Rice, noodle, fish : deep travels through Japan's food culture

309 Pages·2015·28.47 MB·English

by  Goulding

DEDICATION
To the shokunin of Japan, pursuers of perfection,
for showing us the true meaning of devotion
CONTENTS
(Laura Pérez)
Dedication
Foreword: In Correspondence with Bourdain
TOKYO
Plus: Know Before You Go
Food Groups
In the Raw
One Night at a Love Hotel
OSAKA
Plus: Operation Izakaya
Wagyu 101
The Knife Makers of Sakai
KYOTO
Plus: The Art of Gift Giving
Japan’s Greatest Food Journeys
Gaijin Glossary
FUKUOKA
Plus: The Ramen Matrix
Dream Machines
Fear Not!
HIROSHIMA
Plus: The Evolution
The Eight Wonders of the Japanese Convenience
Store
Deep Fried
HOKKAIDO
Plus: Amazing Shit in the Middle of Nowhere
One Night with the Salarymen
On a Stick
NOTO
Plus: One Night with the Geisha
The Beauty of Bento
Acknowledgments
About the Team Behind Rice, Noodle, Fish
About Roads & Kingdoms
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
IN CORRESPONDENCE WITH BOURDAIN:
How this book was born
Dear Tony,
I’m writing you from a laundromat attached to an old teahouse down a dark alley
in Kyoto. I’ve spent the past month eating my way south from Hokkaido—from
the uni shrines of Hakodate to the okonomiyaki dens of Osaka. I’ve been invited
to dine with the Sugimoto clan tonight, the oldest family in Kyoto, in their 300-
year-old home with their 600-year-old recipes, and I need something decent to
wear. So while five weeks’ worth of memories dissolve in the spin cycle, let me
tell you about this idea I have.
If Parts Unknown and its many imitators have taught us anything, it’s that we’re
living in the Golden Age of Gastrotourism. The same people who once traveled
to Rome to stare at statues now go to twirl bucatini on their forks and filter balls
of burrata onto their Instagram accounts. You’ve helped inspire a generation of
food-obsessed pilgrims, the same people we try to reach every day at Roads &
Kingdoms: the ones who want to be smarter, eat better, travel deeper. We’ve
given them ice cream crawls in Mogadishu, the chili sauce wars of the Caucasus,
the burger kings of Karachi.
But it feels like there’s something even bigger out there to tap into, a more
complete way to capture the seismic shift that takes place inside of us as we first
eat our way through a country. And Japan, where a tangle of undressed noodles
can feel like a seminal life moment, is the perfect place to start. I’m imagining a
book that attempts to make sense of the many wondrous, beautiful, confounding
things the outsider experiences here—both at the table and beyond.
I don’t have any clear answers yet, but I know you share my affection for this
country and I thought this might be something you’d want to be a part of. Give it
some thought and let me know what you think. I’ll be here, watching the laundry
spin.
Cheers,
Matt
***
***
Dear Matt,
That’s pretty much where I’d like to be right now, preparing to go out to dinner
in a 300-year-old home—in Kyoto. I stayed in a magnificent old ryokan there
once, so old there were sword slashes in the ceiling beams. Evidence, I was told,
of samurai-related violence.
As you know, Japan hooked me. It was the first Asian country I ever visited. I
was alone, clueless, horribly, cripplingly jet-lagged (back when I still suffered
from such things), and on an ill-fated mission to consult on a French restaurant
project. I’d wake up in Roppongi early in the morning to the shrieks of those
giant crows and wander the streets, trying to summon the courage to enter a
noodle shop. I will never forget the sense of deep satisfaction I felt when I
finally managed to order breakfast for myself.
Tokyo was so dense, so crowded with . . . stuff, so complicated, tempting,
delicious, and seemingly unknowable: layer upon layer of maddeningly
interesting izakayas in one building alone. One city block a life’s work of
exploration. It was a glorious and lasting derangement of the senses that first
trip, and I’ve never been the same since.
I became selfish that first time in Tokyo in ways I had never been. Previously,
when viewing something incredible, impressive, strikingly beautiful, or
interesting, my first instinct was to share. Who might I share this with? How
might I best relate this experience?
In Tokyo, alone and traumatized in the best possible ways by this new universe
of possibilities, I just said “fuck it” to that voice. This was for me. There was no
sharing. I wanted more—whatever it took—and I resolved, consciously or not, I
think, to burn down the whole world if necessary to get more of this.
In Japan you are confronted constantly, almost violently, with how much you
