Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (2 page)

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 few 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.

To have tea at Uogashi, you buy a ticket on the ground floor for either the second floor
sencha
cafe or the third floor matcha cafe. I bought a 700-yen ticket for the matcha cafe, and the woman at the counter warned me, “It’s kind of...outside.” No problem, I said: I brought my hat. It was not that kind of outside. It was a claustrophobic covered roof garden with a couple of modern sculptures that, on another day, I might have been moved to gaze at contemplatively. A fan hummed loudly but produced no ventilation.

The host asked if I wanted matcha or
kakigōri
. Kakigōri is flavored shave ice, a Japanese snow cone. I reasoned, stupidly, that I had not come all the way to Ginza to eat a snow cone, so I asked for matcha. As soon as I’d put in my order, the host started serving kakigōri to everyone else in the cafe, huge mounds of delicate shave ice topped with freshly whipped matcha, which patrons spooned up with evident delight. I tried to remember the Japanese word for “to change one’s mind” and came up empty-headed. It was too late, anyway: the host brought me a cup of
koicha,
thick matcha, thicker than motor oil but much tastier. Only very good matcha can be used to make koicha; lesser tea will whip up chalky and bitter. I cradled my rustic tea bowl in two hands and tried to ignore the crunch of kakigōri on all sides.

It took me about three slurps to finish the koicha, leaving the tea bowl coated with an emerald film. The hostess traded my empty bowl for a perfect yuzu macaron and then asked me the most wonderful question: next up would be thin matcha (
usucha
), and did I want it hot or iced?

“
Aisu,
” I panted. The ice cubes in my cold matcha seemed to have been selected for artistic merit, a large central iceberg surrounded by four little shards, like a family of seals. I downed it quickly and thereby staved off heatstroke.

So what does matcha taste like, if you’ve never had it? It’s commonly described as tasting “green,” which is true, albeit begging the question. Good matcha is naturally very sweet, a plant sweetness quite unlike bad matcha sweetened with sugar, which is common in shelf-stable convenience store drinks and at coffee places. When you’re drinking matcha, even high quality stuff, you can rub your tongue against the roof of your mouth and feel that it was whipped up from a powder. If you like the scent of newly mown grass, you would probably enjoy matcha. It’s not much like brewed green tea at all.

Brewed tea is what you get on the
second
floor of Uogashi Meicha. On another day, I took my seat in that second-floor sencha cafe, and the other customers broke out into unrestrained giggles. What a convivial assembly tea engenders! Actually, I had parked my butt on the table, rather than the seat. This is a no-no, according to local customs. I moved aside to make room for a cup of gyokuro. Like matcha, gyokuro leaves are grown under shade for a couple of weeks before being harvested, and this makes the plant go crazy, producing barrels of chlorophyll to trap what little sun makes it through the gauzy canopy. This produces a vivid color and unusually intense flavor. Also unusually intense price tags. Gyokuro is brewed at a very low temperature for tea (140°F) and served in a tiny teacup.

I was just raising the gyokuro cup to my lips and hoping not to violate any more social norms when someone asked, “Do you like Japanese tea?” It was a young man sitting with a young woman just next to me. (Sitting on the seats, I should add.) They introduced themselves as Akira and Emi. They wanted to practice their English. I wanted to practice Japanese. I handed Akira my business card and he accepted it with two hands and looked it over carefully, exactly as described in every cultural guide for business travelers to Japan. The book added that it’s considered extremely rude to fold or otherwise mistreat someone’s business card.

Presumably this also means you’re not supposed to laugh at someone’s business card, but mine is ridiculous and incomprehensible, even to native English speakers, because it features the name of my blog (
Roots and Grubs
) and a quote from Iris that seemed really funny at the time. The more I tried to explain, the more we all laughed. Probably I should order some new business cards with a recognizable job title on them, but that would involve getting a job.

Like most young children, Iris is capable of making friends instantly.
You’re approximately four feet tall? Great, let’s hang out.
One of the great things about traveling to a foreign place (and I realize every traveler before me has observed this) is that it allows adults to make friends in the same way children do. When I meet a new person on my home turf, it’s as if we’re actively looking for reasons to dislike each other.
Sure, we can be friends, as long as you’re not guilty of anything on my endless list of pet peeves.
I’m the
worst
about this. Is this starting to sound like a voiceover from
Sex and the City
yet?

In Tokyo, however, there was just no way for me to be overly judgmental. Akira and Emi and I all liked tea and foreign language practice and making fun of the guy who just put his ass on the tabletop. Lifelong friendships have been forged on a flimsier basis. We finished our tea and planned to meet again. I escaped the tea cafe without committing any other faux pas and ran home (well, took the Marunouchi line) to tell Laurie and Iris that I’d made some new friends. A couple of days later I got an email from Akira inviting me to meet him in Ueno for dinner.

