Sushi: 100 yen or 100 dollars?

Sushi.

That one word was enough to bring me to Japan. It is a global food, an international delight, known for its simplicity and its freshness, but I must say:

 I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

Sushi is a different beast in Japan. To begin with, there are no sushi rolls. They just don’t do that here. Sushi means rice with vinegar, fish and a touch of wasabi. They look at California rolls and cream cheese with the same disdain you’ll feel for pizza with shrimp, corn and mayonnaise (yeah let me know when you try it). I have been served something wrapped in seaweed paper, sure, but it was masticated fish parts and rice, nothing more, no cucumbers, no jalapeno slices, and gods no mayonnaise. Get over the mayonnaise.

And don’t worry! You won’t miss all that crap designed to hide the quality of the fish. Sushi is omnipresent and hard to avoid in japan. It’s as ubiquitous as beef in Texas, and served in as many ways.

Mountain woman excited about massive tuna



Now, a disclaimer, I don’t live on the coast. In fact, I probably live as far away from the coast as possible, up in the mountains in the center of Honshu, the main island. Yet I am still closer to the coast than I was in Austin, and while I’ve had better in Tokyo, if you come to Takayama, the sushi is worth trying.

 There are many levels sushi.

At the bottom of the list is the stuff from the grocery store. The packs of six or eight pieces of seafood on rice is good for the price (think dollar burger at your favorite corporation) but the novelty wears off quickly. The tuna’s not the greatest, the salmon’s not the freshest, and they tend to lump a few too many pieces of mollusk in there for my taste.

 

Chicken, radish sprouts, miso soup, edamame, rice and
of course, tuna. Slice it yourself and its still good sashimi.

The best thing about the grocery store in Takayama is when they buy a tuna or two from the coast and haul it up for us mountain-folk. When the tuna appears, madness descends on the grocery store. Old ladies jostle for position in line, old men outbid eachother on who gets to take home the enormous fish head. If there is a whole tuna fish at the grocery store, you buy a cut because—even with inferior knife skills—you can prepare the most delicious fish you’ll ever eat at home. For about ten dollars, you can get a piece of lean red meat, the most popular of all cuts. Though if you’re feeling lavish, get the orange stuff from the same fish. It’s fatty and wonderful, and a bargain considering all you have to do is put it on vinegared rice with a touch of wasabi to make it as good anything from a restaurant.

Next up is train sushi. These restaurants literally parade pieces of sushi past your nose on a conveyer belt. Take all you want! They’ll count the plates when you leave. There are of course, varying degrees of quality at these places. I would avoid the restaurants that advertise ‘everything for 100 yen’ and go to the more upscale places that charge 2 or 300 yen for a piece of fish on rice (I know, big spender). The conveyer belt places are a great first stop for sushi because you can try all the weird stuff you’ve never seen in the states without a chef watching to see if your palette is refined enough to handle it (trust me, it’s not). I’ve tried baby squids, fish organs, a variety of fish eggs, raw shrimp, raw crab claw, raw scallop, as well as a handful of unidentifiable fish (my favorite is the purple one). Be sure to try the weird stuff in the beginning of the meal, otherwise you’ll be left with the taste of raw crab claw on your tongue.

Above that is the fancy restaurants with display cases of their favorite creatures chopped to pieces. While expensive, I’ve never been disappointed at one of these places, even in my mountain village. Though I’ve learned there is a difference between fine sushi in the mountains and fine sushi in Tokyo. When my friends from America came to visit we went to the best sushi restaurant in Takayama one day, and a fantastic sushi restaurant in Tokyo the next. Both were delicious, but the difference is clear. Here in Takayama, the fish was at the forefront of the meal. They served big slabs of whatever they’d had trucked in that morning, tuna, salmon, eel, and of course, the local specialty, Hida beef. The emphasis was undoubtedly on the quality of the fish, which was far fresher and richer than anything I’ve had in Austin, and I know, freshness is not the mark of great sushi, but I live in the mountains OK? Cut me some slack, the sushi chef in Tokyo sure didn’t.



In Tokyo, sushi masters can make even this mass of
revolting tentacles delicious!  

In Tokyo, the emphasis was on the interplay between the fish and the rice. Sushi is supposed to be about the rice, and Yazuda certainly followed this rule. His rice had fantastic texture and a subtle vinegar flavor that accented the fresh seafood marvelously. He didn’t focus on serving great hulking slabs of fish, instead he’d pair a piece of shrimp with just the right amount of course salt, or add a pinch of lemon to some creature I’d never heard of and bring tears to my eyes. He chastised my palette at first (a nice way of saying he talked a lot of shit) but I grunted at the appropriate bites so he left me alone.

As a Texan, I’d say the difference is like good steak versus good brisket. Steak is undoubtedly about the meat. You see the meat, you chew the meat, you swallow the meat, and damnit its good. Brisket though, is less about the meat and more about the entire sensory experience. The meat is still there, of course, but there’s also spices and smoke and fantastic texture, perhaps even a touch of sauce. Expensive sushi is like the finest brisket, it’s a labor of love that transforms the fish into something beyond fish, something transcendentally delicious that still somehow is unmistakably simple and familiar.

But, that being said, there’s still a conveyer belt place in town I haven’t been too… and sometimes there’s nothing better than a burger.

I Risk my Life with a Duel-Bladed Barber.

