Rice, Noodle, Fish (2 page)

Dear Tony,

I'm writing you from a laundromat attached to an old teahouse down a dark alley in Kyoto. I've spent the past month eating my way south from Hokkaido—from the
uni
shrines of Hakodate to the
okonomiyaki
dens of Osaka. I've been invited to dine with the Sugimoto clan tonight, the oldest family in Kyoto, in their 300-year-old home with their 600-year-old recipes, and I need something decent to wear. So while five weeks' worth of memories dissolve in the spin cycle, let me tell you about this idea I have.

If
Parts Unknown
and its many imitators have taught us anything, it's that we're living in the Golden Age of Gastrotourism. The same people who once traveled to Rome to stare at statues now go to twirl bucatini on their forks and filter balls of burrata onto their Instagram accounts. You've helped inspire a generation of food-obsessed pilgrims, the same people we try to reach every day at Roads & Kingdoms: the ones who want to be smarter, eat better, travel deeper. We've given them ice cream crawls in Mogadishu, the chili sauce wars of the Caucasus, the burger kings of Karachi.

But it feels like there's something even bigger out there to tap into, a more complete way to capture the seismic shift that takes place inside of us as we first eat our way through a country. And Japan, where a tangle of undressed noodles can feel like a seminal life moment, is the perfect place to start. I'm imagining a book that attempts to make sense of the many
wondrous, beautiful, confounding things the outsider experiences here—both at the table and beyond.

I don't have any clear answers yet, but I know you share my affection for this country and I thought this might be something you'd want to be a part of. Give it some thought and let me know what you think. I'll be here, watching the laundry spin.

Cheers,

Matt

***

Dear Matt,

That's pretty much where I'd like to be right now, preparing to go out to dinner in a 300-year-old home—in Kyoto. I stayed in a magnificent old
ryokan
there once, so old there were sword slashes in the ceiling beams. Evidence, I was told, of samurai-related violence.

As you know, Japan hooked me. It was the first Asian country I ever visited. I was alone, clueless, horribly, cripplingly jet-lagged (back when I still suffered from such things), and on an ill-fated mission to consult on a French restaurant project. I'd wake up in Roppongi early in the morning to the shrieks of those giant crows and wander the streets, trying to summon the courage to enter a noodle shop. I will never forget the sense of deep satisfaction I felt when I finally managed to order breakfast for myself.

Tokyo was so dense, so crowded with . . . stuff, so complicated, tempting, delicious, and seemingly unknowable: layer upon layer of maddeningly interesting izakayas in one building alone. One city block a life's work of exploration. It was a glorious and lasting derangement of the senses that first trip, and I've never been the same since.

I became selfish that first time in Tokyo in ways I had never been. Previously, when viewing something incredible, impressive, strikingly beautiful, or interesting, my first instinct was to share. Who might I share this with? How might I best relate this experience?

In Tokyo, alone and traumatized in the best possible ways by this new universe of possibilities, I just said “fuck it” to that voice. This was for me. There was no sharing. I wanted more—whatever it took—and I resolved, consciously or not, I think, to burn down the whole world if necessary to get more of this.

In Japan you are confronted constantly, almost violently, with how much you don't know. I liked that feeling. I liked that steep, virtually impossible learning curve. I liked, it turned out, that feeling of being a stranger in a strange yet wonderful land, not understanding the language, lost. Every little thing was a discovery.

Things kind of worked out. I found a way to ensure many more trips to Japan, television being a small price to pay for the privilege. I know now exactly what you mean when you speak of the joys of undressed noodles. I yearn for the smoke and sizzle of many parts of pampered chickens in an old-school yakitori joint, the clean smell of the fish market at four in the morning (cigarettes and seawater),
chankonabe
, grilled fish collars in Golden Gai, the glory of the Japanese bathroom. They may work punishingly, insanely hard in Japan. But they have relaxation down to a science. To spend a weekend at a traditional
ryokan
, marinating in an outdoor
onsen
, is a life-changing thing. There's no going back. Not all the way back anyway.

