The Meaning of Rice

by Michael Booth

  So, my first curry rice in years was not at all repulsive, enjoyable even, as was my second – Yukiko and I found that uni curry rice place and, as with anything remotely involving sea urchin, it was gorgeous – but I had to concede these were not really representative of the true, authentic horror of everyday Japanese curry rice. For that, I would have to visit some proper old-school restaurants.

  My first was the venerable Grill Swiss in the unlikely setting of a Ginza backstreet – unlikely because Ginza is home to some of the most expensive and refined restaurants in the world, not to mention the flagship stores for brands like Hermès, Chanel and Louis Vuitton out of which I am gently shepherded every time I attempt to browse.

  The Grill Swiss is in a narrow street parallel to the main drag and is identifiable by its red-and-white striped awning. Inside, little appears to have changed since 1947, the year it was founded, rare in this fast, churning part of the city. I like the old-fashioned niceties: the complimentary coffee cup of some kind of unidentifiable soup with which to start, the gingham tablecloths, and so on. It is the kind of place where, once you are ensconced in a booth, you feel nothing can go wrong, that you are shielded from the horrors of the modern world. (Although, looking back, it does seem odd to have ‘Grill’ in your name if you don’t actually grill anything – presumably they don’t grill the curry.)

  Their curry is really not too bad at all, particularly considering it costs just a few hundred yen. First impressions are of a crude but satisfying meaty-marmity flavour before the white pepper burn takes over, eventually to be defeated by a lingering sugary aftertaste. They serve the chocolate-brown sauce separately from the plate of pristine white rice, perhaps a tradition here. There are nice shreds of beef and a funny little silver foil cup of bright red pickled something or other but, oh dear, there are lumps of carrot. Verdict: edible. A good yardstick by which to measure other curry rice.

  For my next curry rice I am aiming a little higher. Though Hinoya is a chain, it regularly tops polls and wins awards as being among the best in Tokyo. Perhaps because of this, at the first branch I visit the chef tells me that they have ‘run out of roux’, though it isn’t yet eight o’clock. There happens to be an award-winning tsukemen ramen place next door so I am able to stave off my hunger in preparation for the twenty minutes it takes me to walk to the nearest other branch of Hinoya, in Kanda.

  I can smell their curry roux from a hundred metres away as I arrive, and I take a seat at the counter with high expectations for my ¥730 plate. Hinoya’s presentation style is striking: overcooked rice pressed into a thick disc, smothered in sauce, with a raw egg yolk planted plumb centre. It stares back at me like some hideous cyclops. I stick my spoon in its ‘eye’ and taste. It is ridiculously sugary, almost to dessert levels, with the now familiar white pepper burn, but is at least blessedly free of carrots, with tiny, machine-cut cubes of beef and a sauce like an over-reduced boeuf bourguignon. I am still no closer to solving the mysterious appeal of curry rice.

  It is time to call in the armed forces.

  Fast-forward a few days, and I have arrived in Yokosuka, one of Japan’s largest naval bases, fifty miles west of Tokyo. Since the late 1990s, Yokosuka has successfully branded itself as Curry Town, attracting thousands to its annual curry festival during which the warships docked here open up to the public to share their unique interpretations of this massively popular dish.

  As I wait for my contact to pick me up outside Yokosuka Station’s convenience store, I notice that the shelves are full of packets of ‘Yokosuka Curry Rice’ mix. Outside is a statue of a cartoon duck in a seaman’s uniform. The duck, called Sucurry, is Yokosuka’s mascot. He is bearing a plate of curry rice with a silver spoon.

  As I inspect the duck, a naval officer in full uniform approaches, hand outstretched. This is Lieutenant Commander Watanabe, tall, stiff-backed, mustachioed: the full Top Gun.

  ‘Call me Tadpole,’ he smiles. Really? ‘It’s my nickname.’ There it is on his name badge alongside an impressive escutcheon of medals.

  After a quick taxi ride during which there is just time to ascertain Tadpole’s opinion of his commander-in-chief, Prime Minister Abe (‘Very happy with Abe. He’s good for the military. I like him’), I am boarding the escort ship Kirishima and inspecting that row of saluting sailors just as a submarine glides into port with its crew lined up on deck.

