Posted by mamster on Thursday, June 24, 2010
One thing I wondered about Japan was whether we would get tired of Japanese food. This sort of thing has happened to me before—I’ve had pizza in Bangkok and pancakes in Paris—and I don’t see any shame in it. Here’s what happened in Tokyo.
On our third or fourth day in Japan, while we were walking back to our hotel, I said to Iris, “You know, if you’d like to have Western food for dinner one night, that’s fine with me.”
“Then I’d like to have Western food tonight,” said Iris.
“Okay, sure,” I said. “What are you thinking? Burgers? Pizza?”
“Hmm…Chinese dumplings.”
“Uh, okay. I bet we could ask the front desk to recommend a gyoza place in the neighborhood.”
“Great. Hey, that looks good.” It was a display of plastic tempura shrimp at a place right next to our hotel. “Let’s have that tonight.”
“Works for me.” When we came down for dinner, the place was closed. But they’d left a map on the door, pointing around the corner. We followed it to an old two-story house. “Tempura ga arimasu ka?” I asked tentatively. “Hai!” We left our shoes at the bottom of a ladder-like staircase that would have made an American building inspector laugh hysterically. We ascended to a tatami room, sat on the floor, and ordered off a picture menu.
Iris ordered four enormous tempura shrimp with rice; I had the combo, which consisted of three items on rice: (1) a small whole fish, (2) a shrimp, (3) and a bunch of random vegetables and seafood formed into a patty, battered, and fried. We also had tea and pickles. I didn’t get a picture of any of this, so just imagine shrimp bigger than your face.
I don’t know if this was coincidence or a known fact, but every time we ate in an upstairs tatami room, the waitstaff consisted of elderly women with the demeanor of gruff diner waitresses. This was not at all unpleasant. I especially enjoyed my fried kisu fish (a small whiting). Iris ate two of her shrimp and ate the batter off the other two, presenting me with two naked shrimp. The total price was about $40.
Later, after we survived the trip downstairs, I looked up the restaurant and found that we’d eaten at Daikokuya, which has been serving giant shrimp in that location since 1887.
You can watch a short video about the restaurant here.
Outside of breakfast, the subject of Western food never came up again.
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Posted by mamster on Monday, June 21, 2010
I have a lot more to tell you about Japan and will do so as soon as I have time. Right now I’m neck-deep in an article about how to buy insurance on your grilled chicken, or something.
-Matthew
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Posted by mamster on Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Look, I’m not the most well-traveled guy in the world. But I get around. I’ve been to four continents, a lot of top tourist destinations, and a few unusual ones. I’ve eaten gumbo in New Orleans, pad Thai in Bangkok, fish and chips in London, French onion soup in Paris, and lobster rolls in Maine.
Tokyo is very, very different from those places. I’ve struggled to figure out how to explain it, and here’s what I’ve come up with.
Throughout Tokyo there are drink machines, squat, refrigerated vending machines selling small bottles of various beverages for a dollar or two. We often bought water and other drinks: citrus soda, apple juice, iced green tea. It seems like there’s always a drink machine when you want one.
That’s not the magical part. Lots of cities have vending machines.
At a typical Japanese vending machine, you can pay in three ways: coins, transit card, or 1000-yen bill. About a dozen times during our trip, we slid a piece of paper money into the slot on the front of the vending machine, and not once did it ever spit the bill back at us.
That is Tokyo: the least annoying place I’ve ever been.
You know how at a good restaurant—the kind that is in love with making customers happy, not in love with itself—it seems like the staff knows what you need a moment before you realize it yourself? That’s Tokyo. The trains don’t stop in the tunnel without an explanation. We never had trouble finding something good to eat, usually within a few paces of where we were standing. And Tokyo is the most walkable place I’ve ever been in my life.
Tokyo has ruined me. I had a list of other places I wanted to go on future trips. I crossed them all off and just wrote Tokyo six times.
More soon, including Iris’s favorite food of the trip: grilled chicken tail.