I don't know if you know this but I've found that if you sat at a table with eight or nine of the worlds best chefs—from France, Brazil, America, wherever—and you asked them where they'd choose if they had to eat in one, and only one country, for the rest of their lives, they would ALL of them pick Japan without hesitation. We both know why.

I have no doubt that you would make that case brilliantly in the book to come, but I'm going to need more details if I want to convince my cruel masters at HarperCollins. How do you see this playing out on the page?

Best,

Tony

***

Hi Tony,

I know what you mean when you say you've never been the same. I'm supposed to be on a honeymoon with my Catalan wife, but every time a piece of
uni
nigiri or
shirako
tempura is placed before me, I feel like I'm cheating on her. I try to shift the focus back to my bride, but then I look over and see her eyes glazed with that same new Japan sheen, and I know that there will forever be a line in our lives: Before Japan, After Japan.

I could see how you would want to keep this to yourself. Something so intense and intimate—it's hard to share without feeling like you're somehow butchering the translation. Judging by the episodes you've logged from Japan, though, you got over that feeling, no doubt for much the same reason that I'm getting over it: we tell stories for a living, and these stories are the best I've found anywhere.

I'm in Noto now, a windswept peninsula on the west coast known as the Kingdom of Fermentation. Breakfast this morning was a piece of mackerel cured in salt and chilies for 12 years (my body is still buzzing from the umami). Chikako Fukushita is the daughter of Noto's preeminent pickle masters: her father has been honored by the governor for his fish sauce,
her mother is the sole keeper of over 300 recipes that represent the family's—and Noto's—legacy. They never had a son, so it has fallen to Chikako to catalog every last recipe before they pass away.

The plan is to stay here as long as it takes to find stories like these—deep, experiential narratives that tell us something about this country that only the food and its creators can. On the horizon: a Guatemalan immigrant turned
okonomiyaki
master in Hiroshima, a rebel band of sea urchin fishermen in Hokkaido, and a ramen blogger from Fukuoka who eats 400 bowls of
tonkotsu
a year.

I've talked with my Roads & Kingdoms partners about this idea and they're all in. Beyond the high-protein narratives, we see a series of lighter side stories, photo essays, and illustrated decoders illuminating the most interesting corners of Japanese culture. Doug Hughmanick built our website and would be perfect for designing big, beautiful spreads about the glories of the Japanese convenience store or how to navigate a love hotel. Nathan Thornburgh, whom you already know from his days at
Time
magazine, is an intense and uncompromising editor, ready to make whatever I write stronger.

Good thing, because despite the beauty of these stories, there is infinite potential to make an ass of myself. I'm a novice here. I speak no Japanese. I claim no special understanding of this dense culture and hold no key to unlock the country's many closed doors. I went to a very famous sushi restaurant in Tokyo last week, a place that destroyed me the first time I ate there. I came back with a translator and a suit jacket, waited for two hours until the last guests trickled out, then asked the chef if I might arrange an interview. His jaw dropped, his face contorted. “Why would you come here?” he said. “Next time, please go through the embassy.”

I spent the next 24 hours steaming, appalled by the suggestion of involving diplomats to talk about rice and fish and somehow offended that he didn't want to share his story. But deep
down there's something almost noble about his reaction: with only six seats and a loyal local clientele, his only objective now is to protect what he has.

There is no escaping my place as the most outside of outsiders here, so I might as well embrace it. There will be plenty of expertise proffered along the way, just not from me—from the chefs and artisans and families who have this cuisine in their DNA, and who have opened up many doors as I've begun to eat my way through this country.

So the big question is, just who is this book for? People already on their way to Japan? People parked in the armchair with no immediate plans to hit the road? The burrata Instagrammers? You're the book guy these days, and no doubt the suits at HarperCollins will want to know. Any guidance you might have will be rewarded with a fugu sake (a blowfish tail set alight and dropped into a glass of rice wine—a group of salarymen hazed me with this hellbroth last night) next time we cross paths.

Cheers,

Matt

***

Matt,

Thinking about the smell of hinoki wood. You know the smell. One of those deep water tubs that comes up to your chin. Scaldingly hot water, washcloth on head. Maybe a bottle of sake close at hand.

