujin, a fried-chicken stand from which we often brought home takeout, nor do I care, because the chicken was so good. Japanese style fried chicken (
tori no karaage
) is somewhere between chicken nuggets and General Tso’s chicken: large chunks of boneless dark-meat chicken dredged in starch and double-fried for extra crispiness. Tatsujin makes several flavors of karaage, including original,
“reddo”
(spicy), and these rather disturbing chicken balls called “Juicies,” which only Iris liked. A Juicy is a near-perfect fried sphere somehow composed of recognizable slices of oddly juicy chicken meat. If you’ve ever worried about what might be lurking in your chopped-and-formed chicken nuggets, the alternative may be worse.

To me, the quintessential Japanese chain is MOS Burger. My friend Rob Ketcherside, who lived in Nakano for years before returning to Seattle, is also a fan. “Visitors to Japan always make a big deal about McDonald’s teriyaki burgers,” said Rob, “but those are a shallow response to what MOS Burger offers.” Indeed. MOS Burger serves something resembling a regular hamburger, but it is far beside the point. On one visit to MOS, for example, Iris ordered a Yakiniku Rice Burger, with slices of Korean-style grilled beef between two toasted rice patties acting as a bun. My burger had a regular bun, but the patty was a crispy tonkatsu fillet topped with its usual tomatoey brown sauce. After I finished it, I was still hungry, so I ordered my own rice burger, a vegetarian one filled with
kinpira gobō
, shredded burdock root simmered with soy sauce, mirin, and chiles. Beat that, McDonald’s.

Next to the cash register at MOS, I noticed an ad for a new special menu item, only for a limited time: naan tacos. Yes, that would be Indian-style flatbread wrapped around Mexican-style fillings, presumably with a Japanese spin inside and out. I suspect the limited time offer has elapsed by now.