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Posted by mamster on Monday, May 3, 2010
On Thursday we took the JR Nara line two stops to Inari Station, which is just outside the Fushimi Inari shrine. Or as Iris calls it, the Fox Goddess Temple, which is sort of wrong but close enough. As this web page puts it:
Usually when one refers to Inari the two general images are of an old man sitting on a pile of rice with two foxes beside him, or of a beautiful fox-woman.
Temples are Buddhist, and this is a Shinto shrine—although the two religions are totally mixed together in Japan. Anyway, whether you’re interested in religious iconography or not, there are two excellent reasons to visit this shrine.
Torii. Torii are red wooden gates. You’ve seen them before in pictures of Japan. The Fushimi Inari shrine has over 10,000 of them. Here is the famous picture that everyone takes:
The story I have been told is that Inari is the goddess of rice and therefore prosperity, so if you want your business to prosper, you donate a wooden gate to the Fushimi shrine. If Spilled Milk ever hits it big, we are totally donating a torii. You can hike for miles on Inariyama, the hill where the shrine is perched, and hardly ever emerge from under a tunnel of torii.
Eventually I started to get burned out and told Iris I was ready to head back. Iris would have none of it. I was getting hungry. We pressed on. Finally we came to the second reason to visit the Fushimi shrine.
Udon shacks. In Japanese folklore, foxes love to eat aburaage, fried tofu, which is in turn frequently served in a bowl of udon. Iris and I shared a big bowl of the stuff for our morning snack. Look, if there are two things I have no interest in, they are religion and hiking. But Iris sums up our feelings about this place as follows:
You can buy souvenir torii in many sizes at the gift shop. We did not.
We hopped back on the train and continued a few more stops to Uji. I wanted to go to Uji because I wanted to visit Tsuen tea. Tsuen is the oldest tea shop in Japan. It’s been operating at the end of the Uji bridge since 1160. That is a while. I expected Uji to look exactly like this picture from Tsuen’s web site:
It’s actually just a suburban town, but one unusually devoted to tea. To find Tsuen, we stopped in at the tourist office, where they gave us a map entirely in Japanese and seemed very surprised that we were in Uji—not in an annoyed way, more like how I would briefly make a face to indicate, “You live in Tokyo, and you came to Seattle on vacation?”
We found Tsuen, which is just a tea shop. They gave us free samples of gyokuro, which is the highest grade of Japanese tea. Iris took her cup politely and then passed it off to me. I bought some random tea, and I think the guy who helped me was the 24th generation owner of the shop. He looked kind of like me.
Uji is very pretty:
We walked across the bridge and laughed, because there’s a coffee shop on the other side. We tried to find a good place for lunch, maybe some gyoza, but every restaurant seemed to be showcasing food made with tea. So we shared a pork cutlet bento box from the Circle K, where we also discovered Dino Bars, a chocolate bar with white chocolate dinosaur bones and other skeletal images impressed into the top. Good stuff. We brought home half a dozen.
Uji was the low point of the trip for Iris. We got lost, got tea, and got a mediocre convenience store lunch. That’s as far wrong as we ever went in Japan. If you mention Uji to her, however, she will say “grrr,” like a fox goddess.
We caught our shinkansen back to Tokyo and had a late dinner at Yoshinoya, the beef bowl chain, near our hotel. I’d been to Yoshinoya in California, but the original is much better. We sat at the counter and each ordered a bowl of fatty meat, onions, and rice. Iris ate all her meat and asked if she could have more. I mustered enough to Japanese to ask if we could pay for motto gyuniku, and the waitress showed me that there’s actually a section on the menu for more meat. Iris was thrilled.
Meanwhile, I put a bit of pickled ginger into my bowl and wondered whether I might be overdoing it. Then I looked around and saw that everyone else was shoveling a big mound of the stuff on before digging in.
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Posted by mamster on Saturday, May 1, 2010
We sort of blew Kyoto. I don’t blame Kyoto. This was our fault.
We were going to Kyoto because we wanted to ride the shinkansen. I have been wanting to ride the shinkansen since I first heard of it in fourth grade, when we did a class unit on Japan. We learned a whole lot about textiles, as I recall. I’m not sure the word “textile” was ever defined for us, or maybe I slept through that part. We also learned about sushi, which scared the hell out of me, since I was a picky eater.
