Rice, Noodle, Fish (31 page)

A picturesque canal cuts through the center of town, and on either side you'll find dozens of sprawling sushi venues offering more or less the same set 2,000-yen menu to the packs of day-trippers. But beyond the rows of restaurants, past the covered shopping arcade, down a back alley of tiny wooden huts, Sushiya Ko-Dai stands as a firm rebuke to the cookie-cutter sushi culture that dominates so much of Japan.

Technically it's a
yatai
, a street stall, but it could be mistaken for a closet or a can of sardines. People stand at the bar, pressed against each other, pointing through the glass of the most jumbled fish case you'll ever find in Japan. Presiding over this lovely mess is twenty-eight-year-old Sanada Kodai, a warm, talkative host with a perma-smile and a penchant for self-deprecation.

“I always wanted to be a hairstylist,” says Kodai, running his hand over his cue-ball scalp and laughing. “But then
I thought, which job would be cooler when I'm older? I figured cutting fish would be cooler than cutting hair, so here I am.”

As he slices and sculpts and passes each piece across the case to a customer, the chatter never stops. “I wanted to open a fun place, an alternative to conveyor sushi for young people. The best for me is when the counter is full of doctors and a high school student walks in and starts ordering.”

Just then a group of three young Tokyoites open the sliding glass door and pull back the curtain.

“We tried to reserve,” one of them says, seeing the tight space.

“We don't do reservations,” says Kodai.

“Well, we're here now.”

“Great, but you'll have to wait.”

The place may be tiny and the mood relaxed, but the sushi itself is serious stuff. I put myself in Kodai's hands and he walks me, piece by piece, through the greatest of Hokkaido's bounty: mackerel, marinated in soy for twenty minutes (“In Tokyo they have to marinate their
saba
for three hours”); salmon, streaked with huge deposits of fat, better for keeping the fish warm in these cold waters; a slice of scallop so tender that it seems to vanish before I have time to chew; and a generous pile of hairy crab crowning a warm, loose mound of rice, the kind of genre-defining bite that follows you places.

The Tokyo crew, who finally find a space at the counter, are visibly moved by the experience. “I wish we had a place like this back home,” one of them tells me. Kodai beams like a lighthouse.

We finish with a fat piece of
uni
that trembles like flan, so soft and sweet it could double as dessert. It's a powerful ending to one of the best sushi experiences I've had in Japan, and it cost a fifth of what the big places in Tokyo run.

“Look, I have no staff and I work in this tiny space. That's why I can afford to use the best products.”

“So is most of this fish from Otaru?” I ask.

“No. Not exactly. Things are complicated here.”

I press him on the complicated part.

“Tomorrow I'll take you to see the fishermen. You'll see.”

Today's fishermen live in considerably more humble settings than the herring hunters of Otaru past. Most are clustered in a series of huts and small wooden houses just north of the town center. I meet Kodai there at dawn, and we knock gently on the door of what looks like someone's garage.

An imposing figure in a dark V-neck sweater answers the door. “What do you want? Don't you know I'm famous?”

I struggle to find an appropriate response. “Why are you famous?”

“Because I'm crazy.”

“What do you mean crazy? Crazy at night?”

“No, at night I'm a gentleman. I'm crazy on the water—the craziest guy on the water. Today's the only day I won't go out. I sent my sons instead.”

Masao-san looks like a villain from a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie: brick-house build, facial scars, handsome in a slightly menacing way. He is the unofficial leader of the fishermen of Otaru, a pack of seventy-five or so men whose families have worked these waters for generations. Masao's place, a messy shed with a few motorboats parked out back, feels more like a safe house than a fish shack, a place where he and his posse of bandits can lie low while the heat dies down.

Masao moves slowly, except when he's smoking, which is always. “I'm sorry I don't have much to offer you,” he says. He reaches into a freezer and pulls out a shrink-wrapped octopus tentacle the size of a small human arm. He tears it open and cuts the tentacle into thick coins with a pocketknife, smears a wad of wasabi on a small plate, pours soy sauce onto another one, and puts it all over a stack of old newspapers.

“Breakfast is served.”

Behind Masao sits a giant cooler, which I assume is stuffed full of fish, but when he opens it the only thing inside is Boss coffee—hundreds of tiny black cans emblazoned with the pipe-smoking Boss man (played by Tommy Lee Jones in real life).

Hokkaido's seafood remains the finest in Japan, but overfishing threatens its future.

(Matt Goulding)

As we sit chewing on frozen octopus and sipping canned coffee and bathing in cigarette smoke, Masao explains that this is the most important hour of the day, when the fishermen come back to base with their catch. Historically, Otaru has yielded a rich and diverse catch that evolves throughout the year—salmon in the summer, herring in the fall, octopus and
uni
in the spring—but in recent years, they've been lucky to catch enough to live on.

“Every year there's less coming out. Even when I was young the herring supply was way down. This year we're seeing a third of what we had last year.”

While we eat, a neighbor fisherman—short, with long hair and a rubber apron—walks in. “Zero. Zero, zero,” he says, opening the cooler and grabbing a Boss. “I got enough for dinner, but that's it.”

“The summers are hotter, and it's impacted our fish supplies,” says Masao. “There aren't enough good bacteria. Less kombu, less places for fish to lay eggs. The balance is off.”

There are many things to admire about Japanese food culture, but resource management isn't one of them. It's no secret that the Japanese are voracious consumers of life aquatic, eating fifty-five kilograms for every man, woman, and child—more than three times the global average. In the wake of World War II, with protein sources scarce, it was a matter of national policy to catch as much fish as possible, which has left fishermen with little to catch these days.

