Asakusa is in the old part of Tokyo, the low city (shitamachi), and it’s full of faithfully reconstructed historical buildings—reconstructed because Asakusa was destroyed in both 1923 and 1945. Iris loves the place, especially the crowded Nakamise, where she loads up on freshly made rice crackers (osembei) and all sorts of unspeakable trinkets: stuffed animals, keychains, stuffed animal keychains. “Asakusa is kind to foreigners...and especially to foreign children,” writes Seidensticker. Iris could have told you that.
Not to be outdone in the cuteness department, I bought a purple sleeve for my PASMO transit card. Running perpendicular to Nakamise is a covered shopping arcade called Shin Nakamise-dōri (“New Nakamise”), lined with restaurants and more interesting shops. It’s also fun to walk just behind the Nakamise stalls, parallel to the chaos but infinitely quieter, and find the knife shops and stationery stores, the wagashi sweet shops and quirky restaurants like the one specializing in kamameshi, steamed rice with flavorings in a little iron pot, a bit like Korean bibimbap.
Walk around Asakusa in the early morning, and you’ll see the city yawning and waking up. Few shops, even bakeries and cafes, open in Tokyo before 10 a.m. Visiting insomniacs end up at the Starbucks on Kaminarimon-dōri, which opens at 7 and serves the hōjicha latte, a low-caffeine but still addictive beverage of smoky roasted tea and steamed milk.
One day I walked down the covered arcade and stopped into a spice shop called Yagembori, which has specialized in shichimi tōgarashi since 1625. The man behind the counter, a stocky young guy with a mustache, hadn’t been working there quite that long.
Shichimi tōgarashi is a blend of seven spices, with ground red chile always prominent. What makes it different from any old chile powder are the other six players: nori flakes, something tangy like dried lemon peel, Sichuan peppercorns (called sanshō in Japanese), sesame, hemp seed, and so on. You can buy a little red jar of shichimi tōgarashi at any Japanese grocery, and it will cost a couple of bucks and improve any noodle dish, soup, or beef bowl.
At Yagembori, however, every employee is a professional spice blender. If you have the linguistic chops, you can tell them to throw in a little more sesame or whatever your pleasure. If, like me, you lack the chops, you can just say “spicy.” In any case, the counter man scoops individual spices from seven trays into a wooden bowl, stirs it vigorously, and holds it under your nose. You, the customer, swoon. A freshly-mixed packet of Yagembori spice blend is 500 yen, less than a jar of McCormick cinnamon.
At home in Nakano, Iris, who recoils at all things spicy, kept daintily sprinkling shichimi tōgarashi on her rice and eating it two grains at a time. She made me tell and retell the story of how I bought the spice mixture from a grinning shopkeeper who mixed up custom spice blends on the spot. Like so many diners these days, she likes her food to come with a story.
Tokyo has a gaudy replica of the Eiffel Tower called Tokyo Tower. Constructed in 1958, Tokyo Tower is red and white and looks less like a beloved landmark and more like one of those TV towers you don’t want too near your house lest it interfere with your reception. (We didn’t have cable when I was growing up, and I’m still bitter.)
Japan has always appropriated its favorite foreign symbols and structures. There are Statue of Liberty replicas all over the country, and one of the most popular attractions for domestic tourists is a faithfully recreated Dutch village called Huis Ten Bosch.
For its latest architectural insanity, however, Tokyo has built something homegrown, ambitious, and mostly just plain huge. The Tokyo SkyTree looks nothing like the Eiffel Tower; it looks like the place a comic book supervillain would mount his death ray. At 634 meters, it’s the world’s second-tallest freestanding structure after (naturally) a building in Dubai.
When Iris and I stayed in Asakusa in 2010, there was no SkyTree. More to the point, there was no SkyTree merchandise. The shopping arcade of Nakamise-dōri has always been Tokyo’s gateway to kitschy merchandise, but now it’s all SkyTree water bottles, SkyTree cell phone charms, SkyTree hand towels, SkyTree milk caramels. I would bet a hundred dollars you can buy a SkyTree dildo.
