Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo

by Matthew Amster-Burton

And only Japan makes matcha, which is nothing more than high quality tea leaves, ground into powder and whipped up with hot water like a smoothie.

As the saying goes, why buy the octopus when you can get the takoyaki for free?

For my first home-cooked meal in Tokyo, I took an assortment of beautiful Japanese ingredients and did what came naturally: I made Chinese food.

once I interviewed a Japanese-American farmer who grows more than a hundred Asian vegetables in Washington state. Naturally, I asked him about his personal favorite. Cucumber, he said. “How do you prepare it?” I asked. “Slice and eat.”

Here are a few places quieter than the interior of the Kokusai Center: A firing range catering to AK-47 enthusiasts.

A while back, I was listening to The Splendid Table, and Lynne Rossetto Kasper was talking to Lindberg, a Travel and Leisure columnist. The subject? Supermarkets around the world. “What country do you think has the best supermarkets?” asked Kasper. Lindberg didn’t hesitate. “It has to be Japan,” he replied.

In a bit of international solidarity, you’ll see corn dogs, often labeled “Amerikandoggu.”

Nori, incidentally, is also part of the traditional breakfast in Wales, where it is made into laverbread, nori paste breaded in oatmeal and fried. Same seaweed, different coast.

If you already hate tofu, the term “tofu skin” is probably an effective emetic.

You may be familiar with mochi, sometimes called rice taffy, which is cooked sticky rice pounded into a very thick paste. Warabi mochi is not that.

A popular delicacy in Japan is cod or blowfish milt (shirako). “Milt” is just a euphemistic word for sperm.

It’s common to look across the train car and see an entire row of people nodding off, like hobos on boxcars, except these are well-dressed, sober professionals of all ages and both sexes, at all times of day. Sleep seems to hunt them down and overtake them.

This public narcolepsy is, like a bug-eyed anime doll, both cute and unnerving.

Stand on the platform in a small town station, and soon an express train will come screaming through at full speed, in and out of the station in five seconds without stopping. The train gives off an earsplitting insect hum. It seems like you’re watching something physically impossible, like a person lifting a house, or hearing a joke so funny the laughter threatens to rip you apart, and then, with a puff of air, it’s over.

The great stuff about Tokyo is like a vampire: it doesn’t show up in photos. To turn de Botton’s observation on its head, we can be very happy living among ugly buildings.

“I am the same (as the character) in that the only thing in my brain is udon,” said Shigeki Omine, chairman of the association.

The Japanese contend that foxes (kitsune) are really into fried tofu.

Iris’s favorite, kake udon, which is noodles in broth and nothing else, the Japanese equivalent of buttered noodles with Parmesan from the kid’s menu.

When I slurp, it makes the wrong kind of noise, and I’m always biting off noodles and letting them drop back into the bowl, which is a no-no.

My favorite part of the meal was lifting the bowl to my mouth and drinking the broth, rich from egg and tempura grease and noodle starch.

By the end of our Tokyo summer, I wasn’t missing any American foods either, although I did have a craving for spicy food, which is too rare in Tokyo.

Throwing around English words with a katakana accent was lots of fun. I tried it any time I didn’t know the name of something in Japanese, with nearly total success. Pancakes? Pankēki. Beer? Bīru. Culture shock? Karuchā shokku.

Hiragana is squiggly and cuddly-looking; katakana looks like ninja weapons.

I ate very little sushi in Tokyo.

And I would explain, every time, that in Seattle, Japanese food is synonymous with sushi. Some people had heard of this phenomenon. Most found it perplexing, as if American food had taken root abroad but only in the form of lobster rolls.

I enjoyed watching Laurie power through a bowl of sashimi, one of her least-favorite foods, and then say, “Well, I ate sushi for breakfast at Tsukiji fish market. Didn’t I?”

(“Cabbage replenisher” is also super-fun to sing in a guttural death metal voice.)

At home, Iris and I like to finish off a sukiyaki dinner by ladling the last of the broth into sake cups and toasting with it.

So it is with a heavy heart that I must report that the dumplings of Tokyo are mostly lousy.

A soup dumpling is a little marvel of engineering. Called xiao long bao in Chinese, shōronpō in Japanese, and “soupies” by Iris,

I’m exploding with love and soup and I have to tell the world: pan-fried soupies are amazing.

Every time we did something wrong, he sucked in his breath (a very common sound in Japan, at least in my presence) and intervened.

I’m sorry to report that izakaya are among the toughest restaurants to navigate without Japanese language ability.

What makes this particular izakaya special is that it’s not special. No one would go to Nakano just to eat at this restaurant, because it’s surely no better than a fish izakaya in any other neighborhood. These no-name Tokyo holes in the wall could easily go head-to-head with America’s top seafood restaurants.

We had nuta, a sweet miso-dressed salad of assorted vegetables including udo, the chewy white stem of a mountain plant that should always be referred to by its English name, Japanese spikenard.

Tokyo has it bad for Okinawan food and culture, which I think has a lot to do with hardworking people wishing they were on island time. If you can’t make it all the way to Hawaii, Okinawa will do.

Takoyaki are octopus balls—not, thankfully, in the anatomical sense.

If I’m making it sound like we went around eating dessert all the time, it’s because we went around eating dessert all the time. That’s why they call it vacation. A day that ended with Black Thunder probably began with a trip to Mister Donut.

Iris immediately chose an ice cream counter called (really) Mix n’ Mixream, which was like Cold Stone Creamery only good, and asked the guy to bash sponge cake, coconut, and other assorted solids into her ice cream.

Summer is the time to eat eel in Japan.

it’s also true that plastic food costs a lot more than real food, which seems only fair, since it’s rather more durable. A plate of plastic noodles, for example, costs about $60; a plate of real noodles is more like $6.

Kariya, Tetsu and Akira Hanasaki. Oishinbo. Seven volumes in the A La Carte series, published in English by VIZ Media, 2009–2010. There is no greater introduction to the vast world of Japanese cuisine than this eccentric comic series. Begin with the first volume, Japanese Cuisine, and see if you aren’t hooked.