We flew from Sapporo to Osaka the next day, passing over Mount Fuji along the way. Fuji is the perfect mountain; not even the tangle of golf links encroaching on its base can spoil the quasi-spiritual effect of seeing it for the first time from the air.
From Osaka Airport, a striking example of Japanese future-scope engineering on reclaimed land in the Seto Inland Sea, we took the train to Kyoto. It was clear from the ceaseless sprawl of urban development that the two cities are, essentially, one gigantic conurbation with precious little countryside to provide breathing space between them. And the concrete sprawl continues west, too, merging into the third major city of the region, Kobe.
The three cities and their inhabitants could not be more different. Kyoto, 280 miles west of Tokyo, is the cradle of Japanese culture and religion. It was the imperial capital of the country from 794 to 1868, home to the royal household, as well as the country’s spiritual and cultural heart. The legacy of Kyoto’s royal history has, it is said, bred a people who are refined and aloof, not a little standoffish and secretive. Kyotoites are famed for their obfuscation in matters of diplomacy and pride in their local cuisine. The best families in Japan still keep houses here, although they might live in Tokyo.
Kyoto is located well inland and surrounded on three sides by mountains. Because of this, it remained relatively sheltered from the otherwise pervasive cultural influence of China during the Middle Ages, allowing a distinctive Japanese culture to foment in the arts of calligraphy, poetry, theater, painting, ceramics, and, of course, food.
Kyotoites consider themselves to be the most discerning diners in Japan, if not the world. The city was the birthplace of the tea ceremony and has its own highly cultivated cuisine, kyo ryori (meaning Kyoto cuisine), from which evolved kaiseki ryori, the extravagant and costly multicourse feast usually served in private rooms in ryotei, or inns, overlooking Japanese gardens. It still has almost two thousand temples and gardens, famously saved from atomic attack during World War II by Henry L. Stimson, the then U.S. secretary of war, who had visited Kyoto in the 1920s. He realized its cultural importance, and the eternal bitterness there would be toward America were it to be destroyed.
The more everyday Kyoto cuisine is known as obanzai ryori and is centered on tofu and its by-product yuba, the skin that forms on the surface of simmering soy milk, which is either dried or sold as it is and has the highest protein content of any foodstuff on earth. Kyoto is also known for another intriguing substance called fu, a kind of dough made from wheat gluten. And as Kyotoites have never tended to eat out as much as Tokyoites, the city also has a strong market culture, centered on the famous Nishiki Ichiba, which still exists in the city center.
Obanzai ryori home cooking is remarkably healthy, largely vegetarian, very low in fat and sugar, and heavy on vegetables. Recent years have seen a revival of traditional strains of local vegetables—radish, eggplant, burdock root, pumpkin, and cucumber—known collectively as kyo yasai (Kyoto vegetables). These previously rare strains have been rediscovered by Tokyo food lovers, too—partly out of fad value, partly because they are full of flavor, but also as a symptom of the Japanese’s inherent xenophobia, exacerbated by recent health scares regarding Chinese produce. The senshu mizu (Kyoto eggplant) is the height of chic on the dining tables of Tokyo.
In contrast, Osaka is a massive modern metropolis with giant office towers and endless malls, great swooping overpasses, and an industrious and fluid populace quick to react to trends and demands. It has always been a trading city, dependent on constant reinvention. Its people are supposedly down-to-earth, somewhat impatient, and hungry for innovation—there is virtually nothing in the city older than thirty years. I was perhaps more excited about eating in Osaka than in any other city in Japan, having been told by François Simon, esteemed restaurant critic of Le Figaro (and the inspiration for Anton Ego, the coffin-faced critic in the film Ratatouille), that Osaka was, in his opinion, the greatest food city in the world.
Osakan cuisine is usually characterized by one word, kuidaore, which literally translates as “eat till you go bust”—both physically and financially. Osakans have big appetites, they love fried fast food, and, unusually in Japan, they cook with wheat flour—most famously in the form of takoyaki (small savory doughnuts filled with chunks of octopus); okonomiyaki (a kind of thick pancake with various fillings); kitsune udon (soft, squidgy udon noodles served in a slightly sweet dashi with deep-fried tofu skin); and kushikatsu (deep-fried, breaded skewers).