Do you have any tattoos? This is one of the peculiarities of Japan I find both charming and annoying at the same time. Every time I hit a public
onsen
—or a hotel pool for that matter—as soon as the shirt comes off, some very uncomfortable-looking attendant comes running
over with a rash guard to cover me up. Apparently, it's a non-insulting way to keep yakuza out. I wish they would just go with a sign saying “NO GANGSTERS” instead of busting my balls but what can you do? I put the damn rash guard on.

What do you read when in Japan? In Vietnam, it's
The Quiet American
every time. Often, I find it's fiction that better describes a place—the atmospherics, the soul. Graham Greene, being such a terrific traveling companion, it's too bad he never set a novel in Japan. Lowry in Mexico. Orwell in Myanmar. Theroux in Singapore. But Japan? I'm at a loss.

I usually end up watching DVDs that capture better (or more easily) the hallucinatory aspects of Tokyo or Osaka. I've described experiencing Japanese nightlife as like living inside a pinball machine—or dropping acid for the first time—inside yet always outside.

Making an ass of yourself in Japan is an inevitability. Fortunately, we gaijin seem to get cut a lot of slack. I recall with embarrassment being treated to an elaborate kaiseki meal and the elderly geishas who were there to entertain bursting into peals of laughter as I tucked unknowingly into a bowl with my chopsticks, blissfully unaware that it was the condiment not the entree. It's a minefield of potential offense. I'm quite certain that at all times that every single thing about me is somehow “wrong,” from my posture, the way I hold my chopsticks, bow, pour my drink, sit, cross my legs—and so on. But I don't care. Japan is just too awesome to not just forge on.

I don't know why you would call that delightful burning fugu tail drink a hellbroth. I love that shit.

And as I sit here and reflect on “who this book is for and what its appeal might be” I no longer care. The more layers you can peel back, the better. The deeper you dive into all those things that make Japan so fascinating and so pleasurable to us, the better for humanity.

Roads & Kingdoms has for some time now been doing the best travel journalism out there. It's not just WHAT it is—but what it is NOT. You're cutting right to the good shit. A person could easily miss what you had the good sense to celebrate. There is enormous value in that.

This is, after all, the beginning of what I fully expect to be a long and fruitful relationship. An unholy alliance between you—Roads & Kingdoms—and whatever it is that I do for a living.

Readers will either read the book and immediately book tickets to Japan to explore for themselves. They will return changed. Unable to look at the world in the same way ever again. Or . . . they might refine and adjust whatever sadly misguided plans they might have had in favor of destinations described here.

Or they might sit in their chairs and dream of a faraway place where the culture is very old, the food extraordinary and refined beyond imagining, and where there are many beautiful things that feel good.

And someday, if given the opportunity to see this place for themselves, hopefully, they will leap.

The world needs Roads & Kingdoms. It needs this book. Let's give it to them.

Best,

Tony

 

 

If you listen carefully, you will hear the sounds of Japan cooking. But these are not the sounds of a typical kitchen, even a great one, at work—at least not the ones you may be used to hearing. It's not an expediter on a line asking when his rib steak will be ready. It's not the gurgle of a deep fryer violently crisping a thatch of potatoes. It's not the sound of a sauce being scraped across the plate with the back of a spoon, or the pinch of tweezers art-directing another foraged herb into position.

It is the sound of a terry-cloth towel rubbed against the grain of hardwood, scrubbing for hours each night to remove the gentle stain of fish oils accumulated on the hinoki counter over the course of a sushi service. It is the gentle rustle of fingers gliding over green coffee beans, like wind in the trees, in search of imperfections before roasting. It is the whoosh of a handmade fan used to tame a
binchotan
fire. The dull thump of polished wood against the soft flesh of tomato. The muted cadence of a long, thin knife working its way across the flesh of a conger eel.

These are the sounds of Japan cooking. And everything that you will put in your mouth begins with one of these sounds, barely audible, that rises up and
amplifies and takes on a force of its own. In the most perfect moment, when you least expect it, these little whispers will build into a great sonic boom, and all you can do is close your eyes and let it wash over you.