In his book
Wrong About Japan,
Peter Carey takes his teenage son to Tokyo for a trip focused on anime and manga. For some reason—perhaps because writing about a brief family vacation didn’t seem like sufficient material for a book—Carey gave his son an imaginary friend named Takashi, who popped up in every scene as needed and participated in every adventure, offering wise commentary.

Takashi seemed less fake after meeting Akira and Emi. Laurie, Iris, and I spent the kind of afternoons with them that could be edited into a hackneyed getting-to-know-you montage: strolling in the park, paddling in swan boats, eating ice cream, shopping in Ginza. Maybe we met the two nicest people in Tokyo. Or, as I always say: what a convivial assembly tea engenders.

Since we returned from our
trip, Iris has been telling everyone we know to visit Tokyo. “And you
have
to go to Nakano,” she adds. At this, Laurie and I share a knowing glance. Iris is right that Nakano is lively, welcoming to visitors and children, overstuffed with great inexpensive food, and minutes from central Tokyo. There is also practically no reason for a tourist to go to Nakano, because all of these qualities apply to dozens if not hundreds of other neighborhoods.

The western suburbs of Tokyo stretch endlessly along the Chūō train line until they reach the slopes of Mount Takao, more than thirty miles from central Tokyo. Nakano, one stop from Shinjuku on the rapid train, is an inner suburb, and that’s where we rented our tiny apartment.

Nakano is full of great, cheap restaurants, both chains and independents. The ubiquity of great food in Tokyo is beyond imagination. It’s not just that I’m interested in food and pay close attention to restaurants and takeout shops, although that’s true. In Tokyo, great food really is in your face, all the time: sushi, yakitori, Korean barbecue, eel, tempura,
tonkatsu
, bento shops, delis, burgers (Western and Japanese-style), the Japanese take on Western food called
yōshoku,
and, most of all, noodles. I found this cheap everyday food—lovingly called
B-kyū
(“B-grade”) by its fans—so satisfying and so easy on the wallet that I rarely ventured into anything you might call a nice restaurant.

World-class foreign food exists in Tokyo, but you’re not going to just stumble into it. In Nakano, we saw a pizza place, a Thai restaurant, an Indian restaurant, a juice bar called Kale Juice Shop, and a few Chinese restaurants. It was nothing like the profusion of international food you’d find in any neighborhood in New York. If you love Japanese food, you’re going to love Tokyo.

We live in a good food neighborhood in Seattle called Capitol Hill, but compared to Nakano, it’s a food desert like you hear about on NPR. I blew a whole hour theorizing about what aspect of the Japanese or American character could explain the difference before realizing that it’s just a numbers game. Nakano and Capitol Hill are almost exactly the same size in land area. But Nakano has
eight times the population.
That means a lot of hungry mouths. I enjoy sharing this statistic with my Seattle NIMBY neighbors who grumble about how our neighborhood has too many people already. Nakano doesn’t feel overcrowded; it feels
alive.

If a Tokyoite knows anything about Nakano, it’s likely to be Nakano Broadway, a shopping mall with several floors devoted to Japanese comics (manga) and animation (anime). It is geek central. I found most of it incomprehensible, but I did enjoy browsing at Junkworld, which sells useful electronic discards, like old working digital cameras for $5 and assorted connectors and dongles and sound cards. In the 1980s, when William Gibson was padding around the streets of Tokyo and inventing the world of
Neuromancer,
Japan was the place where the future had already arrived, where you could find electronic toys that wouldn’t hit American shelves for years, if ever. For a variety of reasons (blogs and online shopping, advances in international shipping, the fact that the coolest mobile phones are now designed in Silicon Valley and Seoul), this is no longer true. While it’s still fun to go to Akihabara at night and shop all seven floors of a neon-lit electronics superstore, you won’t bring home any objects of nerdy wet dreams.

Two areas where Japanese consumer electronics are still the undisputed world champs are cameras and toilets. I mean, not combined into the same device, as far as I know. But I do find it odd that the U.S., which devotes so much GDP to personal comfort, has really boring toilets. We sat on toilets with heated seats; toilets with a hand-washing sink on top of the tank that goes on automatically upon flushing; toilets with spray nozzles pointed in assorted directions. “Who would use the bidet function in a public bathroom?” asked Laurie rhetorically. I shuffled my feet and said nothing.

