Ivan Ramen Read online

  Syosset is a large suburb about forty minutes from Manhattan. My family moved there when I was five years old. We lived off the beaten path, five miles from my elementary school. (NB: My mother recently revealed to me that we actually lived in the unincorporated village of Oyster Bay Cove, not Syosset. She insists that I get my facts straight, but after forty-nine years of telling people that I’m from Syosset, I’m sticking with it.)

  At home, my mom was an indifferent cook. Her meatloaf was okay, but most of her dishes were things like baked chicken breasts smothered in Campbell’s mushroom soup. She would have been perfectly happy to take a pill that would allow her to forego eating altogether. My dad had a few specialties—spaghetti and meatballs, paella—but in general food wasn’t at the top of my family’s priorities. We’d go out to eat in Manhattan now and then, but I was a pain-in-the-ass kid, so our excursions often ended early with some kind of incident involving me pestering my two sisters.

  In spite of my family’s culinary apathy, I developed a psychological connection with food. It wasn’t based on any refined opinion about which foods were more delicious than others, but simply an association between food and warmth and love. I had a pretty lonely upbringing, and didn’t really have any like-minded friends until high school. Somehow, the vision of sharing a meal with friends and family—the act of coming together to eat—became my picture of happiness.

  By the end of high school, I knew in my heart that I was meant to be a cook. But in 1981 nice Jewish boys continued on the path to college; they didn’t take the blue-collar road of cooking. I was a terrible student, though—a hyper, intense kid. I was kicked out of Hebrew school when I tore out the holiest prayer in the union prayer book, folded it into a paper airplane, and threw it at the teacher (with great accuracy, unfortunately). I ended up going to the only college I could get into: the University of Bridgeport, which had some kind of remedial program for delinquents like me. Six months there, followed by a year-long stint at community college, eventually landed me at the University of Colorado.

  I figured that college might be my only opportunity to live somewhere beautiful and natural, but I really chose Colorado because Boulder was one of the few schools in 1983 that offered a Japanese language program. I still had this nagging curiosity about Japanese culture, which had grown since I’d left the dishwasher job at Tsubo. I knew zero Japanese, and I don’t have any sort of natural gift with languages. I’m a learn-by-doing guy, and it would take years of living in Japan, meeting Japanese people, absorbing one phrase at a time, for me to eventually get it.

  Still, I insisted on majoring in Japanese. The course was built around classes in language, culture, literature, history, and poetry. I read a lot of Junichiro Tanizaki and Ogai Mori. We studied Meiji-era writers and then some contemporary ones, like Kenzaburo Oe. I was still a total shit student, but I really enjoyed Japanese literature—to this day I can hold my own in a discussion on the importance of the wayward monk in Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. But mostly I got help from friends like Eric Jacobsen, who would come over in the morning and do my homework in exchange for breakfast. Eric’s now a children’s-television star in Tokyo.

  Top left: Hiking in the Flatirons near Boulder, with a few Japanese expats who I hung out with in college. The guy in the blue shirt was from Osaka and fed me my first mochi cakes, heated in a toaster oven. Top right: A young me, the last time I had long hair. I cut my hair right after this picture was taken, and cried as the locks fell to the floor. Bottom left: Eric Jacobsen in Tokyo. Bottom right: Another one of my infrequent camping trips as a college student in Boulder. Note the macho mustache.

  Two weeks after graduating from Boulder, I packed up and left for Asia. On the surface, it seemed like a pretty impulsive and risky decision. Even after majoring in Japanese, I was by no means fluent. I had never been outside of the country.

  But I’m a very practical person, and I just don’t think it makes any sense to study Japanese for four years and then not immediately move to Japan. Even if my vision of modern-day Japan was a twisted, fetishized one informed by monster movies and what my dad told me about people he met at Restaurant Nippon in New York, I knew I had to go. Most people pay tens of thousands of dollars to go to school and then graduate with no ideas about what to do next. As impractical as studying Japanese might have been, at least it made the next step as clear as day. In fact, I think nearly everyone in my program went to Japan straight out of school. More than half the group headed for Osaka, but I’m a New York kid, so I decided to make my way to Tokyo. Eric had graduated the year before, and he offered to let me crash at his apartment on the outskirts of the city. My dad gave me a couple grand as a graduation present, and I was on my way.