  After a surprisingly thrilling tour of its weaponry – 127mm rapid-firing guns, multi-purpose ground-to-air missile system, anti-aircraft guns, anti-submarine missiles: basically I feel nine years old again – we visit the bridge where I am invited to sit in the captain’s chair, mounted like a barber’s chair with a fetching red fitted cover. The captain himself is otherwise engaged with a five-a-side football tournament.

  The Kirishima has a crew of 255. Officers eat in the war room, but we join the men in the canteen to sample the Kirishima’s special curry rice.

  ‘We eat it every Friday. It helps the men to get a sense of what day of the week it is when we are at sea,’ explains another officer called Sawada. It is also a long-standing Japanese naval tradition that curry rice is served on the last day before shore leave which means that the dish has extra special associations for all Japanese sailors.

  ‘Even when the men have retired, that smell of curry rice still means it’s Friday, and many still even eat curry rice on Friday long after they have left the ships,’ adds Tadpole. As well as this Pavlovian aspect, curry rice is also an eminently practical dish: the galley can feed 250 men in two and a half hours, including washing-up time, all for ¥440 (£3) a head.

  Each naval port has its own universal curry roux, the basic flavoured thickener with which to make the curry sauce. It is delivered to ships in one-kilo bags, and each ship then has its own recipe for curry rice involving various secret ingredients and tricks. The Kirishima’s recipe has been handed down from chef to chef over twenty years but it is tweaked daily according to who is in charge of the kitchen that week, their preferences, their skill and what supplies they have to hand.

  The man in charge today is Petty Officer Komagome, who looks like a Japanese Leonid Brezhnev. He has an entire arsenal of ‘secret ingredients’, he says, none of which, it turns out, are all that secret: ketchup, jam, honey, chicken fat, oyster sauce and processed, pre-grated cheese, sometimes deployed all at once he tells me (were I his commanding officer I think I would be a little concerned at Komagome’s ability to withstand torture should he ever be captured by the North Koreans). I grimace at the mention of the cheese, but the sailors assure me it is a very common addition to curry rice and has been ever since the British invented it.

  Wait, what? The British invented Japanese curry rice?

  ‘Yes, the curry of the Japanese Imperial Navy originally came from the British Royal Navy during the Meiji era,’ says Komagome.

  I look into this later, and it turns out to be true. Following the British navy’s example, curry rice was indeed introduced to the Japanese navy in the 1880s primarily as a cure for beriberi, a disease of the nervous system caused by a vitamin B deficiency. This was on the recommendation of the surgeon general at the time, Kanehiro Takagi. Beriberi was the most significant cause of death in the Japanese military, a symptom of the malnutrition which has often plagued Japan, partly because of their insistence on polishing away the husk of their rice – wherein the vitamin B lies – to make it white. The theory was that the flour in the curry roux would ensure that the food took longer to travel through a sailor’s digestive system allowing for more nutrients to be digested, and it worked: curry rice did indeed eradicate beriberi in the Japanese navy within just a few years. Because it arrived via Britain, curry rice was considered a ‘yoshoku’ or ‘Western-style’ dish, and it duly appeared on the menu of the early yoshoku restaurants in Yokohama and Tokyo in the late 1800s.

  It wasn’t only the recipe for curry rice which came from the British. For many decades the curry powder used by the Japanese to make it was made in Britain
by Crosse & Blackwell. Those imports came to a shuddering halt, however, with the great curry powder scandal of 1931 in which ‘fake’ powder was found to be in circulation – according to the Japan Times, there were numerous arrests and a diplomatic incident ensued. After that, domestic production began in earnest, with instant curry sauce mix being introduced in the 1950s. Today, most convenience stores sell boil-in-the-bag curry, and entire aisles of Japanese supermarkets are dedicated to the dozens of variations of ‘curry roux’ made by the likes of S&B, Vermont Curry and the biggest brand, House Foods.

  Naval curry rice as a cultural phenomenon is a more recent development, with its origins in a community outreach project initiated by the defence force here in Yokosuka in 2001. That was followed by the first Yokosuka Curry Festival in 2014, which drew 30,000 people and was such a hit that other naval ports, like Kure and Sasebo, followed suit. So successful has the whole naval curry promotion been that the Ministry of Defence in Tokyo is currently engaged in a project to create a definitive joint forces curry involving the combined efforts of the army, navy and air force. ‘But don’t worry, it won’t be a threat to naval curry,’ Komagome assures me.

