We flew from Haneda Airport, Tokyo’s domestic terminal. Though I am not exactly phobic about flying, I have now reached the “bored” stage of what experienced fliers tell me are the three acts of air travel: at first it’s exciting, then becomes tedious, and then comes the Fear. I find the whole getting to the airport, checking in, going through security, getting to the gate, queuing to get into the gate lounge, then queuing again to get on the plane—at each stage being asked to present your boarding pass, remove your belt, “No, not your boarding pass, your passport, stupid,” and so on—deeply harrowing, like being a part-time refugee, but with worse catering: the Exodus sponsored by the Tie Rack. But Haneda Airport was a revelation: clean, quiet, efficient, and full of excellent shops and restaurants representing virtually every main category of Japanese food. If I had been told our trip would end there and that I had to make do with the facilities at Haneda for the next two months, I could have survived quite happily.
But we were leaving Tokyo and wouldn’t return for many weeks. I was a little reluctant to go—so many restaurants, so little time—and Lissen felt the same, but after three weeks it felt right to venture forth, particularly where the children were concerned.
We had had a few food battles with Emil and, in particular, Asger, but they were gradually becoming more open to new things, and we had successfully adhered to our strict “no pizza or burgers” principle. They had enjoyed tempura and loved the ninja restaurant in Shinjuku, which we had had to enter through a hidden door and over a glass drawbridge, and where the waiters performed magic tricks. They were also now genuine sushi enthusiasts to the extent that, left unsupervised, they could easily amass a sizable tower of plates at a conveyor-belt sushi joint.
Though thrilling for us all, I did sense that the ceaseless clamor of the Japanese capital had been difficult for Asger and Emil to adjust to. Though Tokyoites are friendly and helpful and showed great interest in our boys, theirs is not an especially child-friendly city, even compared to Paris. There were no real play parks to speak of, nowhere for them to run wild and let off steam, and the sheer number of people was, I sensed, a little unsettling from time to time.
So, after Tokyo, Sapporo’s space and pace came as a breath of fresh air. As did the actual breath of fresh air that greeted us as we disembarked from the plane. Hokkaido’s climate is markedly different from Japan’s central island, Honshu. At its northernmost tip, Japan comes within a few miles of Russian territory, and even in the southwest of Hokkaido the winters are harsh and snowbound. At summer’s wane, when we arrived, the temperature was already pleasantly cool, yet still warm enough for short sleeves.
Hokkaido is vast, accounting for roughly a fifth of Japan’s land area—equivalent to the size of Austria. You would have thought that with twice as many people as the UK but only a quarter of the habitable land, the Japanese would have swarmed Hokkaido centuries ago. Yet it has historically been thought of as remote and inhospitable. It was colonized only 150 years ago, and then only following government inducements to business and industry and countless “Gosh, Look at All This Space!” billboard campaigns. Until that point, it had been the home of the Ainu, Japan’s indigenous people, who had arrived there hundreds of thousands of years ago, most likely from Siberia. Despite continued government prodding, still only around one-twentieth of the population lives here—just under six million people—and it boasts large tracts of wilderness and virgin forest, neither of which are the first things that spring to mind when one thinks of Japan. But Hokkaido’s geography is not its only unique selling point. The food is quite different here, too.
Japan manages to produce only 40 percent of the food it needs (compared to, say, the United States, which imports about 15 percent), and a large proportion of that comes from Hokkaido. It is the nation’s larder.
The island is the center of Japan’s dairy farming industry, producing excellent butter, cream, and milk, and not-so-excellent cheeses (a vaguely artificial, flavorless brie sold in most supermarkets is the most widely available). They also grow potatoes and corn and, ironically, given that this is one of the poorest parts of the country, Hokkaido is home to those $150 melons (the current record for one of these Yubari King melons is ¥2.5 million [$22,000]—although, again, the purchaser was making a political statement in support of what is actually a very poor part of the country). Hokkaido is also renowned for its varieties of crab and its wild salmon.