  My first stop was Taipei, where a few of my friends from the Chinese department were already living. I figured I’d get a taste for Taiwan before heading to Japan. From the moment the plane touched down, it was chaos. I disembarked the plane in a surge of Chinese people stepping all over each other. Everywhere I walked there was some steamy nastiness going on. I went to line up for the bus and my friend said, “You don’t line up in Taipei,” as he elbowed some old lady in the head and hip-checked another guy. In the city, the air was heavy with the smell of stinky tofu and vinegared fish. Walking the streets felt like wading. Taiwan’s different now, but in 1987 it was by far the dirtiest, craziest, most aggressive place I had ever been. Granted, I’d only ever been to New York and Colorado, but that just made the culture shock all the more intense.

  All we did for three weeks was eat. We’d go to a dumpling house and order massive platters of crisp, chewy, juice-filled meat bombs. We’d drink bottle after bottle of beer and eat thirty dumplings each before rolling-stumbling out of there. In the mornings, we would buy rice cakes filled with meat and drink warm soy milk. It was in Taiwan that I came to understand something fundamental about dining. It’s something that people experience when they eat at David Chang’s bustling restaurants or somewhere like L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon and think, “God, those chefs are geniuses.” They are legitimately brilliant, and their restaurants are wonderful, but they’re building on millennia of experience. The way they’ve integrated casual dining with high technique is something that’s been happening forever in Asia.

  In Asia, eating and drinking is a seamless part of living. For a long time, dining in the West—at least in many of the restaurants where I worked or ate—has seemed almost robotic by contrast. We get our food and we look down at our plates and we eat and we don’t talk. When the plates are cleared, you look up for a second, and start speaking, but then the next course arrives, and everyone quiets down again. That’s just not how people eat in Asia. Eating is a shared experience—hands reach across tables, utensils clank against plates and bowls, people laugh and talk and share. Going out to dinner isn’t as much of an event; it’s just a natural continuation of the day, part of living well.

  I have Taipei and all its entropic mayhem to thank for confirming that there is indeed something special about eating with friends. But I didn’t really fall in love with Asia until I landed in Tokyo. It was my first visit, but as my plane touched down at Narita International, I felt that I was coming home. Where Taipei had been anarchic and confusing, Tokyo was carefully organized. Nobody pushed, everybody quietly lined up, and people cleaned the gum off the stairs and polished the banisters at the train stations. I didn’t know any of that yet, but even as I got off the plane, I could have kissed the ground in happiness.

  I got talked into purchasing a motorcycle soon after arriving in Japan. I never really loved riding it, and when it was stolen three weeks after the purchase—the only act of theft I’ve ever experienced in Japan—I stopped riding motorcycles forever.

  First Encounters

  I’d come to Japan at the peak of the country’s economic power. The Japanese were buying Rockefeller Center and famous golf courses; it was the place to be if you were young and ambitious. Of course, that didn’t rea
lly have anything to do with me. I was there because I’d majored in Japanese and I had a friend in Tokyo who’d offered to let me stay with him.

  Eric was in Kunitachi, a suburb about forty minutes west of downtown Tokyo. It’s a famous university town, pretty hip and funky, with a lot of wealthy residents. The house he lived in was a hundred years old, with sliding doors that opened onto a pretty little garden. But there was no running water, and the toilet was an indoor outhouse—essentially just a hole in the ground in the middle of the house with a septic system designed to accommodate one person, not two.

  I didn’t want to overstay my welcome, and I’ve always been a pretty serious job-hunter, so within my first month of being in Japan I’d found a position teaching English at a school that would sponsor a work visa. In the eighties, Berlitz schools were the only place for Japanese people to study English. I worked at the branch in Shibuya, one of the hipper sections of Tokyo. That meant I had a steady stream of famous students, including Nobuko Miyamoto—the star of the seminal ramen film Tampopo—and her two kids.

