Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo Read online

  PRETTY GOOD

  NUMBER ONE

  An American Family

  Eats Tokyo

  Matthew Amster-Burton

  Copyright © 2013, 2014 by Matthew Amster-Burton

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 978-0-9831629-9-5 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-4841269-8-1 (pbk., 1 ed.)

  ISBN 978-1-4959748-8-5 (pbk., 2 ed.)

  Version 2.0.8, 12 September 2014

  Cover by CL Smith

  prettygoodnumberone.com

  To Iris

  Contents

  目次

  On Japanese Words

  Introduction

  Tea

  West Side Living

  Ramen

  The World’s Greatest Supermarket

  Japanese Breakfast

  Tofu

  Just an American Girl in the Tokyo Streets

  Crush Hour

  Yakitori

  Cozy Town

  Tempura

  Chains of Love

  Udon and Soba

  Katakana Accent

  Sushi

  Steakhouse vs. Porkhouse

  Hot Pots

  Bathtime

  Dumplings

  Okonomiyaki

  Izakaya Nights

  The Takoyaki Chronicles

  Just an American Girl Eating Tokyo Sweets

  Eel

  On the River

  Reentry

  Afterword: Kentucky Christmas

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  On Japanese Words

  日本語

  This book contains Japanese words. Some are written in Japanese characters, but most are written in roman characters for the benefit of English speakers. If you don’t see any Japanese characters on this page (they might show up as empty boxes or question marks), try setting your reader to Publisher’s Defaults mode.

  Japanese pronunciation is not terribly difficult for English speakers, but there are a couple of rules to keep in mind. An e at the end of a word is never silent, and is pronounced approximately like “eh” as in “bed.” The restaurant Tamahide is pronounced “ta-ma-hee-deh.” And g’s are always hard as in “goat,” not soft as in “gentle.”

  Introduction

  序論

  That first fleeting taste of Japan felt like the answer to some unspoken question.

  —Pico Iyer

  The directions to our apartment begin like this:

  Go out the north exit of Nakano Station and into the Sun Mall shopping arcade. After a few steps, you’ll see Gindaco, the takoyaki (octopus balls) chain. Turn right into Pretty Good #1 Alley. Walk past the deli that specializes in okowa (steamed sticky rice with tasty bits), a couple of ramen shops, and a fugu restaurant. Go past the pachinko parlor, the grilled eel stand, the camera shops, and the stairs leading to Ginza Renoir coffee shop. If you see the bicycle parking lot in front of Life Supermarket, you’re going the right way.

  During this two-block walk through a typical neighborhood, you’ve passed more good food than in most midsized Western cities, even if you don’t love octopus balls as much as I do.

  Welcome to Tokyo.

  Tokyo is unreal. It’s the amped-up, neon-spewing cybercity of literature and film. It’s an alley teeming with fragrant grilled chicken shops. It’s children playing safely in the street and riding the train across town with no parents in sight. It’s a doughnut chain with higher standards of customer service than most high-end restaurants in America. A colossal megacity devoid of crime, grime, and bad food? Sounds more like a utopian novel than an earthly metropolis.

  But Tokyo is real, and it is so unlikely, even up close, that it is magic. I hate it when people toss around words like “magic,” but I spent a month in Tokyo in July 2012 in a tiny apartment with my wife, Laurie, and our eight-year-old daughter, Iris, and calling the experience anything other than magical would be dishonest.

  Tokyo is not a beautiful place, but it metes out its charms with almost scientific regularity. Every time one of us went for a walk, we came back with exciting news: a peculiar old building, a funny sign, a family of cats, a new kind of yogurt-flavored candy. Yes, Iris went out often for unaccompanied walks; to my knowledge, she was never forced to join the yakuza, although she occasionally came back with a suspicious tattoo.

  Good food is so easy to find in Tokyo that the city itself seems like a restaurant. In over a month, we had one meal that I found disappointing, and it wasn’t actually bad, just bland. We also had meals, many of them at quirky, inexpensive neighborhood restaurants, that were so great that thinking about them buries the needle on my nostalgia meter. Tokyo provokes a sentimental homesickness in me that I’ve never felt about any other place. It’s embarrassing, and I like it.

