After the China years, the Platts moved on to Tokyo, where I spent my last two years of high school. We lived in a tidy two-story house covered in white stucco, which looked like it had been built, like many houses around the city, after all the wooden buildings burned down during World War II. Tokyo in the 1970s was much the same as it is today—a vast patchwork of villages and neighborhoods knitted together by a network of train lines and raised highways. Life proceeds in these neighborhoods just like it does in a small village—according to an endlessly refined pattern of customs and rituals conducted at a discreet distance from the bustle of the city and often hidden from view. In our little neighborhood of Hiroo in the central part of the city, not far from the US embassy in the fashionable shopping district of Roppongi, there was a public bath by the train station. The giant, pale-skinned Platts would go there sometimes on weekend evenings to soak with the rest of our politely horrified neighbors in the steaming hot water, with wet towels draped over our heads. Back home and lying in bed on a cold winter night, you could hear the slow squeakings of creaky wooden carts pushed by old peddlers selling hot toasted sweet potatoes and calling out their wares in high, croaking voices. There was a pickle shop in the neighborhood where we bought colorful, tart oshinko pickles made from cucumber and bulbs of garlic to eat with our bowls of thick, sticky Japanese rice, procured from an ancient rice shop nearby. There was a soba shop by the train station where, for an extra few yen, you could get a single, fat, slightly soggy tempura-fried shrimp to go with your bowl of noodles after school; and at the local yakitori house, cooks wearing towels around their heads tended classic bincho charcoal grills, fluttering smoke-stained fans made of woven bamboo, just like at the barbecue back in Taichung. You could get spindles of charcoal-grilled baby squid at this restaurant and fatty grilled pork belly threaded, like twirling pinwheels, with shreds of shiso leaf, although the real specialty of the house was chicken. The variety of chicken preparations was so bountiful throughout Tokyo—crispy wings; chewy cockscombs; charred, Chiclet-sized hearts; folded ribbons of skin sizzled in sweet yakitori sauce; even the hen’s uterus in a soy-based yakitori sauce, with the unborn, barely cooked yolk bobbling on the end of the stick—that at some of the restaurants, I discovered later when I revisited them on eating excursions for various magazines, customers were provided with a small, pocket-sized map of the bird, with each part labeled in neat Japanese characters.
The famous national food manias—for French pastries and retro cocktails and antic cooking shows like Iron Chef—many of which would spread around the world from Tokyo, were still decades away back in the early ’70s. Nevertheless, many of the elements of this madcap gastronomic renaissance—the obsession with detail and style, the love of ceremony and presentation (in Japan both then and now, elaborate hundred-dollar boxes of the perfect apple, or the perfect mango, are traditionally presented as gifts), the deep traditions of craftsmanship and technique, the predilection for fads, and the tendency to move in large packs—were already very much on display in Japan. Decades before ramen noodles became an obsessively photographed trophy food for a generation of globe-trotting gastronauts and high-profile cooks, the Platt boys were happily slurping the different varieties of miso and shoyu ramen and comparing the relative merits of noodle broths made from chicken parts and those made using the more classic collection of pork bones. We snacked on crunchy fried potato croquettes at train stations, and for dinner in the wintertime we dined on mountains of breaded pork katsu cutlets, which, in the local katsu shops, were either served on little silver wire trays with decorous piles of shredded cabbage on the side or cooked “katsu don” style and served with a sweet mash of eggs and onions over mounds of rice. We complained about the quality of the Japanese gyoza dumplings, which tended to have more cabbage filling in them than the pork and scallion variety we’d grown up on in Taiwan and Hong Kong. We bought brightly wrapped lunchtime bento boxes for the long train trips we were always taking around the country and triangular rice snacks, called onigiri, folded in strips of dried nori seaweed, with little deposits of dried fish or pickled ume plums in their center. Instead of Hellmann’s, we spread smooth, umami-rich dabs of Kewpie mayonnaise on our lunchtime boiled eggs and tuna sandwiches, along with bottles of a sweet plum sauce called Bulldog. Fifty years later, Kewpie is all the rage among New York chefs, and although I remain a devout Hellmann’s man, in the Platt tradition, I still like to buy the occasional bottle from the local Japanese grocery store, along with some Bulldog to squirt on my fried pork cutlets or furtive afternoon bowls of steamy, sticky Japanese rice.
