Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (3 page)

“How do you prepare it?” I asked.

“Slice and eat.”

The whole meal was about the same as something I’d make at home, but I cooked it in Japan. It was like the SpongeBob SquarePants episode where SpongeBob has to work the night shift at the Krusty Krab, and he keeps saying things like, “I’m chopping lettuce...at night!” I was slicing cucumbers...in Tokyo!

When we moved in, our landlord, Mac, handed us an official four-page color guide explaining how to sort our garbage. “Even Japanese people have trouble,” he said. “Hang in there.” He flashed the thumbs-up. Then he walked off into the Nakano sun, leaving us alone with this document; it was like being a new parent all over again.

I’d heard people complain about the byzantine rules of Tokyo garbage and recycling, but honestly, I had no idea. In Seattle, we sort our discards into three categories: recycling, compost, and other. The first two categories go on to theoretically productive reuse, and those unredeemables in the last category go to the landfill. I’ve grumbled about Seattle trash policy in the past; I will never do so again.

In Tokyo, there are five main categories of trash, with multiple subcategories and exceptions. Each category is collected only on certain days. The apartment manager puts out the proper cans on the proper days, and if you don’t take the stuff out in time, it’s like missing a ferry, only smellier.

The catchall category is Combustible waste, meaning stuff that should go to the incinerator: food scraps, nonrecyclable plastic, diapers, small yard waste (“pruned brunches,” according to the guide). The existence of this category led to many iterations of the following conversation:

Matthew:
Is this Combustible?

Laurie:
No, I think it’s Plastic.

Matthew:
Everything is combustible if you get it hot enough. That’s just physics.

Plastic is not just any plastic. It has to be recyclable and clean without food stains. It is your responsibility as a citizen to make a good-faith effort to wash food residues (say, takoyaki grease) off the plastic before putting it in the Plastic bin. It took me a couple of weeks to realize that there’s a Plastic recycling symbol. It looks like the first two syllables of “purasuchikku” written in katakana. You’re welcome.

Oh, but wait. Not all plastic is Plastic.
PET
bottles go in a separate bin and are collected on a separate day. Summer in Tokyo is high season for drink vending machines, which are so common it’s as if they’re following you. Don’t tell any of our environmentally sensitive friends in Seattle, but we probably went through 250
PET
bottles over the course of the month. There’s more than one way to recycle a
PET
bottle: our friend Akira built a raft out of them.

Paper is the worst. You’re supposed to bundle your newspapers and then slip small pieces of paper (shopping lists, unwanted love notes) in between the newspapers. These parcels are then tied up and placed at group collection points for collection by “voluntary community groups.” Laurie somehow figured out not only where and when to put out Paper, but also which type of string to bind it with. I asked her how she did this, because it seemed like sorcery. “I figured it out by watching the streets,” she replied, which is exactly how I learned to rap.

Thermal receipt paper goes in Combustibles, not Paper. No transaction in Tokyo is finished without a receipt. I would not be at all surprised to learn that hookers give receipts.

Noncombustibles are mainly metal things. By keeping an eye out for the Plastic symbol, I learned just how many things in life appear to be metal but are actually plastic. This struck me as deeply metaphorical.

Is there more to it than this?
you might be wondering. Oh yes, there is. Page 3 of the handout (you are referring to your handout, right?) displays a massive chart of Frequently Asked Items. Some are easy. Aluminum foil? Noncombustible. Stuffed doll 30cm or smaller (Beanie Babies)? Combustible. Larger than 30cm (Cabbage Patch Kids)? Special large item pickup; call ahead.

The frequently asked list has 112 items. One of them, and this is not a joke, is
sphygmomanometer.
If you must know, it’s Noncombustible but must be put in a separate bag and labeled. Do you know how to say “sphygmomanometer” in Japanese? I barely know how to say it in English.

Eventually, I did get the hang of garbage sorting, and I went around humming a little song about Combustibles. It took until the end of the month to figure out a solution to another form of useless cruft, small change.