  The Tokyo train map looks like a bowl of DayGlo ramen, but we felt like experts within days. Our apartment was one stop away from Shinjuku Station, the world’s busiest train station. Sounds like hell, doesn’t it? Well, Shinjuku is nice. Sure, it’s teeming with the purposeful strides of people trying to get somewhere else, but finding your train is easy, and getting carried along in the flood of commuters is the urban equivalent of inner tubing on a lazy river.

  In short, Tokyo is the opposite of the DMV: it’s the least annoying place I’ve ever been.

  Despite these charms, there is a strange lack of swooning travel memoirs about Tokyo. If Westerners think of Tokyo at all, it’s as the capital of a nation struggling to right itself after years of economic stagnation capped by a devastating earthquake and nuclear disaster. Even before the Tōhoku quake, however, Tokyo was a slightly off-the-map tourist destination. How many Tokyo tourist attractions can you name offhand? I’m going to guess zero. If you said Ginza or the Imperial Palace, put down your Lonely Planet and quit cheating.

  But think about Paris for a moment: its warrens of narrow streets, perfect for strolling and getting happily lost; its modern transportation system; its museums and monuments; its world-class shopping; and above all its food and drink, irresistible from breakfast to dinner, from Michelin-starred palaces to hole-in-the-wall crepe shops.

  Tokyo has all of the above, including more Michelin stars than Paris. And there’s no shortage of Tokyo guidebooks and blogs, plus books by Westerners who go to Kyoto (never Tokyo) to find themselves. But the city is missing the English-language books that catapult Paris into the imagination of every romantic. This book is my small attempt to fill that gap.

  My friend Becky likes to talk about Vacation Head, a common traveler’s malady that causes a person to fall madly in love with a destination and overlook all its faults. My relationship with Tokyo developed under a scorching case of Vacation Head. There is no dark underbelly to be found here (just lots of pork belly), but I think mine is a perfectly valid perspective. For one thing, nothing is stopping you from having your own torrid and shallow affair with Tokyo. For another, I’ve suffered many attacks of Vacation Head, but this one made every prior case feel like a bad one-night stand. Something is different about Tokyo.

  Iris was born in 2003, and by the time she was two, it was clear that we had two things in common: a fondness for naps and an appreciation for sushi and other Japanese food, which Laurie did not share. I was a stay-at-home dad with a kid who demanded endless made-up stories, so one day, instead of continuing her favorite epic tale of talking dogs, I told her about a place called Tokyo. I’d never been there and knew little about it other than that it was probably a good place to find some of our favorite foods. Maybe some day we could go there together, just the two of us. In other words, we formed a conspiracy.


  We talked about it nearly every day on the way to preschool in the morning. Preschool was ten blocks away, and Iris was so small at first that I pushed her there in the stroller, and we would talk about going to an amusement park and eating conveyor belt sushi and Beard Papa cream puffs. My dad liked to ask Iris, “What are you going to do in Japan?” and then laugh when she said, “Go to an amusement park and eat cream puffs.”

  In my book Hungry Monkey, which I wrote when Iris was four, I revealed that we were planning the trip:

  Iris and I will eat at a skeezy yakitori joint and enjoy char-grilled chicken parts on a stick. We’ll go to an eel restaurant and eat several courses of eel, my favorite fish. Iris’s favorite is mackerel, so we’ll also eat plenty of salt-broiled mackerel, saba no shioyaki, tearing off fatty bits with our chopsticks. We will eat our weight in rice...we’ll have breakfast at Tsukiji, the world’s largest fish market. And we’ll eat plenty of sushi from a conveyor belt.

  We set aside a hundred bucks each month into a savings account, and eventually the trip started to change from something to talk about on the way to school into something that could actually happen. Then, when Iris was six, we did it, just the two of us: we spent six days in Japan.

