The Meaning of Rice

by Michael Booth

  As I stomp back to my hotel, I hatch a plan. I shall ask the receptionist to ring the restaurant to check if it really is true that they are fully booked. The receptionist duly rings the restaurant. I can tell from the tone of the conversation that there are indeed spaces available but then the receptionist says the dreaded word, ‘gaijin’ – ‘foreigner’, but not in a good way.

  ‘Nooo,’ I hiss, waving my arms around. ‘Don’t tell them that!’

  The receptionist puts his hand over the receiver. ‘You speak Japanese?’

  ‘Erm, yes,’ I lie.

  On my triumphant return to his restaurant a few minutes later, the chef tries his best to hide his irritation and duly serves me twenty or so pieces of sushi in complete silence. It is good sushi, but far from great. Mid-ranking by Tokyo standards. This is an objective critique, you understand, nothing to do with the fact that I ate the entire meal quietly seething with vindicated rage.

  Being turned away from a restaurant or bar on account of not being Japanese has happened to me before in Japan. Indeed, just two days later, in Sapporo, a waiter won’t even bother to claim his izakaya is full, he will simply say: ‘Japanese only’, and close the door in my face. I find it impossible to imagine a restaurant in London turning a potential diner away because they aren’t English, even if they don’t speak English. After all, restaurants are part of the hospitality industry. Is it unreasonable to expect them to be hospitable, even towards foreigners, particularly in a country which so prides itself on its tradition of ‘omotenashi’, the highly refined Japanese notion of excellent service?

  After my sushi meal, I have paid and am about to leave. I look across at the chef. Making sure I have his attention, I lift one hand up, palm down, and waggle it left and right in the universal ‘Meh’ gesture, indicating this was what I thought of his sushi. He looks at me, holding his long, thin sashimi knife in one hand, and for a moment I think he might attempt to fling it in my direction. Clouds of confusion scud across his face but he returns to his chopping board.

  I should have taken a tip from a friend of mine. Though Japanese herself, she experienced similar treatment in a wine bar in notoriously snobby Kyoto a while back. The hostess initially denied her entrance but my friend insisted and took her place at the bar. As she sipped her grudgingly served wine, my friend then had to endure the hostess talking loudly for the entire time about how irritating she found non-regulars. Too mature an individual to engage in the kind of childishness to which I had resorted, my friend instead exacted her revenge as she left with clinical intent by taking one of the bar’s business cards and placing it in her purse next to some yen notes. When my friend had first told me this story, I had waited for the punchline, but that was it. Placing someone’s ‘meishi’ next to money is akin to spitting on it, or grinding it under your heel. It is a gesture of deep disrespect as money is considered unclean.

  So, Hakodate and I do not get off to a great start. The next day, hoping to rebuild our relationship, I make straight for the Morning Market using one of the city’s charming old trams. It turns out I have chanced upon a really old tram, over a hundred years old. The driver and conductor are wearing period costume, which is rather lovely. My mood is once again optimistic. It is time, now surely, to sample the world’s greatest seafood.

  At the Morning Market I scout out the dozens of stalls and restaurants there selling fresh-grilled scallops, massive scarlet crabs, their legs trussed up with rubber bands like bunched fists, and the famed donburi. I plumped for a uni donburi at Uni Murakami, the market’s most famous uni shop. And it is great, it is fine, but I can’t help feel the rest of the market is not quite what I had hoped for. The prices are Tokyo-high: ¥2,000–4,000, (£15–30), for a donburi – the most expensive being the uni. There are no bargains here and the bowls are considerably smaller than those shown in the picture menus. Worse, the quality of produce just isn’t what I had been led to expect. Mass tourism – in this case, of Chinese people – had done what mass tourism does everywhere in the world: it had changed the essential character of the place to one focused almost entirely on parting one-time visitors from their money. I have never before in Japan been harangued by traders trying to get my attention, for instance, but this happens to me in Hakodate, and it makes my nose wrinkle a little. After my uni donburi I sit down in a crab restaurant and immediately the waitress takes great pains to make sure I realise there is a cover charge and 8 per cent tax. Both are quite normal in Japan but clearly she has experienced problems with this. After forty minutes my food has yet to appear and I leave.

