On Friday, our last full day in Japan, my friend Kristin Yamaguchi invited us to meet her and her three kids on [Odaiba](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odaiba), an artificial island in Tokyo Bay.

There are a couple of ways to get to Odaiba. We were hoping to take a boat down the Sumida River. Specifically, this boat, the _Himiko,_ designed by a famous manga artist:

I didn’t take this picture, because we didn’t take this boat. The forecast called for high winds, and the boat trips were canceled. We were bummed. But we perked up on the Yurikamome Line train, the other way to get to Odaiba. This is one of the newer trains, and it’s elevated. While transferring to it, we followed a huge crowd of people who, we figured, must be heading the same way we were. We ended up at a security turnstile in the lobby of a bank building. They were heading to work. The guards pointed us in the right direction.

The Yurikamome line goes across the Rainbow Bridge, which is spectacularly lit at night but just your basic suspension bridge during the day. (Its awesomeness is further limited by the fact that if you Google for “Rainbow Bridge” you will find many copies of a poem about how you will be reunited with your dead pet in the afterlife.)

Right about the time we disembarked and met up with Kristin and her son and two daughters, the windstorm hit. Odaiba is known for being the windiest place in Tokyo, and this was one of the windiest days of the year. For a few moments, it was so windy we couldn’t stand up. I was pretty sure we were going to die. Iris thought this was completely awesome. We took cover inside Starbucks, where Iris and the kids went to work building elaborate spitball guns while I drank my favorite Japanese Starbucks beverage, the [Hojicha Latte](http://everyonestea.blogspot.com/2010/04/hojicha-latte-at-starbucks.html).

Kristin is from the midwest, and her husband is Japanese. Her kids are totally delightful. Iris made friends with Julia, the middle daughter, immediately. They went inside a haunted house, the kind where people in costumes jump out at you, and retreated the same way they’d gone it, clutching each other in terror. Now it was my turn to laugh.

Kristin had asked what we’d like for lunch. “I asked Iris about lunch and she said gyoza, which sounds good to me too if it’s not too boring for you,” I wrote.

“My children all just cheered!” she wrote back. “There is plenty of gyoza to choose from in the Little Hong Kong area that takes up two floors of one of the shopping areas.”

This was exactly as cool as it sounds. We perused a bunch of plastic food and decided on a place specializing in gyoza crowded onto a round, sizzling platter. The dumplings stick together, and you have to tease them apart with your chopsticks. Iris announced that she was going to eat thirty dumplings. She didn’t, but she ate a bunch. I ordered dandan noodles, which were terrific and spicier than I expected (“spicy” in Japan generally translates as “not spicy”).

Then Iris, Kristin, and the girls went on this ferris wheel:

Hide, age 8, and I did not. If you’re keeping score, that means Iris is ahead in the scare contest, two to one. Although I guess I didn’t go inside the haunted house, so maybe it’s three to nothing.

Then we went to this absurd Vegas-style shopping mall called Venus Fort:

By the time we headed back to the Shigetsu, Iris wanted to be adopted into the Yamaguchi family.

People often ask me about my favorite food, and I have a favorite evasive, wordy, and unsatisfying answer, which goes like this:

_Any kind of spicy noodles with vegetables and meat._

That’s actually an oversimplification. I specifically mean dry noodle dishes, not noodle soups, and they don’t have to be spicy at serving time, because I maintain an arsenal of spicy condiments. Oh, and one of my all-time favorites doesn’t actually include vegetables, unless you consider bean sprouts a vegetable.

I was thinking about this tonight as I was cooking up some yakisoba. I’d already decided to make it for dinner, and I Googled for a recipe. The first hit I got was Tara Austen Weaver’s [great post](http://teaandcookies.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-make-yakisoba-recipe.html) on the subject, complete with recipe:

> Customers entered and sat around a large communal table that was covered with a metal grill surface. The ingredients for each order were put on the grill and cooked before the customer, then pushed to where they were sitting so they could eat. I’m not sure if this early experience sealed the deal, but to this day I love yakisoba.