Kobe-ites, meanwhile, have a more international outlook. There are said to be a hundred different nationalities living in the city, squeezed onto a slender strip of land between the mountains and the sea, including some of the country’s most influential expat communities. Kobe has always had stronger links with the outside world than the rest of Japan; from 1868 to 1911, it was, in theory, the only Japanese port open to the outside world, and ships would stop off there to stock up on the city’s excellent fresh water from springs beneath the mountains. Today its residents drink more wine than other Japanese and have more European-style patisseries per capita than any other city in the country (I ticked off about twenty in one afternoon with Asger and Emil—for once eagerly—in tow). Above all, though, its great culinary gift to the world has been Kobe beef—a much misunderstood name, of which more later.
We arrived at Kyoto Station late in the morning. It was warmer here. Autumn in Kyoto is characterized by an oppressive, humid heat caused by its location, surrounded by hills and mountains, quite unlike the refreshing weather we’d experienced in Sapporo.
The station is a splendid cathedral-like place whose ten-story atrium makes those old European steam-era stations, like Saint Pancras or Leipzig, look like parish churches. As usual, even for the most densely populated parts of Japan, all was calm, quiet, and ordered, and I can’t express the joyous sense of ease I felt as a neurotic father, expert at fantasizing nightmare scenarios wherever I travel, to be in a country where no one will steal your bags or try to cheat you. I know there is crime in Japan, but I suspect you’d really have to go looking for trouble to find it.
We had arranged to pick up the keys to a house Lissen had found for rent on the Internet from a woman called Junko, a friend of the owners, who worked as a lecturer at the International Center on the northeastern outskirts of the city. We took a taxi across town, passing mammoth “bird perch” gateways to temples and dark, shadowy machiya—Kyoto’s historic wooden town houses. We found Junko in the middle of a class showing a group of foreign students how to make takoyaki.
In Osaka, takoyaki (the aforementioned “octopus balls,” a kind of savory doughnut with a chunk of octopus at its core) are usually served freshly made from street stalls, where they are made to order and served in a cardboard “boat,” eight at a time, and come slathered in a dark, gloopy sauce made from mirin, Worcestershire sauce, ginger, garlic, sugar, sake, and perhaps dashi. They are sometimes also topped with katsuobushi shavings, which do their customary shimmy in the heat blast from the dough beneath.
To make takoyaki, you need a special cast-iron takoyaki griddle, with ten or so inch-wide, semispherical cups (at home we have a very similar Danish griddle used for making æbleskiver, traditional Scandinavian doughnuts). Heat it up over a stove, oil the cups with sunflower oil or something similar (not olive oil), and pour in your batter until it fills the cups to around the three-quarters mark. This is a runny batter made from cold dashi and flour, plus eggs (12⁄3 cups dashi and 12⁄3 cups flour, with two beaten eggs). You don’t need to mix it too thoroughly, but a little more than for a tempura batter. Then add a chunk of octopus tentacle—or, if you prefer, king prawn—and perhaps some chopped benishoga (pickled ginger), spring onions, or something with a bit of tang to cut through the batter and complement the seafood. As the batter sets (timing is everything here), use a toothpick to turn each ball over so that the central, uncooked batter falls down into the cup, creating the other half of the sphere.
We tried some of Junko’s takoyaki. They were pretty good, a tasty, almost liquid dough with the rubbery crunch of cooked octopus inside. We all soon learned, however, that you have to treat fresh-cooked takoyaki with great caution. As with the Taiwanese soup dumplings, xiao long bao, you need to break them open with a toothpick to let out some of the raging steam before you gingerly nibble a little dough.
After Junko’s demonstration, she introduced us to some of her students from Canada, Australia, and South America. A Serbian man, called Sasha, introduced himself and explained that he was working at a restaurant in Kyoto. We must drop by, he said.
Another taxi took us together with Junko across Kyoto. We skirted the grounds of the Kyoto Imperial Palace, obscured by trees, before the taxi dived into a warren of residential backstreets in an area called Kamigyo-ku.
Our house was located deep among tightly packed houses, some modern and functional, others, like ours, wooden and ancient. The streets had no sidewalks; only tiny front yards crammed with bicycles and potted plants—or occasionally one of those boxy little Japanese cars designed like carry-on luggage to fit an exact space—divided the front doors from the street.