Americans have a curious relationship with housing. We like our houses the way we like our action movie stars: big, well-dressed, and approachable. We like wall-to-wall carpeting and master bedroom suites, three-car garages and double-sink bathrooms.

A Tokyo apartment is unlike the Better Homes and Gardens image of the good life in the same way a gecko is unlike a
T. rex
.

Tokyo apartment listings don’t use the “2 bedroom/1 bath” terminology common in the United States, because bedrooms are converted to living rooms during the day and evening. It would be crazy to waste a whole room by using it only for sleeping. Our second-floor apartment in Nakano was a
1DK
: 1 room plus dining room and kitchen. (The kitchen and dining room are, of course, really just one room.)

A typical family of three in Tokyo isn’t crammed into such a small space, although some certainly are. As of the 2008 census, the average household in Tokyo had 2.2 members and about 300 square feet per person. Our entire apartment was 260 square feet.

Americans who move out of their parents’ house and into a college dorm love every filthy square foot of the place and then, once they graduate, leave the small-space life behind as soon as they can (with perhaps a wistful copy of
The Not So Big House
on the coffee table). I’ve always prided myself on being a small-space guy and kept using the term “McMansion” long after every other intolerable hipster stopped saying it, but after we reserved the apartment in Nakano, I had a total freakout:
Oh, shit. This apartment is 260 square feet. We are going to kill and eat each other, sashimi-style, by week two. This trip was a stupid, stupid idea. Hmm, if someone has to be eaten as sashimi, maybe at least we can serve them with fresh wasabi.

Naturally, life in the apartment turned out to be downright relaxing.

At the entrance to our apartment is the
genkan,
where you remove your shoes. The genkan is just a tiny square of floor with a single step up to the kitchen to mark the beginning of the no-shoes area. There’s a shoe cabinet in the genkan, and Iris often needled me for putting my shoes in the same drawer as hers, because of shoe cooties. I wonder whether anyone has spent time in Japan and returned to the West without internalizing the belief that the soles of shoes accumulate every sort of ill, physical and spiritual, and that you’d no more wear shoes into a person’s house than piss on their rug.

Many houses and apartments in Japan feature one or more tatami rooms. Ours did not, but I’d like to say a few words about tatami anyway, because they are cool. Tatami are rectangular straw mats used as flooring. You’ve probably seen them at a Japanese restaurant. If your room has tatami flooring, you roll out your futon in the evening and go to sleep, then fold up the futon and put it away in a closet during the day. You hang your futon regularly from the balcony railing to air out using a special clip designed for this purpose.

Yes, every apartment in Tokyo has a balcony. Without one, where would you hang your clothes to dry? You certainly don’t have a clothes dryer, which are almost unheard of in Tokyo. Our washing machine, a small top-loading model, sat on the balcony and sprayed rinse water directly out the back of the machine, where it cascaded across the ledge, into a drainpipe, and onto the ground. We were worried that a hose wasn’t hooked up until we looked across and saw our neighbor’s washer doing the same thing.

Every night, we put down the sofa bed, laid out Iris’s futon, and hauled the coffee table into the kitchen. In the morning, we reversed the process. That coffee table and its movers got quite a workout.

The living room was air-conditioned, well lit, and great for snacking, for watching sumo on TV, for lazing around, and for reading the Japan Times (one of the English-language newspapers). I enjoyed the Japan Times very much, especially the TV listings. “Items presented for evaluation include...a piece of pottery linked to the Shimazu fief of Kagoshima,” went the teaser for a program called
Family Treasure Appraisers.
Actually, I know just as much about the Shimazu fief of Kagoshima as I do about anything the appraisers talk about on
Antiques Roadshow
(i.e., zilch).

At night, we stretched out on our futon and converted sofa, and as Iris wavered on the edge of sleep, she’d entertain us by trying to make us guess which words she was surrounding with air quotes in the darkness. This is not as hard as it sounds.

In the wet, hot depths of a Japanese summer even the slightly built, lightly clad Japanese suffer. It is a period that has to be endured. Summer is the most demoralizing season in Japan. The best thing to do, if one can, is simply to sit still in a matted room, clay-walled, with the shōji slid open on the shady side of a small, water-rilled stone garden sprited with green bamboos, and to do nothing.

—James Kirkup,
Japan Behind the Fan

Shortly before the trip, I had tea with my friend Tara Austen Weaver, who lived in Japan for years. I was excited about having my own miniature Japanese kitchen and asked her what seasonal delights she would cook up if she were living in Japan in the summer.

“Nothing,” she replied without hesitation.

