Steak - Mark Schatzker [81]
The soba obsession in Japan is pervasive. Some of the customers at Kikouchitei actually follow the Japanese buckwheat harvest, so that they may be the first to determine which region has the very best. “This year,” the soba master told me, “Yamagata and Fukui have particularly good batches.” The very best soba, apparently, comes from mountain villages just beneath the fog line, where there are large daily temperature differentials.
(Tilde Vecchio has never visited Japan, but if she did, I am confident she would proclaim soba to be a pure savor.)
The soba master mentioned that Canada produces a tremendous amount of buckwheat, an achievement he seemed to respect. Flushed with pride, I asked him what he thought of Canadian soba. He said something in Japanese that was clearly not complimentary, and yet he somehow retained an aura of extreme respectfulness. I was not humiliated, but I did feel shame.
Chada-san and I spent several hours at the Takashimaya department store in a part of town called Shinjuku, home to the world’s busiest train station. The bottom floor is the food market, called Kinokuniya, and a person could pass the better part of week there in rapt awe. No food on earth looks quite so spectacular. Aisle after aisle housed museum-quality culinary creations that were more pleasing to look at than a Zen rock garden. A row of salads sat in large bowls, shaped into precise, tapering piles that appeared to have been assembled leaf by leaf. At the end of the aisle, we saw a salad as it was being composed. A woman was dressed as though for surgery in a white coat, a surgical mask, a bouffant cap, and latex gloves. In front of her was a spinach salad, half complete, being erected one leaf at a time.
Chada-san interrupted the salad sculptress and asked her how long she had trained. From behind the surgical mask came the answer: “Three years.”
In a display fridge a few aisles over was pound cake that had been crisply sliced with an extraordinarily sharp blade into perfectly rectangular slices, the corners of which appeared sharp enough to take out a person’s eye. A slice of cake, I noted, can please not only one’s sense of taste but also one’s sense of geometry. But only in Japan.
If a USDA meat inspector ever walked into the meat section at Kinokuniya, he would think he was in heaven. The display fridges all glow brightly, their gleaming glass fronts are free of finger smudges, and their interiors boast a plenitude of A5 Yamagata beef that costs more than otoro. Raging in those fridges is a celestial festival of marbling red meat pointillated and swirled with so much white fat that it looks like steak painted by Van Gogh.
The greatest example of the degree to which the Japanese are obsessed with marbling is not to be found at the beef counter, however, but on the eleventh floor, in electronics. Chada-san and I began at a wall of washlets, which have nothing to do with marbled beef but are nonetheless notable from the point of view of cultural observation. A washlet is a toilet seat fitted with fans and water jets designed to keep a person’s posterior hospital-clean. Some have settings for oscillation and pulsation, and the better models offer charcoal-filter deodorization and blow-drying. Of all the toilets in Japan, more than half include washlets. There is one in almost every Japanese home, and my hotel room, which was one of the cheapest in Tokyo, had one, too. Beneath the knob controlling pressure was a button that depicted the human buttocks with equal parts cuteness and accuracy. Near it was another symbol: a woman with long