The house was built in the traditional Japanese style and was over a century old, Junko told us. The sliding windows had mesh covers and heavy wooden shutters. They opened onto the neighbor’s windows, which were almost close enough to touch. It was as close to authentic Kyoto as we could have hoped for, not least as the doors had no locks.
Inside, it was cool and dark and smelled of dust and jasmine. The first floor consisted of one large room, empty apart from a pretty vase in the tokonoma (the display alcove). The futons, Junko explained, were folded away in the cupboards, so we began to unpack them to see if we would have enough. “There’s something funny in my pillow,” said Asger. It turned out to be stuffed with buckwheat husks, a traditional pillow filling. There was a small kitchen with a two-burner cooktop but no oven—Japanese domestic kitchens rarely have ovens, but do usually have a small grill—and a tatami floor with a low-slung futon sofa. Emil had followed a trail of tiny brown pellets that led underneath the sofa to several large cockroaches, which Lissen dispatched with the heel of her shoe as I supervised from halfway up the stairs. “They look like Transformers!” said Asger as the last came to an end in a crunchy squelch.
Also in the cupboards were several lightweight patterned dressing gowns. These were yukata. We all decided they were the coolest thing we had ever seen and put them on, only later learning that to tie them right over left is a serious breach of yukata etiquette, as this is how they dress the dead (but it at least explained the look on the face of one of our neighbors one day when I went down to take the trash out while still wearing mine). Emil in particular hadn’t been so attached to an item of clothing since his Spider-Man costume.
We ventured out into our new neighborhood for the first time shortly after Junko left and soon found ourselves lost in a maze of houses.
We knew the old royal palace and its park were nearby, but our map was useless, as there were no street signs and no obvious landmarks. It didn’t matter. I could have wandered for hours peering in through front windows and savoring the details of Japanese everyday life—the unlocked bicycles, the miniature shrines on every street, and the smell of incense in the air. In one parade of shops, an elderly woman sat in the middle of an open shop front mending clothes. There was a pretty good supermarket, small but still with superb fresh fish, perfect fruits and vegetables, and astonishing cuts of heavily marbled, deep-pink beef. Just around the corner from our house was a traditional soy sauce brewery. We peered in through the doorway to see three giant, dark wood barrels, each around three or four yards high with ladders up the side. I asked the man behind the counter if I could take a look and climbed up and peered into a bottomless black hole of soy, the smell deliriously rich and yeasty. Nearby was a unicycle shop; a French patisserie run by Japanese students of my cooking alma mater, Le Cordon Bleu, serving perfect croissants just like back home; while outside on the street, we passed a woman leading a dog with two wheels where his back legs had once been. “Transformer dog!” said Emil. It seemed the kind of neighborhood where anything could happen.
A short walk away we came to a wooden workshop clearly of great age, where they made fu, or wheat-gluten cake. Fuka, as we discovered, is the supplier to the royal household and numerous top restaurants and was founded over a century and a half ago. Inside, I met Shuichiro Kobori, the son of the owner, who very generously—considering we had no appointment—showed us around and explained how this curious foodstuff is made by mixing flour with the beautifully soft water from their centuries-old well in the backyard. The resulting dough is kneaded under constantly flowing water so that the starch sinks to the bottom, leaving pure wheat gluten, which is formed into a sticky, rubbery block. The technique originated in China and came to Japan with the Zen monks as a kind of meat substitute used to bulk up hot pot dishes. You can fry fu as well as boil it, and Fuka sold theirs in a variety of colors and flavors. Kobori-san was especially proud of their new bacon and basil flavors.
On our way home, we were drenched by a thunderous downpour. We had no choice but to brave the rain, as we had no umbrellas and were, again, slightly lost. The wind was whipping up, too. Treetops were bending. A rubbish bin bounded across the road, narrowly missing us. As an old typhoon hand, I recognized the signs.
The typhoon, which we later learned was a force eleven—far stronger than the one in Tokyo—showed no signs of abating, but we had to make a move and run for it back to our house, which, fortunately, turned out to be only a few seconds away.
The next day, more tribulations: a wasp nest appeared just above the front door. I first became aware of it when I was dive-bombed by insects the size of Coke cans. Something had to be done. Preferably by someone else.