Sapporo, its capital, seemed like a cool, relaxed city. No one was rushing, there was plenty of space on the vast, American-sized sidewalks, and the traffic was sparse. Our hotel was an eighties throwback, but pleasant enough. (It reminded me of the Sapporo hotel the protagonist of the Murakami novel Dance Dance Dance checks into only to discover a mysterious extra floor: a dark, dank portal into a parallel mind-zone inhabited by a strange man dressed as a sheep. Ours didn’t have this.) From our room, on the sixteenth floor, we could see mountains, the ski jump built for the 1972 Winter Olympics, and, right across the street, a Ferris wheel. The air was thick with dragonflies, many of them mating as they flew.
From the moment they clapped eyes on the Ferris wheel, Asger and Emil petitioned without pause for a turn. I had my own petition going for a visit to Ramen Yokocho (Ramen Alley), filled with nationally renowned ramen noodle shops. It was a toss-up as to which of us was the whiniest and most irritating, so we split into two groups.
Ramen Yokocho is the best place to eat Hokkaido’s famed bata-kon—or “butter corn”—ramen made with the two eponymous local ingredients. From the street, Ramen Yokocho looked like the back entrance to an office basement, an impression that was hardly altered by its interior: a dingy corridor, lined on one side by small counter-style ramen restaurants. Unusually for Japan, the owners of the half dozen or so restaurants called out to me as I walked down the corridor, gesturing to their laminated picture menus. I chose one at random and settled down at the counter for a nuclear-hot bowl of butter-corn ramen, piled high with sliced roast pork, cubes of chilled butter, tinned sweet corn, shredded spring onion, sheets of nori, and half a boiled egg, all atop a tangle of frantic, curly noodles.
It was sensational. The best ramen I had eaten so far. The oil globules on the surface of the soup had given me cause for concern as I dipped my ceramic spoon in for the first taste, but after that, I was in ramen heaven. It was porky, mildly greasy in a satisfying way, incredibly salty and garlicky, with the chilled butter and corn a shock to the palate amid the piping-hot soup. The spring onion gave it a welcome acidity and the chili oil a lingering masochistic pleasure. I tell you, that soup had it all.
I had planned to taste the ramen in at least three different places, but my compulsion to finish every last morsel of this first one, combined with its monstrous scale, meant that any thoughts of eating further were ruled out by the disconcerting sloshing of my stomach as I rose to pay.
Ten minutes later I was sitting down to eat again. Sapporo is famous for its crabs, which grow to an enormous size in the cold waters here and are exported throughout Japan. As I left Ramen Yokocho nursing my balloon belly, my eye was caught by a giant fiberglass crab waving its claws, beckoning to me from the front of a restaurant across the street. Inside, I crossed a small crab-filled moat, removed my shoes, and settled on the tatami floor at a window to taste of one of Japan’s most revered delicacies.
The menu listed a royal flush of crabs: king, queen, snow, spiny, and hairy, each, judging from the picture menu, looking like some deep-sea H. R. Giger nightmare. Traditional Japanese music played as, around me, families and couples went to work diligently dismantling these fearsome crustaceans. Mine arrived: various cuts and species arranged beautifully in pieces in a bowl made from ice, with leaves, twigs, and purple and green seaweed for decoration. The taste of the raw crab was elusive; initially my taste buds struggled to find any flavor, then slowly a faint sweetness of the sea and traces of iodine emerged from the pleasantly slimy texture. The green part of the crabmeat had more flavor and the king crab the most resistant texture, but I really couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Sitting there on the floor watching the pair of giant mechanical crab claws slowly waving back and forth outside my window, I felt quite underwhelmed.