In Japan, cash is still king. Credit and debit card payments are rare, and I never saw one person pay with a cell phone. Back home in Seattle, I’m a debit card devotee, but in Tokyo, I was constantly fumbling with coins and bills, and that’s what you’d find on top of our shoe cabinet: a yogurt container overflowing with 1-yen coins, plus many precarious stacks of 10- and 5-yen coins.

The 1-yen coins are the worst—worse than pennies. They’re made of aluminum and weigh practically nothing (1 gram, to be exact). They feel like play money.

Japanese currency is just different enough from American to drive me nuts. One yen is equivalent to about 1 U.S. cent. There are 10,000-, 5000-, and 1000-yen bills, equivalent to $100s, $50s, and $10s. ATMs in Tokyo—at least the 7-Eleven ATMs that accepted my American ATM card—dispense only the largest 10,000-yen bills, and every merchant is happy to break a Benjamin. Actually, the 10,000-yen bill features the stern visage of Japanese enlightenment figure Yukichi Fukuzawa. I have no idea whether anyone calls the bills Fukuzawas, but I like the sound of it.

So the bills are easy. The problem is the coins. Japan issues 500- and 100-yen coins, worth about $5 and $1, respectively. In the U.S., it’s easy to distinguish between real money and chump change: real money folds. If you get a hole in your pocket in Indiana and all your change falls into a sewer grate, big deal. In Japan, it’s easy to end up carrying $25 worth of change, particularly if you come from the U.S. and automatically reach for bills whenever you’re making a nontrivial purchase.

To make matters worse, there is no tipping in Japan. One day, I went to a very fancy tofu restaurant for lunch. The service was, of course, fabulous. At the end of the meal I paid exactly the amount shown on the bill, which was close to $100. If I’d tried to leave even an extra 100 yen on the table, I know exactly what would have happened: a waitress would have run after me to tell me I forgot some money.

If I were living in Japan long-term, I’d develop a coin-management strategy. I asked our friend Kate, who lives in Chiba, what she does with her coin hoard. “I spend it,” she said. Both cashiers and the people in line behind you are very understanding if you want to count out exact change. Or if they’re grumbling internally, they do an amazing job of hiding it. Kate also mentioned that it’s considered good luck to keep a 5-yen piece, which has a hole in the middle, in your pocket. The 5-yen is also the only piece of Japanese money with no Arabic numerals on it, so you see foreigners squinting at them a lot.

So how did we eventually rid ourselves of those coins? We spent them at a cat cafe.

Millions of Tokyoites find themselves in the same position as Iris. They love cats but aren’t allowed to have a cat at home. In Iris’s case, it’s because her parents are
so
unfair. We are unfair, in part, because we remember the time we cat-sat for a friend’s purebred Siberian for a weekend at our apartment, and the cat meowed all night and attacked our feet.

At some point, we’ll probably give in. But Tokyo offers cat cafes, a commercial solution to the problem of wanting to commune with cats but being unwilling or unable to have one at home.

Iris’s favorite cat cafe is Nekorobi, in the Ikebukuro neighborhood. When I first heard about cat cafes, I imagined something like Starbucks with a cat on your lap. Wrong. Nekorobi is what you’d get if you asked a cat-obsessed kid to draw a floorplan of her dream apartment: a bathroom, a drink vending machine (free with admission), a snack table, video games, and about ten cats and their attendant toys, scratching posts, beds, and climbing structures. Oh, and the furniture is in the beanbag chic style.

Considering all the attention they get, the cats were amazingly friendly, and I’d never seen such a variety of cat breeds up close. (Nor had I ever spent more than ten seconds thinking about cat breeds.) My favorite was a light gray cat with soft fur, which curled up and slept near me while I sat on a beanbag and read a book. Iris made the rounds, drinking a bottomless cup of the vitamin-fortified soda C.C. Lemon and making sure to give equal time to each cat, including the flat-faced feline that looked like it had been beaned with a skillet in old-timey cartoon fashion.