One morning I set out into Asakusa at 6 a.m. It was a Saturday, and the streets were empty except for old men strolling and beautiful women bicycling. I wandered along Dembo-in street, just south of the Sensō-ji temple complex, and came to a narrow lane lavishly decorated with streamers in all colors—actually, just the most saturated ones. I couldn’t figure out what they were celebrating until I turned around and saw the SkyTree, visible all the way to its base, framed by the cavalcade of corkscrews.
Of course I snapped a picture. But it’s hard to find a place to stand in this neighborhood where you can’t see the SkyTree. It is so out of scale, its design so space-age, that it looks fake, like a plastic model from a 100-yen store.
Usually such a soaring monument is considered an out-of-character pimple for a few years before gaining grudging acceptance and later adulation from people who tell you they loved it all along. When the Eiffel Tower was under construction, Parisian notables considered it a ruinous eyesore. In Seattle, we have a Frank Gehry-designed museum called the Experience Music Project, which looks like brightly colored oatmeal dropped from a height. It’s not well-liked, but give it time. As Stewart Brand says in his book How Buildings Learn, there are no unloved 100-year-old buildings.
The SkyTree, however, skipped right over its gawky adolescence: locals love it. For two months after it opened in May 2012, tickets were available only by advance purchase to people with Japanese-issued bank cards. It sold out every day. When I talked to people about the SkyTree, they smiled. There was none of the reflexive Japanese “oh, that thing” modesty. The SkyTree stands for the proposition that Japan can still build cool stuff.
I love the SkyTree, too. For something so big, it’s playful, almost cuddly, and the builders found a great place to stick it. Er, that didn’t sound right. What I mean is: when you come into the city from Narita Airport, you will get an eyeful of SkyTree. “Welcome to Tokyo,” it says. “Here’s something you certainly won’t see anywhere else.”
In mid-July, the SkyTree started selling same-day tickets to anyone with 2000 yen to spare. Iris and I rode over to SkyTree station on the newly rechristened Tōbu SkyTree line (formerly the Isesaki line). It was a cloudy day—zero chance of a Fuji sighting—and there was no line. The elevator whisked us up 350 meters in seconds. The walls of the SkyTree elevator are opaque and inlaid with brightly colored LED designs. As an acrophobia sufferer, I support this design decision. When we got out on the Tembo Deck, I let Iris wander around while I stayed back from the windows and breathed deeply. Eventually, I was able to peer westward at the view of Asakusa, of Ueno Park, Nakano, and, lurking invisibly behind a wall of suspended water vapor as thick as pudding, Mount Fuji.
I was ready to head home for some comforting udon after ten seconds. However, once you’re up on the Tembo Deck, you can drop (maybe “drop” is the wrong word) an additional 1000 yen to go 100 meters higher, to the Tembo Galleria. If you’re going to do this thing, go all the way, it taunts. Iris talked me into it. This one is a glass elevator, with views through the floor and ceiling. I looked up into the elevator shaft and thought about Die Hard.
On Tembo Galleria deck, you emerge at 445 meters and walk the last 5 meters on a sloping pathway curled around the circumference of the structure. You can see this observation deck from the ground, and it looks like a raised eyebrow. It’s the SkyTree’s most endearing feature; no fascist would construct anything so quirky.
This is exactly what a cranky acrophobe would say, but you don’t have to go up the SkyTree to enjoy it. Tokyo is more impressive from the ground than from the air. Sometimes it’s especially impressive below-ground, I thought, as Iris and I finally caught the train to Nakano and stepped into our favorite basement udon restaurant for steaming bowls of noodles.
Walk fifteen minutes west of Kaminarimon Gate, and you’ll see a giant chef’s head growing out of a building. This m
arks the entrance to Kappabashi-dōri, the restaurant supply district.
Kappabashi is written up in most guidebooks as the place to buy the plastic food you see in restaurant windows. This is true, and 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.
But Kappabashi is much more than plastic food. Anything cool you’ve seen in or around a Tokyo restaurant is for sale here, and you’ll recognize tableware, utensils, and more from your meals out. One shop specializes in noren, the curtains flapping in front of restaurant doorways. In summer, many shops sell everything you need to set up your own kakigōri stand: the ice-shaving machine, the syrups and their dispenser, the flower-shaped plastic cups, and the light blue kakigōri advertising banner, emblazoned with the kanji for ice: 氷. A store selling plastic sushi also sold a $200 wall clock with twelve pieces of nigiri sushi instead of numerals.
