SAKURA AND SUSHI IN TOKYO
According to the clichés Japan is a land with a fascinating and sometimes baffling mixture of history and modernity. It is certainly a big change (some aspects pleasant, some less so) for us after South America, and we started right in the thick of things with Tokyo. Over the course of 5 nights here, we took some time to soak in the atmosphere, visit several gardens and temples in the cherry blossom season, learn about Japanese samurai attire and swords in the National Museum, view the evening skyline, attend an auction where around 100 massive tuna were sold in 5 minutes, not to mention rectifying some glaring gaps in our knowledge of sushi etiquette while attending a sushi cooking course.
Rescheduled Flight…
Unfortunately, what should have been our first day was a write-off, since our flight from Istanbul was delayed by 12 hours due to a schedule change (which had happened back in October). Apparently Turkish Airlines had told our booking agency, who completely forgot to pass the message on, and we found out only when checking in online the previous day. This meant that our flight was meant to leave at 01:00am, while we had to check out of our hotel by noon the previous day. Not fancying roughing it at the airport for that long (and the weather was too chilly and wet for further sightseeing), we managed to negotiate for Turkish Airlines to put us up at their airport hotel for the time. It was very useful in retrospect, as we were still jet-lagged from South America, and by getting sleep in the afternoon, we were able to start adjusting to Asian time (without having gotten used to European time zones), so we didn’t have any problems in Japan!
Shrines, Gardens and Sakura (Cherry Blossoms)
While we had planned our trip around arriving here in time for the cherry blossom season (sakura), obviously there is always variation from one year to another. Luckily, we timed it perfectly – and it was surreal how quickly it spread! The day we arrived there were only a few trees blossoming here and there, but there was a huge difference when we returned to the same location only three days later! There are daily forecasts (on maps similar to weather forecasts) for how the sakura is progressing as it spreads up North through the country. Interestingly, Southern Japan is only 1-2 days ahead of Tokyo in terms of the progression of sakura (or even behind in some cases), but the North, especially Hokkaido, is up to a month behind. During sakura the parks (and hotels as we found out) are absolutely packed, as hanami (cherry-blossom viewing) is a highlight for both locals and tourists!
There are hundreds of lists online where people share their inside tips about the best places and parks to see the blossoms, but here are the ones we visited:
Ueno Park – a 5-star location, with hundreds of cherry trees lining the sides of the walkways. It would be ideal for photos if it wasn’t as packed as a can of sardines (really!). Make sure you also look at the Ueno koen shrine. At weekends the park is filled with street food vendors. selling all type of Japanese food you can possible imagine.
Shinjuku Park – a moderately crowded location for viewing cherry trees around a beautiful lake and a Japanese garden.
Senso-ji koen – this shrine was built to house the golden image of Kanon, the Buddhist god of mercy, that was miraculously pulled out of the river by two fishermen. My favourite part were the two giant statues of Fujin and Raijin, the gods of wind and thunder, that protected the shrine. There are also a few cherry trees in the park outside the shrine. Due to sakura at the time of our visit there was a celebration here with live kabuki performance.
Meiji-Jingu – a beautiful shrine to the Emperor Meiji, who started the push to rapidly modernise Japan in 1868 (as well as supported sake production - which is commemorated by the picturesque sake barrels in the park). Not as many cherry trees, but there is a garden with irises which should be stunning if you visit in July. We were lucky to witness here a traditional wedding ceremony too!
Yoyogi-koen – another nice park with a fair few cherry tree spots, where blossoming started a bit earlier than elsewhere hence it got a popular destination for picnic. You can visit Shinjuku park, Meiji-Jingu and Yoyogi-koen right next to each other to make it a hat trick.
Imperial Palace gardens – this garden also has some pretty spots, but it is inundated by hordes of other sakura seekers. There were fewer people when we went on a weekday, but we couldn’t stay long as we met up with two university friends, Zoli and Geri, who happened to be finishing their visit to Japan – thanks again for the advices guys!
Sushi Cooking Course
One of the highlights of our time in Tokyo was attending a sushi course with Yuka Mazda, a local culinary celebrity who has her own cookbooks and cooking show on TV. She took eight of us would-be chefs to her home and introduced us into the meticulous intricacies of making sushi and miso soup – the course is not cheap (~70 EUR per person) but for sure we will never look at sushi the same way again!
There is absolutely no way I would have guessed that the most difficult part of sushi is preparing the rice correctly, she even teaches sushi chefs from Europe and North America who come here just to learn how to cook rice! Before we saw how she timed the rice cooking and stirring to the precise second, you could tell that all of us were thinking “but it’s just cooking rice, anyone can do that…”.
The next most difficult thing is cutting the fish the correct way (right angle and size – in order to make the most of small chunks of fish), to make sure it looks as perfect as in the restaurant. A critical pre-requisite for a good sushi chef is having cold hands (to keep the fish as fresh as possible despite touching them), so Renata thinks I’ve finally found a situation where my cold hands are actually an advantage!