When it was time to pay, we brought out 2000 yen in 10-yen coins. “
Subarashii!
” said the woman working the desk.
Excellent!
I apologized for the unorthodox payment method and offered to count the money myself, but she assured me that wasn’t necessary and she would count it later. By the time we got our shoes on, however, she’d already counted out two hundred coins and returned our plastic container.

By the end of our third visit to Nekorobi, I started to get used to having a cat nudge me possessively with the top of its head when I tried to read a book. But I’ve already made the mistake of admitting in print that we might let Iris get a cat someday, so I’m not going to do
that
again.

Every day when we walked under the green gateway marking the entrance to Pretty Good #1 Alley, an electric eye detected our approach, and a sliding glass door opened and released a cloud of cigarette smoke, the sound of millions of tortured souls crying out from the depths of hell, and a less infernal blast of chilled air. It was the Kokusai Center pachinko parlor.

“You should go in there,” said Iris.

“Forget it,” I said. “I don’t know how to play, and if it’s this loud on the street, imagine how loud it is in there.”

“But you have to
try
it.”

Pachinko is Japan’s favorite form of gambling, a vertical pinball machine augmented in recent decades with colorful computer screens and sound effects. The video game Peggle is loosely based on pachinko, in that you launch a ball and then wait to see what happens; there are no flippers. (Please, do not send me emails about how you can earn flippers in Peggle.) In pachinko, the player shoots steel balls into the play area and, depending on where they land, receives more steel balls as a prize.

I know this because when I was a kid, I had my own pachinko machine. It was a fully manual model with a satisfying spring-loaded lever to launch the balls. Looking at photos of classic pachinko machines online, I think mine was quite authentic. Once the ball is launched, it plinks down into a forest of metal pegs and settles into an array of holes that determine your prize. I spent hours playing this thing, because my parents wouldn’t buy me an Atari 2600.

Gambling for money in Japan is illegal. Pachinko addicts, however, are not kittens obsessed with shiny objects. Here, as I understand it, is how the money part works: when you win a sackful of silver balls, you can exchange them for a variety of carnival prizes, like at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Next door to the pachinko parlor is a pawnshop that will buy your dumb stuffed animals for cash. The pachinko employees aren’t supposed to direct anyone to the pawnshop, but if I know the drill, everyone does.

“When are you going to that pachinko parlor, Dada?” asked Iris.

“If you’re so curious, why don’t you go in there?”

“I don’t think they allow kids. Besides, it would be a good story for your book.”

Just down the block from the pachinko parlor was a fugu restaurant, serving raw and cooked blowfish meat. Every time I suggested we try it, Iris said, “NO! You are NOT eating fugu!” Improperly prepared fugu is fatally poisonous. The only people who actually die of fugu poisoning are adrenaline junkies who can’t resist just one little taste of the toxic liver, not restaurant patrons. Meanwhile, she couldn’t wait to send me into the pachinko parlor to lose all our money.

Eventually, Iris wore me down. She demanded my wallet, then waited outside while I walked into Kokusai Center carrying only a 1000 yen bill, about $10.

Here are a few places quieter than the interior of the Kokusai Center:

• A firing range catering to
  AK-47
  enthusiasts.
  
• A fire station responding to a massive call, with sirens blaring and engines about to pull out of the garage.
  
• A metal cast parts factory in full production. (I can vouch for this one, because my father used to work at a cast parts company.)
  
• An overenrolled preschool after skipping naptime.
  
• Krakatoa during the 1883 eruption.
  

But I looked around at the old smoking guys playing pachinko and figured, hey, if these guys aren’t deaf, I can hang out here for a few minutes. In retrospect, those guys are unquestionably deaf.

I sat down at one of Kokusai’s several hundred pachinko machines and slipped my bill into the slot. Nothing happened. An attendant came over, gave me an unmistakable “you don’t belong here” look, and pushed a button to release a few dozen metal balls into an internal tray. Modern pachinko machines don’t have a spring-loaded lever like my childhood game; they have a motorized cannon capable of firing several balls per second. All of the strategy is in aiming your balls with tiny degrees of precision.