  I need more uni-therapy. At the heart of the Morning Market is an indoor food hall, the Market Square, selling local produce – himono (sun-dried fish), smoked salmon, konbu, fancy Hokkaido melons, and more live seafood. I stop by a stall with a few uni and pay a thousand yen for a single sea urchin. The stallholder opens one up for me to eat as if it were a hard-boiled egg and I scoop out thick pale yellow tongues, the size of my thumb. They taste almost floral, sweet but mildly briny too with a creamy, fatty texture and a lingering, haunting flavour. Fantastic. I’m feeling a bit better once more.

  The centrepiece of the food hall is a large tank of live squid around which snakes a line of Chinese tourists, including many children, all waiting for the chance to catch their own lunch with little fishing rods. With not much else on their dance cards, the squid are easily hooked – through their bodies, eyes, wherever – and lifted from the tank to be prepared immediately and served up on paper plates, still very much alive.

  Live squid sashimi is another Hakodate speciality. I order some at a nearby place. The plate arrives bearing a squid so recently dismembered that it doesn’t seem yet to have realised. The unfortunate cephalopod continues not only to twitch its various detached body parts, but to pulsate its camouflage. A bit late for that, I think to myself, as I tentatively pluck at a slice of its body, only to find a nearby tentacle grabbing hold of it. I’m rarely squeamish about food, but I do feel a little sympathetic towards my lunch.

  A couple of days later I find myself at Sapporo’s Nijo Market, where the story is the same: a once fantastic seafood market feels like just another stop on a coach tour with high prices and substandard food and service. Growing increasingly desperate, I head on to Otaru, another coastal Hokkaido town, an hour by train from Sapporo, famed in particular for its sushi. But what modest appeal Otaru once boasted as a wealthy trading and herring harbour has also long been lost to the relentless kettling of tourists from the station to the kitschy drag of souvenir shops on Sakaimachidori, and then on to the early-twentieth-century warehouses beside the canal close to the harbour. These warehouses feature in every single photograph of the town and are apparently famous from many TV dramas, but to me they resemble the less salubrious parts of Birmingham. The sushi is far from bad, but given the much vaunted context, still far from excellent.

  It is all very disheartening. I feel cheated, somehow; as if something halcyon has been lost: Hokkaido’s seafood heart seems to me no longer to be pumping. Where am I going to gorge on my dream uni? There is only one answer: I am going to have to go to the source.

  This is how stupid I am. I have booked one of the most expensive hotels, if not the most expensive, on Hokkaido, boasting one of the greatest views of any hotel in the world, for one night only, but I both arrive and leave after dark. I dine in the top-floor restaurant which has by all accounts the most staggering panoramic view over a gigantic lake-filled volcanic caldera but, as it is night time, I gaze out instead at my own face reflected back from the pitch-dark windows. But never mind: I didn’t come here for the view. I came for the Gargouillou.

  This is French chef Michel Bras’ restaurant at the Hotel Windsor in Toya, awarded three stars in the 2014 Hokkaido Michelin guide; alma mater of some of the greatest chefs in the world at the moment (Shinobu Namae, of L’Effervescence in Tokyo and Alexandre Bourdas from SaQuaNa in Honfleur, Normandy, to name two); and a place I have been dreaming of visiting ever sinc
e I was lucky enough to meet Bras and cook with him one afternoon in Copenhagen five years ago (he showed me how to avoid cutting off the tops of my fingers when slicing fennel bulbs on a mandolin, for which I am eternally grateful).

  I have a principle (much mocked by Japanese friends) of only ever eating Japanese cuisine when in Japan (at least, I avoid restaurants which are straightforwardly French, Spanish, Italian, Mexican, and so on), but I had decided to break my self-imposed embargo in order to try Bras’ iconic Gargouillou.