Which made what happened over the coming weeks all the more peculiar. As we traveled on south through Japan, I began to pine for those Hokkaido crabs; in quiet moments on trains and planes, my thoughts would return to their delicate flavor, but mostly it was the texture—that intriguing half-liquid, half-solid state of raw crabmeat that gave it just enough resistance to remain on one’s tongue long enough for it to tease with its taste. It was another example of the Japanese’s ultrarefined sense of texture. They value the feel of food in the mouth almost as highly as its flavor and certainly employ it with greater nuance than they do temperature (scorching hot is the default setting for most hot dishes), whether it be in the unsettling chewy-crunch of jellyfish, the soft rubber of mochi (rice-flour sweets), or the sharp spikes of fried panko bread crumbs. More challengingly, the Japanese also value a mealy texture in some foods—like adzuki bean paste, which features as a filling for various sweets and desserts, and also snot-like ground yam. Texture variation and contrast was one of the most revelatory aspects of my eating odyssey through Japan. There is a tremendous amount we can learn from the Japanese about combining textures in a dish, or throughout a meal, to heighten the pleasure and to broaden the sensual experience of eating.
The Sapporo crab was sensuous to the point of perversion. I still pine for it. Indeed it is one of the abiding regrets of my eating career—and unusual for me when I find something I like—that I didn’t take the opportunity to stuff myself silly with Hokkaido crab every day we were in Sapporo until I never wanted to eat it again. I have, in my life, done just this with a whole range of foodstuffs, from Milky Ways to pickled onions, yet here was something really worth getting sick of, and I let it go after one tasting. A lesson for the future there, I feel.
But it was the ramen I raved about when I met up with Lissen, Asger, and Emil half an hour later. Despite my distended belly and indigestion-induced grimaces, they insisted I take them back to Ramen Yokocho. I was glad they did, as Lissen’s map-reading led us to the second, more inviting part of the alley, which I hadn’t realized continued across the street from the inhospitable corridor I had dined in. Ramen Yokocho II was much more atmospheric, with tightly packed diners and a bustling Friday evening mood with crowds of locals wandering, like us, bewildered by the choice and the siren smells from the various kitchens.
We chose a shop run by an elderly husband and wife who were initially alarmed to see an entire gaijin family enter their restaurant. They soon softened, and the wife—whose only English was “I’m sorry, OK?”—caught a dragonfly by the wings and handed it to Asger with a big smile. Asger took the insect gently with his thumb and forefinger. He and Emil examined it for a while, Emil not feeling quite bold enough to hold it himself but impressed by his brother’s courage.
I was served some shochu, a potent domestic spirit distilled from wheat, sweet potato, buckwheat, or black sugar, depending on where in Japan it comes from. Why is shochu not more popular in the West? It is strong but has a light, mild taste and is a dangerously friendly spirit to guzzle. Normally served in a tumbler with a gigantic spherical ice cube, here it came in a glass jar with a removable ring-pull top. Soon our ramen arrived, not quite as epochal as my first, but still good enough for me to drain the bowl, despite its containing substantially more chili and oil. By now I felt as if I were undergoing some kind of arcane Japanese torture, my stomach and bladder pushed to the bursting point. “I’m sorry, OK?” the wife asked, meaning, “Would you like something else?” I pointed to some gyoza on the menu. Well, you never know when you’re going to eat again, do you?
Our introduction to Sapporo had been revelatory. What else could you ask of a city but a Ferris wheel, randy dragonflies, and great ramen? But the next day cemented its place in our hearts forever.
We began with an uninspiring morning visit to the one-room Ainu Museum. Today there are thought to be less than two hundred “pure” Ainu left—that is, people with two Ainu parents—and their language and culture are on the brink of extinction. As with the Maori, the Native Americans, the Aborigines, and the low-caste Dalits in India, the Ainu suffer from varying degrees of persecution and prejudice in their homeland. Unemployment is disproportionately high among the Ainu population, and educational standards are low. This being Japan, the establishment does a very good job of keeping quiet about the Ainu, although recent legislation has helped their cause slightly. And it has to be said there are other minorities as badly off, if not worse, in Japan—the Burakumin, for example, who are genuine outcasts, ghettoized descendants of butchers or tanners and thus thought of as unclean, or the Korean and Chinese communities in Osaka and elsewhere.
The official Ainu population, including those of mixed heritage, is said to be around twenty-five thousand, although Ainu pressure groups claim there are twice as many—they simply choose not to admit to it. Alcoholism is a major problem for the Ainu, as, prior to the arrival of the modern Japanese, they drank only occasionally during rituals and have a low tolerance even today (this is not unusual; around half the population of Japan suffers from aldehyde dehydrogenase deficiency, which means their blood pressure drops when they drink).