Me too, despite my lack of formative experiences with the stuff. Yakisoba is fast food: precooked noodles, a few common vegetables, whatever meat is on hand. The spicy, if you want any, comes from [shichimi togarashi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shichimi_togarashi). I ate my yakisoba, read the latest Everyday Food (“Have you tried: corn tortillas?” Yes. Yes I have), and started thinking about what yakisoba is. (Reading Everyday Food always puts me in a philosophical mood, what with all of Martha’s obscure biblical references and Socratic dialogues and stuff.)

You can classify yakisoba as a [Japanese noodle dish](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_noodles), of course. Two excellent Japanese noodle books were published last year: [Takashi’s Noodles](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1580089658/?tag=mamstesgrubshack) and [Noodle Comfort](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1934287571/?tag=mamstesgrubshack), and it was while reading the latter book this morning that I got yakisoba lodged in my brain.

But another way of looking at yakisoba is as a member of a family of stir-fried and otherwise non-soupy noodle dishes that cuts across Asia. It includes (among many others; these are just the ones I’m most familiar with):

* [Yaki udon](http://www.culinate.com/search/q,vt=top,q=yaki+udon/190643) (Japan)
* [Japchae](http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/pacificnw/2008680298_pacificptaste01.html) (Korea)
* [Ants on a tree](http://www.culinate.com/content/books/collections/3199/hungry_monkey/ants_on_a_tree) (China)
* [Pad thai](http://www.culinate.com/search/q,vt=top,q=pad+thai/74307) (Thailand)
* Other Thai noodle dishes like _khanom jeen,_ _pad kee mao,_ and _pad si ew._
* [Pancit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancit) (Philippines)

and, of course, chow mein, some form of which is presumably the ancestor of all fried noodles. I say this not because I have any historical evidence–it’s just that any food I like always seems to come from China if you go back far enough. It’s almost like the human race came from Africa but food came from China.

What fried noodle dishes have I forgotten? If there were a fried noodle cookbook, am I the only one who would curl up with it night after night?

Iris and I stayed at a popular Asakusa tourist hotel called Ryokan Shigetsu. Everyone seems to have heard of the place, and with good reason: they took very, very good care of us.

By the time we arrived at the Shigetsu, it was about 3am Seattle time and each of us was shocked that the other was still awake. We snuggled into our futons and went right to sleep…and woke up at 5am, just like everyone warned us we would. So we read our books ([Neuromancer](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0441012035/?tag=mamstesgrubshack) and [The Pirates’ Mixed-up Voyage](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0140371281/?tag=mamstesgrubshack), respectively) until breakfast.

The Shigetsu is a little six-story hotel in the middle of Asakusa. We chose Asakusa because we’d heard it was a classic, old-school Tokyo neighborhood, which it was. Every time we went out, we walked past a new interesting window to peek in, which is not an experience unique to Asakusa, but it made going out that much more fun. We saw an old man hand-cutting soba noodles in the window of a restaurant, and a knife shop with a sharpening stone in the window that I happen to have at home. (Iris and I were, for some reason, unreasonably proud of this.) We saw people making red bean cakes using a device very similar to a sandwich press my parents had when I was a kid, used for cooking sandwiches over a campfire. The red bean cakes smelled fabulous, and we stopped to buy some on the way to dinner one night. They tasted like cake with beans in the middle. Red bean paste is a Japanese taste I haven’t acquired yet.

One nice thing about Asakusa is that the blocks are very, very short. What looks like a long walk on the map is probably a short walk. Just east of the Shigetsu is Nakamise-dori, the tourist shopping street:

That’s Nakamise-dori one morning before most of the shops opened. (We were waking up before 6am for a few days before we got onto Japan time.) It’s mostly junky souvenirs, but there are many makers of _senbei,_ rice crackers, which are exactly like the soy sauce-flavored rice crackers you get in an assortment at the supermarket, but much fresher; the most popular kind is larger than a silver dollar and must be eaten in several hearty bites. These are addictive. Iris, of course, loved Nakamise-dori, and she took her spending money and promptly bought three different stuffed cats. Mission accomplished.

