Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (4 page)

No one postures in a supermarket. It’s an unfiltered view under those bright lights. You’re going to see the real culture and the real cravings and appetites of the people.

—Peter Jon Lindberg

A while back, I was
listening to
The Splendid Table,
and Lynne Rossetto Kasper was talking to Lindberg, a
Travel and Leisure
columnist. The subject? Supermarkets around the world.

“What country do you think has the best supermarkets?” asked Kasper.

Lindberg didn’t hesitate. “It has to be Japan,” he replied.

The moment I stepped into Life Supermarket in Nakano, I knew what he meant. The name is written in English and pronounced “rye-fuh,” and it looks like a small suburban American supermarket, except the only parking lot is for bicycles. Dozens and dozens of bicycles. Bicycle parking lots in Japan can be enormous. Think it’s hard to find your car at the airport? I saw a parking lot outside a mall in Asakusa with room for at least a thousand bikes, all spooned together, with none of those helpful cartoon reminders that you’re parked in
2C
.

Go through the sliding doors and take the escalator down to the basement. If it’s a hot day—and in July, it’s always a hot day—you’ll drink in a welcome blast of air conditioning and, perhaps, a less-welcome blast of the Life Supermarket theme song. This five-second jingle is played on a continuous loop in random parts of the store at random times of day, at various tempos. The song consists of a girlish voice singing, “FUNNY FUNNY FUNNY / SURPRISE, SURPRISE!” over and over and over again.

This induces the Five Stages of Dealing with an Intolerable Jingle. First you laugh. Then you get confused. Then you get angry. Then you go into a wide-eyed trance. Then you load up your basket with Japanese candy bars. In a couple of days, I went from, “Why are they polluting this beautiful supermarket with this terrible song?” to “I don’t hear anything, but for some reason, I feel like if I shop here more often I’ll get a funny surprise.”

This may be a silly thing to say, but Life Supermarket is thoroughly devoted to Japanese food. It’s easy to cook Japanese in a small kitchen, and it’s just as easy to stock a satisfying range of Japanese ingredients and prepared foods in a small supermarket. Life Supermarket is tiny compared to a suburban American store.

True, there’s an aisle devoted to foreign foods, and then there are familiar foods that have been put through the Japanese filter and emerged a little bit mutated. Take breakfast cereal. You’ll find familiar American brands such as Kellogg’s, but often without English words anywhere on the box. One of the most popular Kellogg’s cereals in Japan is Brown Rice Flakes. They’re quite good, and the back-of-the-box recipes include cold tofu salad and the savory pancake okonomiyaki, each topped with a flurry of crispy rice flakes. Iris and I got mildly addicted to a Japanese brand of dark chocolate cornflakes, the only chocolate cereal I’ve ever eaten that actually tastes like chocolate. (Believe me, I’ve tried them all.)

Stocking my pantry at Life Supermarket was fantastically simple and inexpensive. I bought soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, rice, salt, and sugar. (I was standing right in front of the salt when I asked where to find it. This happens to me every time I ask for help finding any item in any store.) Total outlay: about $15, and most of that was for the rice. Japan is an unabashed rice protectionist, levying prohibitive tariffs on imported rice. As a result, supermarket rice is domestic, high quality, and very expensive. There were many brands of white rice to choose from, the sacks advertising different growing regions and rice varieties. (I did the restaurant wine list thing and chose the second least expensive.) Japanese consumers love to hear about the regional origins of their foods. I almost never saw ingredients advertised as coming from a particular farm, like you’d see in a farm-to-table restaurant in the U.S., but if the milk is from Hokkaido, the rice from Niigata, and the tea from Uji, all is well. I suppose this is not so different from Idaho potatoes and Florida orange juice.

When I got home, I opened the salt and sugar and spooned some into small bowls near the stove. The next day I learned that Japanese salt and sugar are hygroscopic: their crystalline structure draws in water from the air (and Tokyo, in summer, has enough water in the air to supply the world’s car washes). I figured this was harmless and went on licking slightly moist salt and sugar off my fingers every time I cooked.

I went to Life Supermarket as often as possible. It just made me happy. In the produce section, I bought cucumbers, baby bok choy, and ginger, and I was able to choose from stem ginger and young ginger as well as the mature ginger sold in Western markets.