Cries from conservationists looking to impose some level of sustainability on Japan's fish habits have largely been ignored by all, including consumers. At the heart of these complicated issues—the whale hunting, the tuna desolation, the systematic emptying of the seas—is a simple argument that stops all other arguments in their tracks: it's
our tradition. It's true, Japan for millennia has been a nation that survives largely off seafood, but a dense population combined with the rise of convenience-store and conveyor sushi has stretched its dining habits to the limits.

It's a loaded debate, a cultural minefield for a foreigner, but one can't help but get the sense that if the Japanese preserved ecosystems as carefully as they preserve tradition, the future of the fishing industry might not look so grim. Masao seems stranded somewhere between the two sides: he respects the tradition and is desperate to make a living, but he sees the need to adapt to the limitations of today.

Another fisherman enters and dramatically drops two live shrimp on the table. “Today's catch, your majesty.” Masao lights another cigarette.

“We overfished. We should have made changes earlier. The older people would just take whatever they could take. The ones without sons were the worst. And now we're paying for it.”

On cue, Masao's younger son walks in empty-handed. “I had one, it was right there, but it got away.” He grabs a Boss and lights a cigarette.

Finally Masao's older son—heavyset, with dark red hair and a patchy beard—enters through the back door. He's carrying a plastic sack, which he opens and shakes in front of us. An orange octopus with two-foot-long tentacles drops to the floor and slithers its way across the cement.

“I was afraid of what Dad might do if I came back empty-handed.” He gives the octopus a good kick, then looks up and notices me for the first time. “Who brought the gaijin here?” We all have a good laugh.

Soon the entire room is smoking and eating octopus and drinking cans of Boss coffee.

“Are there fishermen in America?” the older brother asks.

“Yeah,” the younger one responds. “They look really cool.”

A discussion about king crab ensues,
and I explain that my brother used to work on the Alaskan crab boats and made some really good coin doing it. Suddenly the fishermen are ready for a relocation.

“If we're all going to America, I'm coming too,” says the younger brother.

“You should all get insurance,” says Masao, lighting another cigarette. “I'll stay here and collect when you die.”

米 麺 魚

In the early years of the Meiji Restoration, the new imperial government of Japan implemented a series of measures that would forever change the country and its culture. Closed off to the outside world for 180 years, the leaders of new Japan looked to modernize the country overnight, and to do so called upon foreign experts to help bring the country up to speed.

And so it was that William S. Clark, a Massachusetts-born son of a country doctor, found himself in Sapporo, charged with establishing Hokkaido's first agricultural college. Clark was a powerful academic, with a doctorate in mineralogy from Germany and a high-ranking post at Amherst as a professor of chemistry, zoology, and botany. A vigorous supporter of the Union cause, he took a leave from his teaching to lead a regiment in the Civil War. His bravery earned him accolades and a legion of loyal troops; in one immortalized moment during the Battle of New Bern, he mounted a Confederate canon like a metal steed, allowing his men to advance and overtake the enemy battery. Between the war heroics, the deep education, and a prodigious growth of facial hair, Clark would have made a strong candidate for Most Interesting Man of the Nineteenth Century.

He landed in Hokkaido in the spring of 1876 and got down to business, building out the Sapporo Agricultural College in a month flat. He introduced new crops to Hokkaido, along with lessons on Western agricultural techniques, animal husbandry, and Christianity. He
became a trusted adviser to Hokkaido governor Kuroda Kiyotaka, offering counsel on everything from fisheries management to architecture to the textiles industry.

Clark was called back to the States after just eight months in Hokkaido, and a pack of his students rode with him to the outskirts of Sapporo to see him off. In a good-bye that was destined to inspire generations of Japanese, he turned back to the pack of young Hokkaidoans and offered his final words: “Boys, be ambitious!”

Today statues of Clark can be found all around Hokkaido, and his parting words, emblazoned on government buildings and appropriated by makers of manga and J-pop, maintain an outsize place in Japanese culture.

The message wasn't lost on the people of Hokkaido. Since the days of Clark's dramatic send-off, they've worked to prove that Hokkaido is as much an idea as it is an island. It's the idea of a Japan apart, the world beyond Honshu, Kanto, and Kyushu, the island that operates on its own time, plays by its own rules. Even after hundreds of years of gentle growth, Hokkaido remains uncharted territory, the place you come to start new, to reinvent yourself and make a footprint in a way that would be impossible down below, where conformity is the unwritten rule that governs so much of society. For those who need to breathe deeply, to live beyond the white noise of the urban experiment; for those with a few jagged skeletons stuffed in their closets; for those who won't be tethered to the totems of history and tradition that cast impossible shadows across the rest of Japan, there will always be Hokkaido: once and forever the new frontier.

Takahiko Soga knows the frontier spirit better than most. He was born in the mountains around Nagano, son to a first-generation winemaker. He inherited the family winery, along with his brother, but quickly realized he needed his own space to make the wine he wanted. “The first thing that I learned was having a winery with your brother
isn't a good idea. We needed some distance between us, so I came to Hokkaido.”

Domaine Takahiko is a ten-acre winery situated on the rolling hills outside of Yoichi, about three miles from the coast. At the crest of the hill, Hokkaido flags flap in the gentle breeze that sweeps in off the sea.

Japanese wine consumption has shot up since the 1980s, when a growing appetite for foreign culture and the blossoming of expense accounts introduced the country to the virtues of French burgundies and Italian Barolos. The domestic wine industry took off around the same time, centered around Yamanashi Prefecture, close to where Soga was born, and spreading from the northern reaches to the bottom of Kyushu. Hokkaido is proving one of the country's most promising regions for wine production, not just because of the terrain and the weather but because producers have the space—physical, psychic—to experiment with their fruit.