The food was excellent and the beer cold. I finished, marveling at how much flavor a cook can coax out with a little salt, pepper, and hot charcoal. Sure, it’s easy to make pork taste good, but the zucchini was also charred, juicy, and irresistible. I wandered around the alley a little more and then out among the skyscrapers and department stores of Shinjuku, thinking about the words of William Gibson. “Shinjuku at night is one of the most deliriously beautiful places in the world,” he wrote, “and somehow the silliest of all beautiful places—and the combination is sheer delight.”
Yakitori is also sheer delight. On our first trip to Japan, Iris and I went to dinner at a tavern—an izakaya—that was part of a national chain and situated invitingly on the bank of the Sumida River in Asakusa. The restaurant had a picture menu, which was a good thing, since neither of us could read any Japanese at the time. Despite the pictures, I managed to order poorly. A chain izakaya is not the place to order sushi, and to drink, I ordered what I thought was a small bottle of sake but turned out to be a small bottle of sake accompanied by a giant bottle of beer. Iris thought this was so hilarious that she still brings it up, three years later.
In retrospect, I’m not sure why I considered unexpected beer a problem, but the place was smoky and not especially welcoming, and Iris was in the mood for tonkatsu but couldn’t find any on the menu. She flipped through for a while and then said, “I want that.”
“Looks good to me,” I said. It was some kind of chicken on a stick. When I ordered it, the waiter asked if we wanted shio or tare. This much I could understand. Shio is salt; tare is a rich, sweet sauce made from reduced soy sauce, mirin, and simmered chicken parts. It’s a common choice in yakitori places; tare is the safe option, since anything tastes good with sweetened soy sauce. Salt is for when you really want to see what the grill master can do.
Here we went with tare. Soon the waiter brought two skewers, each loaded up with tiny, glistening bites of chicken. We each took a bite and shared an astonished stare: this was the best chicken we’d ever tasted, and we had absolutely no idea what chicken part we were eating.
Later we figured out that it was bonjiri (sometimes written bonchiri). In English, it’s called chicken tail or, more memorably, the Pope’s Nose, a fatty gland usually discarded when prepping a chicken for Western-style cooking. We ordered two more plates of the stuff.
Yakitori is a beak-to-tail approach to chicken. OK, not literally beaks, but common choices at a yakitori place include thigh meat, breast meat, wings, heart, liver, and cartilage. The true test of a yakitori cook, I think, is chicken skin. To thread the skin onto skewers at the proper density and then grill it until juicy but neither overcooked (dry and crusty) or undercooked (unspeakable) requires serious skill.
“I wish we could go somewhere with an English menu so I know what I’m ordering,” said Laurie.
“Doubtful,” I replied. But I could understand not wanting to leave all the ordering in the hands of, well, me. There was a fifties throwback sexism to it (“And she’ll have...”), but more to the point, who knows when I might order something weird like chicken skin on a stick?
Laurie got her wish at a yakitori place in Nakano that ended up becoming one of our favorite restaurants. It’s a chain restaurant whose actual name is Akiyoshi, but I called it Yakitori Stadium, and Laurie and Iris, picking up on a mistranslation on the English menu, called it Yakitorino. I’ll call it that, too, because it’s fun to say. The menu was a double-sided laminated (that is, sauce-proof) sheet with Japanese on one side and English on the other.
Diners at Yakitorino sit at a U-shaped wooden counter around the grill, and as the cook finishes grilling each order of skewers, a waiter delivers the food to a heated metal shelf just above the counter. It’s a great gimmick. The food is rushed to you as soon as it finishes cooking, and since your fellow customers are eating two feet away on either side, it’s easy to spy on and steal their orders. (Order the same thing, I mean, not swipe their skewers, although I certainly thought about it.) When you finish nibbling all the chicken off a skewer, you drop the empty into a black plastic cup, giving a real-time tally of how many you’ve demolished.
Actually, Laurie only sort of got her wish for an English menu, because once Iris got her hands on the menu, she took charge. “Negima onegai shimasu,” she’d say, putting her finger to her lower lip the same way I do when deciding what to order. Negima is the single most popular yakitori skewer, chunks of chicken thigh meat interspersed with lengths of sliced negi.