And I bought dozens of
negi.
Negi are sometimes called Japanese leeks or Welsh onions, and in Tokyo they're often called
shiro negi
(white negi) or
naganegi
(long negi) to distinguish them from the shorter, greener variety popular in the Kansai region of Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe. (Tokyo is in the Kantō region and is constantly comparing itself to Kansai in terms of food, culture, and language. The two regions are 300 miles apart, a two-and-a-half hour train ride. What looks like a cultural chasm to the Japanese will probably be as obvious, to the tourist, as the differences between Oregon and Washington.)

Negi are Tokyo's favorite aromatic vegetable, and also my favorite. Fatter than scallions but thinner than green onions, negi improve everything. They’re sliced thin and used as a garnish on noodles, rice bowls, and tofu; sliced thick, they’re found in hot pots and on yakitori skewers. It’s like a negi fairy has gone around Tokyo flinging them everywhere. At udon chains, you can buy a cup of extra sliced negi to mound atop your noodles and be your own negi fairy. When we returned to Seattle, going back to food not covered in negi was no fun.

The produce in Japan is eerily perfect and tastes as good as it looks. (Organic produce, however, is rare.) I went around leering at eggplants and squash. I wanted to buy more vegetables than I could cook, just to have them around, much as Senator Phil Gramm once said, “I have more shotguns than I need, but not as many as I want.”

Vegetables in Japan are cheap, plentiful, unblemished, and delicious; vegetables five minutes past their prime are taken out back and shot. A supermarket cucumber is one of the greatest pleasures Life Supermarket (and life itself) can offer. Fruit, however, is mostly imported, expensive, and merely OK. We ate a few apples and grapefruits and blueberries that weren’t as good as what we get in Seattle. They did have some of those expensive gift melons every visitor to Japan is required to gawk at; because Life is not a fancy store, however, the melons there were only $40, not $100-plus. I started to devise a melon arbitrage scheme involving stuffing my carry-on with Seattle farmers market melons and...okay, I just wanted to say “melon arbitrage.”

Next to the fresh produce is the pickle section, a rainbow coalition of preserved vegetables in plastic tubs. The spicier varieties kept luring me in, especially pickled radish stems, cut crosswise into short lengths, salted, and tossed with dried chile. They’re a little crunchy and offer a bracing hit of acidity along with a tag-team punch of spice from the radish itself and the red chile. I also enjoyed the spicy vegetable medley with chunks of cucumber, carrot, and napa cabbage. That said, almost nothing I ate in Japan was really that spicy, aside from a Dangerously Spicy Kimchi Rice Ball I bought at a convenience store. Then again, I didn’t try about eighty-seven other pickle varieties for sale at Life.

Buying fish in the supermarket in Japan is a delight, even if the fish is displayed in styrofoam trays, as it is at Life. The most common supermarket fish, mackerel, also happens to be my favorite, and it’s sold in a variety of precise quantities. Want three small mackerel fillets? Sure thing. One large? Right over here. Mackerel costs practically nothing and is a snap to cook with the fish grill. I also tried marinated
aji
(Spanish mackerel) but skipped the salmon.

In the freezer case I found a brand of Korean rice dishes that I liked, and potstickers appeared in many guises: raw, cooked, fresh, frozen. My favorite freezer item, however, was frozen water. This is verging on the level of delusion that causes people to ascribe the quality of New York bagels to the local tap water, I know, but Tokyo has really wonderful ice. Sold in resealable plastic bags imprinted with the Japanese character for ice (
氷
), each clear, slow-melting shard is a unique and ephemeral objet d’art. Every time I came home from Life or anywhere else, I’d artlessly fling off my shoes, plunk a few lovely ice cubes into a glass, and fill it with
mugicha,
or barley tea, which is not really tea, just toasted barley steeped in cold water. You can brew mugicha yourself from loose barley or teabags, but we bought it in large plastic bottles at Life. It tastes ever so slightly like coffee and is said to be especially restorative on a hot day, and in summer in Tokyo there is no other kind of day. I found mugicha perplexing at first and then proceeded to drink gallons of it. The amount of mugicha Tokyo drinks on a July day would fill many swimming pools with uninviting toasty-brown liquid.

The meat section is mostly devoted to presliced meats for hot pots and quick-cooked dishes, with a thin steak or chop here and there. In addition to commodity meat, you’ll find Wagyu beef and kurobuta pork. The quality of the meat in an average Tokyo supermarket is higher than at most specialty butchers in the U.S.

Time to fess up. Life Supermarket is not the best supermarket in the world;
every
supermarket in Tokyo is the best supermarket in the world. I haven’t even gotten to the prepared food (two different yakitori sections, reheatable fried foods that stay crunchy, and lots of appealing salads and cooked vegetables).

