Rice, Noodle, Fish (30 page)

Tatsuru built Raku-ichi himself, fashioning a twelve-seat hinoki bar into a quiet viewing area for the performance that unfolds in the kitchen. He makes every order of soba by hand, working in small batches so that by the time you've eaten, you'll have witnessed the extraordinary transformation of grain and water into noodle. It takes him eight minutes from start to finish, a process so lovely and intimate that you blush every time he looks up from his work area.

He starts with 100 percent local buckwheat—a grain stubborn enough that most soba masters cut their dough with wheat flour to make it easier to work with. Once the water is added and the dough shaped into a smooth, seamless ball, he works it with a wooden dowel, using his forearms and his palms to make the mass thinner and thinner. With each pass of the dowel, he pats the dough with his right hand, a quick, seamless motion that acts as a metronome for the elaborate rolling process. The thud of the dowel, the slap of the hand, the rustle of the buckwheat against the board: it starts soft, grows louder and faster, like the building of a great jazz performance. He rolls, slaps, rotates, rolls, slaps, rotates, rolls, slaps, rotates—over and over until the crude circle is shaped into a sharp rectangle. With a twelve-inch soba blade and a wooden board to guide him, he transforms the rectangle into thousands of dark brown strands. No wasted motion, no alien movements, not a scrap of dough lost to inexactitude or impatience.

Tatsuru Rai turns buckwheat and water into performance art.

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Nobody talks, as if too much breath might break the magical bond of buckwheat and water. (When Tatsuru traveled to Copenhagen to make his noodles in front of a crowd of food-industry luminaries, three hundred of the world's greatest chefs sat slack-jawed in silence as he did nothing more or less than what he does ten times a day in his tiny Hokkaido restaurant.)

The noodles are served by Tatsuru's wife, Midori, a lovely, soft-spoken hostess who wraps herself in gorgeous, expensive kimonos. The soba comes two ways:
seiro
, afloat in a dark, hot dashi spiked with slices of duck breast, or
kake
, cold and naked, to be dipped into a concentrated version of that same broth. Even if it's -50˚F outside and you've lost all sensation in your toes, eat these noodles cold, the elegant chew and earthy taste of the buckwheat uncompromised by the heat of the dashi.

“The process is everything,” Tatsuru says, in what could be a four-word definition of Japan.

The young man next to me, a spiky-haired pop star from Sapporo, nods his head in agreement. “Once you eat here, it's hard to go back,” he says, in what could be a nine-word definition of Hokkaido.

米 麺 魚

The story of Hokkaido is not a lovely one. It is a history of neglect and repression, displacement and discrimination, outcasts and vagabonds. Some have likened Hokkaido to the Wild West, and the parallels are easy enough to draw: the government malfeasance, the band of misfits and clansmen that came here to operate outside of the law, the world of shit forced upon the native population.

For most of its written history, Hokkaido was known as Ezo, an island occupied by the Ainu, believed to be descendants of the ancient Jomon people,
with a nomadic streak and a deep dedication to their spirituality. The Ainu had little contact with the Japanese until 1590, when Hideyoshi Toyotomi granted the Matsumae clan, a group of roaming samurai that settled in southern Hokkaido, exclusive trading rights with the “barbarians from the north.”

The Ainu had things the rest of Japan wanted—fish, seaweed, furs—and in turn they took what their home couldn't provide: rice, sake, and tools. But the Matsumae clan did more than just trade with the Ainu: they restricted their movements within their own lands, prohibited them from trading with outside groups, and enforced their exclusive relationship with brutal force, gutting the indigenous culture and killing Ainu leaders over minor disputes.

Even with the increased trading between the Ainu and the Japanese, Ezo remained a land apart, one not formally recognized by Japan until the Meiji Restoration was in full swing. In 1869 the new imperial government christened the island Hokkaido and began to actively encourage settlement, primarily as a buffer against Russia, which was quickly encroaching on Japanese territory from the north.

As Hokkaido became more important to the Japanese government, so too did suppressing the Ainu, whose culture they viewed as a threat to Honshu homogeneity. Ainu language was banned, religious practices snuffed out, and the people themselves forcibly assimilated into the Japanese way of life. The Ainu survived in pockets scattered around southern Hokkaido, but their home was no longer theirs alone. (Only in 2008 did the Japanese government formally recognize the Ainu as “an indigenous people with a distinct language, religion and culture.” Around 25,000 Ainu live in Hokkaido today, using a mixture of tourism income and government funds to restore many of the traditions and practices they suffered the loss of over the years.)

Like the pack of thieves and scoundrels that protect the Wall in
Game of
Thrones
, the earliest Japanese settlers were people from the margins of society: ex-criminals, forgotten sons, failed families. In the north they saw a chance to trade in their messy pasts for clean canvases. And the new Hokkaido government, for its part, was all too happy to provide them that opportunity.

After World War II, many of the Japanese who had occupied Manchuria repatriated to Hokkaido, adding to the motley mix of new faces looking for a fresh start in Japan's northern reaches. In 1971 the Japanese government decided it was time to finally connect Hokkaido to the rest of the country, and they began construction on an ambitious tunnel project that would reshape the island forever.