We even found a shop selling ramen ticket machines. You use the ticket machine in front of the store to select which ticket machine you want to buy. Just kidding.
Most Kappabashi business is wholesale, but retail customers are welcome at every store we visited. My friend Neil is a pastry chef, and he asked us to look for heavy-duty molds for baking canelé, an obscure French pastry. They were easy to find and inexpensive, and Neil marveled at the quality. I spent a long time in a store selling Korean tableware, including a huge selection of stone bowls for making dolsot bibimbap, rice with assorted toppings served in a deadly hot stone bowl that crisps the bottom of the rice.
Probably our favorite shop on Kappabashi, however, was Hashito, which sells only chopsticks, from giant sacks of disposable waribashi at pennies per unit to handmade artisan pairs for $200 and up.
Before our first trip to Japan, I tried and failed to teach Iris to use chopsticks. We watched YouTube videos and bought snazzy Korean teaching chopsticks with finger loops and rests. No dice; Iris made it through with forks and fingers and the confidence that meant, as a cute American kid, she could get away with the most savage displays of sloppy eating.
Before our month in Tokyo, I gave Iris a pair of kid-sized chopsticks (no loops or training wheels) and a bowl of star anise (easy to pick up) and told her she had to practice for at least five minutes every day before playing video games. There was plenty of grumbling, and it worked. Iris arrived in Tokyo a fluent chopstick user. In a couple of years, I’m going to teach her to drive by turning her loose on Grand Theft Auto.
In Oishinbo: Japanese Cuisine, a teenage girl who has traveled abroad decides that chopsticks are barbaric and that silverware equals civilization. Yamaoka and Kurita take her to visit an artisan who demonstrates the arduous process of making handmade cedar chopsticks. The scene is classically paced (“And now they’re done, right?” “Ha ha, not quite yet,” ten times), and the girl predictably flings her knife and fork aside by the end. The most expensive chopsticks at Hashito, like high-quality Japanese products in general, are like the ones in Oishinbo: plain and humble, not heavily ornamented. Japanese knives are like this, too; you can certainly buy flashy Damascus steel knives with quilted cocobolo wood handles, but real cooks spend just as much or more on knives that look perfectly ordinary but feel extraordinary.
Iris, who is not known for the subtlety of her aesthetic, bought a pair of chopsticks capped with semiprecious stones. I didn’t buy any fancy chopsticks, because I remembered the following scene in Oishinbo, in which Yamaoka and the gang break in their new artisan sticks at a rustic meal. As they finish up, the villain Kaibara Yūzan, who is somehow always invited to these things, demands to see everybody’s chopsticks and berates them for eating like cavemen, specifically, letting a whole inch of their chopsticks become food-stained, rather than just the very tips. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.
We were not the first Western tourists to fall in love with Asakusa. A couple from the U.S. spent the summer in Tokyo in 1879. Their names were Ulysses and Julia Grant. The former first couple traveled around Japan but were especially taken with Tokyo and in particular with the low city area around the Sumida River, which runs alongside Asakusa.
In late July, the Grants joined the rest of the city in celebrating the “opening of the Sumida.” Like many festivals in Japan, this one involves setting off a shitload of fireworks and stuffing your face with street food, which is usually rare in Tokyo but proliferates wherever people celebrate outdoors. Seidensticker reports:
The general viewed it in comfort from an aristocratic villa, it being a day when there were still such villas on the river.... Fireworks and crowds got rained upon. All manner of pyrotechnical glories were arranged in red, white, and blue. The general indicated great admiration.... On the whole, the city seems to have loved the general and the general the city.
This celebration survives very much intact, even though it was canceled for about six decades of the twentieth century due to natural disaster, war, and a Sumida fouled with raw sewage. I guess nobody wants to crowd around a river that smells like poop, no matter how many cans of Sapporo you bring with you.
On the last Saturday in July, the Amster-Burtons made like the Grants and headed over to Asakusa to stake out our spot in Sumida River Park to watch the fireworks. We joined over a million other Tokyoites, mostly twentysomethings relaxing on blue tarps with their friends, drinking beer or canned chuhai, and eating street food. To blend in with the locals (not really), Laurie went to the 100-yen store to buy our blue tarp, which was identified on the packaging as a leisure sheet. “Have sex on a leisure sheet” is totally going on my bucket list, albeit purely because of the linguistic connotation, not because of any beneficial feature of the leisure sheet, an extremely thin $1 sheet of plastic. Just call me Leisure Sheet Larry.