If all of this feels precious, that's because it is. One of your first revelations in Japan, especially while eating, will be just how much the details matter: the angle of the maple leaf garnishing your plate, the mood of the chef when frying your asparagus, the bloodline of the farmer who grew that radish. The fact that you—and everyone else, including experienced Japanese diners—will miss most of these details doesn't matter; there is the underlying belief that nearly imperceptible improvements are made in the quality of the food by the most subtle actions of its creators. The tempura batter tastes better when stirred with chopsticks from the Meiji era; the dashi is purer when simmered by a cook with a clear mind and a light heart.

But not everything is so subtle. There are succulent loins of fatty pork fried in scales of thin bread crumbs and served with bowls of thickened Worcestershire and dabs of fiery mustard. Giant pots of curry, dark and brooding as a sudden summer storm, where apples and onions and huge hunks of meat are simmered into submission over hours. Or days. There is
okonomiyaki
, the great geologic mass of carbs and cabbage and pork fat that would feel more at home on a stoner's coffee table than a Japanese tatami mat.

And, of course, there is ramen, the loudest of all Japanese foods, a soundtrack of thwacks, sizzles, drips, and slurps that undermines everything you thought you knew about this country and its culture. Is that cook chopping leeks to the bass of a hip-hop track? Why yes, yes he is.

No country on this planet inspires wonder like Japan does. Everywhere you turn, you will find a reason to be astounded.

It starts on the airplane, twenty
thousand feet above Tokyo. I remember my first approach to Narita, when the plane knifed through the clouds and suddenly there it was, the biggest city in the history of the earth, pixilated in a billion yellow dots below me. In the early 1600s, when the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu decided to build his castle here, Tokyo was nothing but a tiny fishing village. By 1800 it was already the largest city in the world, with more than a million people calling Japan's new capital home. Over the years, it would shake, shatter, splinter, and burn again and again. And still it stands and stretches on to infinity.

I first came to Tokyo in the fall of 2008 with no plans, no reservations, not the slightest clue about the transformation that awaited me. With six thousand miles separating me from sleep, I stumbled down into the subway at dawn and emerged on the outskirts of the Tsukiji market just as the sun broke across Tokyo Bay. Inside the market, I saw the entire ocean on display: swollen-bellied salmon, dark disks of abalone, vast armies of exotic crustaceans, conger eels so shiny and new they looked to be napping in their Styrofoam boxes. I stumbled onward to a tuna auction, where a man in a trader's cap worked his way through a hundred silver carcasses scattered across the cement floor, using a system of rapid hand motions and guttural noises unintelligible to all but a select group of tuna savants. When the auction ended, I followed one of the bodies back to its buyer's stall, where a man and his son used band saw, katana blade, cleaver, and fillet knife to work the massive fish down into sellable components: sinewy tail meat for the cheap izakaya, ruby loins for hotel restaurants, blocks of marbled belly for the high-end sushi temples.

By 8:00 a.m. I was starving. First, a sushi feast, a twelve-piece procession of Tsukiji's finest—fat-frizzled bluefin, chewy surf clam, a custardy slab of Hokkaido
uni
—washed down with frosty glasses of Kirin. Then a bowl of warm soba from the outer market, crowned at the last second with a golden nest of vegetable tempura. By the time the sun had climbed directly above me, I stood before a wall of skyscrapers, smiling stupidly, uncomfortably full but hungrier than ever.

The largest city on earth, as seen from Roppongi Hills

(JapanExterna)

If you've never been before, you will do what we all do when we first come to Japan: you will blink and rub your eyes like a cartoon character, you will lose yourself in the human churn of Shibuya and Shinjuku, you will bear witness to the fantastic collision of past and future as you move from neon jungle to ancient temple and back into Tomorrowland. You will marvel at the plastic food, the bullet trains, the omnipresent vending machines. You will take pictures of toilets. Your e-mails back home will be filthy with exclamation points.

You will feel completely and wonderfully overwhelmed by the stimuli, and there will be moments when you don't know what to do. Which way to turn. Which person to ask. Which dish to eat.