  We never went to the cream puff place. We didn’t eat any conveyor belt sushi or salt-broiled mackerel. We didn’t go to an eel restaurant or eat breakfast at the fish market. We did go to a skeezy yakitori place, however, which is where Iris discovered bonjiri, chicken tail, the fattiest, juiciest bit of the chicken, and the best to grill on a stick and brush with sweetened soy sauce.

  In short, we barely did any of the things we originally planned to do, and it was the best vacation ever. Japan is absurdly welcoming and easy to navigate. Having a six-year-old along turned out to be an asset; Iris made a good ambassador, and the trip was delightfully free of the miscommunications that tend to crop up between otherwise amiable adults under the stress of travel.

  Something about Tokyo’s exuberant modernism made Iris and me feel like the city existed just to make us happy: Cheer up! the waving maneki-neko cats seemed to whisper. You’re in Tokyo!

  Iris and I came back with a list of Tokyo attractions we never made it to on our first trip, a list about a month long. And we started to drive Laurie insane by breaking into misty-eyed reminiscences about our cherry blossom days in Japan.

  “Fine,” said Laurie. “If Tokyo is so great, let’s all get an apartment there and stay for a month.” Probably she was thinking:

  “This idea is so obviously unaffordable that Matthew, the notorious cheapskate, will dismiss it immediately.”

  “Let’s see how much they like Japan after spending a month in a tiny apartment living like newly landed immigrants.”

  Challenge accepted!

  One other guy accompanied us that summer. I apologize, because I kind of wish I could get rid of him, but he’s proved hard to shake, like a case of mono.

  His name is Shiro Yamaoka, and he is my literary alter ego. Shiro is a rat of an imaginary friend. He’s a self-centered, lazy, know-it-all with unkempt hair.

  Yamaoka is the hero of Oishinbo, a long-running manga comic series focused on Japanese cuisine. He’s a daily newspaper reporter who’d rather sleep at his desk and daydream about fried gyoza than write articles. When the paper puts him in charge of the Ultimate Menu project, collecting essential dishes from the four corners of Japan, Shiro finds his calling, not to mention some office romance with fellow reporter Yuko Kurita. Kurita is Yamaoka’s intellectual equal, his superior in social skills, and super foxy. I know someone like that.

  Now, having said all this, Oishinbo is easy to criticize. The characters are thinner than washi paper, and the plots are absurd. Yamaoka is constantly dragging his entire office off to East Bumfuck, Japan, to learn about taro roots or whatever. He works out his daddy issues by challenging his estranged father, Kaibara Yūzan, to a series of Iron Chef–style culinary battles.

  But you know what? I’m also a one-dimensional character. Probably this is a guy thing, but I’ve never had a complicated inner life. Shiro Yamaoka cares about good food and is intolerant of bad food, but he’s also distrustful of anything with a gourmet pedigree. He is probably a good writer but takes the rest of the week off if he writes two whole articles. One reason he’s drawn to the world of food is because he finds flavor and texture a lot easier to understand than human behavior. If Yamaoka wrote a book, he wouldn’t think twice about spending pages haranguing people to read his favorite comic.

  Every character in Oishinbo is oddly obsessed with food. I’d assumed this was a literary device, but now I know otherwise. Everyone in Oishinbo is obsessed with food because they live in Tokyo, where great food is omnipresent and impossible to ignore.

  And to drink? Japan makes great beer, coffee, sake, and liquor, but let’s begin the way I start every day, in Tokyo or elsewhere, with a cup of green tea.

  Tea

  お茶

  Most airlines serving Asia highlight their standard of service, the comeliness of their flight attendants, or the culturally informed punctuality of their flights. But we chose an American airline that flies nonstop from Seattle to Tokyo and neither promises nor delivers anything special.

  Even so, there is a tiny welcome-to-Japan moment on any flight to Japan when the flight attendant offers you a choice of “coffee or ocha.” The latter is green tea, and it is doubly comforting when offered by a flight attendant with a hint of a Texas twang.