Before heading to Asakusa, we bought picnic food at our local 7-Eleven: assorted rice balls, a couple of menchikatsu patties (seasoned ground beef, breaded and fried), crudités, fresh pineapple, and a bag of chocolate cookies. After we spread out our leisure sheet, I bought a giant kakigōri, the shave ice saturated with lemon, melon, cherry, and other lurid fruit syrups, and we settled in to watch the fashion parade.
Forget Harajuku girls. The Sumida fireworks festival offers the most drool-worthy people watching anywhere. Women, and a few men, put on their best summer yukata and parade up and down the banks of the river, and we saw literally thousands of colorful yukata on thousands of beautiful women. Vendors sold yakisoba (stir-fried noodles with meat and vegetables), fried chicken, hot dogs on sticks, and okonomiyaki pancakes, and of course you can’t pass a summer evening in Tokyo without a kyūri, a Japanese cucumber; at festivals they’re briefly marinated with soy sauce and kombu, speared on a chopstick, and kept fresh in lightly salted ice water. To paraphrase George Carlin, if you are a straight man and can watch a woman in a yukata eat a cucumber on a stick without thinking about blow jobs, check your vitals.
I went to the vending machine for water, and when I came back, Iris was gone. “She’s over there,” said Laurie, rolling her eyes. Iris was, indeed, across the path, on the lap of Naoko, who somehow became Iris’s BFF in the space of five minutes. Naoko’s yukata was purple and white striped with pink flowers, and she shared her leisure sheet with Takashi, Yūko, and Hanata, all of whom wore stylish civilian garb. I joined them for a while, and we talked about our favorite foods in halting Japanglish, and I drove Iris nuts in classic Dad fashion by asking her questions in Japanese. “Dada, WHY do you keep talking to me in Japanese?” she wailed. I wasn’t doing it on purpose, I told her; my brain kept jumping tracks. After I left, reported Iris, they went back to talking about sumo and ninjas and snapping cell phone pictures of each other and giggling.
We didn’t get Iris back until after the pyrotechnics were over. Naoko and Hanata took turns hoisting her onto their shoulders for a better view and sometimes carried her off to another section of the park for ten or fifteen min
utes at a time. Yes, we let tipsy strangers disappear with our daughter into a crowd of a million people. That is Tokyo.
The fireworks, you may have gathered, are a bit beside the point. The show is billed as the most retina-scarring over-the-top fireworks extravaganza imaginable. Two barges operated by different companies drop anchor on adjacent stretches of the Sumida and try to outdo each other in size, volume, and style; the actual show lasts over an hour. “Don’t miss the finale,” people kept telling us. Well, we couldn’t see much through the trees, and what we could see, other than the occasional Pokemon-shaped blast, looked a lot like American fireworks, albeit over a longer duration. The SkyTree, illuminated across the river, was more impressive. Of course, I would go back anytime, perhaps after my second term as president.
Reentry
帰国する
Places make the best lovers.
—Peter Rees, London city planner, quoted in
Craig Taylor’s Londoners
Imagine, for a moment, the life of a happy baby. Mundane details are anything but mundane; every experience is surprising and mostly delightful. You don’t understand how anything works, and you’re constantly trying to decipher the processes, customs, and language that govern your existence. This is frustrating and exhilarating, and every small accomplishment produces a rush of pride and an involuntary smile and giggle.
People around you do their best to make sure you’re well fed, and every food is delicious and novel. You may feel temporary pain, discomfort, or fear, but you don’t yet understand worry. You’re wrapped in blankets literal and figurative. The world is not only safe, but also tailored for your arrival.
This was my world during our Tokyo summer. Like Tokyo Swayze teaching me to cook okonomiyaki, the entire city was my understanding parent. And then, like real babyhood, it was over too fast. We arrived back in Seattle at 9:30 on a Tuesday morning. Both Laurie and Iris had Aoba Ramen broth stains on their shirts.
Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo Page 17