As in New York, everyone gets around by subway in Tokyo, and like New York, the city is a festival of cheap snack delicacies designed to be consumed quickly and on the go. Because we commuted an hour and a half each way every day to the American School out in Chofu, a northwestern suburb, my brothers and I would graze up and down the Hibiya, Shinjiku, and Sendai lines, like buffalo following the ancient food trails. At the Chofu station after school, you could buy the aforementioned fried potato croquettes, crunchy and hot, in greasy wax paper bags, and if you were still feeling hungry, or possibly just a little sad, skewers of meatballs fried in panko crumbs, all squirted with more Bulldog sauce, would hit the spot. There were noodle joints everywhere, but my favorite was a small soba shop by the Hiroo station where you could get the buckwheat noodles cold in the summer, served on bamboo trays, with a tangy sweet ponzu sauce for dipping. My favorite yakitori shop ended up being a place in Shinjiku surrounded by noisy pachinko parlors, where I used to go after basketball games with friends or on weekends to order platter after platter of chicken thighs and crispy fat chicken skin brushed with a sugar-and-soy-based mirin sauce, which we washed down with tall frosty bottles of Kirin beer.
Like today, the more refined dining establishments in Tokyo tended to be discreet and hard to find, and even if you managed to find them, you couldn’t reliably get a seat without a written introduction from a well-connected regular customer. The best cooks and chefs practiced their craft behind small bars, rarely advertised themselves to the outside world, and greeted you by name after a few visits—provided they let foreign-speaking gaijin through their doors at all. There were small tempura bars where devotees of aged tempura masters lined up for hours to experience that ineffable state of tempura nirvana called hitoshimeri (literally, “a delicate wetness”), which the cooks achieved, I would later learn, not by watching the tempura but by listening to the sizzling sounds the ingredients made as they cooked in the oil. Much later on, during my days as a professional eater, a business friend took me to a teppanyaki grill restaurant called Shiozawa. The small basement restaurant in the Ginza shopping district had no sign on the door, and inside the walls were lined with bottles of Grand Cru wines from Burgundy and Bordeaux, each with the name of one of the regulars marked on its label. Before you even asked for your own bottle of Grand Cru Bordeaux, the price of a set-course grilled Kobe beef dinner started at $400 per guest. When we sat down, there were only a few other guests—a couple of older gentlemen, dressed in Savile Row suits, sat with their silent, unsmiling escorts at the bar, which was built in a square shape around the flat-topped grill. I remember the first course was spoonfuls of Iranian caviar on toast, followed by pieces of fresh abalone sizzled in butter by the genial chef, who wore a red scarf around his neck and a tall paper toque on his head. “Who knows about this place?” I asked my friend as we sipped our goblets of Bordeaux, waiting for the Kobe beef to arrive. “Nobody knows about this place” was his reply.
Shiozawa has since closed, but there have long been thousands of similar anonymous little establishments in Tokyo that are run by cooks and chefs practicing their craft in anonymous shopping centers, in back alleys, or, as the famous sushi master Jiro Ono still does today, by an entrance to the Ginza subway station. Then as now, sushi was a great delicacy in Japan, and once a month, on a Sunday evening, the Platts would pay a visit to our own private Jiro, a friendly, loquacious gentleman named Noike-san, who ran a small sushi bar not far from Tokyo University in a neighborhood called Ichigaya. Besides introducing us to the wonders of uni, Noike-san also showed us different grades of tuna belly, which he bought on his early morning visits to Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market. Like all traditional sushi chefs, Noike-san had his own signature recipe for the smooth, faintly sweet slice of egg omelet called tamago, the traditional conclusion to a sushi meal. If we were still hungry, which we usually were, he’d improvise a variety of hand rolls made with chopped yellowtail and scallions, or more uni folded into cones of rice and gently toasted nori seaweed, or a small spoonful of tart, salty-sweet plum paste called ume, which he dressed with cuttings of fresh shiso leaf that left a minty taste in the back of your nose.
Not that we considered ourselves overly obsessed with food at the time. After moving from strange city to strange city every few years like a family of vagabonds, the Platt brothers had a semblance of a normal teenage life in Tokyo. We wore bell-bottom jeans fitted with wide leather belts and scraggly, shoulder-length hair. Unlike the dysfunctional, weed-addled, all-boys New England boarding school I’d attended while my parents were in China, the American School in Japan was a refreshingly functional place, with a homecoming queen and a school prom and normal American kids from places like San Diego, Detroit, and Dallas. Like them, I zoned out for hours listening to Led Zeppelin on huge, snowball-colored Sony headphones, drank industrial amounts of excellent Japanese beer, and experimented with a hash substance called Buddha on the golf course outside of school. I was the slow-footed backup center on the varsity basketball team, the genial, shambling player whose shorts were perpetually falling down and who came off the bench to provide comic relief for the crowd long after the game had been won or lost. I took the daughter of a Baptist missionary to the senior prom, wrote articles for the school newspaper, and read weathered, month-old copies of the New Yorker and Rolling Stone slouched in my favorite beanbag chair in a corner of the library. We still have the faded white leather yearbook from 1976, which has a picture of me in this posture, above a quotation from the Taoist philosopher Lao-Tzu that, to the horror and amusement of my wife and daughters, reads: “In not doing, all things are achieved.”
