Two-hour limit

One of the most impenetrable concepts in Japan was the two-hour limit on restaurant reservations.  If you called a restaurant and reserved a table, you'd be warned that you had to leave after two hours.  And, sure enough, even if you were prepared to order more food, consume more booze, and fatten the restaurant's bottom line, when two hours were up, you'd be given the check and politely told that your time was up.  However, if you simply showed up without bothering to call first, there was no limit on how long you could stay.

Let me explain the absurdity a little further.  Izakayas in Japan were often open till 11:00 p.m. or later, but the mostly after-work crowd would thin out fast after 9:00 p.m., either because people wanted to move to another spot or because they had a long train ride to deepest Chiba or darkest Kanagawa and needed to get home.  There wasn't a "second seating" as there might be in a popular New York restaurant, so no one was lined up waiting for your seat after the initial rush.  You might think that, in a restaurant that was emptying out, but still open for several more hours, they'd be happy for you to continue to eat and drink, especially if you were a large group (the only time I ever bothered to make a reservation).  Not so.  If your reservation started at 7:00 pm, you were out at 9:00, period.  But, just show up with the same group at the same time without any prior warning and the staff would often be too polite to ask you to leave even if you ran right up against closing time.

I only found my way around this conundrum once.  I brought a large group of friends to an izakaya I frequented in Shibuya.  When the two hour mark rolled around, the waiter came up and told us that our reservation was up.  We looked around and found the restaurant was emptying out, with no one waiting.  We'd like to stay longer, I told the waiter.  "I'm so sorry," he responded, "but we have a two-hour limit on reservations."  "Well," I told him, "we want to keep on eating and drinking.  Can you recommend a good place nearby?"

The waiter went and consulted with the manager, who hurriedly came over and said we could stay.  Evidently the prospect of losing money to a competitor awakened the man's capitalist instincts.

Gaijin's Torment: Adjusting to Japanese Food

The day comes for every gaijin in Japan when he or she encounters food that he just can't -- or won't -- swallow. Back in the day, for many gaijin this food item was raw fish (though it's hard to believe this is still the case, when sushi is the first solid food fed to half the children in Manhattan). Though I wasn't yet a fan, I had at least conquered my fear of raw fish by the time I got to Japan, so this wasn't a problem for me.

Nor did I flinch at eating the grasshoppers caramelized in sugar that were once served to me in an izakaya the way that chips or pretzels would be in an American bar. (They were really good.) I happily ate thinly-sliced raw horse meat and was surprised to find the raw chicken sashimi to be delightful. The cod sperm-sac stew I had at a chankonabe restaurant was silky, salty, and perfect on a cold winter night. My yakitori-shop-owning gourmand of a friend, Daisuke, even took me to a famous "hormone" restaurant, where we waited for an hour for a chance to eat pig liver, intestines, uterus and other organ meats completely raw. I'd happily go back there if I ever get the chance.

But I was shocked to that mayonnaise, the French condiment that now symbolizes American cuisine the world over, shows up repeatedly, and unexpectedly, in Japanese cuisine. It coats okonomiyaki (lit. "whatever-you-like" savory hotcakes), covers takoyaki (battered octopus-chunks), and, when people feel compelled to eat some vegetables in an izakaya, serves as the dipping sauce for yasai (veggie) sticks. Mayonnaise is what you put on grilled whole squid or roasted dried squid at the ballgame. And, if a restaurant eschews carrot-ginger or shiso dressing for a green salad, mayo inevitably replaces them. I didn't even know they had mayonnaise in Japan, but when I got there, it was everywhere and on everything.

Corn, which I did not expect to see in Japan either, also appeared where I least expected it. A green salad an in izakaya consisted of a few slices of iceberg lettuce, one wedge of tomato, a sprig of parsley, mayo dressing, and a spoonful of corn kernels. One can imagine the irritation of eating a bunch of corn kernels one-by-one with chopsticks, so they often tended to be left floating around uneaten in the bottom of a bowl of watery mayonnaise. Corn kernels also showed up in the most inappropriate place of all: pizza.

