Sapporo

I just got back from a two-day workshop up in Northern Japan. It was held at Hokkaido University in the city of Sapporo (yes, where they make the beer of the same name). After a frantic hour of not being able to find the right building (why I thought that I could just show up and ask information at the front gate is beyond me. lesson learned), I slid in the room 40 minutes late, sweating and panting. My talk was 15 minutes after that. Let's just say it wasn't my calmest most succinct talk ever, but the Q&A went well, and getting the talk over early meant I had the rest of the workshop to relax. That night we all went to a local restaurant for a reception dinner. It started with a big lacquered boat with several sushi including the deepest purplish red tuna I have ever seen. Then came a huge pile (Hokkaido-style they said) of cabbage and seasoned raw beef that cooked down on pans at the table.

This was followed by a big pot of soup with chicken wings, crab legs, mushrooms and clams.

...and of course beer, plenty of beer.
And at the end came the Hokkaido version of onigiri with an extra long seaweed sheet so that you could grab it like a taco. That large dollop of fish eggs was daunting so I had the brown kind in the front. I think it was a kind of seaweed. 'twas salty, but not overwhelmingly so.

What I really couldn't believe was how much it all reminded me of the northeast. Here is a row of ginkos on the University of Hokkaido ("Hokodai") campus.

This white building, for instance, is like every building on the Dartmouth campus. Definitely not what I expected here.

A stream ran through the center of campus. It was all really beautiful and tranquil. I met lots of good contacts and had some fun geeky conversations with a couple of folks from Nagoya who also do experiments on ice.

Unfortunately it was a very short trip. Before I caught my plane back on the second night, I grabbed some dinner. I lost track of the other folks in the conference so I was on my own. Hokkaido is known for its really fresh seafood, so I set out to look for a good restaurant. A couple of small cool looking places didn't seem keen on having someone who spoke zero japanese, so I decided to just look for the most touristy place I could find.

Voila! I guess when all else fails, look for the place with the giant mechanical crab out front. Yes, this place did just fine. I got a big quiet room all to myself and great service and really really yummy tempura fried king crab legs (below). So then it was just off to catch my flight and what ended up being the very last train to our neighborhood.

Birthday Kaiseki

For my birthday, Ryan treated me to a fancy Kaiseki, or Japanese tasting menu, at Kozue.

We donned our best duds and headed out to Shinjuku to the restaurant on one of the top floors of the Park Hyatt (of Lost in Translation infamy).

Here is the top half of our menu. Every item was prepared by a different cooking method and each came in a uniquely crafted dish. Here is seared Bonito I believe.

And here is simmered surf clam with some cooked sea urchin and dried seaweed. These first two appetizers were amazing.

The soup course came in beautiful earthenware pots nestled in wooden baskets. We were told that a small quantity of soup should be poured into the tiny bowl with a good squeeze of the lime and sipped first. Then we could open the lid and fish out all the larger chunks with chopsticks.

Sashimi included toro, ebi, mounds of fresh seaweed and the surprise treat was that they were out of turbot and instead served us blowfish, a very special delicacy, wrapped around thinly- sliced scallions.

Then came assorted delicacies (two of each) in a ceramic basket, covered with a large lotus leaf.

All were autumn-themed and included a variety of tastes and textures. There was firm, gooey, gummy (the reddish brown cube), crunchy (fried bit), slimy (in the little bowl), mushy (chestnut flavored thing), dopey and sneezy.

Okay - halfway there. Let's have some more sake and look around the room. Ooh nice art and an amazing view beyond that wall of windows. Sometime after the sashimi they actually moved us to a more intimate window seat. Thus the pictures get a little darker.

Here is the second half of the menu. Deep-fried flounder and a little bowl of crispy, salty bones with lime.

Simmered beef and mushrooms (above) and a very methodically-prepared rice course (below) with a big wooden squisher and several rice specific tools I have never seen.

And I think for dessert they must have gone off menu and instead brought us one with creme anglaise and green tea sauce with a chestnut. Very yummy and not overly sweet. Even with dessert the focus was on subtle flavors.

Overall a really amazing meal and incredible service. I didn't get any pictures of them, but we were served by two women in beautiful kimonos. As we got in the elevator one server even gave us the deepest bow I have ever seen. As usual we were the very last ones to leave.

Trick or Treat

Halloween really isn't celebrated here, but it does have a tiny presence, mainly in stores:

I recently bought a thermos from starbucks and the gal ran out to show me the options, which included holiday-themed ones. She was having so much fun giggling and saying "Trick or Treat", I almost felt bad for getting the plain white one.
Much more common are the general autumn-themed decorations. Here is the menu window at my university cafeteria. The brown baby porcupines are apparently chestnuts (I had no idea they looked like that) which they call marrons, after the french. Lots of marron-flavored desserts this time of year.

