And So It Goes

Winter sunset over Tokyo

Burgers in Tokyo

I've always liked cheeseburgers, and even here in Japan I occasionally indulge -- and by that I don't mean McDonald's. There are a couple of places I generally go for real burgers, and I usually don't get much out of that particular rut. But lately I've had burgers on the brain for a couple of reasons.

Hamburgers, as you might expect in Japan, is about as exotic as sushi is in the United States -- bearing in mind that these days you can find sushi at the Wal-Mart in Plano, Texas. That means that while not as common as burger joints are in the United States, nonetheless there are very many around.

While browsing through the brochures at the tourist information center at Tokyo City Hall, a surprising discover a brochure from the city of Sasebo near Nagasaki, billing itself as a "Burger Map of Sasebo".  Yes, it was a map in the burger joints of this port city.

My next burger encounter was a publication I saw on sale at Tower Books in Shibuya last weekend, called the best burger book This publication is a guide to the burgers of Japan from Hokkaido in northern Japan all the way down to the island of Okinawa, organized by region. It has such things as profiles of owners of hamburger joints and the person who perhaps introduced hamburgers in Japan, at a sandwich shop up north in Sendai. There's also an introduction including the history of the hamburger (there's a photo of Louis' Lunch in New Haven, Connecticut) and the four top hamburger joints of Los Angeles (which I'm assuming they considered the center of hamburger culture in America.  Yes, In-and-Out Burger is tops on that list).

I was most interested, of course, in their listings for the Tokyo area: 35 or so different restaurants, each with an entry, a specialty burger, and location. Lots of pictures, which is helpful for me since my Japanese-language abilities are so rotten and the book is entirely in Japanese.

Naturally, I wanted to know where the burger places were, and while I could puzzle out the addresses with the aid of a map, I thought I would use technology instead: as you can see, I entered all the aforementioned Tokyo entries into Google maps and have created a "burgers in Tokyo" map. This was originally intended for my own use, but what the hey, I might as well share.

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The burger-and-soda icons mean a standard burger joint, the martini-glass icon means a bar, and the bed icon means a fancy hotel restaurant. Don't blame me, those were the categories the book used. Some highlights include:

• 7025 Franklin Avenue, a place in Shinagawa which was Liz's favorite (or, since Liz is Canadian, favourite). I'm not entirely certain what the source of the name is, though my browsing through Google maps convinces me it's connected to that address in Los Angeles, which is the location of the Magic Castle Hotel in Hollywood.
• Seasons Bistro, attached to the Four Seasons Hotel. Yes, it's marked by one of those little red beds: other hotels with restaurants attached include the Peninsula Hotel, the Westin Tokyo Hotel, and the Hotel New Otani. As you might expect, the burgers are priced accordingly, with the Seasons Bistro offer being a truffle burger at ¥3150 (about $32 or so).

I've only just started, and I've only eaten at a few of the places on this map, so the entries are still a bit sketchy. But over the next several months (diet willing) I hope to eat at most of the places on this map (except the hotel restaurants, of course) and I'll flesh out the entries as I do.

Shopping in Shibuya

While walking up the street in Shibuya this evening this evening, I came across a store with an intriguing name: Three Minutes Happiness, so of course I wandered in. Near as I can tell, it seems to be owned by the fashion chain Comme des Garçons. The first floor had very low-priced fashion accessories (scarves, barrettes, makeup, etc) so it wasn't particularly interesting, but the second floor got my attention -- dry goods, like a version of Crate & Barrel, with spare-looking and pastel-shaded dinnerware, kitchenware, and housewares, at very low prices. Very nice looking, and I wound up buying some basic chopsticks, wooden chopsticks rests (¥105 each) and little square dishes that match some square plates I had from IKEA (¥150 each), and air fresheners in tins like cat-food cans (vanilla, ¥105 each). Nice, uncluttered designs, so I may go back to supplement my existing Muji fetish.