The last big secret to making good sushi, is not necessarily one of skill, but of using the best ingredients. Yuka kept showing us what to look for with the wasabi, tuna or the miso – but generally the rule of thumb is to look at the price, if it’s more expensive, it’s superior quality (we’re told that this is true within Japan, if you’re abroad, all bets are off with regards to quality). Yuka told us how she always uses the highest quality ingredients and what their individual costs were (astronomical to say the least). Let’s just say that I hope one day I’ll be able to fully appreciate the difference, and not just along the lines of “This tastes a lot better than the sushi I used to have back at home!”
We learned quite a few things about sushi etiquette too and realised we’ve inadvertently made quite a few faux-pases over the years, for example:
You should never mix the wasabi in the soy sauce as it will completely spoil the wasabi flavour! Yuka told us that if you are in a fancy restaurant, the waiters will notice straight away that you are a country bumpkin and start to bring you inferior plates (cuts of fish, etc.) so as not to waste the best pieces on someone who has no appreciation for the flavour
Wasabi, by the way, is a root, and looks like a really large and thick asparagus. The paste we eat is made by grating it (on sharkskin, since a normal cheese grater isn’t small enough) and adding some spices, the exact composition of which is each chef’s personal secret.
You should only use a tiny bit of soy sauce, and it should go directly on the fish, and the fish only – if you put too much, it will drown out the fish taste and is an insult to the chef
Ginger is eaten between pieces of sushi to cleanse your taste, rather than at the same time. You might hesitate about eating ginger by itself (we did too), the secret is to get the right quality ginger – the one Yuka served us was amazingly fruity and aromatic, a pleasure to eat! Unfortunately, she also said that Japanese ginger isn’t really exported, as they want to eat it all themselves
You never put prepared sushi (or the prepared rice) in the fridge, as the rice vinegar serves to preserve the latter, while the wasabi (which you should spread finely over the fish, or between the fish and the rice) helps to preserves the former
Salmon is a far inferior ingredient compared to tuna (at least when it comes to sushi), and the Japanese barely consume any sushi with salmon – they are crazy about tuna on the other hand, the menus in the restaurants we saw had at least 6 different types of tuna sushi, with hugely varying prices of course
Tokyo by Night
After soaking in all the culinary knowledge over the course of nearly four hours, we did a bit more city sightseeing in the remainder of the day. Firstly, we visited the famous Shibuya crossing, which is one of the busiest pedestrian junctions in the world, with supposedly over 1000 people crossing at each green light during peak times. On this note, it is worth mentioning that, while very crowded (13 million people live in the city limits and a total of 38 million in the wider metropolitan area), it doesn’t feel much more so than in London – and since it is more recently built, the Tokyo underground carriages are less claustrophobic (I can’t stand up straight in the London Tube). The other unexpected thing, is that I don’t stand out particularly with regards to height amongst the locals, although I do tend to hit my head in the older doorways!
We finished the day (or night, to be more precise) with admiring the city lights from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government office’s 45th floor in the middle of the skyscraper district – it’s very thoughtful that they open their government buildings for the public for free, to view the city lights as they stretch to the endless horizon, I don’t remember anything of the sort in London!
Naturally, we couldn’t miss out on Akihabara either, the centre for electronics shopping and anime (Japanese cartoons) with huge neon billboards everywhere, so we stopped by there one evening to stock up on tax-free electronics that had worn out during the trip.
Tsukiji Fish Market
As I’m writing this post, it is 03:00am, and we’re sitting on the floor along with 118 other (obviously also crazy) tourists in neon yellow and green vests, waiting for the tuna auction at the Tsukiji Seafood Intermediate Wholesaler’s Area (otherwise known as the Tsukiji Fish Market) that will start in a mere two and a half hours... While the auction doesn’t start until 05:30, there are only 120 places available each day, and they fill up very fast – so we had to take a very expensive taxi (25 GBP for 15 minutes) to get there before 03:15 (bad luck if you arrive afterwards) as the public transportation system doesn’t run that early!
The auction is run in a huge hanger with enormous frozen tuna (and I mean enormous, easily as large as a fully grown pig) lying on the ground everywhere in 5-6 rows. After giving the authorised buyers a chance to inspect the fish (there are sample slices displayed, and the people walking around also have a big ice pick which they hack into the fish to test it somehow) the auction itself starts. Each row’s auction leader stands up on a crate and starts auctioning off the fish, while the buyers make hand signals to indicate their bids. The whole thing happens quite quietly and very quickly, so by the time you realise what’s happening, a hundred tuna have been sold in 5-10 minutes (there are other auctions going on in parallel), and people have started dragging their tuna away with their ice picks or loading them onto forklifts. Processing happens extremely quickly, when we were walking back 5 minutes later, we saw people were already sawing the frozen tuna into “smaller” chunks, just like if it were wood.