There are lots of shinkansen lines, but we decided to do Kyoto because we got a reasonably priced train/hotel package and because Kate Williamson’s book A Year in Japan is set there. The book is an illustrated chronicle of Williamson’s year spent living in Kyoto, and one of the most memorable pages shows people skipping across stepping stones set in the Kamo river, which runs through central Kyoto. Iris really wanted to cross those stepping stones. (Me too.)
You don’t need me to tell you that the shinkansen is completely awesome. Painted stripes on the platform show you where to stand, which is important, because the train arrives precisely on time and dwells on the platform for less than two minutes before proceeding.
We rode the Nozomi, which is currently the fastest shinkansen service. Top speed: 186 mph. I was a little worried that the shinkansen might seem anticlimactic, just fast rather than really fast, or worse yet so smooth that it didn’t even feel fast, like a plane that happens to be flying on the ground.
No worries, I felt totally sick. It felt every bit of 186mph, ten times more of a thrill ride than the recycled Disney submarine ride we went on the previous day. We whipped through town and countryside and mostly lots and lots of tunnels. A woman in a smart uniform walks through the train selling tea and coffee and sandwiches and candy, and Iris bought some chocolate sticks with embedded rice crackers—like Japanese Nestle Crunch, except they come four tiny sticks to a package and sixteen tiny packages to a box. Each cellophane pack has a different animal on it. “Here,” said Iris, “you can have wild boar and I’ll take pygmy hippopotamus.” We opened our candy. “Hey, they’re the same,” said Iris, apparently disappointed that her chocolate was not hippo-flavored.
When I caught my first glimpse of Mt. Fuji, I kind of flipped out, but no more so than the middle-aged Japanese women across the aisle. Something about the mountain undoes the stiffest upper lip. The train goes preposterously close to it; it’s the opposite of a zen view. You can practically lick it. (We got much, much closer than in the photo, but after I took this picture I was too busy panting against the glass to take any others.)
Before boarding the train, we bought our bento boxes at Tokyo Station. Somehow I’d envisioned Tokyo Station as being like Grand Central Terminal, with soaring ceilings. It’s actually Penn Station—the current one, not the old one—but clean and with better shopping. Like, insanely great shopping. We skipped the fancy chocolates, but the delis alone are worth the trip. Iris chose a tonkatsu bento and I got assorted sushi. She liked her pork, and ate little else, but I think the side dishes make the bento. I had an oden-like stew of assorted fish cakes and burdock root. Iris had a little seaweed salad and some kinpira gobo to go with her pork. It was really just as good as I imagined it.
We rested for a while at our hotel in Kyoto before heading to Gion, the preserved historic district.
Here’s how we blew Kyoto, item one: we didn’t really do any research before arriving there. So when we got to the river, no stepping stones.
Later I looked it up and they were maybe a mile upstream. But we did find the river, and walked across a bridge and down a cherry blossom-lined lane. Which was pretty and, well, kind of boring. On the west bank of the river, however, is an alley full of restaurants, called Pontocho. We stopped at the first place that looked good, a sukiyaki restaurant that was mildly disastrous.
At home, we serve sukiyaki with a bowl of beaten raw egg on the side for dipping the beef and other ingredients in before eating. Well, I do, at least. Iris and Laurie aren’t into that.
So we went into this place and asked about sukiyaki, and they took us up to the fifth floor, overlooking the river. This was the view from our table:
The waitress asked if we wanted egg with our sukiyaki. I said sure. She cracked eggs into two bowls and beat the eggs, cooked our sukiyaki, and then, to Iris’s horror, pulled out nearly all the beef and plunked it right into the bowl of raw egg. This was the only thing in Japan served to Iris that she refused to try. And can you blame her?
So we did the only sensible thing. I wolfed down all the sukiyaki, and then we had a second dinner of stuff grilled on sticks: chicken wings, yakitori, shishito peppers, and chicken skin. The place took great care to expose every fatty bit of chicken to the heat of the grill, and it was all terrific.
The next day had similar ups and downs.
Next time: The Fox Goddess and Uji.
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