Even though I used to own a pachinko machine and am a certified Peggle Grand Master (and have been trying for years to figure out a way to brag about this in print), I lost all my money in five minutes. Thank God. At one point, I believe I won a few balls and immediately recycled them back into the machine, but who knows?

“So, how was it?” asked Iris.

“What? Speak up!” I replied.

On our first evening in
Tokyo, after a ten-hour flight and shuttling efficiently through customs, we took our seats on the Keisei Skyliner, a high-speed train serving Narita Airport. A man asked to see our tickets. He wasn’t a conductor; we’d unknowingly sat down in his reserved seat. After finding our actual seats, I went to the vending machine and bought a bottle of C.C. Lemon to share with Laurie and Iris. We drank the fizzy stuff, turned to the window, and watched the city draw us in.

By the time we checked in at our hotel, it was about 6:30 p.m. Tokyo time. That’s 2:30 a.m. Seattle time, and it felt like it. The rule for avoiding jet lag (eat and sleep on the local schedule immediately) clashed with the rule for sleepy children (let them stay up a minute too long, and you will be very, very sorry). Hunger lured us out into the streets of Asakusa to look for dinner. We wanted something quick, filling, and cheap. Ramen was preordained. To start, however, we’d have to contend with our first ramen ticket machine.

A ramen ticket machine is an aptitude test, menu, and robot in one box. It stands outside (or just inside) the entrance to a ramen restaurant and has a push button for each menu item: ramen, gyōza, side of rice, and so on. Ticket machines are common at ramen places and rare at other types of restaurants. Some ticket machines have color photos on the buttons, and some have only Japanese writing. If you find yourself in line for a ticket machine that looks problematic, you can order by price and position—the button near the top denoting something that costs between 700 yen and 1000 yen will probably get you a basic bowl of ramen, or you can hit the same button as the person in front of you.

This machine, on Kaminarimon-dōri, had photos. I recognized
tonkotsu
(pork broth) ramen and gyōza. (Ton
kotsu
is different from ton
katsu,
although the “ton” in each refers to pork.) We fed some bills into the machine, received our tickets, and presented them to a waiter. Why do the ticket machines exist? To save the waitstaff from having to stand at your table while you say, “Hmm, maybe I’ll have the—no, wait, make that....” Why do they exist only at ramen joints? I don’t know.

In Tokyo, ramen is a playground for the culinary imagination. As long as the dish contains thin wheat noodles, it’s ramen. In fact, there’s a literal ramen playground called Tokyo Ramen Street in the basement of Tokyo Station, with eight top-rated ramen shops sharing one corridor. We stopped by one evening after a day of riding around on the Shinkansen. After drooling over the photos at establishments such as Junk Garage, which serves oily, brothless noodles hidden under a towering slag heap of toppings, we settled on Ramen Honda based on its short line and the fact that its ramen seemed to be topped with a massive pile of scallions. However, anything in Tokyo that appears to be topped with scallions is actually topped with something much better. You’ll meet this delectable doppelgänger soon, and in mass quantities.

The Internet is littered with dozens if not hundreds of exclamation point–bedecked ramen blogs (Rameniac, GO RAMEN!, Ramen Adventures, Ramenate!) in English, Japanese, and probably Serbian, Hindi, and Xhosa. In Tokyo, you’ll find hot and cold ramen; Thai green curry ramen; diet ramen and ramen with pork broth so thick you could sculpt with it; Italian-inspired tomato ramen; and Hokkaido-style miso ramen. You’ll find ramen chains and fiercely individual holes-in-the-wall. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is having a meet-cute with her first bowl of ramen. As she fills up on pork and noodles and seaweed and bamboo shoots, she thinks,
we were meant to be together,
and she is embarrassed at her atavistic reaction to a simple bowl of soup.