The intermediate retail section opens at 06:00am (again, only for authorised buyers), where shops and restaurants can buy the newly sawed tuna chunks. Of course, there are all kinds of seafood being bought and sold, not only tuna – in total over 2000 tonnes of it is sold each day (some of it while still alive)! Tourists are only allowed to enter this area after 09:00, once the majority of the activity has died down, and I can kind of understand why – it is a highly choreographed time-pressured environment, and forklifts carrying iced fish can’t afford to be dodging tourists. While we were tolerated, they were obviously a bit impatient with tourists hindering their work - I suppose this is part of the reason why this section of the fish market will be moving to a new location in November 2016, which won’t be accessible to the public – so if you want to see it, go visit before then!
Outside this frantic centre is the retail area, which is open to the general public from the crack of dawn (indeed, I had the feeling it was built on tourists), with their fish shops and sushi restaurants. It was also a nice experience to walk around and look at everything (I almost bumped my head into a huge dried fish hanging from the ceiling at one point!), but we were advised by Yuka from our cooking course that it is a bit overpriced and the sushi can be better elsewhere. This area will stay here even after the wholesale market moves to its new location later in the year. Overall it was a very surreal experience, and we don’t regret having gone for a second, although we did go back home for a nap once we were done here!
National Museum
Our last stop in Tokyo was the National Museum, which introduces the visitor to a whistle-stop tour of Japanese art through the centuries. It was an interesting educational experience, but my favourite parts were the samurai armor and sword exhibitions. Sadly, I don’t have a picture of the samurai armour with fluffy rabbit ears (yes, really!), but that was the highlight of the show! The woodprint and lacquerware sections are well worth a visit too, although I’m afraid the subtleties of the various techniques might have been lost on me… Unfortunately, the woodprint of the Wave of Kanagawa wasn’t on display at the time, nor did they have a copy to buy in the museum store, so I had to buy a t-shirt with it!
Differences in Japan
There were quite a few things we were looking forward to in Japan. Besides the delicious food and the beautiful gardens, there were a few things that seem basic in a developed country, but were sorely missed after South America, such as being free to drink water from the tap and having an orderly transportation system!
Naturally, there were a couple things that surprised us after we got here. No matter how much you know intellectually that Japan is expensive, after 2.5 months in South America, it is inevitably going to be a shock. I would say that overall it’s a bit more expensive than London, but back home you have proper facilities to cook for yourself and don’t have to eat out all the time. Restaurants (except street food) and groceries are much more expensive (I never thought I’d ever pay over 1 GBP for the cheapest piece of apple in a budget supermarket!).
The cost of accommodation is a shocker too. A private room with a shared bathroom in a cheap hostel is easily over 60 GBP (more in Tokyo or Kyoto), and rooms are beyond tiny (dorms start at 20 GBP / person too). Through lots of research and by staying in the cheapest part of the city, we were usually able to bring this down to 40 GBP (but there are no deals to be had in the countryside, e.g. if you go hiking), but any room outside of Japan will seem like a mansion in the future – when we put our bags on the floor as opposed to the bed (packed, as there was no space to unpack), there was literally no space to open the door! On the plus side, the accommodation was (almost) always spotlessly clean and well-equipped.
Another big change is that we needed to start planning ahead for our trip. In South America we could easily rock up somewhere and check for ourselves what kind of accommodation is available and pick one of them (or alternatively, when we decided we’d spent enough time in City A and would like to go to City B, we booked the bus ticket and accommodation for the next day. Unfortunately it doesn’t really work like this in Japan, particularly during the sakura high season in Tokyo, Mt. Fuji, Kyoto and Osaka, nor for the shinkansen bullet trains. When at the start of our time in Tokyo we realised we wanted to extend our stay by one day compared to what we had planned, it was a real challenge to find space – we stopped by 10 different budget hostels (some with over 100 rooms, thankfully they were all near where we were staying) before we found one that had availability due to a recent cancellation! Luckily, we could use the nights of the 4 days we spent in Tokyo to research and plan our itinerary for the remainder of the time, but I feel a bit sorry to have lost the flexibility we had in South America!
While on the topic on planning ahead, we also made a pit-stop at the Vietnamese embassy to procure our visas (it will be the country we visit after China). I must say, it was a shockingly smooth process, we only had to wait 10 minutes after filling out our forms (and paying of course) before getting our visa – we thought we would have to come pack 2-3 days later! While it is still an exercise to fleece tourists, at least it is a well-oiled machine to rid them of their money as opposed to a horribly inconvenient one (unlike the Chinese visa, for which you need to submit a detailed itinerary with round trip tickets. Now we need a few days’ breathe before we can even think of starting to plan China, however, this has to be completed by the last stage of our tour in Japan, Osaka, where we will apply for the Chinese visa too.