In fact, not only corn defiled pizza in Japan. There was canned tuna, too. Though some Italian restaurants served good brick-oven style pizzas, the New York variety could not be had except through delivery services that charged about $30 for a pie, at a time when the going rate in New York was about $10. And a plain pie could not be had -- except after one picked off all the corn and tuna. Corn and tuna were, in fact, the baseline items for all delivery pizza in Tokyo. You could get corn and squid or tuna and spicy cod roe, or corn and tuna, but you simply could not get a plain pie delivered to your house.

Pepperoni was out of the question.

The Birth of Meishi Man

My friend Dave S. and I developed a regular habit of hitting an izakaya called Tonta once a month or so. Tonta was under the Yamanote Line tracks, halfway between Yurakucho Station and Shimbashi Station, directly behind the Imperial Hotel. It was down three steps in a half-basement and had everything a good izakaya needs -- long communal tables, advertisements from Kirin and Sapporo of buxom young Japanese women in bikinis holding pints of beer, cigarette smoke, cheap beer and sake, and decent food. I don't know whether Tonta is particularly well known, or it just happens to be known to certain cameramen in Japan, but every once in a while, I see the interior of Tonta (which is burned into my memory) on TV.

A group of two at Tonta would usually be seated across a communal table from one another, with people you did not know on either side of you. If you came with a larger group, you could get a table to yourself, but not usually with two people, unless it was a slow night. When seated alongside strangers, the etiquette is generally to pretend they don't exist. It's the only way to have some privacy when you are seated six inches from a couple of strangers. Of course, speaking in English provided a buffer for our conversations, but you never knew who could speak English, so it was best just to imagine they didn't exist anyway. (Japanese usually assumed we could not speak Japanese, so it was common, as soon as we sat down, to hear conversations about America, the speaker's inability to speak English, etc.)

One night, we were seated at a table right near the door. A large foreigner in a suit -- probably staying at the Imperial -- came to the door, looked through the window, saw us sitting there, and decided it was okay to come in. Because he was by himself and it was very crowded, the waitress seated him at the end of a table, which happened to be our table. Foreigners are generally not used to being seated with strangers, and even less used to the idea that, if you are seated with strangers, you are supposed to ignore them. The foreigner immediately started talking to the two salarymen seated on either side of him. From his accent, we could tell he was German.

The two salarymen did their best speaking English with him. His booming voice matched his large frame and we could hear everything he said. Suddenly, he asked them, "So, is this a Chinese restaurant?"

Dave and I checked our laughter. The two Japanese, probably expecting such ignorance, explained to him earnestly that this was an izakaya, a kind of Japanese bar.

After a while, Dave and I tuned out the conversation, which was following the standard Japanese-gaijin format of "Do you like Japanese sushi?" and so on, and went on drinking. Eventually, the two salarymen bid the German a good night and left to return either to the office for more work or to their homes in deepest Chiba or Kanagawa Prefecture. Dave then abruptly announced, "I'm going to get his meishi!" He went over to the German, talked for five minutes, and came back with his business card.

I didn't know it at the time, but I had just witnessed the birth of Meishi Man.

I don't know whether Dave had been reading books about networking or what, but over the coming months, he became obsessed with obtaining people's business cards. We'd be out drinking somewhere, and all of a sudden, he'd be collecting the meishi of everyone in sight. There was no rhyme or reason to his obsession. He did not seem to target people in any particular field. He just wanted cards, any cards, as though, somehow, if he collected enough of them, he would have some kind of networking breakthrough, reach some kind of meishi collecting nirvana, that would lead to a new career opportunity. I don't know what he did with all the cards. He never mentioned to me that he had later contacted a single person whose card he had collected while out drinking with me.

In the end, Dave proved a good networker, apparently networking his way into a job as the president of a Japanese subsidiary in Italy after business school. I don't know if he still collects business cards obsessively. I'm just proud to say that I knew Meishi Man when he was just a meishi boy.

Oh, Those Drunken Yakitori Nights!

Yakitori -- chicken parts on sticks -- is a salaryman standby in Japan and one of my favorite feeds. Yakitori comes in many varieties, as all parts of the chicken are used, from the white breast meat that Americans eat to the exclusion of every other part of the chicken to the knee cartilege (hiza nankotsu), one of my favorite cuts of all. Yakitori places are as varied as yakitori itself, ranging from upscale restaurants to smoky open-air joints stuck under the tracks near railway stations. The latter were my favorite.