Now, I don’t want to sound even shallower than a man who drags his family to the other side of the world for some dinners may already sound, but although I was of course touched by the Ainu’s plight, I was more interested in what they ate. Back in Tokyo we had visited an Ainu restaurant, Rera Cise, or “house of wind,” which opened in 1994 as a focal point for the Ainu cause and to promote awareness of their culture.
An Ainu spokesman we met there had told us a little about his people: “Our religion is quite similar to Shinto, but the bear plays a very special role,” he said.
“Do you know any bears?” asked Asger.
The spokesman looked puzzled. “No, but we do have a ritual where we kill a bear.”
Asger went quiet.
In fact, they don’t just kill the animal they revere; they eat it, too. Nineteenth-century British anthropologist John Batchelor—who founded the Ainu Museum in Sapporo—recorded that the Ainu ate bear cooked in horse fat, concluding, “In no sense are the Ainu epicures.”
The spokesman had a present for Asger and Emil, he said, and pulled from a woven wool bag what looked like two fancy chopsticks. He placed one end of one chopstick over his open mouth and began to twang the other end. It was a mukkur, a kind of wooden Jew’s harp, which he was obviously skilled at playing.
The food began to arrive: pickled cucumber and seaweed, and what the Japanese call mountain vegetables, edible wild ferns and bulbs, although these were special Ainu mountain vegetables, called kito piro. “They have lots of vitamin E, D, iron, and minerals, good for colds and constipation, high blood pressure, contagious diseases, and getting rid of evil spirits,” our Ainu friend said. This was followed by rather less appealing deep-fried potato and pumpkin cakes, and venison, cheese, and onion wrapped in phyllo pastry, which was delicious but rather greasy and, it turned out, not all that authentic.
As I tried some slightly bitter greens, I asked why so many Ainu left Hokkaido for Tokyo: “The discrimination is much worse for us in Hokkaido. We stand out because we have thicker hair, thicker eyebrows, darker skin—people say we are stinky or dirty. There are many more foreigners in Tokyo, so we aren’t so obvious. The government says there are 2,700 of us in Tokyo, but I think there is double that. Many Ainu keep their heritage a secret. You know, if you are Ainu, you cannot join the police force, for instance, and there are many other areas where there is prejudice against us. We don’t have much money, so it is difficult to get a good education. The Japanese are still in denial that there were people on these islands before they arrived from Japan. They say we were only in Hokkaido, but there were Ainu people all the way to Okinawa.”
* * *
Back in Sapporo, after visiting the Ainu Museum, our spirits were lifted by some deliciously nutty black sesame ice cream, and a sighting of a Daihatsu Naked as we drove across town to the city’s wonderful indoor market, Nijo. Here we saw sacks of salmon roe, taut and bursting with luminous orange-red eggs; herring being smoked on the sidewalk; and a gigantic boiled octopus, its deep red tentacles curled like the ends of a Victorian villain’s mustache.
We entered one shop entirely filled with open tanks of crabs. The owner, a young woman, approached us. The hairy crab was the best to eat, she said, but also the most expensive, at ¥5,000 each (around $60). She was from the southwest of Hokkaido—konbu territory. I mentioned that Asger and I were taking a trip there the next day, and she enthused about the people and the beauty of the coast. As we were talking, before we could protest, she had removed the largest king crab, with a span of almost three feet and a body as large as Asger’s head, from one of the tanks and was offering it to him to hold.
Lissen, Emil, and I took a step backward and made encouraging faces. Asger offered his arms outstretched and was soon holding an eight-legged, pinky-red, prehistoric monster, easily big enough to overpower a small dog. Asger stood rigid, proud and exhilarated but with a beseeching look best described as Will you just take the damn photograph? To Emil, who had already seen his elder brother defeat a sumo ten times his size, Asger now attained the stature of a hero of Greek mythology. What none of us knew was that the next day we would encounter a far more dangerous natural predator.