  Often erroneously described as the greatest vegetarian dish ever (it usually features some air-dried ham), it is true that the Gargouillou is one of the most influential dishes of modern times, replicated in top restaurants around the world, from New York to London, Paris and Copenhagen. In essence just a plate of seasonal vegetables, flowers and plants, the Gargouillou is deceptively complex, with each of its sixty or so components cooked a specific way for a specific time, or indeed left raw, and all of them meticulously plated amid various colourful sauces to resemble as much a piece of abstract art as dinner. It is easily the highlight of my meal, the rest of which is a fairly typical, Michelin-approved, stream of neurotic, tweezered dishes; even Bras’ equally famous innovation, the molten chocolate dessert, was a little underwhelming, its theatricality dulled by overexposure from the freezer department of every supermarket in the world.

  After the meal, I sleep fitfully, partly because I am annoyed with myself that I have blown such a huge amount of money on what was actually a rather soulless, chintzy hotel with a view I was completely unable to enjoy, but also because I have set the alarm for 4 a.m. and rising at that time will be a new and frightening experience for me. And, sure enough, getting up so early and making my way in the dark to a small harbour at Usu, on the Uchiura Bay coast in south-western Hokkaido, is easily among the top twenty most harrowing experiences of my life. But, boy, is it worth it in the end.

  Usu is home to thirteen uni fishermen; Ashihara-san, once one of them, now retired, has been kind enough to offer to take me out in his isobune, the special, narrow, fibreglass boat, about four or five metres long, white on the outside, pale blue inside, used for fishing for uni and abalone.

  ‘When I was a child, the seabed was covered in uni, completely black with them,’ Ashihara shouts above the noise of the outboard motor. ‘But that has all changed. These days, we have to buy fifty thousand young uni every year from Okushiri [an island on the other side of the Oshima peninsula] and leave them here to grow.’

  They leave the babies for four years before harvesting – a process called ‘seeding’ – feeding them with dried, ground starfish in the meantime. There used to be twice as many uni fishermen here back in his childhood, he adds, but over the years their numbers have been depleted due to old age, retirement and death. (Later, I check and the decline was actually far greater; fifty years ago, 130 fishermen had uni permits in this harbour alone.)

  We sail out between the rocky, wooded islets which guard the entrance to Usu harbour, and continue a few hundred yards further out to sea. Soon, several similar boats come into view clustered around some black rocks. Each of the boats is curiously tilted to one side. As we draw closer, through the gauzy early morning light I can see the reason why: the fishermen are leaning over the sides of the boats using large black masks, like glass-bottomed buckets, strapped to their heads, to search beneath the surface of the sea. Every once in a while, one of the men will rise back into the boat, lifting up a pole almost as long as the boat itself. The poles have three short metal prongs on the end, into which are wedged dark, round, fuzzy shadows: sea urchins.

  Following a massive collapse in uni stocks in the waters around Japan in the early 1980s, the uni harvesting season is now closely regulated. It varies around the coast of Hokkaido, but here in this part of Uchiura Bay it runs from mid-June to mid-August. The reason for our early start today is that the fishermen only fish until 7 a.m. after which they must rush to process the haul before the distributors arrive. In the winter, the fishermen go after even more valuable commodities: abalone and sea cucumber.

  After half an hour or so, with fog now rolling in, we follow the fishermen back to the quayside and help unload their catch among the mountains of yellow and orange buoys, barnacle-encrusted nets and plastic crates on the quayside.I am introduced to Masaki Fujino, seventy-three, who fishes here together with his forty-year-old son. During his career, Fujino has fished for everything – grouper, abalone and now, as he has grown older, the slightly less arduous uni. Today has been a good day.

  ‘I’ve caught too many!’ he jokes as they unload the blue plastic crates filled with the precious prickly balls from their boat. Huge, oil-black crows stand like nightclub bouncers on mounds of glossy brown konbu as swooping seagulls compete noisily for scraps. Cats lurk by the scallop tanks. Fujino and his son have harvested around 130kg of uni today; there are about eight urchins per kilo, but after processing they are left with about 15 per cent edible matter. (Technically, the edible part of the uni are its gonads, although they are often erroneously referred to as ‘roe’. Personally I think ‘tongues’ or ‘lobes’ are more palatable euphemisms.)