On that first night, as soon as our ramen hit the table, we dove in, parceling out noodles, ultratender braised pork belly, and broth. I ate in a sleepy haze, peering through the glass door of the restaurant.
That’s Tokyo out there,
I thought, and grinned. Anyone looking in would have recognized me as a jetlagged sentimental dipshit who just survived his first ramen ticket machine.

In summer, most ramen restaurants in Tokyo serve
hiyashi chūka,
a cold ramen noodle salad topped with strips of ham, cucumber, and omelet; a tart sesame- or soy-based sauce; and sometimes other vegetables, like a tomato wedge or sheets of
wakame
seaweed. The vegetables are arranged in piles of parallel shreds radiating from the center to the edge of the plate like bicycle spokes, and you toss everything together before eating. It’s bracing, ice-cold, addictive—summer food from the days before air conditioning.

In Oishinbo: Ramen and Gyōza
,
a young lifestyle reporter wants to write an article about hiyashi chūka. “I’m not interested in something like hiyashi chūka,” says my alter ego Yamaoka. It’s a fake Chinese dish made with cheap industrial ingredients, he explains.

Later, however, Yamaoka relents. “Cold noodles, cold soup, and cold toppings,” he muses. “The idea of trying to make a good dish out of them is a valid one.” Good point, jerk. He mills organic wheat into flour and hires a Chinese chef to make the noodles. He buys a farmyard chicken from an old woman to make the stock and seasons it with the finest Japanese vinegar, soy sauce, and sake. Yamaoka’s mean old dad Kaibara Yūzan inevitably gets involved and makes an even better hiyashi chūka by substituting the finest
Chinese
vinegar, soy sauce, and rice wine.

When I first read this, I enjoyed trying to follow the heated argument over this dish I’d never even heard of. Yamaoka and Kaibara are in total agreement that hiyashi chūka needs to be made with quality ingredients, but they disagree about what kind of dish it is: Chinese, Japanese, or somewhere in between? Unlike American food, Japanese cuisine has boundary issues.

For enlightenment, or at least sustenance, I went to Sapporo-ya, a lunch counter in Nihonbashi. According to Yukari Sakamoto, author of the guidebook
Food Sake Tokyo,
Sapporo-ya serves the best hiyashi chūka in town. (Yamaoka gets kicked out of a similar place in Ginza for loudly criticizing the food.) It was a perfect day for cold noodles, cold soup, and cold toppings: during the three-block walk from the subway station to the restaurant, I had to stop at a vending machine for water and then lean against a building, trying not to faint. You know how the weather report sometimes says, “75 degrees (feels like 78)”? In Tokyo in the summer, it’s 88 degrees (feels like 375).

Finally, I descended into the basement-level restaurant. In lieu of a ticket machine, a man sits at a podium, takes your order and your cash, and issues a handwritten ticket which you then present to a waitress about six feet away. This did not strike me as particularly efficient, but I wasn’t thinking about labor productivity. I was thinking,
This is possibly the ugliest restaurant in the world.

There are so many thousands of ramen places in Tokyo that it’s foolish to generalize about their aesthetic, but many of them make your average hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurant look like the Four Seasons. They are not actually dirty, because nothing in Tokyo is actually dirty, but they manage to suggest decades of accumulated filth without the filth. The prevailing decor is “if you want decor, go to a fucking
kaiseki
place.” Also, many great ramen places smell like pork bones that have been boiling for three days, and when you sit down at the counter, you’re inches away from a giant vat of pork bones that have been boiling for three days. Some cooking smells (grilling meat, frying onions) reach into an ancient brain lobe designed to identify good eating; this is not one of them.

The reason for this uncharacteristic inattention to detail is that the ramen shop wants you to understand that they are putting all of their money and energy into the bowl. You’ll get a potentially life-changing soup for less than $10. In exchange, you’re expected to ignore or learn to appreciate scruffiness. The message: “Our ramen is so good, we don’t need to wash our curtain.”