My way of finding a good yakitori joint was to look for a really grubby place that was very crowded with salarymen. If the place was packed despite having zero ambiance, then chances were good people were there for the food.

My favorite yakitori joint, Komatsu, was this kind of place. Located in Yurakucho, the Ginza's grubby neighbor, it stood near the entrance of a short tunnel under the Yamanote Line tracks, half-way between Yurakucho and Shimbashi stations, that contained about six yakitori places. Although the tunnel seemed to be pedestrianized, it was actually a city street, and a couple of times a night a car or truck would drive right through the middle of this yakitori bazaar. Komatsu was run by a middle-aged woman, the daughter of the founder, who was occasionally helped by one or the other of her two daughters. It held perhaps 12 seats -- two long tables and a small counter near the grill -- under the sloping barrel roof of the tunnel. If you didn't get there by 6:00 p.m. or so, you couldn't get in again until late. Komatsu would be packed even when the other places nearby were empty.

Soon after starting at Look Japan, my friends David Benjamin and Junko Yoshida, who had been going there for years, introduced me to Komatsu, and Benji and I developed a custom of going there once a month or so. One evening, we swung by on the back end of the rush. The place had emptied out except for a couple of salarymen. After we had been there for an hour or so, and the salarymen, who were already drunk when we got there, had become totally shitfaced, one of them worked up the courage to talk to the foreigners, probably to try to impress his friend with either his guts or his English ability.

When middle-aged Japanese men in the 1990s approached foreigners to practice or show of their English, they usually asked one or more of the following three questions. This is how the conversation usually went:

Question 1. "Are you a student?"

Answer: "No. I am working."

Follow-up question: "Are you teaching Ingurish?"

Answer: "No."

(No follow-up.)

Question 2. "Do you like Japanese sushi?" (It was always Japanese sushi, as if there were some other kind.)

Answer: "Yes."

Follow-up question: "Really?" (This was always asked in a tone of utter disbelief, as if what divided the Japanese from the rest of the world and maintained order in the universe was that Japanese ate raw fish and no one else could even think of eating it without gagging.)

Answer: "Yes, really." (Stunned silence. No follow up.)

Question 3. "Do you like Japanese gyaru (girls)?" (The previous questions were just warm-up for this, the most important question, loaded with unexpressed resentment that so many Japanese girls had foreign boyfriends, and asked only to confirm the asker's pre-existing belief: Of course he likes Japanese girls! They're only here to steal our women! )

Answer: "Some of them, yes." (This answer seemed to be sufficient confirmation of their pre-conceived explanation for my presence and led to no follow-up.)

Here the conversation would usually end.

At Komatsu that day, one of the two men leaned over from the next table, business cards in hand, and introduced himself to us in English. He immediately launched into the Three Questions. However, he was clearly struggling with his English, which was barely understandable. I thought I would cut him a break and speak Japanese.

He ignored me and continued to ask questions in barely intelligible English, worsened by a thick accent and way too much booze.

I continued to try to make conversation in Japanese. However, in those days Japanese-speaking foreigners were rare, and many Japanese people simply refused to believe that foreigners could learn their language. Because I spoke good Japanese, people often assumed that the only explanation was some hidden Japanese ancestry and would ask if my mother was Japanese. This guy's demeanor suggested that he just did not believe that I was speaking Japanese to him. Or, perhaps was concentrating so hard on formulating questions in English that he could not understand what I was saying to him. Whatever the reason, I gave up and let him continue to struggle along.

Eventually he finished the interrogation. Apparently I answered the Three Questions appropriately, because my friend then announced that he wanted to consummate our new friendship by giving me his business card -- the ultimate sign that the relationship was expected to continue.

The business card he had already given me was still sitting in front of me on the table.

"I already have your card," I said to him in English.

"Let me give you my card," he persisted.

"Meishi ha, mou itadakimashita yo," I said, repeating myself in Japanese, thinking that perhaps he had not understood me.

"No, no, let me give you my card," came the response in English.

"No, really," I said, holding my copy of his business card in front of his face, "I already have your card."