  In those early months, even walking into a restaurant was intimidating. With my lack of language skills, I didn’t know how to order. I ate at a lot of teishoku shops, which are basically the Japanese equivalent of American diners. Back in the eighties, teishoku were everywhere—mostly independently run, each with its own unique character, much like diners in the New York and New Jersey area. (Now they’ve mostly disappeared and been replaced by “famires”—“family restaurants” like Denny’s.) You’d get a meal of soup, some pickles, and one of ten or fifteen entrées—a piece of grilled fish or a pork-ginger sauté or some other Japanese comfort food. Like an American diner, there’s comfort in the familiarity, the ritual. There’s even a ritual to the way you eat your meal: you take a bite of fish, then a little pickle, a slurp of soup, and finally a mouthful of steaming rice. Repeat. But a big part of the appeal was the fact that it was easy for a language-challenged person like me to order. It can be really tempting to just go into the same place you went yesterday, where they have pictures of the food and you can just point at what you want.

  Most days, Eric had his own thing going on, and he didn’t have time to coddle me. His Japanese was much better than mine, so he was enjoying life at a higher level. I would hang out with him and his friends and just have no idea what the hell they were talking about. I didn’t have a girlfriend or even a group of friends I could go drinking with. But I also refused to be one of the guys that would only speak English and eat at McDonald’s. I was in Japan to speak Japanese. That sounds obvious, but all around me there were foreigners living in Japan who weren’t that interested in Japan. They had their English-teaching gig and the job paid well; they would teach English, go out with their American buds, get hammered, and pick up Japanese girls—that was their lifestyle.

  Coming to a foreign country to set up an outpost of your own culture just struck me as disrespectful. I wasn’t the sort of intense weirdo who would say, “Gomen, nihongo shika hanasenai” (“No, sorry, I only speak Japanese”) if a group of English speakers asked me to go grab a beer, but I was constantly amazed that people would come all the way to this coun- try and ignore all the amazing things around us. I met people who had been in Tokyo for seventeen years who didn’t speak any Japanese. I’d look at them and think, “Are you okay? What’s your problem? You came to live in Tokyo, but don’t understand the language, don’t like Japanese food, and don’t feel like trying to fix either situation. You’ve created a bizarre little English-speaking world in downtown Tokyo.” One guy I met had a wife who didn’t speak any English, and even their two kids didn’t speak English very well either—he couldn’t talk to his own kids! He wasn’t a bad guy, but what a tragic life.

  The travelers who have successful experiences are the people who are willing to keep pushing themselves outside of their comfort zones. That’s not news, but it’s the truth. Foreign cultures can be bewildering—people behave differently, local customs seldom make sense. It’s the same anywhere, but especially so in Japan and other parts of Asia where the culture is so deep and so different from the West. No matter how long I live in Japan, I don’t think I’ll ever completely grasp all the cultural nuances. There are times when the idiosyncracies are just too inexplicable, too hard to grasp.

  At worst, I’d act out by playing up my status as an ugly American—disobeying pedestrian rules, ignoring proper social protocols even when I recognized the cues. If I was in a situation that demanded I use formal speech (keigo) to greet someone important, I’d blurt out the equivalent of “Yo.” Another thing that Americans did was ride the train with inadequate train fare. Back in those days, they didn’t have ticket machines, just ticket takers with hole punchers that the guys would swing in their hands, making a clackety-clack sound. I’d walk past the guy and give him my ticket with insufficient money on it, and he’d shout after me, and I’d pretend that I didn’t understand him. They’d always let you go, because they figured you wouldn’t understand what they had to say anyway. (Come to think of it, that’s not really an ignored social cue, it’s just outright theft.)

  Something would always snap me back from my ugliness, though. I’d be lost and someone would put me in their car and take me home, make me dinner, and then drive me wherever I needed to go. The Japanese never failed to prove their unflagging generosity.

