‘The younger generation demand salmon,’ interjects Kazuto. ‘Salmon is the number one most popular neta [nigiri topping], you know.’
I also find this rather hard to believe but let it go. I ask instead about tuna. Outside of Japan there is broad awareness that bluefin tuna is endangered and many believe it should no longer be served in restaurants, but within Japan one rarely gets a sense that this impending extinction is high on anyone’s agenda and I have never eaten in a sushi restaurant in Japan where tuna was not on the menu. I wonder if Ogawa is concerned about the dramatic decline in stocks.
‘Yes, very worried,’ he says. ‘Maybe in the future there won’t be much left. Bluefin is very popular in China. They like oily fish. Japanese prefer umami flavour.’ I am not sure the Chinese deserve to take the blame for bluefin’s decline. ‘The best wild bluefin comes from Oma in Aomori Prefecture [this is the north-eastern tip of the main island, Honshu, close to Hokkaido]. They feed on the squid in the sea there, where the cold water meets the warm coming up from the Philippines. The best time is from October to January.’ Our meal is at an end. I thank these two tough sushi taskmasters, and head back into the city.
Ogawa, Kazuto and I next meet a few days later in the vast function room of a posh hotel in Tokyo, the location of the final of the Global Sushi Challenge. I will be judging alongside Yoshihiro Narisawa, the multi-award-winning chef of the eponymous Tokyo restaurant, whom I know a little. Another judge will be chef Ryu Hwan Tan of Ryunique, in Gangnam, Seoul, who is new to me but apparently has a growing international reputation, and then there are the WSSI chefs who will also be judging alongside us. Fourteen finalists from around the world have won the right to compete here in Tokyo; all are male. The winner will get a posh knife and a three-day training session in Tokyo; if the Japanese contestant wins, he gets a trip to Norway.
This time, I have had breakfast.
The procedure is the same as in London but everything is on a much larger scale. There are TV crews from Japan, Turkey, Korea, France and elsewhere and, before we get underway, we must endure several extremely dull speeches from important people in the Tokyo sushi scene, and the Norwegian sponsors.
‘People think they can come to Japan for three or four months and learn how to make sushi,’ Tadashi Yamagata (head of another sushi organisation) tells the assembled crowd of competitors, supporters, sponsors and media – the now familiar refrain. ‘But they can’t. It takes years. So what happens is that the reputation of sushi abroad is damaged. Now we want to disseminate the correct way around the world.’
Someone gestures to me. Apparently, I also have to say something to inspire our competitors so I take the microphone and mumble a few encouraging words, which I think we can gloss over here, don’t you?
Now feeling even more out of my depth than in London, as the competition begins I shadow Narisawa and Ryu, both of whom are in their chefs’ whites. Many of the chefs have chosen to use ingredients from their native countries in their sushi: the competitor from Spain substitutes Iberico ham for nori seaweed in his maki, for instance, and the Swedish chef uses dill, which is virtually unheard of in Japanese cuisine, let alone sushi. I’m quite pleased about this as the Japanese are, as we’ve heard, hyper-chauvinistic when it comes to sushi, but one of the competitors’ creations, a salmon nigiri topped with parmesan and pine nuts, will haunt me to the end of my days.
After many hours of deliberation, back in the judges’ room we are in agreement: the American and Norwegian contestants were excellent, and I can see the UK’s Xia Jia Tian has been practising hard, but Dae-Won Han from Korea just pips the Japanese chef. His sushi is precise, original and has a wonderfully balanced range of flavours. The scoresheets tell a different story, though. Apparently, unseen by Narisawa or I, Han cut his finger at one point, incurring a penalty which, in this close-fought competition, drops him to seventh. Narisawa politely protests but it is explained that for a sushi chef to cut his finger in front of diners is unthinkable. The decision rests.
The award ceremony features a stirring performance from Japanese drummers, and many more speeches. Finally, Ogawa-san takes the microphone as the exhausted contestants in their chefs’ whites line up behind him. He thanks the sponsors and the various attendees and then, in front of a crowd of a few hundred, including members of parliament from Japan and Norway, this tireless taskmaster breaks down and begins to cry. Months of tension are released as he thanks the contestants and praises their efforts, tears streaming down his face.