Charcoal-grilled negi becomes amazingly tender, and the layers slide apart with a nudge of the tooth. Negima is sometimes made in the U.S. with scallions in place of negi, and it’s not the same. In general, as much as I like scallions, they make a poor substitute for negi; they’re smaller and the flavor is more oniony. American leeks are too tough. I guess the only substitute for negi is dreaming about negi like a nostalgic doofus.
Laurie and I ordered chūhai to drink. Short for “shōchū highball,” chūhai is cheap vodka-like liquor with club soda and often lemon or other fruit flavoring. It’s a tall, icy drink, not very strong, perfect for summer. Anyone serious about drinking would dismiss chūhai as being identical to wine coolers, but every drink has its proper context, and a fizzy, unchallenging, lightly alcoholic drink on a hot summer night is hard to beat—especially with salty food.
At Iris’s direction, we enjoyed all sorts of skewered bits. While most yakitori places serve various cuts of chicken and a few vegetables, the menu at Yakitorino was all over the place, and nearly everything was good: breaded and fried beef cubes on a stick; fried lotus root; pork jowl with miso; shishitō peppers. But Iris and Laurie’s single favorite dish at Yakitorino was neither meat nor vegetable and was not served on a stick. “If you’d really left the ordering up to me,” Iris said to me recently, “we would have had nothing but yaki onigiri.”
Yaki onigiri are plain, triangular rice balls (no fillings or nori wrapper) cooked on a hot charcoal grill and brushed with soy sauce or miso. The sauce on the outside caramelizes as the rice becomes charred and crispy and gives off an aroma of popcorn. The interior of the ball heats up and drinks in just a hint of sauce. It is a riot of flavor and texture made with two completely ordinary ingredients.
Iris and I have decided that if we were going to open a Japanese restaurant, it would be a yakitori place, which Iris has dubbed Yakitori Ding-Dong. “You would cook and I would serve,” she told me. Which is silly, since I don’t know any more about making yakitori than she does, but maybe the knowledge is contained in a master chef’s sweaty tenugui. Hand-me-downs, anyone?
Cozy Town
ほっとする
Not much is old in Tokyo, but the street pattern is, and makes Tokyo seem warmer and cozier than Nagoya, a much smaller city.
—Edward Seidensticker, Tokyo from Edo to Shōwa
A few years ago I was on a Seattle city board devoted to pedestrian issues. (And let me tell you, we weighed in on some pedestrian issues.) A lot of our time was spent advocating for building sidewalks in neighborhoods that didn’t have any. Well, most streets in our Tokyo neighborhood of Nakano don’t have sidewalks and don’t need them.
If you’ve seen pictures of Tokyo streets, like the teeming Shibuya Crossing or the city’s other Times Square–like districts (Shinjuku, Akihabara, and so on), it’s easy to get the idea that the whole city looks like that, or that the only respite from urban hyperintensity is to visit a temple or shrine. This is not true at all. Even in the center city districts, if you walk a couple of blocks off the major arterial, the bustle and crush fade quickly.
Tokyo has a bizarre street address system, so arcane that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was designed during the Edo period to confuse foreign invaders. Each district is divided into neighborhoods, and each neighborhood is divided into multiblock parcels called chome (cho-meh). Within each chome, the blocks are numbered, and on each block, the buildings are numbered. But they’re not necessarily numbered
in order: building #1 might be between #17 and #24. This means any street address in Tokyo is an incomprehensible string of numbers (building/block/chome). Nobody other than the post office actually navigates by street address; people use landmarks and mobile phones.
My point isn’t to scare you away from ever visiting Tokyo, which is actually quite easy to navigate. The reason Tokyo doesn’t operate on the lot number/street name system used in American cities is because nonarterial streets in Tokyo, taking a cue from U2, don’t have names. Our apartment wasn’t on Cherry Blossom Lane or any other street with a cute name; like most homes, it was on a nameless street.