  Japan can be a terribly frustrating country for a Westerner to fit into. Tokyo in the 1980s was a far less cosmopolitan place than it is now. People would see a white guy like me and be amazed by the smallest achievements. They’d compliment me for the most mundane stuff, like using chopsticks. For someone who was trying to blend in, it was deflating to be singled out for such dumb shit. In America, everybody assumes you understand English, because English is what you’re supposed to understand. There’s an expectation that you should acclimate, that you should speak the language. It can manifest itself in ugly, xenophobic ways, but it also means that if you learn to act like an American, people will treat you like one.

  I’m essentially an adventurous person and I’ve always veered toward the unconventional, so I pushed myself. It was difficult to find situations that were conducive to learning, but I always challenged myself to go on day trips with Japanese speakers, or go drinking with Japanese acquaintances. Every now and then, I’d happen upon someone soldiering through the same challenges. One day I met a guy in front of a supermarket who was obviously an English speaker forcing himself to speak Japanese. We struggled through a broken conversation in Japanese—both of us refusing to resort to our native language. Our stubbornness made it ten times harder to get to know each other, but neither of us wanted to be seen as a gaijin, which translates as “outsider.” Nowadays I can call myself a gaijin in a self-effacing way, but back then it was hurtful to hear the word, to have my efforts to assimilate be dismissed. This guy and I both had the same goal; both of us wanted to find our own way in Japan on our own terms. Neither of us was seeking the easy solace of a gaijin friend.

  None of this is to say that I was a model traveler, or that I got it right off the bat. In fact, I was a total wimp. Some of my fellow teachers would spend their earnings on trips to different parts of Japan, but not me. Nine months in, as soon as I’d saved up a little money, I flew right back home to New York.

  I was homesick. This was before the Internet (no NPR, no New York Times), and international phone calls were $3 a minute. I missed my parents and my friends. I missed eating ice cream and going to the movies. Deli. New York pizza. Dim sum. Every time I came up with another $1,000 I would always fly back to New York. In retrospect, allowing myself to come back was the worst thing I could have done. While other people were saving their money to travel to Thailand or Nepal, or hitchhiking all over Japan, I would fly home and sit around in my parents’ apartment—they’d moved to the Upper West Side—and drink coffee.

  But to my credit, I always returned to Japan. The closest I ever came to staying was on one longer trip h
ome. I’d been in the States for about two and a half months, and I’d become involved with a woman who wanted me to start a life with her in America. She didn’t like Japan—she thought it was a misogynistic culture—and she tried to convince me to attend business school. Me, in a math-based graduate program! She almost succeeded, too. On a lark, I agreed to help her move across the country, and found myself with her in Maine. Then I had an epiphany. I looked up and said, “You know what? I don’t like Maine and I love Japan. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, but that’s the place I want to be.” No offense to Maine, but it took being there for me to realize how much I wanted to be somewhere else.

  Each day in Japan yielded a new experience. One afternoon a Japanese friend dragged me to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Shibuya. It was four or five blocks from where I was working, in a stinky, dilapidated strip of restaurants. The place served all sorts of dishes—grilled saba (mackerel), katsudon (egg and pork cutlet over rice), that sort of thing—and ramen. Up to this point, I’d been sampling everything the local teishokus had to offer, but hadn’t yet tried ramen. My friend sat me down and ordered us two bowls of miso ramen. That was the day I learned how to sweat.

  This pungent, fatty soup landed in front of me. Currents of hot broth circulated around the bowl as if it was still simmering over a burner. I inhaled the steam tentatively, but my friend, hunched over his own bowl, insisted that I start eating immediately. He showed me how to gather a clump of noodles with my chopsticks and slurp them loudly into my mouth, followed by a spoonful of the scalding broth. It’s hard to convey the pain of that first bite. It didn’t just burn like hot pizza on the roof of your mouth. A layer of fat hovering on top of the soup seemed to have sucked in the flames from the stove only to unleash them in my head. I felt pins and needles pricking every surface of my face. My brain screamed for me to stop eating, but I looked around at all the other diners casually spooning and sucking in the boiling liquid, and I persevered.