I also dropped in to the Tower Records bookshop nearby -- a big English-language book and magazine source in search -- unsuccessful -- of a newspaper (the International Herald Tribune, that is). While there, I browsed and looked over their offerings including their many displays. Like all Tower Records stores, they had displays set up highlighting whatever artists or themes take the fancy of the store people -- in this particular store I’ve seen displays set up for particular authors, Beat literature, Charles Bukowski, and other such topics. One particular display today, however, caught my eye, for Chipp Kidd. 

Chip Kidd is not a book writer -- at least not primarily one. What he is is a book designer, known for revolutionizing book cover design starting in the 1980s or so (he actually has written a couple of novels, as well as putting together some collections of comic-related items, including collections of Batman and Peanuts material). The books in this display included not only the material he produced, but merely those books that he had designed.

This is not a completely out-of-the-blue idea or obscure, as the first I'd heard of the guy was here, through two exhibitions devoted to his work over the last few years. Both were at a graphics gallery in the Ginza, with one featuring just his book design work, while the other being devoted to his newly published book collecting the art of Charles Schulz. I actually have a copy of the latter book on my shelf.

 

Tokyo Orchid Show, YouTube version

Orchids at the Japan Grand Prix International Orchid Festival in Tokyo on Saturday and Sunday at (of all places) the Tokyo Dome. Which is an indoor baseball stadium. Low-def YouTube version.

Tokyo Orchid Show, Vimeo version

Some of the orchids seen at the Japan Grand Prix International Orchid Festival in Tokyo. High-definition video, I hope.
Tokyo Orchid Show from Calton Bolick on Vimeo.

Snowy Light Show at Tokyo Midtown, YouTube version

The low-def, YouTube version of the light show video:

Snowy Light Show at Tokyo Midtown, Vimeo version

A big snowfall hit Tokyo on Sunday, and I took my video camera to see the effect of snow on the landscape. What I got was an eerily beautiful lightshow at the park behind the Tokyo Midtown development in Roppongi... This is the letterboxed, Quicktime version, supposedly in HD. We'll see.

Snowy Evening at Tokyo Midtown - QT version from Calton Bolick on Vimeo.

A bit of Hollywood shows up in Tokyo

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the trailer for an upcoming movie called Jumper, a science-fiction thriller starring Hayden Christensen (you can see it here, at Apple's trailer page). One bit caught my eye, in the scene (45 seconds in) where the main character is standing in front of an auto showroom; namely, the dealership name, Yanase, which is the name of a big luxury-car import business here in Tokyo. (That's a screenshot, to the right.)

"Huh, someone did their research," I thought, assuming (given how relatively generic that sort of setting is), it had been filmed in Los Angeles or Toronto using some random storefront with the "Yanase" sign attached. Nice touch in putting a Japanese taxi on the edge of the scene, I thought.

Last night, I was walking through the Ginza, having left someone's sayonara party¹ and having walked with several participants as far as the karaoke place that they were bound for afterwards. Since there's not enough alcohol in Tokyo to get me to sing karaoke, I left them there and cut through the back streets on the way to Shimbashi station. Which is where I ran into this strangely familiar building:

Yes, it's the same building. Which means some Hollywood film crew came all the way out to Tokyo to set up and film (what I assume) is a short scene that -- practically speaking -- could be faked relatively easily (assuming the art director was a stickler for details) in downtown LA or Toronto. ²

Man, that's going the extra mile for authenticity.

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¹ At a nice Italian place near Yurakucho station called "Scorpion Stazione". Next to the big Muji store and highly recommended.

² I mention Toronto because it's a very common location for film producers looking to save a few bucks over filming in Hollywood, though I don't know how the weak U.S. dollar is affecting that business.

Tokuzo Mitsuda

While browsing through Wikipedia today (hey, everyone needs a hobby), I came across the oddest reference in their short item about a British steamship called the S.S. Sauternes, a freighter built in 1922 which sank in a storm off the Faroe Islands on December 7, 1941. Whoever wrote the item saw fit to list the names of every one of the 25 crew and passengers who died in the disaster.

It wasn't the excessive detail which really caught my eye, however, it was one of the names: in the midst of names like "Captain George Albert Perris", "Robert Brown Palmer", and "Donald Fraser"  was the name Tokuzo Mitsuda.