As you walk from named to nameless streets, the urban quality changes. The named streets are often huge, packed with cars, with wide sidewalks and tons of street-facing businesses, often several floors of them. It’s common, and mouthwatering, to see a tall skinny building with a large sign listing all the restaurants you’ll find on its various floors. (“Yakitori 2F, Sushi 3F, Korean BBQ 4F–5F,” etc.) The nameless streets are skinny, usually wide enough for one car with room for pedestrians or bikes to squeak by either side of it. Everyone shares the road: parents on bikes with one kid in front and another behind; businessmen in white dress shirts and black slacks (summer “cool biz” style) carrying briefcases; schoolgirls and schoolboys in uniform; vigorous-looking elderly people; and the occasional slow-moving car or truck. Every time I saw a Domino’s or Pizza Hut delivery, I laughed, because the vehicle of choice is a tiny scooter outfitted with a pizza trunk. (Also, I laughed because, hey, why would you order Domino’s if you lived in Tokyo?)
No matter how far into the residential area of a neighborhood you walk, the side streets are punctuated by vending machines. You’ve probably heard tales of all the crazy things you can buy in Japanese vending machines, but the golden age of vending diversity, when you could buy sake and books and fetish gear, is mostly gone. Today, nearly all vending machines sell drinks, and in the summer they’re indispensable.
Vending innovation isn’t dead. Some machines use facial recognition software to guess which drink you’re in the mood for (based mostly on your gender and the time of day, I was told). Iris and I always liked to stop at the machine on the Nakano Station platform that dispensed slushy iced drinks like cocoa-strawberry, matcha, and Ramune. (Ramune is a soda known for its unusual bottle, which has a glass marble in the neck, and for coming in various flavors like orange, red, and blue, all of which taste the same to me.)
It took about eighty seconds to shave the ice into the cup, which meant we’d miss our train. Luckily, the next train was always three minutes behind. We also enjoyed the occasional touch-screen machine, where the screen took up the entirety of the front panel, like a giant iPad, and you’d tap a life-size depiction of the bottle you wanted to buy.
Most vending machines, however, were like the ones in the cluster near our apartment which we dubbed, inventively enough, Vending Machine Corner. For about $1.50, you could get iced green tea or black tea with milk; various sweetened iced coffee drinks like Boss and (actual brand name) Mt. Rainier: The Mountain of Seattle; sports drinks like Speed Athlete and Pocari Sweat; and our personal favorite, water. The iced tea is tasty, but once I made the mistake of trying hot tea from a machine and received a warm plastic bottle. The tea was lousy, but even if it had been the finest first-growth tea from Uji, drinking from warm plastic will make you think of a urine sample.
Occasionally we saw someone refilling a machine, but mostly the vending machines were unattended and ready to serve. Where do they plug in? Who owns them? Life is mystery.
Not all of Tokyo’s nameless side streets are residential. When we took the Tōbu Tōjō line train deep into Saitama Prefecture to visit friends one Sunday, at every brief station stop along the way we could see a shōtengai inviting us to throw out our plans.
A shōtengai is a busy pedestrian shopping street, closed or inhospitable to cars. Walk three blocks down a typical shōtengai, and you’ll pass well over a hundred businesses: casual restaurants, convenience stores, record stores, pachinko parlors, used book and record stores, produce stands, clothing shops, all the customary urban mishmash. In Kichijōji one day we took a long detour into a store selling nothing but high-quality clothing buttons, and the place was so charming that even I was into it. My time in that store probably constituted the majority of the time in my entire life I have thought about buttons. On a shōtengai north of Kōenji Station, we ran into a troupe of tipsy comedians mugging for photos.
Years ago I read a quote whose source I’ve been unable to trace. The writer described great urban spaces “where the city holds you in the palm of its hand.” The most important ingredient in that feeling is a pleasant sense of enclosure, of being in what architectural theorist Christopher Alexander calls an outdoor room. Tokyo is riddled with this kind of delightful place, and I think it’s what Seidensticker was talking about when he said Tokyo’s street pattern makes it warm and cozy. Those nameless, narrow backstreets, with frequent intersections and diversions, are Tokyo’s fundamental form, and they are arranged into neighborhoods with recognizable personalities.