The Seikan Tunnel is the world's deepest and longest tunnel, an under-water expanse that takes twenty-two minutes traveling at 140 kilometers an hour to pass through. At the other end of the abyss is Hakodate, the gateway to Hokkaido and, for many years, to the rest of Japan. Hakodate was one of two ports to open to the outside world after Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to end its closed-door policy in 1854, a first stop for American and Russian ships winding their way down the country. It was once the most important city in Hokkaido—before the rise of Sapporo, before the Great Hakodate Fire of 1934—and signs of its former greatness still linger around town: the generous port and its polished warehouses, the cable cars that climb past the brick Orthodox churches in the hillside Motomachi district, the five-pointed star of Goryokaku, the European-style fort at the southern end of the city. From atop Mount Hakodate at night, you can take in the sparkle of Hakodate's hourglass body, and the bright lights of the squid boats bobbing in the water below.

The clearest signs of Hakodate's current greatness, though, can be found clustered around its central train station, in the morning market, where blocks and blocks of pristine seafood
explode onto the sidewalks like an edible aquarium, showcasing the might of the Japanese fishing industry.

Hokkaido is ground zero for the world's high-end sushi culture. The cold waters off the island have long been home to Japan's A-list of seafood: hairy crab, salmon, scallops, squid, and, of course,
uni
. The word “Hokkaido” attached to any of these creatures commands a premium at market, one that the finest sushi chefs around the world are all too happy to pay.

Most of the Hokkaido haul is shipped off to the Tsukiji market in Tokyo, where it's auctioned and scattered piece by piece around Japan and the big cities of the world. But the island keeps a small portion of the good stuff for itself, most of which seems to be concentrated in a two-hundred-meter stretch in Hakodate.

Everything here glistens with that sparkly sea essence, and nearly everything is meant to be consumed in the moment. Live sea urchins, piled high in hillocks of purple spikes, are split with scissors and scraped out raw with chopsticks. Scallops are blowtorched in their shells until their edges char and their sweet liquor concentrates. Somewhere, surely, a young fishmonger will spoon salmon roe directly into your mouth for the right price.

This is Japan, after all, where freshness cannot be faked because everybody knows the difference between yesterday's scallop and today's. But sometimes, in this quest for deliciousness, lines are crossed. In the center of the morning market sits a giant tank of live squid and a handful of fishing poles. I pay my 500 yen and drop a line in. A group of Chinese tourists surround the tank, cheering me on in Mandarin as I try my best to hook one of the squirmy cephalopods. When I finally pull a squid out of the tank, it blasts a jet stream of water onto the crowd, which drives them wild. The squid is air-dropped immediately onto a cutting board where a man with a long blade and a stern face turns the dancing creature into a plate of sashimi before the muscles have a chance to stop wriggling. The body is sweet and supple, but the legs, still busily in search of their final resting state, don't go down without a fight.

The many wonders of Hokkaido's waters on display in Hakodate's morning market

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Like so much in Japan, it's equal parts cute, impressive, and unsettling. There's a reason that markets like these aren't frequented by locals; they prefer their squid without a crowd of wealthy Shanghainese urging them on. The real game, as I soon discover, is
donburi
.
Donburi
, often shortened to
don
, means “bowl,” and the name encapsulates a vast array of rice bowls topped with delicious stuff:
oyakodon
(chicken and egg),
unadon
(grilled eel),
tendon
(tempura). As nice as meat and tempura and eel can be, the
donburi
of yours and mine and every sensible person's dreams is topped with a rainbow bounty of raw fish. Warm rice, cool fish, a dab of wasabi, a splash of soy—sushi, without the pageantry and without the price tag.

At Kikuyo Shokudo Honten you will find more than three dozen varieties of seafood
don
s, including a kaleidoscopic combination of
uni
, salmon,
ikura
(salmon roe), quail eggs, and avocado. I opt for what I've come to call the Hokkaido Superhero's Special: scallops, salmon roe, hairy crab, and
uni
. It's ridiculous hyperbole to call a simple plate of food life changing, but as the tiny briny eggs pop and the sweet scallops dissolve and the
uni
melts like ocean Velveeta, I feel some tectonic shift taking place just below my surface.

Over the next few days, I eat nothing but
donburi
. At 7:00 a.m., when the sun still sleeps with the fishes. At 2:00 p.m., as the local workforce is mustering up the strength to see the day through. At 11:00 p.m., with the staff looking on nervously, trying to determine if I might finally be full. If I had to travel to just one part of Japan to eat one type of food, it would be seafood
donburi
in Hakodate. Truth.

If
uni
is your objective, you can do no better than Uniya Murakami, a fifth-generation family business with
unparalleled dedication to the noble urchin, which it serves in dozens of guises: lightly cured in soy sauce, folded into the soft curds of an omelet, clinging to udon noodles like a Far Eastern carbonara. All of this, of course, is a distraction from what really counts: two dozen tongues of
uni
, an umbrella of orange with a green wasabi top, draped over warm rice, the
donburi
to end all others.

If there is anywhere more famous for
uni
than Hakodate, it's Otaru, a small, postcard-pretty harbor town on the west coast of Hokkaido, thirty minutes by train from Sapporo. They say the waters were once so rich in Otaru that you could catch fish with your bare hands. It was a wealthy town, the wealthiest in all of Hokkaido, built on the back of a gangbuster
nishin
industry—tiny herring fished in abundance and processed into fertilizer. Herring mansions, fancy nineteenth-century processing centers that doubled as residences for their wealthy owners, still dot the hillsides around Otaru, but it's been many years since they've seen any action.