In accordance with the ageless wisdom of Lao-Tzu, however, Tokyo turned out to be a kind of nirvana for a future slacker restaurant critic. There my brothers and I were introduced to different kinds of instant ramen and learned to pronounce mysterious words like “omakase” and “umami,” and, more than anywhere we’d lived before, the city was filled with culinary expeditions and adventures of every kind. You could dine on strange nose-to-tail delicacies (it was in Japan that I first learned that really bad meals are as interesting as really good ones) and take the train out to Kappabashi, a distant neighborhood in the eastern part of the city where you could buy the perfectly rendered plastic replicas of every kind of food imaginable used as displays in restaurant windows all over Japan—cheeseburgers, ice cream cones, Kobe beef steaks, and uncannily rendered pieces of fried chicken. You could amble around the glittering depachika food halls of the grand Tokyo department stores, like Mitsukoshi and Takashimaya, where my mother liked to wander the aisles admiring the trophy apples and mangoes, nestled in their carefully constructed boxes, and the rows of bento boxes wrapped up like Christmas presents, while her large sons sidled off to the butcher displays and ogled the Bavarian hams and strings of fat sausages that were flown into Japan—where meat products were a scarce luxury—from the finest butchers in Germany.
One winter we traveled up to the northern island of Hokkaido to eat sushi in Sapporo and soak in the bubbling hot sulfur springs of a town called Niseko, which is an international skiing destination now, but in those days was a one-lane village surrounded by mountains piled with rumpled blankets of snow. In the spring my mother and I rode the bullet train down to Kyoto, where we toured the temples in a snowstorm. The price of a night’s stay in one of the city’s traditional inns was a tenth of what it is today and included a breakfast of grilled fish, eggs, and rice mixed with salmon roe and pickles, all arranged in different antique lacquer boxes. We would make the early morning trip to Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, which even in those pre–Travel Channel days was an obligatory tourist pilgrimage, like rising to see the Pyramids at dawn. We watched the chefs and cooks wander among the bubbling tanks of sea creatures with their baskets, and attended the morning bluefin auction where the brokers, dressed in their smocks and gum boots, moved among the silvery, headless carcasses on the concrete floor, calling out prices and ringing their bells. Afterward we’d eat bowls of noodles for breakfast or sample the sushi—Spanish mackerel touched with ground daikon radish, or sweet, pearly, impossibly fresh white shrimp shiroebi, hauled in fresh from Toyama Bay in northern Japan—which was sold in little stalls and restaurants around the market for half of what the fish would cost a few hours later for lunch or dinner at the gourmet sushi restaurants around town.
The late 1970s was also a golden era for traditionalist sumo wrestling fans in Japan, and because we followed sumo, my father took us one morning to tour a wrestling stable. For the Platt boys, this visit was a special kind of nirvana, like visiting the Yankees’ clubhouse during spring training or obtaining a pass to watch boxers train before a big fight in Vegas. In those days, wrestlers from Japan populated the top ranks of the sport, instead of the giant foreigners, many from Mongolia, who dominate the sport today. Our hero was the first foreign-born sumo to compete in Japan, a genial Hawaiian giant named Jesse Kuhaulua whose fighting name was Takamiyama. Sumo is a highly technical art, filled with different holds and leverage points, but Takamiyama, who was famous for his bushy sideburns and easy Santa Claus disposition, specialized in grabbing smaller wrestlers by their brightly colored mawashi girdles and merrily bulldozing them from the ring. Jesse arrived in Tokyo as a portly young man and grew to enormous size on the special high-protein hot pot called chankonabe, which the masters who ran stables fed their wrestlers four times a day, starting early in the morning, to maximize calorie intake and fatten them up for battle. At the wrestling stable with our father, we watched these portly giants slap each other in the unheated ring and roll around in the dust, and afterward we shared a giant pot of chankonabe with them. Several bowls of the famously thick, sticky, sugar- and fat-laced beef and vegetable stew added up to roughly 10,000 calories, and it had an addictively sweet savory taste, like some ancient trencherman’s form of Sunday supper ragù.
I’ve been back to Japan many times since leaving for college in the summer of 1976, and more than any of the places where we lived during that wandering childhood in Asia long ago, it looks and feels the same as it did back then. Many of the subway cars are still painted the same colors, and if you want to circumnavigate the city, it’s still best to avoid the cab drivers, who get lost driving down the twisting alleyways, and to take the green-painted Shinjiku line, which runs in an oval ring around the central part of the city. Takamiyama retired years ago and now manages his own sumo stable, but if you want a taste of chankonabe, it’s available in various styles in many different restaurants now. Our house in Hiroo had been replaced by a small apartment block the last time I visited the old neighborhood, but the public baths were still there, and so were the crowded shops of the Harajiku district. Mr. Noike closed his sushi restaurant long ago, but if you have connections and several hundred thousand yen in your pocket, Jiro and his acolytes are still producing chaste ten-piece omakase dinners at his now-world-famous restaurant by the subway entrance in Ginza.