The Jiyūgaoka neighborhood, for example, can only be described as cute, or, to use the favorite word of every Japanese schoolgirl, kawaii! You step out of the train station and into a village of high-end shopping, French bakeries, and international food. Pedestrians mill at train crossings, waiting to let a small commuter train pass, then stream across. On the other side of the tracks is a small strip of park blocks, a bit like Brooklyn or my hometown of Portland, Oregon. And this is way out in the suburbs.
Street patterns are amazingly resilient. Tokyo was destroyed twice in the twentieth century, but an old street map would still serve you well. Visitors to Tokyo have no reason to think about street patterns except to curse them when they get lost, but if Tokyo had been rebuilt along modernist lines after World War II, with a grid system and wide streets, I would not be writing this, because the Tokyo that I love would not exist. Some parts of Tokyo, like the area around Tokyo Tower and some of the artificial islands in Tokyo Bay (like Toyosu and Odaiba) provide an ill-proportioned counterexample to the good urban form that pervades most of the city. I find these areas very hard to appreciate. (OK, they suck.)
But these exceptions are rare, and Tokyo has even found ways to accommodate urban features that provoke handwringing and revulsion elsewhere. After an evening walk in our neighborhood of Nakano, Laurie noticed something strange: the three of us had just strolled through an adult entertainment district, and it felt totally family-friendly. “Maid cafes” such as Kuroneco (meaning “black cat” and written in roman characters to be stylish) solicited men looking to spend an evening doted upon by a young woman dressed as a French maid. This is actually more innocent than it sounds—no sex, all doting. Other cafes offered strip shows and possibly more, but as discreetly as you can imagine. There’s a strong proscription in Japanese society against belligerent public drunkenness and other forms of public bad behavior, so whatever naughtiness is going on indoors rarely spills over onto the street. There are enough layers of questions (about feminism, sexual openness and repression, and the international appeal of French maids) to build several onions, and I’m not equipped to peel them, but the point is that our neighborhood catered to a variety of urges, gustatory and otherwise, and was safe and comfortable day and night.
(Yes, of course I considered trying the maid cafe, but chickened out because I was worried the language barrier would be embarrassing. In retrospect, I should have gone in wearing a butler costume and we could have had a whole Remains of the Day role-play going on.)
Alain de Botton is that guy with a French name who writes books in English about why modern life doesn’t make us as happy as it should. He’s written books about travel, work, and religion, and a few years ago he wrote a book called The Architecture of Happiness. One observation from that book has stuck with me: “[E]ven if the whole of the man-made world could, through relentless
effort and sacrifice, be modeled to rival St. Mark’s Square, even if we could spend the rest of our lives in the Villa Rotonda or the Glass House, we would still often be in a bad mood.”
When you look at a picture of Paris, you want to insert yourself into the scene. That’s you, sitting at the cafe, lingering over a croissant and café crème. There you are again, on a bicycle, with a baguette sticking out of your satchel. Strolling down the Champs-Élysées. Kissing beside a fountain. Buying macarons in a rainbow of colors. Like it or not, you’re the star of Being Jean-Claude Malkovich.
Even though Tokyo is a superb place to buy a panoply of macarons, photos of Asian cities don’t provoke the same kind of longing, because the cities don’t throw up mansard roofs and ornamented terra cotta in the background of every picture. Most photography books and children’s picture books about Japan are about Mount Fuji, or Japanese gardens, or something, anything, not marred by power lines.
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.
There is, of course, beautiful traditional architecture in Tokyo, just not very much of it, and what looks old often isn’t. When we arrived in the city from the airport and emerged from the Ginza line station in Asakusa, our first view was dominated by the Kaminarimon (“thunder”) Gate, which marks the entrance to the Sensō-ji temple complex, Tokyo’s most visited attraction. The gate, a towering wooden torii complete with a hanging red lantern, looks like it has stood guard for a thousand years. This is essentially true: Kaminarimon was built in 941. What you see in 2013, however, is a 1960 reconstruction. (The current red lantern is from 2003.) But most of Tokyo is not reconstructed temple gates. It’s soot-stained concrete modernism. And it just doesn’t matter.
Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo Page 8