The main floor of Life sells housewares and school supplies. I like these fancy mechanical pencils that are exorbitantly priced and hard to find in Seattle; Life sells them for $5. (I told my friend Emi how pleased I was to find my favorite Uni-Ball pencils there, but I pronounced it “OO-nee ball,” which sent her into hysterics. I’d unwittingly said “sea urchin ball.”)

The cashiers at Life operate hefty automated cash registers. If you pay with paper money, the cashier inserts the bill into a vertical slot, and any bills in change come out an adjacent slot. The bills are hot to the touch when they emerge from the register, which is oddly satisfying, like it’s fresh-baked cash.

To better understand what makes Japan one of the world’s greatest places to eat, we should go to 7-Eleven.

7-Eleven is owned by a Japanese company, which is why you sometimes see Hi-Chew for sale at American locations. Tokyo boasts more 7-Elevens (over 1700) than any other city in the world. I realize this sounds like bragging about owning the world’s largest collection of dust bunnies, but only if you haven’t been to a Tokyo 7-Eleven.

On the last day of our first trip to Tokyo, Iris and I wandered around Asakusa, up the gaudy souvenir arcade of Nakamise-dōri, darting in and out of the tiny side streets that feed into it like capillaries. At some point we ended up with our faces pressed against a plate glass window watching an old man make soba. He rolled out the buckwheat noodle dough on a floured table, folded it, and sliced it into noodles with a knife hooked up to a manual rig that supported the weight of the knife while leaving the precision slicing work to the chef. I suggested to Iris that we stop in for a lunch of
zaru soba,
cold buckwheat noodles served in a wicker box. Yes, it looks like you dropped your lunch in a Pier One Imports.

Iris, who inherited my obsessive punctuality and crippling fear of missing a bus, train, or plane, said no, we should stop at 7-Eleven for a bento box and eat it while waiting for the airport train.

Right now I’m sitting three blocks from an American 7-Eleven, so for journalistic accuracy I stopped in to see what I could turn up in the way of a hot, nourishing lunch for under $5. Answer: two taquitos, a Buffalo Chicken Roller, and a Slurpee. Other options included microwaveable beef-and-bean burritos and Lunchable-type deli packs. The lunch philosophy at an American 7-Eleven is
We’ll serve whatever can be compressed into a cylinder and displayed near the cash register on the hot dog warmer
. The taquitos were bad in a satisfying junk-foody way. The Buffalo Chicken Roller was just plain bad, a tube of compressed chicken coated with lurid red Buffalo seasoning powder.

Meanwhile, at a Tokyo 7-Eleven, someone right now is choosing from a variety of bento boxes and rice bowls, delivered that morning and featuring grilled fish, sushi, mapo tofu, tonkatsu, and a dozen other choices. The lunch philosophy at Japanese 7-Eleven?
Actual food.

On the day we missed out on fresh soba, Iris had a tonkatsu bento, and I chose a couple of rice balls (
onigiri
), one filled with pickled plum and the other with spicy fish roe. For less than $1.50, convenience store onigiri encapsulate everything that is great about Japanese food and packaging. Let’s start in the middle and work outward, like we’re building an onion. The core of an onigiri features a flavorful and usually salty filling. This could be an
umeboshi
(pickled apricot, but usually translated as pickled plum), as sour as a Sour Patch Kid; flaked salmon; or cod or mullet roe.

Next is the rice, packed lightly by machine into a perfect triangle. Japanese rice is unusual among staple rices in Asia because it’s good at room temperature or a little colder. Sushi or onigiri made with long-grain rice would be a chalky, crumbly disaster. Oishinbo argues that Japan is the only country in Asia that makes rice balls because of the unique properties of Japanese rice. I doubt this. Medium- and short-grain rices are also popular in parts of southern China, and presumably wherever those rices exist, people squish them into a ball to eat later, kind of like I used to do with a fistful of crustless white bread. (Come on, I can’t be the only one.)

Next comes a layer of cellophane, followed by a layer of nori and another layer of cellophane. The nori is preserved in a transparent shell for the same reason Han Solo was encased in carbonite: to ensure that he would remain crispy until just before eating. (At least, I assume that’s what Jabba the Hutt had in mind.) You pull a red strip on the onigiri packaging, both layers of cellophane part, and a ready-to-eat rice ball tumbles into your hand, encased in crispy seaweed.