Eating Japanese food like a complete jackass

Katsu kari don at Narita International Airport.

I cobbled together the last few yen on my Suica transit card and a fistful of hundred yen coins to buy the above breaded pork cutlet in sweet and acidic curry gravy, washed down with a bland as a mountain stream lager. I could have taken a parting shot at some more serious sushi or a last ball of octopus fritter at the airport lounge takoyaki bar but I didn’t.

I’m a bad food tourist. I eat Japanese food like a complete jackass.

Despite the public display of nothing but food on my photostream, the trip to Japan was more about catching up with close friends rather than having a forced and micromanaged eating experience. The only solid food plan was to visit Tsukiji and eat a sticky pancake in an all-you-can-drink setting.

When I started researching my trip to Japan, it scared the hell out of me. I’m not the best on-the-beaten-path food tourist and am at my happiest when I find food at what approaches pure randomness. I take tips on board and metastasize them into queer tumors of culinary knowledge; a lingering feeling that I should be seeking out a certain food in a certain suburb or town rather than a beeline to the top restaurant.

Chowhound has a wealth of sample itineraries for Tokyo from people who are clavicle deep in the know, but they err towards foodie accord on what constitutes the best experience; a consensual Japanese-American hallucination as to what makes capital-A authentic Tokyo dining. It is all about canonising the perfect slice of toro from Tsukiji followed by a Edo-era duck sukiyaki rather than serendipitous finds and challenging what exactly constitutes modern Japanese food.

Making a giant tray of processed mayonnaise pasta salad at the Takishimaya food hall (depachika).

Deep down, Japanese food isn’t just about respecting the seasons. It’s about eating like a goddamned fool, the liberal application of the deep fryer and barbecue, about seeking out the newest edible novelty that the world has to offer and drinking deeply from the vending machine and convenience store beer fridge. While the department store basements might be packed with regional specialties, they too hold whatever cupcake happens to be trendy and the cheap, starchy deep fried foods that Westerners tend to eat only from an employee of a funfair.

There is a whole beautiful genre of Japanese food prepared for the sole purpose of eating while getting drunk to avoid the peak hour train crush. Omoide Yokochō, an alley that runs alongside Shinjuku station is devoted to it.

The streets around the station are heavy with yakitori barbecue smoke and beer crates. In the few hours after peak hour, it was nigh on impossible to get a seat even close to a grill. Fluorescent signs illuminate the beer special and battered material of the day.

In this case, deep-fried, battered chicken skin served with a wedge of lemon and sweet processed mayonnaise.

Potato, bacon and onion fried in butter.

Tsukiji Market is not just fish.

It also sells fat red chunks of whale meat. Not much of it though.

While the cubed cetacean is pretty hard to uncover (I only saw a single vendor), what does tend to get overlooked is that there is also a gigantic vegetable market next door. Compared to the speed and clatter of the neighbouring fish market, the vegetable sheds are downright sedate. Fewer forklifts and a general lack of food voyeurs striding amongst the hundreds of low rows of boxed vegetables than on the fish side.

The auctioning takes place on a set of bleachers in the middle of the warehouse, boxed vegetables opened in front of the crowd and quickly sold off.

A box of fresh wasabi root. The general quality on show is overwhelming (not that I’m a great pick of wasabi in particular) – but there does seem to be a clear reason for the premiums paid on vegies in Japan.

This is where tuna ends

Whole frozen tuna on a forklift at Tsukiji fish market, Tokyo

I have no hope whatsoever for the future of tuna. The death warrant for Atlantic tuna was written at the last meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, ensuring that current tuna stocks will have a 50% chance of recovering in the next decade. The tuna is one of the only endangered species that you could buy at the supermarket to feed to your cat or rave about eating a perfect red shard atop vinegared rice without social repercussions. I doubt this prevailing attitude will change before the bluefin and yellowfin tuna are well dead.

Roughly, three quarters of the world’s tuna is eaten by Japan and from four in the morning, it looks like roughly three quarters of the Japan’s tuna is at Tsukiji fish market in downtown Tokyo. Frozen torpedoes of fish are lined up in a warehouse for auction, a visual cliche of Tokyo that wrestles for space in travel brochures with Goth Lolitas and that busy intersection in Shibuya.

The auction rooms are currently cut off to tourists thanks to its popularity and the propensity of tourists to fall beneath forklifts. (It appears that the auction area is actually open to a limited number of visitors each day (Cheers, Akila) – I must have missed the cut). Austin Bush has some excellent coverage of the auctions. I concentrated on what happens next.

The areas where the middlemen transfer and dismantle the tuna is still accessible for death by forklift. Tuna are transferred from the auction area into stalls on handcarts yoked to the elderly, motorised gurneys which appear to be the offspring of a motorcycle and a double bed, and your construction-variety forklift.

Tuna are kept cool with blocks of dry ice while they await the bandsaw. The smaller stallholders break down their morning’s buy into component cuts, dividing the buttery belly cuts from the coarser red flesh. It’s a much less sterile process that I would have expected with tuna heads piling up on the concrete floor before the flesh is removed from their cheeks, collar and eyes.

Fresh fish are hand-filleted. If you’re at all interested in the full Japanese 27-step process for breaking down a tuna, Cooking Issues comes up with the goods.

Once removed from the bone, fillets are further onsold; restaurants and smaller vendors picking up particular cuts to resell elsewhere in the city and sate the endless appetite for this doomed fish.

The Last Appetite

Posts Tagged → Tsukiji

Eating Japanese food like a complete jackass

Tsukiji Market is not just fish.

This is where tuna ends