  It is time to eat. Taking a compartmentalised pressed tin tray I join the queue, ignoring the hot dogs and strange, rubbery pucks of omelette, to reach the vat of steaming brown slop that is today’s Kirishima Curry Rice. I fill the largest indentation half and half, lumpy curry and a hefty chunk of rice, with a couple of pieces of lettuce for appearance’s sake, and return to the table.

  The bad news first: there are cooked carrots in the sauce. Did I mention nobody likes cooked carrots? There are also potatoes, which are more acceptable, and the beef is sliced rather than cubed – apparently that’s just how it arrived (from Australia) that week. It has a deep, beefy flavour, isn’t too sweet, but there is that by now customary white pepper assault.

  As I eat to the sound of several dozen clattering spoons on trays, a thought suddenly strikes me: in 1942 the Japanese had invaded Singapore, capturing hundreds of British servicemen, many of whom later perished in internment camps. Among those who escaped was a twenty-two-year-old sergeant major in the Royal Air Force, Stanley Victor Booth, my father. He told me that, on hearing the Japanese were about to enter Singapore, he and his comrades literally dropped everything they had with them on the quayside and boarded a mango boat for Sumatra, escaping from the enemy with hours, if not minutes, to spare.

  My father held no particular grudge against the Japanese for their conduct towards him during World War II, so I am sure he would have been delighted by a turn of events which has seen me hosted for lunch on a Japanese destroyer. I weigh up whether to share all of this with my lunch companions. Is it unfair, or even inappropriate, to burden them with my sentimental backstory?

  I begin to tell them the story but halfway through I can feel myself becoming a little emotional. My father died more than a dozen years ago, before I even began visiting Japan. Yes, I think to myself. He would have loved this. He would have loved to hear about this day.

  I take a deep gulp of tea, compose myself, and make it to the end of my story. I don’t know what I was expecting by way of a response, but my new friends seem sympathetic, and smile back.

  ‘So, how does this compare to British Royal Navy Curry Rice?’ Komagome asks as I finish my lunch. ‘Which was best?’

  ‘Oh yours, definitely yours,’ I say, and raise my cup of tea as a toast.

  Chapter 26

  Yakitori

  I’ve been to Torishiki several times, but it never seems to be in the same place twice.

  Everywhere is difficult to find in Tokyo: you can take it for given that for virtually all of the places we visit in this book my family and I will have spent at least half an hour lost, trying to find it. Picture me sweaty and tight-lipped, clutching a crumpled scrap of paper which I will occasionally brandish at innocent passers-by while my family pretend not to know me. Well-meaning strangers draw a blank, and I let out a deep, almost existential sigh, before finally turning on ‘data roaming’ in a desperate, prohibitively expensive attempt to find out where on earth we are.

  It doesn’t even matter if I have visited a place before. Every time I come to Torishiki, for instance, I spend a good deal of time in a frantic, spiralling orbit of Meguro Station with random digressions down dark alleyways and, each time, this chic little yakitori joint suddenly appears at the end of the same alleyway that I have checked three times already. It is the Brigadoon of restaurants. It doesn’t help that its entrance is the epitome of discretion: an unmarked pale wooden door, draped with a white noren curtain, set in a windowless charcoal-coloured wall. It looks more like an exclusive kaiseki restaurant than a yakitori joint.

  That is not entirely inappropriate as this is arguably the best yakitori restaurant in Tokyo; in fact, it might well represent the future of yakitori globally, as its ambitious chef, Yoshiteru Ikegawa, explains when I finally settle behind his horseshoe-shaped counter for a chat.

  ‘I want yakitori to be thought of in the same way as sushi. I want yakitori restaurants to have that same image, the same prestige around the world,’ he tells me.

  ‘Yakitori’ literally means ‘grilled chicken’, although various vegetables, pork, cheese, even nuts, can be involved. Usually yakitori places are smoke-filled, low on comfort, with tatty beer ads pinned to the wall, a model of a waving cat on the counter, and a prominently placed air-conditioning unit caked in dusty fat – a ‘quick and dirty’ kind of vibe.