Now, back to the Shigetsu. Iris and I are still reminiscing about how comfortable the futons were. We slept fabulously, and not just because we wore ourselves out on a daily basis. The room was absolutely tiny. A real estate ad would have called it “cozy.”

In the corridor on the way to the elevator was a tiny plant that the staff changed daily. And on the sixth floor was the hot bath.

Public baths are Japanese tradition, and if the public bath is a big wooden bathtub on the top floor of a small hotel, that’s good enough. Or better. Every night, we put on our yukatas:

and went up to the hot bath, which was almost always deserted. (I took Iris into the men’s bath with me; next time she’ll be old enough to go to the women’s bath alone, so I’m glad we went when we did.) The bath was very hot, and it had a view of the temple spire and some nearby skyscrapers. When we got into the tub, water spilled over the edge and seeped through the floorboards, something I’m always warning Iris not to do at home but which is totally expected in a Japanese bath.

On [the day we got lost in Uji](https://www.rootsandgrubs.com/2010/05/03/udon-with-the-fox-goddess/) and got back to Tokyo late and hungry, we got to the Shigetsu and Iris said, “I’m so glad we’re home.” It’s that kind of place.

**Next:** A day on Odaiba. Oh, and I wrote about [chicken tail](http://www.culinate.com/columns/bacon/yakitori_grilling_meat_on_a_stick) on Culinate.

One thing I wondered about Japan was whether we would get tired of Japanese food. This sort of thing has happened to me before–I’ve had pizza in Bangkok and pancakes in Paris–and I don’t see any shame in it. Here’s what happened in Tokyo.

On our third or fourth day in Japan, while we were walking back to our hotel, I said to Iris, “You know, if you’d like to have Western food for dinner one night, that’s fine with me.”

“Then I’d like to have Western food tonight,” said Iris.

“Okay, sure,” I said. “What are you thinking? Burgers? Pizza?”

“Hmm…Chinese dumplings.”

“Uh, okay. I bet we could ask the front desk to recommend a gyoza place in the neighborhood.”

“Great. Hey, _that_ looks good.” It was a display of plastic tempura shrimp at a place right next to our hotel. “Let’s have that tonight.”

“Works for me.” When we came down for dinner, the place was closed. But they’d left a map on the door, pointing around the corner. We followed it to an old two-story house. _”Tempura ga arimasu ka?”_ I asked tentatively. “Hai!” We left our shoes at the bottom of a ladder-like staircase that would have made an American building inspector laugh hysterically. We ascended to a tatami room, sat on the floor, and ordered off a picture menu.

Iris ordered four enormous tempura shrimp with rice; I had the combo, which consisted of three items on rice: (1) a small whole fish, (2) a shrimp, (3) and a bunch of random vegetables and seafood formed into a patty, battered, and fried. We also had tea and pickles. I didn’t get a picture of any of this, so just imagine shrimp bigger than your face.

I don’t know if this was coincidence or a known fact, but every time we ate in an upstairs tatami room, the waitstaff consisted of elderly women with the demeanor of gruff diner waitresses. This was not at all unpleasant. I especially enjoyed my fried kisu fish (a small whiting). Iris ate two of her shrimp and ate the batter off the other two, presenting me with two naked shrimp. The total price was about $40.

Later, after we survived the trip downstairs, I looked up the restaurant and found that we’d eaten at [Daikokuya](http://www.tempura.co.jp/english/index.html), which has been serving giant shrimp in that location since 1887.

You can watch a short video about the restaurant [here](http://www.japan-in-motion.com/jim/item/mov_195/).

Outside of breakfast, the subject of Western food never came up again.

I have a lot more to tell you about Japan and will do so as soon as I have time. Right now I’m neck-deep in an article about how to buy insurance on your grilled chicken, or something.

-Matthew