Tastes Like Ass

Literally. It tastes like ass because it is ass.

Exploring the dining options - there are many - on the blocks fanning out from the Kurasumori Exit of Shimbashi Station, the Ajimi team came upon a little izakaya, Aoki (青樹). The owner, Aoki himself, a small, tightly built man harangued us with his bare rasp of a disappearing voice to set on down and have a heapin' helpin' of his hospitality.

Aoki's xeroxed menu highlighted a mess of bargain drinks, some of the usual yaki suspects and its main claim to fame, motsu. Motsu being innards. Liver, tripe, gizzards and more - the unknown and forbidden animal parts that most Americans would throw away in a heartbeat. That is if they even had the option of throwing it away. It's often difficult to even find liver in the meat department of a US grocery store these days.

Feeling intrepid... well, perhaps we had had a few to drink before landing on the stools outside of Aoki... we decided to order something we've never tried before. There were many never-before seen words on the menu, so a random choice led to teppou (テッポー). When quizzed as to what it was, the waitress pointed vaguely "down there" and with a giggle confirmed that it was very tasty indeed.

A beer later, the plate of teppou arrived. A couple of skewers with squares of gray-white meat stuff, lightly bronzed by the grill. All in all, it didn't look bad. I offered a piece to the wiser member of the Ajimi team, who chose to demur.

The first bite - tough. The second - tougher still. Several chews into the unknown organ meat and it seemed to be getting tougher and more rubbery with each mastication. Plus, to confound matters, a not too pleasant outer layer of fibrous material seemed to be getting more straw-like as it seemed to cling harder and harder to the layer of rubber it adhered to. Imagine a bicycle tire, cut into pieces, bleached white and laid to the flame.

But I can say that it probably didn't taste quite as good as burnt bicycle tires. As teeth crushed tissue a sort of pork-funkiness squirted forth that soon began reacting on those little glands at back of the mouth above the throat that emit an acrid sourness in times of danger. You know, the ones that signal its time to vomit. Now I like my pork as funky as any swine lover does. And in the immortal words of George Clinton - "you gotta funk yo' butt." But the pork/funk/butt axis definitely tasted a bit evil.

I managed to choke the thing down and foolishly tried a second piece.

I signaled to Aoki-san and queried "OK, what animal part is this?" He grabbed me by the hand, brought me to a poster from the Japan Livestock Industry Association and gleefully pointed to a picture of unidentifiable roadkill labled chokuchou (チョクチョウ), yet another name for the unmentionable body part that lies south of the intestines but barely north of the anus. Still in some denial, yet fearing the worst, we looked it up in our electronic dictionary only to confirm the obvious.

At least now, whenever I say "it tastes like ass!" I will be speaking with some authority.

The website for Aoki is here - http://mo2aoki.hp.infoseek.co.jp/

NV

Kamakura-area Restaurant Highlights

The Ajimi Team took a few weeks this summer exploring dining options in Kamakura and the Shonan beach area of Kanto. The results of our research are now available for your consideration at bento.com.

Densha Otoko

There are times, particularly when the weather is dull and rainy, as it was in the days leading up to last Thursday's typhoon, when Tokyo feels like an obstacle course. Its 12 million or so inhabitants are channeled into the same tunnels and concourses, the same steaming trains, and their sole purpose seems to be to keep you from getting where you want to go. But these past few post-typhoon days have been glorious, sunny and crisp, and Tokyo has once again opened up, ours to explore, our fellow residents becoming objects of wonder.

On Saturday we decided to head to Hibiya to visit both the Japan Sake Brewers' Association and the park where we thought there was a Kyushu food festival going on. The sake brewers are located in an architectural desert around Toranomon between the fortified enclaves of the national government and the glitz of Ginza. The district is one of the few in Tokyo where the street pattern resembles a grid and it represents the triumph of efficiency over charm. The only human presence in non-business hours is the odd septugenarian moonlighting security guard. It would be a terrible place in which to be attacked by a pack of zombies but you can totally imagine it happening. Unfortunately, the JSBA was closed for the weekend but through the window we could see row upon row of nihonshu bottles as well as dusty dioramas depicting the sake-brewing process. If there's anything the Ajimi Team loves more than booze it's dioramas so we vowed to return. And off we went to Hibiya Park.