It's the last one that gets me every time. What to eat? You've crossed a dozen time zones to get here and you want to make every meal count. Do you start at an izakaya, a Japanese pub, and eat raw fish and grilled chicken parts and fried tofu, all washed down with a river of cold sake? Do you seek out the familiar nourishment of noodles—ramen, udon, soba—and let the warmth and beauty of this cuisine slip gloriously past your lips? Or maybe you wade into the vast unknown, throw yourself entirely into the world of unfamiliar flavors: a bowl of salt-roasted eel, a mound of sticky fermented soybeans, a nine-course kaiseki feast.

You would be ill-advised to take this decision lightly. Make no mistake about it: Tokyo is the greatest feast on earth. Not New York. Not Paris. Not Bangkok. All of these cities offer sprawling, beautiful food cultures worthy of a lifetime of exploration, but none can compare with the depth and breadth of deliciousness proffered by Tokyo's culinary legions.

First of all, it's the size. New York City has some 30,000 restaurants; Tokyo, 300,000. (Take a moment to let that sink in, please.) Whereas most of the world confines their restaurants to street level, a ten-story building in Japan might have two or three restaurants on every floor, towers of deliciousness stretched toward the heavens like Babel.

But Tokyo's preeminence as the world's most exciting dining destination isn't a quantity thing: it's a quality one. There are a dozen factors that make Japanese food so special—ingredient obsession, technical precision, thousands of years of meticulous refinement—but chief among them is one simple concept: specialization. In the Western world, where miso-braised short ribs share menu space with white truffle pizza and sea bass ceviche, restaurants cast massive nets to try to catch as many fish as possible, but in Japan, the secret to success is choosing one thing and doing it really fucking well. Forever. There are people who dedicate their entire lives to grilling beef intestines, slicing blowfish, kneading buckwheat into tangles of chewy noodles—microdisciplines with infinite room for improvement.

The concept of
shokunin
, an artisan deeply and singularly dedicated to his or her craft, is at the core of Japanese culture. Japan's most famous
shokunin
these days is Jiro Ono, immortalized in the documentary
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
, but you will encounter his level of relentless focus across the entire food industry. Behind closed doors. Down dark alleyways. Up small stairwells. Hiding in every corner of this city and country: the eighty-year-old tempura man who has spent the past six decades discovering the subtle differences yielded by temperature and motion. The twelfth-generation
unagi
sage who uses metal skewers like an acupuncturist uses needles, teasing the muscles of wild eel into new territories. The young man who has grown old at his father's side, measuring his age in kitchen lessons. Any moment now, it will be his turn to be the master,
and when he does, he'll know exactly what to do.

“The
shokunin
has a social obligation to work his or her best for the general welfare of the people,” says Japanese sculptor Tasio Odate. “This obligation is both spiritual and material, in that no matter what it is, the
shokunin
's responsibility is to fulfill the requirement.”

Tokyo is the city of ten thousand
shokunin
. If you come to Japan to eat, you come for them.

At first I didn't get this. I ate nothing but ramen and udon and tempura from any place that looked legit—and I was deeply satisfied doing it. But then a friend, Shinji Nohara, a culinary guide who makes a living out of turning first-timers into lifelong Japanophiles, took me to a small coffee shop where an old man named Katsuji Daibo had spent four decades converting muddy water into a religious experience: sifting bean-by-bean through pounds of coffee every morning, hand-roasting each batch for thirty minutes over a low flame, executing a drip-by-drip pour-over that felt like watching life move backward—a painstaking process that produced the city's richest, most expensive, most labor-intensive cup of coffee.

By the time I emerged from Daibo, Tokyo and Japan and the entire food world had changed for me. I had a new lens through which to view this country and a new reason to keep coming back: to eat the noodles and conveyor sushi and pork-belly pancakes, yes, but also to take the time to experience the true masters of Tokyo, the
shokunin
, the ones who bless this city with their quiet pursuit of perfection.

米 麺 魚

Ginza is the heart of Tokyo's sushi culture, making it the center of Japan's sushi culture, making it the greatest neighborhood in the world for eating fish. Walk these gilded streets for a few blocks and you'll soon figure out why: this is one of Japan's wealthiest zip codes, home to extravagant department stores and a battery of international luxury brands housed in beautiful buildings created by famous architects. A perfect fit for the world's most expensive cuisine.