  Torishiki, on the other hand, has a Michelin star, and Ikegawa is one of only a few yakitori chefs to work on the ‘omakase’ principle, as practised by the better sushi places, where the chef selects the courses you eat without a menu. But one star and acclaim from the New York Times and others are not enough. As Ikegawa explains, he wants nothing less than to be the Jiro Ono of yakitori.

  ‘There are a lot of similarities with sushi, you know. They both look like simple ways of cooking from the outside. There’s just the meat, the salt and the tare, or the fish and the rice, and you serve the customer directly, but yakitori is very complicated if you do it well. I want Japanese chefs to start spreading the story about high-quality yakitori like they have with sushi. I think it can get much better quality and much more refined. There is still so much potential.’

  It is late afternoon and, as we chat, Ikegawa prepares for the evening service, gliding with smooth purpose about his small, open kitchen, occasionally removing a large fan from the belt behind his back to give his fire a quick waft, or hammering down the charcoal into an even spread in the oblong grill behind the cedar-wood counter.

  Ikegawa, forty-three, grew up in the eastern Tokyo district of Koiwa. The way he describes it, his childhood was permanently wreathed in yakitori smoke from the restaurants clustered in the alleyways close by Koiwa Station.

  ‘I spent all my pocket money on yakitori,’ he grins. ‘Back then, yakitori was definitely a low-class kind of food. All yakitori restaurants were very casual, very smoky usually. But by the time I was twenty, I had made up my mind that I wanted to be a yakitori chef and started to plan how to make that happen. My father [a printer] was against it. He didn’t think I would be good enough to make a living.’

  At this stage, others might have approached an established yakitori restaurant for a trainee position, but Ikegawa instead spent most of his twenties just eating as much grilled food as possible. ‘I was working in an office by day but in the evening and during my time off I was eating yakitori, seeing it from the customer’s point of view. Finally, I found the restaurant I wanted to train in: Toriyoshi.’

  Toriyoshi’s owner was Yoshito Inomata, a venerated yakitori master. He had been the first to offer wine as an accompaniment to yakitori and, as a result, had already begun to attract the attention of French culinary tourists. But Inomata, more used to teenage apprentices, was extremely reluctant to take on a trainee of such comparatively advanced years.

  ‘He made it clear that
he expected me to work twice as hard,’ recalls Ikegawa. ‘I really had to prove myself. They gave me all the rubbish jobs. For the first year, I was not even allowed to touch any of the chicken meat. Many other trainees quit in that first year. The boss was watching who would survive. He never directly taught us techniques, but that’s normal in Japanese kitchens: you just have to learn by watching. But I never thought of giving up. Quitting was not an option.’

  Ikegawa spent years two, three and four of his apprenticeship learning how to prepare the meat for the grill, taking care of the customers, and in particular observing the way Inomata timed the meal.

  ‘He used to say, “To make good yakitori, the most important thing is to brush up on your personality skills, then you can understand your customers better.” Timing is so important. I am like a conductor, and the diners’ breaths are like musical notes.’ He turns away to tend to a simmering pot, then back again. ‘When you exhale you can’t eat, so I try to sense my customers’ breathing. I have to be alert all the time to my customers, to serve the women first or, if there is a group, then the oldest guest, but I need to check on all the relationships. I have to figure out who is hungry, who eats fast, who is more interested in talking to their companion. I have to feel the atmosphere, watch the body language to time the meal to maximise their satisfaction.’

  Looking back, when I’ve eaten here before, the pacing of the meal has been perfect. Ikegawa-san usually starts quite quickly, placing a few skewers in rapid succession upon the hefty ceramic plates on the counter before you, then slowing the pace to let you digest and catch up with your companions. Sometimes he can almost seem to be teasing you (or, at least, someone like me who eats far too quickly), making you wait longer than you might want, whipping your appetite up into a frenzy of anticipation with the wafting smoke and sizzling chicken juices. You watch, rapt, as he tends his grill like a brilliant xylophonist, turning skewers a specific number of times (it varies depending on the cut of meat: some he turns up to ten times), removing others to dip in tare (again, several times), judging the cooking time of each to within seconds. Now I think about it, this also explains the slightly stilted way he moves about this open kitchen, purposefully pausing to face different customers as he attends (or appears to attend) to some or other task.