It turned out that the Kyushu festival was happening elsewhere. Instead, we followed the sound of an old-fashioned steam whistle to the 16th annual Railroad Festival. All the lively quirkiness that Toranomon lacked could be found in the surrounding few hectares of the park.

If the Ajimi Team had its entrepreneurial wits about it, it would design a series of train-related sex toys, such is the ardour that a certain (largely male) segment of the Japanese population holds for railroads. Imagine anatomically correct inflatable shinkansen cars ("Hi, I'm Nozomi. Let's go for a ride."). Cosplay subway attendant uniforms. The vibrator possibilities are endless. (NB: There are already places in seedier sections of town where you can grope simulated school girls in simulated subway cars so train-related porn is not, um, virgin territory.)

None of those kinds of things were on display at the railroad festival but it seemed that very little else had been left unmarketed. There were booths for 20 or more local and national train lines. They were selling old tickets, calendars, route maps, t-shirts, water bottles, key chains, train models, mascot stuffed animals, ekiben - the generally semi-edible lunch boxes sold at many stations, schedules, towels, socks. One booth even had a couple of rusty valves on offer. The free attractions included a wee Thomas the Tank Engine ride powered by a real steam engine (the source of the train whistle) that hauled kids and grownups around an oval track. It was also a rich environment for people-watching. One large, round 20-something lad, his waistband hiked up to just under his armpits, was marching around murmuring the names of the stops along the Yamanote Line into his clenched fist, perhaps living out a lifelong train conductor fantasy. No one batted an eye.

There were things of interest for people like us, too, you know, normal people. The Ajimi Team are suckers for "Showa retro" images of old Tokyo so we hung around the stands screening images of long-dead subway riders and vanished tram lines. We also loved the exhibit of Japan's historic wooden train stations, the subject of a recent NHK documentary series. We do love trains, just not in THAT way.


VS

Baby Bags!

In Japanese they're called kobukuro (コブクロ). "Little bags," or as I prefer "baby bags." They've been calling out to me for some time, but a certain squeamishness would take hold every time I had the opportunity to order them. Last night the Ajimi team was in need of a low budget celebration, so we went to our favorite moderne retro izakaya in Kichijoji, Tecchan.

Tecchan (pronounced tay-chan) is a place that can't and shouldn't be missed. North of Kichijoji station is a small honeycomb of small covered alleys called Harmonica Yokocho. Dozens of little watering holes, noodle shops, a handful of boutiques and more fill this last reminder of the black market shanty towns that sprang up around stations throughout Tokyo in the immediate post-war years.

In the heart of Harmonica Yokocho, you will find Tecchan, a medium sized yakitori-ya, with ever-billowing smoke and an ever-full bubbling cauldron of motsu (innard stew). A funky counter snakes around the theatrical serving and preparation area. Two charcoal grills seem to never be empty as busy workers fan the flames with singed red fans. The best tsukune on the west side can be found here, in addition to mune, momo, negima, lamb, buta bara, miscellaneous innards and various vegetables.

All of this and a great selection of nihonshus and shochus. This is the place where the Ajimi team's love affair with Kumesen, a favorite awamori, began.

But back the the "baby bags." For some time, I had watched enthusiastic revelers chowing down on what looked like caducei of some unidentifiable organ meat. It intrigued me. It was finally revealed that these strange little curlicue meats were none other than pig uteri. I didn't jump immediately at the chance to scarf them down. But for some reason - maybe it was the moon, maybe my looming mortality - I decided, by way of special celebration, that it was time to partake of this delicacy.

At 100 yen a stick, a true deal. And raw, to boot! Slightly gray and of trembling flesh - not me, the kobukuro - in a pool of ponzu and sprinkled liberally with chives, they beckoned. The first bite revealed a mild meatiness, with a slight tooth and good give. They were a fine accompaniment to the tall glass of amakuchi nihonshu that we were sampling. With the enthusiasm of a new discovery, I offered a taste to the more demure member of the Ajimi team. She politely passed.

Map to and pics of Tecchan are available at http://www.good24.jp/shop/f104.html

NV

Vida brevis. Esselunga!