At the end of it all, the winner is, perhaps inevitably, Japanese: forty-five-year-old Jun Jibiki of Komazushi in Tokyo. ‘I felt so much pressure, being the Japanese entrant,’ Jibiki tells me afterwards, as he clutches his glass trophy. ‘I’ve been a chef since I was eighteen, so it’s maybe not surprising that I had kind of reached a standstill in terms of my development, but this competition, particularly the creative part, has pushed me forward. I really understand for the first time the creative possibilities with sushi.’
‘I know how the chefs feel, because I am a chef,’ Ogawa tells me, tears still streaming down his face some time later. ‘I think the Japanese contestant won because he knew how to cut, because of technique; Japanese chefs have more than ten years of training, every day cutting.’
Two days after the final of the Global Sushi Challenge I lunch at Jiro Sushi, the most famous sushi restaurant in the world. The 2011 documentary about Jiro-san and his working life revealed the extraordinary dedication of the now ninety-year-old chef and his team, and the relentless, meticulous hard work that goes into making sushi at the very highest level, day in, day out. It also made getting a reservation more difficult than ever: this time it required a friend of a friend, who happened to be a CEO of Sony Japan, to vouch for me and I am, needless to say, almost hysterical with excitement at the prospect of experiencing this pinnacle of Japanese cuisine for myself.
So how was it?
I realise this is irritating given how difficult and costly it is to get a reservation at what is a surprisingly humble-looking subterranean restaurant incongruously located amid the network of passages and tunnels that comprise Ginza Metro station, but Jiro-san’s is the best sushi I have ever eaten.
He had just turned ninety when I dined there but still stands behind his eight-seater counter for lunch and dinner weekdays, and lunch on Saturdays. He moulds the nigiri perhaps a little more slowly these days but still with a steady precision born of decades of honing. He looks like a majestic Galápagos tortoise. He serves his rice still warm, roughly body temperature, which gives a wonderful contrast with the chilled fish, introducing the grains of rice very gently to each other so that they hold together just long enough to transfer the pieces from the counter to their mouth (by hand, chopsticks are not advised). In contrast to Kazato’s delicate flavours, and more to my preference, Jiro’s rice is bracingly vinegared but balances perfectly with the umami-rich, aged, raw fish and fresh shellfish. The whole experience, though brief and awfully expensive (the meal, without drinks, costs £165), is for me as enjoyable and moving as any piece of theatre or musical performance.
After twenty-one pieces of sushi with the famous, cake-like omelette and slice of absurdly ripe and juicy Hokkaido melon to finish, all eaten in silence but for a few groans of pleasure, my friend and I get up to pay. I am surprised to see Jiro leave his counter to say goodbye. The stern, frowning sushi machine we had watched at work for the last half-hour – who had actually scolded the two Chinese diners sitting alongside us for some unseen breach of sushi etiquette – suddenly transforms into a smiling, chatty old codger.
I ask him how he manages to stay on his feet all day: ‘When I was at school, the teacher was always sending me to stand outside the classroom, so I got used to it,’ he laughs. How did he celebrate his milestone birthday the other day? He came to work as usual, he shrugs, as if to say, this is what I do, this is my life. ‘The life of the shokunin is like a sportsman,’ nods his son, Yoshikazu, who one day will take over
the restaurant.
As I re-emerge into the Ginza afternoon sunshine, it almost seems wrong that shoppers are bustling by, oblivious to the culinary magic which has just unfolded beneath the streets.
I can’t help but wonder how many more Jiros Japan has left in its future. Given the country’s seemingly irreversible demographic decline and the economic challenges Japan faces, how many more young men, or women, will be prepared to commit their lives to standing behind a sushi counter, learning how to wash, cook and season rice, fillet, age and slice fish, how to master the grill and the simmering pot?
Chapter 25
Curry Rice
Clutching the handrail, trying not to look down, I finally reach the top of the destroyer’s gangplank. It is a warm, clear, blue-sky day. I take a deep breath. The sea air carries the contrasting aromas of fresh paint and curry. They blend surprisingly well.