James Kirkup and Tara Weaver are right: July weather in Japan is odious. Kirkup, however, was writing in the 1960s, and Tara lived in a rural area with few modern conveniences. For Kirkup’s clay-walled room, I would substitute an air-conditioned apartment or perhaps the second floor of the Starbucks on Nakano-dōri. It’s disappointing that Japan has not yet invented a supercooled summer jumpsuit, but it’s only a matter of time. It could be lined with slender ice packs and stored in the freezer.

As for the cooking, well, I admit it: weather and the ubiquity of great, cheap restaurants sidelined my grand plans to cook my way through the Japanese repertoire. As the saying goes, why buy the octopus when you can get the takoyaki for free?

Still, it was a nice little kitchen, a strip along the wall of the dining room. To the left of the sink was a stack of appliances: refrigerator, microwave, toaster oven. Printed on the front of the microwave was a quick guide to heating times for the four items you’re most likely to heat up: rice, sake, milk, and bento boxes.

Nearly every family in Japan has a version of the same stove, two gas burners and a fish grill. A more luxurious model might have three or four burners, but for a small apartment, two is plenty. Before the advent of the gas stove, the Japanese home had a
kamado,
an imposing charcoal-fueled stove with cooking vessels sunk into a rangetop, each topped with a wooden lid sporting fin-like handles. The kamado has been reborn in the form of the Big Green Egg and similar ceramic barbecue devices. The Big Green Egg has a big green advantage over the classic kamado:
you’re not burning charcoal inside your house.

But back to the modern stove. A few years ago, the New York Times caused a minor stir by publishing a photo of columnist Mark Bittman cooking at home. Bittman is the bestselling author of many enormous cookbooks (
How to Cook Everything, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman Forgot More Recipes Than You Ever Knew,
etc.), and his home kitchen is a classic Manhattan apartment afterthought.

“People like to cook when they’re camping and in other places where the situation is less than adequate,” Bittman said at the time. “For some reason they think they have to have a great kitchen to cook at home, but it’s not true.”

So far Bittman and the average Japanese home cook are on the same page. But then he added, “One of the things I hate about my stove is you can’t put four pots on it at the same time, so you cook with two pots and use the oven more.”

Boohoo! The only oven in a Japanese kitchen is a toaster oven. If you want something baked or roasted, you buy it at a shop.

The fish grill is a clever little device. When I was a kid, I hung out with a friend who had a weird uncle. Not sleazy weird, just eccentric. The most obvious mark of his eccentricity, aside from his seventies mustache, was that he liked to cook his dinner in the broiler at the bottom of the gas range. He’d be on the floor, opening the little drawer and peering at his piece of meat or whatever. I don’t think I saw a broiler drawer between 1990 and 2012, but the Japanese fish grill is the same thing in miniature: a drip pan with a metal grate on top, which you slide under a gas flame.

Several people in Tokyo told me they never use their fish grill, as if the reason for this would be evident, but I found that it worked great, especially for juicy, hard-to-overcook fish like mackerel, the most common (and cheapest) fish in Japanese supermarkets. I’d lean over and slide the drawer out to check on my fish, just like the weird uncle. My mustache is more groomed, but not by much.

Later, I discovered the problem with the fish grill, in three steps:

1. Present your family with succulent grilled fish. (Did I mention that, for some reason, broiling is always known as “grilling” in Japan?)
   
2. Slide the fish grill shut so that no one takes a blow to the kidney while walking through the kitchen.
   
3. Three days later, open the fish grill and scream. Surprise! Rancid, congealed fish grease.
   

Japanese cuisine has a small footprint. Home cooks have been preparing it in tiny kitchens for generations. Some of the best parts of a Japanese meal, such as the pickles, just sit around waiting to be eaten. The same goes for rice: everyone has a rice cooker, and at any time of day it tends to be on the
keep warm
setting, full of cooked rice. While the two burners of the stove are occupied, the rice cooker sits quietly in the corner and treats your rice with the proper respect.

For my first home-cooked meal in Tokyo, I took an assortment of beautiful Japanese ingredients and did what came naturally: I made Chinese food. I stir-fried some beautifully marbled
kurobuta
(Berkshire breed) pork with bok choy, ginger, and leeks
,
sauced it with soy sauce, mirin, and vinegar, and served it over rice, sprinkled with
shichimi tōgarashi
seven-spice mixture. This seemed like a reasonable act of Japanese-Chinese fusion. I made some quick-pickled cucumbers on the side. This was before we discovered that anything you do to a Japanese cucumber diminishes it. I should have known this; once I interviewed a Japanese-American farmer who grows more than a hundred Asian vegetables in Washington state. Naturally, I asked him about his personal favorite. Cucumber, he said.