I made a dash for it, engulfed by loud buzzing, and grabbed a passing neighbor, a mother out with her two sons. She looked aghast and hurried off, returning a few minutes later with a large can of insecticide. She said something in rapid-fire Japanese and hurried off again, this time leaving her two sons standing looking at me with shy curiosity. She returned, spoke at length again, then just stood, waiting. I smiled awkwardly. Did she expect me to do something? Surely not to go and spray those monstrous zeppelins. I could see Asger and Emil peering out of the first-floor window at the two Japanese boys, who were around their age. Knowing they were playmate-hungry, I beckoned them out, somehow in that moment stupidly forgetting all about the wasps.
Emil exploded from the front door, in his customary excitable, pre-play frame of mind, and almost immediately, as if they had been waiting for just such an opportunity, one of the wasps stung him slap bang in the middle of the forehead. He screamed, which only made the other wasps even more agitated. I rushed him indoors, where Lissen applied some mom magic (from the same knowledge bank that tells her exactly what to do with red wine stains on white carpets and bubble gum on a wool sweater) in the form of a hastily assembled unguent.
By the time Emil’s screaming had subsided, there was a knock at the door. A young man in a gray suit was outside with a bicycle and a clipboard. He didn’t look like a pest controller, but I assumed that’s what he was and followed him outside, where, from a safe distance, I watched him liberally douse the wasps with the neighbor’s insect repellent.
This really annoyed them. They swarmed from their nest and flew off on various seemingly random trajectories. They didn’t get far. Within about ten seconds, they began dropping from the sky like a biblical plague, landing on the ground, where they twitched and fizzed before finally conking out.
The man made a few ticks on his clipboard. I tried to offer him some money, but he looked horrified, bowed, got on his bike, and cycled off. I thanked the neighbor, and she beckoned us into her house for tea and mochi and awkward smiling silences.
That night on television, we watched Baruto, our Estonian sumo friend, win seven bouts out of seven at a tournament in Osaka, which meant that he stood a good chance of ascending to the next division. There was an unforgettable moment during the third bout. “Look,” said Asger. “His nappy’s coming off!” The two wrestlers had literally frozen in mid-grapple while the referee helped Baruto’s opponent retie his gusset. Once he was neatly trussed once more, they resumed the bout exactly as they were, as if nothing had happened. Asger and Emil were so taken with this spectacle, they spent the rest of the evening reenacting it for us.
I know I promised not to mention anything about Japanese toilets. I am sure you have heard plenty before about how they have bracing jets of water and steam, play music or fake flushing noises, and generally make going to the lavatory a thoroughly twenty-first-century experience. But such things were all very new to Asger. Our house may have been traditional in virtually every respect, but there was one room that had more microprocessing power than Apollo 13: the bathroom. It contained the most sophisticated lavatory I have ever seen—it did everything short of reading the newspaper aloud for you—and it didn’t take Asger, renowned in our family for his ceaselessly inquisitive fingers, long to start exploring the control panel for its blue-sky/clean-bottom capabilities. He grew rather obsessed to the extent that, throughout our three weeks in Kyoto, whenever Asger had gone missing for more than a few minutes, we always knew where he would be: sitting on the toilet with a faraway, almost transcendental smile on his face.
The evening of the wasp attack, with Emil now sporting a bindi on his forehead, we walked beside the Kamo River, which runs through the eastern side of Kyoto. Cranes and bats caught the moonlight as they skimmed the water. Courting couples sat with their legs dangling over the sloping embankments. There were distant sounds of traffic, clamorous pachinko parlors, and water rushing over a weir. The western bank of the river is overlooked, high above on stilted platforms bedecked with lanterns, by the restaurants of Ponto-cho, the nightlife area frequented by the “practitioners of the arts,” or geisha, of which there are said to be around five to ten thousand still in Japan.
A few minutes later we were sitting down to eat on one of the restaurant terraces, tucking into deliciously tender beef cheek cooked in soy sauce. Emil chomped happily on crunchy chicken-cartilage yakitori, which was becoming one of his favorite Japanese dishes. Through the bamboo fencing that divided our restaurant from a more expensive neighbor, we saw occasional flashes of butterfly-colored kimonos and glossy black hair. It was, sadly, as close as we would get to the world of the geisha.