Awaiting my arrival on deck is a line of five officers in uniform. They are wearing peaked white caps and offer me a sharp salute. Nothing thus far in my life has prepared me for this eventuality. What am I supposed to do? My first instinct, informed by all those battleship movies, is to return their salute, but that would be absurd, wouldn’t it? I am not actually in the Japanese navy or, as it is properly known, the Defence Force. My right hand twitches at my side like Dr Strangelove’s, but I manage to control the urge. Should I shake hands? No, that wouldn’t work either, you fool; then they’d have to stop saluting. Instead, I elect to offer several half-nods as I walk unsteadily along the row of officers.
A little over seventy years ago, the Japanese military tried to kill my father. Today, they have invited me for lunch aboard their destroyer, JS Kirishima, motto: ‘Right, Brave & Power’. Strange, the places food takes you.
I have travelled by train to the port at Yokosuka fifty miles west of Tokyo to try to get to the bottom of a wildly popular, perhaps the most popular, Japanese dish. It is foreign in origin but thoroughly indigenous in execution. (I know you already know what the dish it as it is the title of the chapter, but just go along with this, OK?) It is, to me, one of the least lovely of all Japan’s popular dishes yet to the Japanese it is the ultimate comfort food, evocative of childhood and schooldays, the simplest of home-cooked meals, one that anyone can make and which everyone does. But first, let’s rewind a few days to an audience with the self-proclaimed monarch of this particular dish.
Wearing a gold jumpsuit, an oversized red and gold foam crown and Elvis sunglasses, with an electric guitar slung over his shoulders, the Curry King and I meet outside the entrance to Shimo-Kitazawa Station on the final day of the annual Curry Festival. He is here to welcome new arrivals to this rather lovely district of western Tokyo, known for its independent theatres and hipster hangouts, and to hand passers-by maps of the 145 participating restaurants and cafés.
The festival seems like a good place to start if I want to get to the bottom of this country’s fascination for a dish which, to me, is not only perplexing in its ubiquity but also deeply unappealing.
These days several types of ‘Japanese’ food are broadly recognisable to us in the West: sushi, of course, tempura, miso soup, ramen and perhaps yakitori. Also maybe soba, tofu and gyoza. However, raisu kare – or ‘curry rice’ – though rarely associated with Japan by outsiders, invariably appears near, or, in the case of Japanese kids, at the very top, of any list of their absolute most favourite foods.
The first time I tried curry rice was in a restaurant specialising in the dish in Roppongi. It had all the spicy zing of workhouse gruel and the texture of baby food. I recoiled at its cloying sweetness, its one-note flavour, the white pepper afterburn and its gloopy, starch-thickened mouth-feel. I remember, too, that they offered me grated cheese as a topping. How could they even call this curry, I had thought to myself as I pushed the sickly sweet matter around my plate.
Typically, curry rice is served on a plate featuring clearly delineated portions of, on one side, a suspiciously glossy, faecal brown sauce with lumps of unidentifiable meat in it, and pristine, bleached-white rice on the other. That first ever bowl of Japanese curry rice. Sometimes, I later learned, you might get a piece of tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlet) on top, or perhaps instead of the rice there might be some udon noodles, which is a definite improvement, but all too often there were also cooked carrots!
And no one, but no one, likes cooked carrots.
One thing was for sure: this was not curry as I knew it. Where was the symphony of spices, the chilli kick, the nose-twitching aroma? Where was the subtle complexity of a bhuna gosht or rogan josh? Like many English people, I had been weaned on kormas, biryanis and chicken tikka masala as a child, before progressing to madras, vindaloo and then branching off into the endless variety of subcontinental cuisine. I do realise that the ‘curries’ we eat in British Indian restaurants are often a bastardised version of dishes eaten in the Punjab or Bangladesh, and that even the term ‘curry’ is a false construct, but having travelled in India I knew that there was at least some relation between what I knew as curry in Britain and what was eaten in the place where it originated. But in Japan, where supermarkets can have entire aisles dedicated to ready-made curry sauce powders or boil-in-the-bag varieties, it almost seemed an affront – ‘cultural appropriation’, as people call it these days – to Indian culture; they really ought to have come up with another name for their own version. At least the Québécois had the good grace to name their version of chips and gravy ‘poutine’.