In the fickle ever-changing world of food fashion, Tokyo seems to have replaced Paris as the epicenter of the chic and style, and the city is a destination not just for diners but for worshipful chefs. They come from their kitchens around the world to purchase Japanese knife blades and soak up knowledge on foraging techniques from the wizened mushroom and herb masters in the forests and mountains of central Japan. A few years back, my editors sent me out to cover one of these highly publicized pilgrimages, a six-week pop-up organized by the famous Danish chef René Redzepi. Pop-ups aren’t something I usually write about as a working critic. They’re never around for very long, and most are designed not so much with the dining public or groundbreaking recipes in mind but as publicity for up-and-coming chefs or high-profile cooks who are between projects. Redzepi had left his world-famous Copenhagen restaurant, Noma, and he was happy to take the Mandarin Oriental hotel’s offer of room and board for his seventy-five cooks and other kitchen staff in exchange for six weeks of Nordic Japanophile dinners and all the frenzied attention that the world’s most renowned chef and a luxury hotel in the new culinary capital of the world could generate.
I flew into Tokyo in the evening and spent the night in one of the Mandarin sky box suites, looking out at the blinking office lights of the city, drinking glasses of Suntory whiskey, Bill Murray–style, in a jet-lagged daze. The waiting list for seats in the dining room was sixty thousand names long, one of the breathless hotel officials told me, and dinner was fully booked for the entire Redzepi run. However, they set up a lunchtime spot for the visiting critic propped up on a stool at the pass, between the hot, clattering kitchen and the dining room, which was decorated in a cursory way with Nordic furs thrown here and there over the backs of the chairs. The chef, when I met him for my odd meal, was genial and soft-spoken and dressed in his starched chef’s whites, surrounded in his narrow little kitchen by his lean, serious-faced cooks, many of them with whiskers and tattoos. He looked a little like the diminutive captain on the bridge of a newly launched Scandinavian vessel far from home, and they looked like his crew.
The first dish of my meal, as I wrote at the time, was a bowl of slightly bitter strawberries, followed by a stunned, still-wriggling (and curiously waxy-tasting) Hokkaido shrimp dotted with ants, which one of the cooks happily told me were foraged “by this cool ant dude in Nagano.” The ants were supposed to give the dish a little acidity, but they didn’t taste much like anything at all. They were followed by a decorative creation that looked like loops of orange ribbon candy but turned out to be thin bands of shaved monkfish liver, which tasted icy, salty, and faintly primal, as though hauled directly from some freezing Arctic sea. My strange jet-lagged lunch proceeded with fiery orange segments of sea urchin wrapped in steamed cabbage, slices of hakkori pumpkin paired with salty spoonfuls of Fukuoka caviar, and a serving of Scallop Fudge, a magically strange substance made from foraged beechnuts, kelp, and dehydrated scallops. The main course was a roasted wild duck, which had been caught, the cooks told me, according to ancient custom: by hunters using nets in the marshlands just south of Hokkaido.
AS I BLEARILY ATE MY DUCK WITH THE HEAT OF THE KITCHEN AT MY back, peering out at the crowd of mostly Japanese diners politely picking at their thousand-dollar meals, Redzepi stopped by now and then to chat. He said he preferred the term “restaurant internship” to “pop-up,” and that although he’d visited Japan before, this was the first time he’d stayed in the country for a long period. When I asked him if he and his cooks had gotten out into the city to eat, his eyes lit up. It was a revelation, he said, to spend an extended amount of time immersed in a food culture much larger than his own. He told me about a sushi stand at Tsukiji where for $80 three people could get twenty pieces of sushi each, along with a few cans of beer. He told me about a bar he’d visited where the bartender muddled a special breed of tomato from the south of Japan to make his Bloody Marys, and another where the bartenders made their own Campari from scratch. He told me about the tempura he’d tasted at a little place by the Sumida River that had forever expanded his knowledge of how a fried shrimp could taste, and he told me about a ramen stand near a subway station, not far from the hotel, where the cooks had mastered, after years of practice, a certain spicy, chili oil–laced version of ramen noodles. “Oh, you definitely have to go there,” the chef said, sounding, it occurred to me later, the way I did back in the day, when I was roaming the train stations of Tokyo with my brothers, looking for another meal. “Those damn noodles will definitely blow your mind.”