The Ajimi Team wanted to commemorate our last night of housesitting in Kamakura (thanks again Denise and Robbie!) with a really special meal. Over several weeks we had enjoyed tasty Japanese restaurant experiences, yummy beach food, lots of good crunchy korroke, plus some marvelous meals prepared at home from local provender. We were hardly starving but we wanted to round out the dining out portion of our stay with something continental: the European continent, that is. Weeks before a friend had enthusiastically recommended a new Italian place near Hase station on the Enoden Line, started with an "I" or something, couldn't exactly remember the name. On a walk in the neighborhood the distaff member of the team stumbled across Esselunga, which fit the description. Windows overlooked a sunny garden, which was filled with culinary herbs. Yes, indeed, this was the place that our friend had recommended, and on Sunday the team settled in for a two-hour dining experience that could have occured in Rome or Florence or maybe Palermo.

Esselunga opened in spring 2009 on a sidestreet a few blocks from Hasedera. The building appears to be of fairly recent vintage but is modeled on traditional Japanese architecture: viewing the spotless wooden floor from the genkan we asked if shoes were allowed. Of course, they were, and we were escorted to a table for two overlooking the herb garden. There was just one other couple dining at 6 pm on Sunday (the room seats around 20). We settled in with the help of a friendly, unstuffy and English-speaking waiter who guided us through the selection of white wines by the glass. We selected the vermentino by Poggio di Paterno, a marvelously citrusy and slightly frizzante wine.

There were about 8 choices in each of the antipasti, primi and secondi piatti categories, chalked on a board suspended over the dining room. Choosing took some time. For starters we decided on the carpaccio of the day's fish, inada, or young yellowtail. It was served in an almost fugu-like ruffled arrangement on a large plate with fresh dill and red peppercorns, sliced leeks, lemon and a light vinaigrette accompanied by homemade foccacia and sliced baguettes. The toughest decision was the pasta course. Three varieties of homemade pasta were on offer in addition to an array of other secondi. We ordered the polenta with ragu of lamb and beef and a kind of miter-shaped ravioli (all the pasta is made on the premises) stuffed with the same ragu and topped with a sage and butter sauce. A light sangiovese accompanied the pasta course.

The pasta portions were large and delicious enough that we could have stopped there but, hey, who are we kidding? We moved on to a meat course, roasted cubes of pork paired with dry roasted potatoes. The pork was heaven, slightly fatty, flecked with rosemary and perfectly cooked. We were told that it came from a farm in Yamagata prefecture. We discovered this during a tableside chat with the chef, a young Japanese man who had studied cooking in Milano and elsewhere in Italy. The waiter, for his part, had spent some time travelling in Spain. Their combined periginations help to explain the decidely mediterranean sensibility of this place: service is relaxed yet attentive, and the dishes are perfectly executed.

We skipped the dessert course, feeling constrained by the mental calculation that the bill we were racking up was fast approaching the 12,000 yen we had with us. But we plan to go back, next time armed with (1) more cash and (2) more people so that we can savor more of what Esselunga has to offer.

VS

Hockney Days in Wadabori Koen

Somewhere in the top 5 of our personal favorite Tokyo summer phenomena (along with cicadas, butterflies, summer festivals and strawberry kaki kouri with evaporated milk) is splashing around in outdoor swimming pools. Our nearest and dearest is the public pool in Wadabori Koen, about a 10-minute bike ride from Ajimi HQ. Like most municipal pools, it opens on the first of July, about a month later than our biological thermostats tells us it should. By mid-June at the latest summer in Tokyo is literally going full steam and we find ourselves longing for a sunny pool to plunge into.

For the first few weeks each season the 50-meter pool is relatively empty for most of the day and one can spend blissful hours floating through a David Hockney world of sunlit bright blue and do actual laps without running into anyone. But as schools let out for the summer around mid-July and the heat becomes increasingly insufferable, the pool becomes a tangle of legs and floatation devices. It is then hard to advance more than a few meters without getting broadsided by a 1/2 scale inflatable killer whale. One gives up hope of doing any real swimming but surrenders to the joys of splashing around and goofing off like a 9-year-old. There's plenty of real wildlife to relate to there, as well, among the inflatable kind. Dragonflies dart along the water's surface on bright afternoons and bats emerge from the adjacent woods in the evenings. Then there are the buzzing near-corpses of doomed cicadas bobbing along in the water which we gently move to the drier pool edge as much to avoid swallowing the damn things as out of respect for their final agonies.

