Japan Journal: My Home Away from Home is Hard to Write Home About

I am once again summering in Hakodate, Japan, and you’d think I’d have plenty to blog about, but the place is so familiar to me that nothing stands out enough to qualify as blog-worthy, and I’m not sure I’d want (or am able) to write a travelogue about places I frequent. I could write about the Kantaro sushi restaurant, right on the water, with floor to ceiling plate glass windows, where the fish comes by on a conveyor belt but where we order directly with the chefs anyway, to request less rice or more wasabi or just fresher fish that hasn’t been going around on a conveyor belt. I’m still partial to engawa (fluke, or flounder, fin), especially the braised variety, although they’ve got a miso-encrusted version out now too. They also have real deal eel this year, not just anago, although I really ain’t particular. Of course, we’ve also eaten ramen and soba. The soba place we went to was a bit out of town, where the potato fields and mountains are and where the air is very fresh. My wife was wearing a white hempen gown from Taiwan, and I was wearing a Japanese samue robe, and we looked like cultists. While we waited on the porch for our table, folks coming to eat didn’t know what to make of us and asked my (Japanese) wife nervous questions in English. After we were shown to our table, I ordered wasabi soba and was given a wasabi root to grate, before the noodles arrived. I ground down almost all of it, but most of it adhered to the grater. The hostess advised me to apply the hot stuff directly to my noodles, but I could not scrape off enough of it to amount to more than a little schmeer, which seemed absurd, considering the amount of labor I had expended and the mountain of the stuff I had produced, and I began to giggle and chortle. It was like a waiter at an Italian restaurant asking if you wanted parmesan cheese on your pasta and then, instead of sprinkling it on your food, putting it on his beard, standing over your table, and shaking his head. I laughed all the way home, and we had a story (and something to blog about, but I guess you had to be there). Driving around to all these places to eat, it helps to have a little music, but the local radio DJs can’t stop talking, at least twenty minutes for every two minute fifty second song they play. I resort to the collection of CDs I’ve kept here, but most of them are good only at night (Miles Davis, Radiohead, A.A. Bondy). On a visit to the immense Tsutaya bookstore (another frequent destination for our money), I enquired about the background music playing there and ended up the proud owner of ‘B Side,’ a CD by the French jazz-soul singer Hyleen; so now everything we see sounds like the French background jazz typical of Japan. We paid early visits to breathtaking Cape Tachimachi and Motomachi (the old part of town) and the warehouse district (which sounds not like French background jazz but like music boxes). As for the establishments we have tried, there is a certain sameness about them, as they all tend to be teahouses or French patisseries; but they all have their own unique vibe, in many cases conforming to the old buildings in which they’re located. (We even enjoyed some hōjicha in a rustic teahouse set up in the old wooden quarantine building, overlooking the harbor.) Now that I think about it, Hakodate has a lot of character for this reason. It makes do with what’s already here and avoids conformity to the Starbuck’s style. While engaged in all this consumption and self-pampering, I can’t help but to reflect on how unsustainable it all seems. Maybe it’s just me – I sure don’t know how I’m going to pay for all these croissants and flounder fins – but I think it’s also Japan and maybe Western civilization in general: a 24/7 food channel and Ariana Grande concert, demographically stagnated, over-indulged, effete, and bankrupt. I might as well enjoy it while I can.

Author: Harry Miller

I have traveled and lived in Taiwan, China, and Japan and am now a professor of Asian history and author of Southern Rain, a novel of seventeenth-century China. View all posts by Harry Miller