I have an unnatural fear of barbers. Just the thought of sitting in that swivel chair, draped and unmoving while the barber hacks away at me with hinged razorblades fills me with dread. For years I’ve been going to my sister-in-law’s salon. Carla’s awesome. She knows what I want (shorter hair) and never makes me explain how to cut it. Still, going there is a harrowing experience. Techno blares, fashionable women eye my unkempt appearance, and the owner offers my coffee drinks I can’t pronounce. Sometimes in desperation I go to Bird’s Barbershop. They offer you beer while you wait and I always need a drink during stressful situations. I even got to know a barber there that I liked. He knew how I liked my hair (shorter) and we were both very comfortable with not talking.

But then I moved to Japan. Goodbye Carla. Goodbye quiet barber.

My hair was already too long when I got here. It’s barely been two weeks here and already I look like and Australopithecus (it doesn’t help that everyone around me looks so damn put-together).

I decided to go the nearest spinning blue and red pole I could find. I figured if the haircut went well, it would be easy to come back, and if he suffocated me with aftershave or drowned me in one of those hairwashing sinks, Raquel wouldn’t have to travel far to enact revenge. I parked my car, stifled the urge to vomit, and walked in. The shop was decorated with two barber chairs, a few plants, and a collection of miniature race cars.  Convinced it wasn’t a salon for old ladies, I politely yelled, “Sumimasen!”

That’s what you do in Japan when you need help in a place of business. You yell sumimasen and they come running. Most businesses seem deserted until you yell sumimasen. At restaurants waiters don’t come check on you or try to sell you desert or another beer. You want something, you yell sumimasen. Like many customs in Japan, it’s kind of strange, and it’s kind of nice.

The barber emerged from the back of the shop, like a demon summoned from beyond the Seventh Gate.

“Sumimasen,” I said, much more meekly this time, showed him a picture of my head with shorter hair, and pretended my fingers were scissors.

He looked at me the way a master sushi chef must examine Fugu before he risks his diners’ lives and filets it for them to eat. I understood. I’m a hairy man. I’m not ashamed. I have chest hair, back hair, arm hair and toe hair. There’s hair on my ass and hair on my knuckles. In Austin my beard won the 6-month sprint division at the annual Come and Shave It facial hair competition, which basically means, I am way too hairy.

After a long moment he nodded. Hai. I sunk into one of his swivel chairs, and he began.

First he draped me in plastic (think Dexter), then extended two horrifying stirrup apparatuses. I thought of my wife’s descriptions of visits to the gynecologist and I stopped breathing. Was he going to probe me? Maybe at Japanese barber shops they didn’t stop the haircut at the neck, maybe they did the whole body at once. I hoped I had clean underwear.

Thankfully there was no probing. He got to work, and the little depression had made slowly filled with hair (who wants to see hair on the floor of a barbershop?). Like many Japanese crafts, his work was meticulous. Everyone in our neighborhood has beautiful gardens with manicured trees. In the city, I rarely see the majestic shade trees so common in every American neighborhood, those exist at temples and on the mountains. All the neighborhood trees are trimmed constantly, so they look like stunted old men. Each tip of each branch is cut with a pair of shears, one by one, so they tree never appears unkempt. My barber had the same zealous OCD. Inch by inch he worked, never moving on until that region of my scalp was finished. In America I think we tend to work in broad strokes, then refine the work afterwards. In Japan it seems to be about painstaking perfection one snip at a time.

The haircut was going well. No major arteries had been severed. He hadn’t removed my oversized ears. I couldn’t compliment his work because I can’t speak Japanese outside of bars, so, naturally, I began to grunt.

Grunting takes some getting used to. At first it can be off-putting. I’ll be telling someone a story, and my victim looks away and grunts. At first I thought I was boring them, but that’s not the case. It doesn’t matter if I complement the deliciousness of a meal or talk about Godzilla’s atomic breath and it’s relation to the Atomic bomb, my conversation partner stares into space and grunts. It seems like I’m being ignored, but really it means they’re politely listening. It’s considered aggressive to maintain too much eye contact, and grunting shows you’re paying attention.

I was definitely paying attention to the barber, so I grunted like a pig in slop. He seemed to appreciate my grunts, and smiled. He finished up, held up a mirror for me to see the back of my head and asked, “Neck shave?” I accepted, otherwise not only would I sound like a wild boar, I’d look like one.

To my dismay he whipped out a straight edge. Where was the electric clipper with its plastic guard to protect me? Oh god this was the moment. He’d spared me thus far because he liked his victims to be well trimmed! He clearly had a sick fascination with cleanliness. He was going to wrap me up in the plastic he’d draped me in so when he slit my throat, my blood wouldn’t leave any evidence.

I closed my eyes, and said farewell to the world.

I felt the blade scrape against the back of my neck as he plotted how to begin the mutilation. Would he go straight for the carotid artery or was he a windpipe kind of guy? Maybe he’d just sever my spine so I I’d be paralyzed while he hacked my body to pieces.

The seconds ticked on, my death loomed closer. Was he wiping shaving cream on his towel, or was it blood? I’ve read that there’s blades so sharp you don’t feel them cut you. If those exist, they exist in the land of the samurai.  

Finally, after an eternity of scraping and wiping, scraping and wiping, he was done.

I survived!

I politely declined the shampoo (it wasn’t too late for him to fill the sink with hot grease or hydrochloric acid), paid my tab (careful not to tip, tipping is rude), and bowed my thanks for the haircut, his English abilities, and my life. He bowed deeply, so I bowed again. This seemed to distress him so he bowed once more, very seriously this time. Fine. I still don’t get the bowing thing, so I smiled and left.

I got back into the car and looked at my haircut for the first time. I can never really look at my hair inside the barber shop, even in the States. I always just tip generously and get the hell out.

 

He did a fine job. I’ll probably go back in a month (who am I kidding? More like three) because at least I won’t have to explain how I like my hair.