I have been on the lookout for Halloween decorations on people's homes. There are only a few discreet decorations here and there, mostly on houses where some children live.

But I have been told that kids do not dress up and actually go trick or treating here. I think they do learn the term when they are in elementary school during English class. I guess the teacher keeps a bag of candy and has them come up one at a time and say the phrase to collect a treat.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to see a table full of japanese undergrads in costumes at the cafeteria on Friday. There were several cats, maybe sort of a zombie, and the character from a Nightmare Before Christmas. And then last night while we were coming home from dinner we saw these two Care Bears waiting for the train. Halloween in Tokyo.

SUMO!

Ryan and I went to Sumo with our friends Michael and Momoe. What an experience! I really didn't think I would enjoy it, but I was enthralled. All the action goes down on the little mound of dirt down in the middle, underneath the strangely hovering roof. This low mag picture is not good but you can get the sense of where we were sitting and how big the stadium is. This is early on in the day, so many of the box seats are still empty. Although ours were regular, movie-style seats, the ones down on the main floor were cushions on tatami mats.

Here two wrestlers (one from the East team and one from the West team) are squaring off. They go through a whole host of poses and ceremonial flair before the wrestling actually begins. Once it starts, the goal is to somehow get the other guy to fall on the ground (first) or step outside of the circle.

Occasionally something very exciting would happen: two wrestlers would both fall out at the same time and roll down the hill into the cameramen. If it was unclear who actually fell first, all of the judges (below in black jackets) would confer.

The matches are arranged so that the newbies or lower ranked fighters go earlier in the day. At about 4 pm, they transition into the top ranked fighters, who will fight in increasing order of rank, with the top two ranked fighters (right now there are two of the highest possible rank, yokozuna) going last. Before they start their matches, all of the top wrestlers first parade through the stadium and onto the ring in their formal outfits.

And now a word from our sponsors...

Here are two wrestlers doing the classic leg stomp, which is supposed to symbolize that they are stomping out evil spirits. Before the match each fighter also throws salt onto the floor of the ring, which I think also is supposed to have some cleansing symbolism. In this picture, the fellas holding the banners represent companies who have given donations. Part of the money goes into an envelope and the winner of this match will win a small pile of envelopes at the end. As the matches get more heated and the rankings higher, the piles get larger and larger.

Food stuffs are available at the stadium. Here Ryan enjoys a Bento box lunch. That is a sour plum in the middle of his rice. It is supposed to resemble the Japanese flag.

Below is the final match of the day. The guy with his arms out is one of the two top ranked fighters, Asashyoryu. He and the other yokozuna, Hakuho, are both Mongolian. The day after we were there- the last of the tournament- they faced each other. Hakuho won the bout resulting in a tied (14-1) record for both fighters. So, a run-off immediately followed with Asashyoryu winning and taking the tournament.

Here is a link to the final match of the last day - a great fight. Anytime a yokozuna is beat (and one of the two is here) people throw their cushions at the ring.

For how great Asashyoryu is at putting on a show and posturing, see the pre-face-off around 4:10-4:40 here.

The Dohyo-iri 'dance' that yokozuna do before the top tier of fighters start, here.

7/10

This week I got an email from my former boss/mentor at the U.S. Geological Survey saying that he was on his way to Tokyo for a few days. Steve was planning to stay a few days before he headed further east to do some teaching. He has been to Tokyo so many times that he knows his way around far better than I do. He was staying at his usual hotel and, the first night, he invited me along to his favorite bar/restaurant Sumire, which I guess he frequents every time he is in town. As soon as he stuck his head in, the owner and many of the customers all welcomed him by name and the owner pulled down the bottle with his name on it that she had been storing. Just out of coincidence, another one of the regulars Ed (or Edo-san as they called him) had 3 visiting astronomers in town. Us plus them plus one of the locals meant that 7 out of the 10 chairs in the restaurant were filled with gaijin. This is very unusual indeed for this tiny, family-owned restaurant located off a narrow alley, so the owner and even some of the other patrons started snapping some photos.

During the weekend, Ryan and I went with Steve to the Edo-Tokyo Museum housed in this huge building (apparently it was designed to be the same height as the old Edo Castle).

In addition to the special exhibit on wood block prints, which were fascinating, the permanent collection of the Edo museum consisted of a bunch of artifacts and recreations from the Edo period of Japanese history. This is the post-samurai era during which life changed from small farm-based villages to the city (named Edo) built within the walls of a castle. Edo later became known as Tokyo.

So the museum shows the different walks of life that dwelled within the castle-city, including merchant stores and life-sized mockups of craftsmen making their wares. Lots of tiny models of city floor plans complete with binoculars so that you can really get all the details. The homes even had tatami mats the size of sticks of gum.

Speaking of tatami mats, one of the exhibits gave you the opportunity to take your shoes off and walk through a traditional Japanese style room. Funny, it looks extremely similar to another room I know (our bedroom).