don’t know. I liked that feeling. I liked that steep, virtually impossible learning
curve. I liked, it turned out, that feeling of being a stranger in a strange yet
wonderful land, not understanding the language, lost. Every little thing was a
discovery.
Things kind of worked out. I found a way to ensure many more trips to Japan,
television being a small price to pay for the privilege. I know now exactly what
you mean when you speak of the joys of undressed noodles. I yearn for the
smoke and sizzle of many parts of pampered chickens in an old-school yakitori
joint, the clean smell of the fish market at four in the morning (cigarettes and
seawater), chankonabe, grilled fish collars in Golden Gai, the glory of the
Japanese bathroom. They may work punishingly, insanely hard in Japan. But
they have relaxation down to a science. To spend a weekend at a traditional
ryokan, marinating in an outdoor onsen, is a life-changing thing. There’s no
going back. Not all the way back anyway.
I don’t know if you know this but I’ve found that if you sat at a table with eight
or nine of the worlds best chefs—from France, Brazil, America, wherever—and
you asked them where they’d choose if they had to eat in one, and only one
country, for the rest of their lives, they would ALL of them pick Japan without
hesitation. We both know why.
I have no doubt that you would make that case brilliantly in the book to come,
but I’m going to need more details if I want to convince my cruel masters at
HarperCollins. How do you see this playing out on the page?
Best,
Tony
***
Hi Tony,
I know what you mean when you say you’ve never been the same. I’m supposed
to be on a honeymoon with my Catalan wife, but every time a piece of uni nigiri
or shirako tempura is placed before me, I feel like I’m cheating on her. I try to
shift the focus back to my bride, but then I look over and see her eyes glazed
with that same new Japan sheen, and I know that there will forever be a line in
our lives: Before Japan, After Japan.
I could see how you would want to keep this to yourself. Something so intense
and intimate—it’s hard to share without feeling like you’re somehow butchering
the translation. Judging by the episodes you’ve logged from Japan, though, you
got over that feeling, no doubt for much the same reason that I’m getting over it:
we tell stories for a living, and these stories are the best I’ve found anywhere.
I’m in Noto now, a windswept peninsula on the west coast known as the
Kingdom of Fermentation. Breakfast this morning was a piece of mackerel cured
in salt and chilies for 12 years (my body is still buzzing from the umami).
Chikako Fukushita is the daughter of Noto’s preeminent pickle masters: her
father has been honored by the governor for his fish sauce, her mother is the sole
keeper of over 300 recipes that represent the family’s—and Noto’s—legacy.
They never had a son, so it has fallen to Chikako to catalog every last recipe
before they pass away.
The plan is to stay here as long as it takes to find stories like these—deep,
experiential narratives that tell us something about this country that only the
food and its creators can. On the horizon: a Guatemalan immigrant turned
okonomiyaki master in Hiroshima, a rebel band of sea urchin fishermen in
Hokkaido, and a ramen blogger from Fukuoka who eats 400 bowls of tonkotsu a
year.
I’ve talked with my Roads & Kingdoms partners about this idea and they’re all
in. Beyond the high-protein narratives, we see a series of lighter side stories,
photo essays, and illustrated decoders illuminating the most interesting corners
of Japanese culture. Doug Hughmanick built our website and would be perfect
for designing big, beautiful spreads about the glories of the Japanese
convenience store or how to navigate a love hotel. Nathan Thornburgh, whom
you already know from his days at Time magazine, is an intense and
uncompromising editor, ready to make whatever I write stronger.
Good thing, because despite the beauty of these stories, there is infinite potential
to make an ass of myself. I’m a novice here. I speak no Japanese. I claim no
special understanding of this dense culture and hold no key to unlock the
country’s many closed doors. I went to a very famous sushi restaurant in Tokyo
last week, a place that destroyed me the first time I ate there. I came back with a
translator and a suit jacket, waited for two hours until the last guests trickled out,
then asked the chef if I might arrange an interview. His jaw dropped, his face
contorted. “Why would you come here?” he said. “Next time, please go through
the embassy.”