"No, let me give you my card," he said, drunkenly thrusting a second copy of his card into my hand.

The man and his buddy stood up to leave. They shook our hands and insisted that we get together again. They then stumbled out of Komatsu, to search for more booze or to catch the train home to deepest Yokohama, Chiba, suburban Tokyo, or perhaps beyond. Needless to say, Benji and I never saw our Komatsu friends again.

Punch Perms and Umeboshi -- My First Izakaya Experience

A week or so after I arrived at Canon Fujigaoka Dormitory No. 1, Arai-san, the dormitory manager, prevailed upon my dorm mates to take me out and get to know me. They asked me if I had ever been to an izakaya, and when I asked what that was, they told me it was a "Japanese-style bar." Sounded good to me. We arranged to meet one day after work at the local izakaya, which was half-way between Fujigaoka Station and our dormitory. I knew the place they described from passing it twice a day on my walks uphill both ways to and from the station.

When I arrived, most of the other guys were already there, about six in total. Like every other izakaya I have been to since, it was noisy with the conversation of customers and the shouts of the waiters welcoming guest, thanking departing customers and conveying their orders to the cooks and beer-pullers. (I call them beer-pullers rather than bartenders because Izakaya don't have bars as we know them in the US and don't serve drinks that require bartenders. The drinks menu usually consists of beer, sake, shochu (a spirit made from either potatoes or wheat), chu-hai (shochu mixed in a highball glass with some kind of flavoring), and soft drinks.) I sat down at the table and someone gave me a small glass and poured me a beer from the shared bottle.

Our waiter was a middle-aged man with what looked like a short, neatly-trimmed Afro and much tanner skin than most Japanese. He looked like one of my sports coaches in high school, which is to say, he looked black, but he was clearly Japanese. I struggled to explain his looks to myself, and then came up with a story to make sense of them: he was part African-American, and his father had probably been a serviceman stationed at one of the U.S. military bases in Japan. I asked one of the guys whether he thought the waiter was half-black, and when he asked why, I explained my reasoning. No, he told me, the waiter's hair was curly because he had a panchi paamu ("punch perm"), a permanent wave hairstyle popular in the 1980s and early 1990s with gangsters and some members of the working class, who thought it made them look tough.

The conversation alternated between my dorm-mates peppering me with questions and talking amongst themselves about topics that quickly lost me. Whenever I did understand the conversation and attempted to contribute something, by the time I had translated my comment from English to Japanese inside my head, the conversation had moved on to another topic.

At some point in the evening, the conversation turned to what would become a familiar topic over the years, my level of knowledge and/or comfort with certain Japanese foods. They wanted to know if I ate "raw fish," sushi being considered the ultimate gross-out food for non-Japanese and the real test for how far a foreigner was willing to go in Japanese culture. I told them I did. They tried a few other foodstuffs they thought would be offputting to me, and I had eaten them all. Finally, they asked me if I had ever had an umeboshi. I did not know what an umeboshi was. They tried to explain to me what it was, and even looked it up in my Japanese-English dictionary, to find the translation "pickled plum." A picked plum did not make any more sense to me, so finally they ordered one to see if I would eat it.

The waiter brought a tiny round dish, about two inches across, with a single, reddish shriveled round object that did not look like any plum I had ever seen. They warned me that it was very sour. Good, I said, I love sour foods.

For some reason, even though they knew that I did not know what an umeboshi was, for some reason, it did not occur to them that I would not know how to eat one properly. Evidently, they are considered too sour to eat as-is, and you are meant to take a small piece with chopsticks and use it to flavor something else, like rice. I, however, seeing a grape-sized piece of what they said was a plum, picked up the umeboshi and popped it into my mouth whole. It wasn't that sour.

Everyone at the table gasped.

Thinking I had breached some kind of etiquette, I spit the umeboshi back into the dish.

Then, realizing I had now definitely committed a faux pas, I popped the umeboshi back in my mouth and ate it. Only then did they tell me that it was considered too sour to eat whole and explained how it was supposed to be consumed. They ordered another and showed me.

So, this day featured my introduction to izakaya and umeboshi (and punch perms). I became a huge fan of izakaya dining and would travel across Tokyo to go to a good one.

And I still eat umeboshi whole.