  Japanese tea is weird. Laurie, who drinks English-style black tea with milk, absolutely hates it. My mother thinks the tea leaves smell like spinach, and I can’t deny it. In most tea-drinking countries, the leaves are processed so that their origin as the green leaves of a plant is disguised. This is true even of Chinese green tea, which is wonderful in its own way but which always has a hint of smoky barbecue to it because the leaves are dried briefly over a fire.

  In Japan, on the other hand, the greener the leaves the better. “Vegetal,” a word which is never used as a compliment outside a mulch pile, is an apt descriptor for Japanese tea. Some Japanese teas are so green they look like FD&C dye was involved, and some have the texture of rich chicken stock and thousands of tiny green leaf flecks swirling in the cup. (Really, tea fans get excited about these qualities.)

  And only Japan makes matcha, which is nothing more than high quality tea leaves, ground into powder and whipped up with hot water like a smoothie.

  If the average person knows anything about Japanese tea, it’s that it figures in a tea ceremony that visitors to Japan pretend to enjoy while sitting for hours with their legs in a position conducive to deep-vein thrombosis. Honestly, I’m not going to defend the tea ceremony, but Japanese tea is a ceremony in a cup. It is only ever itself: it’s not easy to like, and you can’t ease into it by hiding its flavor behind sweet or floral or fruity additives. Sure, these combinations exist, but they’re terrible gateway drugs: a matcha latte drinker is still going to find pure matcha challenging. Like Edo-period Japan, Japanese tea walls itself off against foreign influences.

  Predictably, perhaps, I’ve gravitated toward the form of Japanese tea with the funniest name: fukamushi sencha. All Japanese tea is steamed before drying; fukamushi is steamed a little longer. This makes for spindly little leaves, like pine needles ground underfoot, and a thick, rich, cloudy cup of tea. I can sense Laurie cringing already.

  But I’m not picky: any Japanese tea will do, which is kind of like saying “any caviar will do.” Japanese tea is virtually unknown in the United States. Starbucks doesn’t serve it, except for an occasional sighting of matcha Frappuccinos in the summer. No major brand (not Stash, not Lipton, not Celestial Seasonings) sells it in bags. I buy it online from o-cha.com; in teabags for travel from Seattle’s Uwajimaya supermarket; and hot, every morning, from my neighborhood tea cafe, Remedy Teas. Of all the snobby things I do—and it’s not a short list—carrying teabags is among the worst. I can’t help it. It’s not just the caffeine: after a fe
w days without a sip of Japanese tea, I start to think about it all the time.

  So when I’m presented with a cup of ocha on the flight to Tokyo, it’s an auspicious gesture, because in Japan, everyone drinks green tea all the time. Restaurants serve a bottomless free cup with meals. Hotel rooms provide an electric kettle and teabags. Tea shops sell a variety of types in beautiful 100-gram packets; you can spot a tea shop in Tokyo by looking for a giant green plastic ice cream cone advertising matcha soft-serve.

  In 2010, I dragged Iris to a town called Uji because I wanted to go to a particular tea shop founded in 1160. Uji turned out to be a sleepy town devoted to temples and green tea and little else. We went to the tea shop and received free samples of gyokuro, the fanciest kind of brewed tea in Japan. Iris accepted her cup and managed to communicate, in one horrified look, I know that good manners require me to take this cup, and if you tell me I have to drink it, too, I will literally die right here in this tea shop. I drank her cup and mine, and it was great, and then we got lost and hungry trying to get back to the train station. Two years later, if I say the word “Uji,” Iris glares like I’m talking about detention.

  So in 2012, I went out for tea by myself, in Ginza. As you approach exit 7 from Ginza Station, the floors, walls, and ceiling transition from concrete and subway tile to sleek black stone. That’s because exit 7 is also the entrance to an Armani store.

  I was not, you will be shocked to learn, on my way to Armani; I was headed to Uogashi Meicha, a merely 75-year-old tea shop also known as Cha Ginza. Uogashi is fancy, but not Armani fancy. Wedged into three stories of a slim building on a Ginza side street, Uogashi is the perfect place for an introduction to Japanese tea and is one of my favorite places in Tokyo.