I wanted to know who was responsible for this outrage. How could a people who had created a dazzling cuisine which I otherwise considered the very apogee of culinary sophistication, the world’s most refined and discerning eaters, how could they eat this … this … abomination?
To tell you the truth, in the years since I first tried it, I had kind of been in denial of curry rice. I had ignored it; ignored the fact that millions of Japanese people ate this shit every day, that there were thousands of restaurants specialising in it. But the Japanese love curry rice, there was no use pretending otherwise. It was time to confront the skeleton in their culinary closet.
‘I think the reason you don’t like curry rice is because it’s sticky,’ the Curry King told me, mildly, when I confessed my antipathy for his beloved dish. ‘You see, we mix flour into it so that we can eat it more easily with chopsticks, and they don’t do that in India.’
A man walked past in a yellow t-shirt bearing the words, ‘Shall We Curry?’
‘No,’ I thought. ‘We shall not.’
I suspected it was more than a little flour thickener that was putting me off curry rice, but I persevered. Why did he love it so? ‘Compared to other dishes, I get more surprises with curry rice, and I love the power the spice gives you. I realise that Japanese curry is not really curry, it’s another food. Really, it exists only for Japanese rice.’
The Curry King told me he ate curry rice at least four times a week and kindly suggested a few restaurants that my friend and I might try. I was intrigued by a place which was serving uni (sea urchin) curry, as uni is one of my very favourite things, less so by another offering ‘minced horse tendon keema curry’, and totally not by the British restaurant Good Heavens! (the exclamation mark is theirs), which had put ‘Fish & Chips with Curry Sauce’ on their menu, but the King suggested an Indonesian-style place, Magic Spice, instead.
The smell of curry powder hung heavy in the air on the streets of Shimo-Kitazawa that day. Seemingly every restaurant my friend Yukiko (who had kindly offered to help me navigate a part of the city she knew well) and I passed was serving curry rice.
Usually, a queue is an encouraging sign at any restaurant in Japan but I reserved judgement as we arrived at Magic Spice, which was done up in a generic India-backpacker style. We joined the waiting crowd in the entrance hall beneath a large gold statue of Ganesh beside an array of Magic Spice products: their own brand packets of curry roux, t-shirts, baseball caps. It is rare that I actively dread lunch but the menu offered little
by way of comfort (it is reproduced here; the typographical errors are their own):
‘Dear the first guest
The curry of the totally new type that the curry of MAGICSPA makes a clear distinction from so-called general curry such as Indian curry and Western-style curry … It is ‘soup curry’.
The magical mystery world represented in this place is an original of MAGICSPA.… A form, a flavour, wave motion … All is an MAGICSPA original thing, and it is finished space.
And it is becoming the new food culture of the departure from Sapporo.
I’m hoping you’ll throw away old measure (such as a fixed idea, an established concept) and then have a holy trip into The unknown world of the spice.’
The flip side of the menu invited us to choose the meat and toppings we wanted, and the spice level, at least that’s what I think they meant:
More good stimulation! ‘Spirit and energy before the public performance!’ ‘I want to do a space trip!’ … For such guests, we have the special hot version, too. (Awakening Aum air)
Other levels of spiceness offered included ‘Consciousness flying in the sky’ and ‘The entrance to the mysterious world’. Toppings included camembert, sausage, natto, raw egg, mochi, tofu and something called ‘MAGIC no MUSHROOM’. There were also Maitake mushrooms which the menu claimed had the power to cure both AIDS and cancer. I chose beef and camembert, and the spiciest version which promised ‘The gateway to the world of mystic hotness of MAGICSPICE’.
The food arrived, the rice in one bowl, the curry soup – dark and malevolent with pools of oil shimmering on its surface and topped with crisp rice noodles – in the other. This was far from the classic Japanese curry rice I was used to, so in that sense a good thing.
It was indeed spicy. Rivulets of sweat began trickling down my forehead with my first mouthful but the heat was tolerable, madras level. ‘Is it OK? Are you all right?’ asked the waiter, concerned. I nodded. ‘Some take a mouthful of the soup, then some rice and mix it in their mouths, some mix it in the bowl,’ he added helpfully.
The Meaning of Rice Page 22