  ‘It’s been a good season. Other areas of Hokkaido have been hit by bad storms but the sea is quiet here. The price has doubled,’ Fujino tells me. It wasn’t so long ago that uni were considered virtually worthless. ‘In my father’s time, no one cared about uni, it just wasn’t profitable,’ another fisherman told me on a later visit to a different harbour. ‘Only the fishermen ate them, and their families.’ Today, demand for uni is increasing globally and domestically but, as Ashihara had said, the main problem with supply in terms of Japan is the decline in the number of uni fishermen. Those who aren’t retiring, or dying, are switching to scallop farming or, in particular, fishing for sea cucumbers, which are more profitable. As a result, since the late eighties the domestic supply of uni has fallen by about 60 per cent, and the Japanese are now reliant on the Russians for much of their uni. In Russia, the uni grow to more than twenty centimeters in diameter. ‘But they taste terrible,’ says one fisherman, disapprovingly.

  Edible sea urchins are found just about everywhere in the world. They have been eaten around the Mediterranean at least since Roman times; I’ve seen them depicted in mosaics in Pompeii, and in the 1980s a major industry grew up off the California coast farming them. I have even dived for uni in the Arctic off the coast of Norway – which was cold. But the Japanese eat most of the world’s supply; according to the book Echinoderm Aquaculture by Nicholas Brown and Steve Eddy – around 80 per cent of the global catch, 50,000 tons in all per year, worth over £200m.

  The uni caught in the waters of Hokkaido are generally considered to be the best in the world. There are two main types of sea urchin caught here: the murasaki, or ‘purple’ uni, which is a very dark purple, almost black, and has long spines; and the bafun uni, which is dark brown and has shorter spines – its nickname is ‘horseshit uni’ because it vaguely resembles a lump of horse manure. Fifteen or so years ago the bafun was the far more common of the two, making up around 90 per cent of the catch. These days, Fujino tells me, that proportion has reversed. An almost two degree temperature increase in the sea, coupled with an explosion in the hardier murasaki population – which can basically eat anything, including each other, and rocks – has decimated the fussier, more vulnerable bafun, which tend to eat mostly konbu.

  ‘Bafun are more sensitive to the change in temperature from the sea. Purple sea urchin never die,’ says Fujino, bony but straight-backed with skin the colour of teak, and dressed in blue rubber dungarees. (He is also wearing extremely cool 1970s-style steel-framed glasses with pale brown lenses, but not, I suspect, with the intention of appearing cool.) ‘Ninety per cent of the bafun population has gone, and that’s a shame because we used to have the best bafun here, it was the gold standard at Tsukiji.’

  And here’s the kicker: guess which type of sea urchin is the most delicious? The bafun. ‘It’s so m
uch better,’ one fisherman will tell me the next day, when I make another uni trip to the port of Suttsu, on the other side of the Oshima peninsula. He explains their superior flavour by the bafun’s umami-rich, konbu-centric diet. ‘The sweetness, it is extremely sweet, so different,’ he rhapsodises. Without doubt, among those in the know, among those who have a really bad case of uni addiction, it is the bafun that are the most sought after.

  In Uchiura, Fujino says, the bafun population is now effectively zero and the few which survive here are very difficult to find as they tend to hide right at the root of the seaweed. Bafun are still found further north, particularly around the Rebun and Rishiri islands off the northern tip of Hokkaido, but, if its current trajectory continues, the species may eventually become extinct there too.

  The largest purple uni grow to about fifteen centimetres, bafuns to ten. They can live ten to fifteen years but taste best at three to five years. The fishermen harvest them from the seabed four to five metres beneath the surface using long poles either with the three-pronged claws I saw them using in Uchiura Bay, or more sophisticated grabbing claws. It is technically possible to farm uni – further east on the south coast at Attsukeshi they are doing this – but very difficult to make a profit as the costs are high and they take so long to mature.