But my platonic ideal of a neighborhood pool is still the first one I encountered when I moved to Japan. I lived then in Urawa, Saitama prefecture, and Harayama was my local pool. The main pool was an oval course about 7 meters wide and 200 meters in circumference. In addition, there was a lap pool located within the oval and a kiddie pool with a slide. But the oval pool was the main attraction. On hot days it was packed with people walking, floating, occasionally swimming in the same direction, a great tide of humanity. In fact, the current created by this movement was so strong that it was impossible to walk against it in the opposite direction. I could spend hours in that pool, chatting with friends, watching young families float by on air mattresses, occasionally stepping out for a lunch consisting of a footlong hotdog and yakisoba. I started work around 1 pm in those days so most mornings I hit the pool and I got brown as a nut.

The Wadabori Koen pool closes this week for the season, a bit too early, of course. We could happily swim there well into October. We will hit the nearby indoor pool from time to time but it won't be the same. The mood at the indoor pool seems more geared toward the inner geriatric than the inner 9-year-old.

VS

Utopia

The arrival in the mail the other day of Bradford Peck's classic of utopian literature,The World A Department Store, got the Ajimi team seriously thinking of utopia - and why there seems to be a dearth of progressive positivist thinking toward what the future holds in store. As a bit of an exercise we challenged ourselves to think of what a 21st century utopian novel might envision and came up a bit short. Even with the huge sea-change of positive energy that hit the world with the election of Barack Obama, the hard realities of realpolitik, the legacies of the monumentally misguided misadventures of most world leaders during the last several decades and the continued intransigence and irresponsibility of anyone associated with the Republican party still makes the future appear a lot less than rosy. Dystopia seems to be the common currency.

The the crushingly damp heat and daily grayness of a Tokyo summer doesn't exactly move a mind to lofty thoughts either. One of the most memorable and enduring dystopias to catch the public imagination in recent years (1982!) is the brilliantly designed mise-en-scene of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Even though the ostensible setting of the movie is Los

Angeles, everybody knows it's based on Tokyo.

The utopias of the late 19th century and of the 1960s tended to an idea of returning to the land, creating new agrarian communities - a long-held Christian metaphor of a return to the garden. Dystopia has often been associated with cities, the hard and evil urban wilderness - manifestations of the hubris of Babylon. Biblical metaphors notwithstanding, we at Ajimi believe in the possibilities of cities. Especially great cities like Tokyo.

And there have been others who have seen the potential for utopia in Tokyo.

In 1959 a group of young architects, under the rubric of the Metabolist Movement envisioned a new architecture and way of living with a vision for the future that addressed the problems of the real world - housing, movement, social and physical function. The movement itself was fractured by the mid-70s, though many of the architects involved continued on with visionary architecture. Like similar movements in England (Archigram) and Italy (Archizoom), the Metabolists embraced the possibilities of cities with a true utopian fervor.

The future never turns out the way it's supposed to. Particularly for a utopia. But monuments to these ideas, though they may become a bit worn around the edges and ultimately crumble and fade, never lose their luster.

Case in point is Kishio Kurokawa's Nagakin Capsule Tower. Completed in 1972, Kurokawa made manifest his ideas of modular construction, architecture as evolving form and solutions for mobile transitory late 20th century human kind. It's noteworthy that the tower stands quite close to the Tsukiji Fish Market, a sprawling complex that has organically created the metaphors and ideas that Kurokawa put into his building. The building at the southern edge of Ginza is now a bit forlorn and forsaken. The tenants, tired of cramped living spaces and poor maintenance are giving up on it. Though not scheduled yet, plans are afoot to tear the structure down. Kurokawa had offered to refurbish and update the units, but passed away before any of these things could happen. In a city of largely uninspired and uninspiring architecture, this brilliant failure stands out. Its Skinner box-like cubes still look stridently modern - a vision of what utopia could be. For some it may be resolutely dystopic - controlled living in brutalist boxes - but the intent was far nobler. The realities of the world tend to subvert intent. But still, it lifts the spirits to be in presence of such a vision. It may not be long for the world. When in Tokyo, be sure to give it a visit.

東京都中央区銀座8-16-10

Map

Click here for a recent article in the New York Times on the Nakagin Tower.

NV