You’re also supposed to eat fast and get out. A ramen joint is not the place to play Lady and the Tramp with your lover; it’s solitary food. One chain, Ichiran, segregates diners into individual booths. You slide into a booth smaller than a study carrel and present your ticket; a faceless server on the other side hands you the soup through a curtain. Nevertheless, Laurie and Iris and I went out for ramen together often, ate slowly by local standards, and always felt welcome—though we never went to Ichiran.

Now, back to Sapporo-ya. The place is deep enough below street level that the windows let in no natural light; harsh fluorescent lamps made everyone look ill. The walls are greenish-yellow. If you are directing a modern adaptation of
The Divine Comedy
, shoot the purgatory scenes here.

The waitress set down my hiyashi chūka
goma dare
(sesame sauce). It was in every way the opposite of its surroundings: colorful, artfully presented, sweated over. The tangle of yellow noodles was served in a shallow blue-and-white bowl and topped with daikon, pickled ginger, roast pork, bamboo shoots, tomato, shredded nori, cucumber, bean sprouts, half a hard-boiled egg, and Japanese mustard. It was almost too pretty to ruin by tossing it together with chopsticks.

I sat at a communal table with two other men. One was a harried-looking businessman in the official summer attire of black pants and a white shirt. He dispatched his hiyashi chūka in five minutes with no apparent shirt stains and went back to work. People in Tokyo are capable of eating noodles at shocking speeds; I lost count of how many times people eating next to me disappeared so quickly that they might as well have left behind a cloud of smoke and a cartoon ZOING! sound. Also at my table, however, was an older man in casual dress, probably retired, who ate nearly as slowly as I did and with evident pleasure. Every bite of hiyashi chūka is a little different but always brought together by the lip-smacking, tangy sauce. As with any bowl of ramen, it is totally appropriate to lift the dish to your mouth and drink the broth, and I did, until it was gone. Yamaoka would not have been impressed—for about $11, there’s no way they’re using organic or otherwise rarefied ingredients. But it worked for me.

Then I looked around at the horrifying decor and got the hell out of there before I turned out to be the protagonist in a dystopian novel.

Our neighborhood ramen place was called Aoba. That’s a joke. There were actually more than fifty ramen places within walking distance of our apartment. But this one was our favorite.

Aoba makes a wonderful and unusual ramen with a mixture of pork and fish broth. The noodles are firm and chewy, and the pork tender and almost smoky, like ham. I also liked how they gave us a small bowl for sharing with Iris without our even asking.

What I really appreciated about this place, however, were two aspects of ramen that I haven’t mentioned yet: the eggs and the dipping noodles. After these two, I will stop, but there’s so much more to ramen. Would someone please write an English-language book about ramen? Real ramen, not how to cook with Top Ramen noodles? Thanks. (I did find a Japanese-language book called
State-of-the-Art Technology of Pork Bone Ramen
on Amazon. Wish-listed!)

One of the most popular ramen toppings is a soft-boiled egg. Long before sous vide cookery, ramen cooks were slow-cooking eggs to a precise doneness. Eggs for ramen (
ajitsuke tamago
) are generally marinated in a soy sauce mixture after cooking so the whites turn a little brown and the eggs turn a little sweet and salty. I like it best when an egg is plunked whole into the broth so I can bisect it with my chopsticks and reveal the intensely orange, barely runny yolk. A cool egg moistened with rich broth is alchemy. Forget the noodles; I want a ramen egg with a little broth for breakfast.

Finding hot and cold in the same mouthful is another hallmark of Japanese summer food, and many ramen restaurants, including Aoba, feature it in the form of
tsukemen,
dipping noodles. Tsukemen is deconstructed ramen, a bowl of cold cooked noodles and a smaller bowl of hot, ultra-rich broth and toppings. The goal is to lift a tangle of noodles with your chopsticks and dip them in the bowl of broth on the way to your mouth. This is a crazy way to eat noodles and, unless you’ve been inculcated with the principles of noodle-slurping physics from birth, a great way to ruin your clothes.