Untangling My Chopsticks (17 page)

Aside from having all these special manners and customs, Kyoto natives are known for being quite closed, which only adds to one's sense of estrangement. Even Tomiko described them as having an air of superiority; something I could understand having come from the small New England town of Manchester, north of Boston, Kyoto's Sister City. Nonetheless, despite their snooty attitude, even to other Japanese, Kyoto natives are respected. As a friend from Tokyo explained, “We're proud of them because they are carrying on all the old traditions.”

Being an American woman in Kyoto closed the screen even tighter, particularly since women in Japan have highly traditional roles in this conservative society. What's more, every Westerner I passed on the street refused to make eye contact. It was as though by acknowledging me, I would ruin their Japanese experience. “Pretend you don't see me, so I can pretend I didn't see you,” their body language seemed to say, as they quickly strode by.

But Tomiko and Yasu were different. They had reached out, slid open the shoji, and welcomed me into their home.

Before I moved, I had worried about the logistics of living with this Japanese couple. Who would use the shower first in the morning? Should I buy my own coffee for breakfast? How would we deal with dinner?

Because I was American, I was the only one who wanted to shower in the morning. I would rise around 7:00, go for a run, then shower when I returned. Tomiko and Yasu, like most Japa
nese, drew a bath in the evening to soak away the cares of the day before retiring to bed.

Yasu, a small, wiry man with thick black hair and steel-rimmed glasses, had often left for work by the time I came down for breakfast around 8:30. On those occasions when we did share breakfast, Yasu would kneel on a cushion in his blue jeans, work shirt, and bleached cotton athletic socks at the low redwood table on the rug in the family room fiddling with his walkie-talkie and eating the thick fingers of white toast that Tomiko prepared for him. He would then drive to his carpentry site, while Tomiko often crept upstairs for another snooze.

To my surprise, both Tomiko and Yasu drank coffee for breakfast. Tomiko would spoon out instant Nescafé and Cremora from family-size jars that sat on a white rolling cart parked by the stove. She then added boiling water to the mugs from an electric Thermos that also sat on the cart, next to the fruit bowl and telephone. I also drank the Nescafé because it was much less expensive than brewed coffee and more in harmony with “the group.”

Yet, I often wondered what their fondness for coffee said about the future of Japan's traditional foodways. I had heard most schoolchildren now ate cold cereal or toast for breakfast, since housewives no longer wanted to get up early to make the traditional Japanese breakfast of rice, miso soup, cooked vegetables, and grilled fish. I couldn't blame them. But what other habits, rituals, and traditions were disappearing?

I began to feel a little guilty about all this as I ate my morning bowl of muesli with sliced bananas. Perhaps if I had made tea and miso soup, Tomiko would have joined me in a traditional Japanese breakfast, instead of eating cereal like me, or toast like Yasu. But in the end, we all preferred the taste of coffee (albeit in
stant), which, to be honest, would clash with the fermented salty smack of miso soup.

Supper required the most thoughtful planning. Who would decide the menu? Would I go to market, or Tomiko? Would she cook, or would we switch off ? How much money should I contribute toward our food? Most important, would my evening teaching schedule interrupt their dinner routine?

Tomiko made it clear from the start that she would plan, shop for, and cook all meals. In a way, this was a relief. Or so I thought at first. To help, I insisted on setting the table and washing the dishes. It was the least I could do. As for money, we agreed I would pay her $150 a month to cover groceries and incidental expenses.

Since Yasu had grown up subsisting on vegetables as the son of a farmer, he refused to eat them as an adult. I noticed this same sentiment prevailed among many postwar Japanese. Since they finally could afford not to eat vegetables, they relished not doing so. Therefore, with Yasu happily rejecting most plant foods, Tomiko's dinners usually featured meat, particularly beef. She had grown up eating lots of red meat, as a result of her grandfather's influence. He had lived in a German-occupied area of China during World War II and, thus, developed a fondness for sausage, beef, bread, and cheese. Naturally, he passed these predilections onto his son, Tomiko's father, who, in turn, passed them onto Tomiko.

In contrast, if I never saw another steak, I would moo with contentment. So at Tomiko's I usually took a polite helping of whatever meat dish came to the table and then loaded up on rice and pickles. Occasionally, there would be a vegetable.

But it was never in the form of salad. Most Japanese cook or pickle their vegetables. The closest you'll come to a bowl of raw
greens in Japan (with the exception of foreign restaurants) is the nest of shredded cabbage that garnishes
tonkatsu,
the deep-fried pork cutlets coated with fluffy breadcrumbs. Some say the Japanese avoid raw vegetables out of habit from the days when farmers used night soil as fertilizer. Others say raw vegetables lead to indigestion. Regardless of the reason, I often pined for leafy greens and the vegetable mixtures I saw piled high in Kyoto's markets.

