Japan Navigator

Newsweek has taken up the Michelin-story in an interesting and knowledgeable article called The New Food Capital of the World by Christian Caryl and Akiko Kashiwagi.

“Japan is a food-crazy nation like few others,” they say – and as I fully agree with their judgement, I’d like to pick up a few points from the article and add some observations of my own. After all, could there be a better reason for being in Japan?

- About one-third of all TV broadcasts in Japan are devoted to food. This ranges from the cooking shows you find also in other countries to food quizzes. But even in news programs dishes are often carried in to be tasted in front of the cameras. And travel programs, whether devoted to trips in Japan or abroad, pay more attention to tasting the local cuisine than visiting museums or other cultural monuments. To the Japanese, food is culture!

- Not mentioned in the article, is the enormous amount of books and magazines devoted to food. Walk into any reasonably sized bookstore and the food-craziness of the Japanese will be clearly on view. Publications range from guidebooks for restaurants to specialized magazines about one particular kind of food, from books for people obsessed by Chinese ramen noodles to recipe collections from famous French restaurants… Nor surprisingly, then, that the Tokyo Michelin Guide sold out in only 24 hours – the same number of books it took a whole year to sell in New York – and after reprinting managed to make it to second position on the bestseller list of 2007, although being published at the end of the year! But in Japan Michelin is only one of many – there are countless excellent Japanese guides.

- One of the favorite pastimes of the Japanese is tabearuki, walking around the town in search of new restaurants. A popular food magazine or guidebook in hand, especially in the weekends, you see Japan’s foodies roaming around town in search of a new culinary experience. As everybody concentrates on the same restaurants which are popular at that particular time, you find them in a long row outside, patiently waiting, until there is a seat vacant.

- And of course all those happy eaters want to write about their experiences, so there is an enormous amount of food or gourmet blogs on the Japanese net (here is a link to some of them). The detailed gourmet records are interlaced with cell-phone photos to document the experience. The Newsweek article makes mention of “one housewife whose blog documents her quest for the country’s best bread and who has visited 384 bakeries in the city of Kobe alone.”

- The sheer number of restaurants in Japan is overwhelming. Tokyo has 160,000 restaurants (Paris only 13,000, for example); in the whole of Japan there are about half a million. These are not all expensive haute-cuisine palaces worthy of inclusion in Michelin, on the contrary, the interesting thing to note is that even ordinary eating places are often of an exceptional high level.

- Finally we have to mention the obsessive craftsmanship which is a characteristic of Japanese culture in general, and also very strong in the field of gastronomy. For Japanese, not only the result is important, but also the process. As the Newsweek article mentiones, students at Tokyo’s elite Tsuji Culinary Institute start by learning how to stand properly in the kitchen while using a knife.

“There’s no moving on to more-refined topics until they’ve mastered the proper way to cut vegetables, and some critics have compared the rote movements to martial-arts training.”

There is only one correct arm-hand-finger movement to make sushi, just like their is only one proper way to swing your golf stick. And, contrary to the United States, you will never become a sushi chef after only three months on the job – it will rather take five years of rigorous slaving practice under a severe and strict master. Japanese cuisine is a difficult art form, that does not stop at food, but also demands from students that they remember the intricacies of how to select the proper dish or bowl from among numerous differently formed and colored ceramics – not to forget which dish fits which season.

Remarkable is also the emphasis of chefs on selecting the fish for that day’s menu by themselves every morning at a terribly early hour in Tsukiji, or ordering a particular type of kelp all the way from Hokkaido, even insisting on trucking in a special kind of well water for making the important dashi broth… this kind of stubbornness, this uncompromising quest for the highest quality, is typically Japanese and has made the cuisine here the greatest in the world…