Yet, vegetables were not just absent at Tomiko and Yasu's. Contrary to popular belief, Japanese restaurants rarely feature vegetables. Step into a sushi shop, for example, and you'll see what I mean. With the exception of a cucumber or two on the appetizer menu, it is seafood and rice from there on out.

Eel restaurants offer the same veggie conundrum. Order an eel dinner and you're likely to get clear soup containing the rubbery heart, a bowl of white rice, perhaps a slice of rolled omelet, and several fillets of eel. That's it. Nothing green. No vegetables, except for the requisite sliced pickles.

Likewise, rice bowls and noodles dishes rarely feature vegetables. The same holds true with restaurants featuring tempura, unless you order vegetable tempura, in which case your healthy vegetables are deep-fried. Oftentimes, the only green I encountered in a Kyoto-style restaurant was the jagged piece of plastic “grass” that separated the different foods.

The exception to this strange phenomenon is the foods served at extremely elegant restaurants, such as those featuring restaurant kaiseki (as opposed to tea kaiseki). Haute cuisine in Kyoto highlights peak seasonal ingredients, particularly vegetables. Elaborately prepared in Thumbelina-size portions, to avoid sending you home stuffed, they arrive on rare and beautiful tableware in a quiet contemplative atmosphere.

For a small fortune, you can sit in a private tatami room
overlooking a moss garden and savor this colorful sequence of seasonal specialties, a single
matsutake
mushroom in autumn, the sweet tip of a fresh bamboo shoot in May, and a tablespoon of slippery lemony-tasting water shield in summer. Of course, these plant-based treasures, this kind of feast, lay far beyond the grasp of my humble chopsticks.

But I could hardly complain. A few greens missing from my rice bowl at Tomiko and Yasu's was nothing compared to the privilege of having such a special place to park my bicycle at night.

This simple, comforting, home-style dish evolved after the Meiji Restoration, when beef entered the Japanese diet. You can easily use pork or chicken instead of the beef. Enjoy it on a snowy winter night with a side of greens.

• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  

• 3 medium potatoes (about 1¾ pounds), peeled and cut into bite-size chunks
  

• 2 medium onions, peeled and coarsely chopped
  

• ⅓ pound lean beef, sliced into thin bite-size strips
  

• ⅔ cups dashi (
  page 48
  )
  

• 3 tablespoons sugar
  

• 3 tablespoons sake
  

• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
  

• 1 tablespoon mirin
  

Heat the oil in a large shallow saucepan over medium heat. Add the potatoes, onions, and beef and sauté for 5 minutes. Stir in the dashi, sugar, sake, soy sauce, and mirin. Reduce the heat to low and cook the mixture, partially covered, for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the potatoes are falling apart and melting into the syrupy sauce.

Makes 4 to 6 servings

Long simmering and a bit of sugar transform these radishes from crisp and spicy to juicy, sweet, and chopstick tender. A dab of mustard adds a tasty bite of heat. As with most Japanese foods, these radishes taste best at room temperature.

• One 2-pound daikon radish
  

• 2½ cups dashi (
  page 48
  )
  

• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
  

• 2 teaspoons mirin
  

• 1 teaspoon sugar
  

• ½ teaspoon coarse salt
  

• Hot mustard (such as Chinese) for garnish
  

1. Trim and peel the radish and then cut into 1-inch-thick wheels. Place in a large shallow saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring the radishes to a boil, reduce the heat to low, and simmer, partially covered, for 40 minutes. Drain.
   

2. Pour the dashi over the cooked radishes in the same large shallow saucepan. Add the soy sauce, mirin, sugar, and salt and bring the mixture to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and simmer the radishes, partially covered, for 30 minutes. Let the radishes cool in the cooking liquid.
   

3. To serve, place several daikon wheels in a deep bowl with some of the cooking juices. Top each wheel with a little dab of hot mustard.
   

Makes 6 servings

10.

ne evening after a particularly gratifying supper of silken cabbage leaves padded with savory ground pork and braised in dashi until spoon tender, Tomiko made a proposition: “I think it would be fun to roast a chicken for Christmas dinner. What do you think?”

Christmas had been on my mind ever since I started hearing “Silent Night” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” piping through the streets of downtown Kyoto around the first week of December. I told Tomiko I would love to roast a chicken. In fact, I would help plan, cook, and pay for the meal.