Tokuzo Mitsuda? What the hell was a Japanese man doing on a British Merchant Navy ship in the North Atlantic in 1941?

A little digging turned up very little, once I had plowed through all of the various websites that reuse Wikipedia content (and therefore simply reprint the Wikipedia article). I did find out a little something, courtesy of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which tracks memorials and cemeteries of UK and Commonwealth war dead. According to their entry for Tokuzo Mitsuda, he was a member of the crew of the Sauternes, a 57-year-old Fireman and Trimmer (meaning he worked down in the ship's engine room). Because he was lost at sea, there is no grave: rather, he has a spot on a memorial panel at the Tower Hill Memorial in London, near the Tower of London.

Which, of course makes it a bigger mystery: how did a Japanese man, born in 1884 -- only 17 years after the Meiji Restoration -- wind up in Britain, at age 57, shoveling coal (or stoking the oil fires) in the boiler room of a steamship in the North Atlantic on the literal eve of World War II?* Somehow -- though I doubt I'll be the one to do it -- I sense there's a story here waiting to be told.

*Yes (to forestall the nitpickers) I am well aware that for Great Britain, war with Germany started in 1939. But war between the British and the Japanese did NOT start until 1941, when Japan attacked British colonies in Asia at the same time they attacked Pearl Harbor.

More Songs Posts About Buildings and Food

Another late start, as is usual for me on Saturdays. First, I stopped by my old company’s offices in Tamachi to drop off some paperwork – technically, I’m still a part-time employee there, even if it’s one (1) hour a week – passing by a group of Japanese Christmas carolers inside Akabanebashi Station. Not completely fluent – no surprise – and while I have no proof, I suspect this wasn’t a Christian thing, but a hobbyist thing, kind of like people in the U.S. who sing Latin Masses for fun even if they’re not churchgoers.

Paperwork dropped off, I went on to the GA Gallery in Yoyogi to see another architectural show. The GA Gallery is the bookstore/exhibition space for a publisher of big glossy books and monographs on modernist architecture – in a small modernist building, of course – and they regularly put on exhibitions displaying models, conceptual drawings, and presentation posters for contemporary projects and proposals. A few months ago, for example, they had one on the latest work of French architect Jean Nouvel, highlighting his designs for the huge new Quai Branly Museum in Paris and the new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Today, it was a catch-all covering recent proposals/projects by modernist Japanese architects. This included a competition entry proposal by architect Arata Isozaki for a massive mixed-use development project in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon), Vietnam. The project, called the Diamond Island New Urban Quarter Development, I quite liked the look of, including the look of how some of the residential units were stacked on top of it each in oddly overlapping ways.¹

I headed back to Yoyogi Station and did my biweekly browsing of the magazine rack at the big Kinokuniya Books nearby (bought three) and browsed the travel guides for Italy – I’m considering a Spring vacation there – and by the time I was ready to leave it was dinnertime and I was hungry. I crossed the pedestrian bridge to check out the new Krispy Kreme doughnut shop on the other side, maybe to buy a snack or a box to bring to the office on Monday but it was still jampacked with an incredibly long line.  Still, the sign on the door said they open at 7 AM, so if I really wanted a doughnut, I should come back early Monday morning as a long detour on the way to work.

So, wanting dinner and not wanting to wait until I got home, I headed back in the direction of the GA Gallery, to check out a place I’d passed earlier, a French bistro calling itself Bistro d’Artemis. It’s small stand-alone building – rare enough in this densely built urban center – tucked on an odd-sized lot under a highway not far from Yoyogi Station. Maybe 20 seats total, informal-looking, open kitchen, windows and walls covered with an assortment of authentic-looking bistro signs, menu in French. Seeing this had given me a bit of a craving to try cassoulet², so, stymied in my attempt to buy a doughnut, I went back for that. You might ask, “A choice between some sugar-laden American fat bombs and what is probably authentic (this being Japan, probably disturbingly so) French bistro food? You had to think about this?” Yeah yeah, I know.

Inside the Bistro d’Artemis, it was very Gallic – though I don’t know if the average Paris bistro has a four-meter (15-foot) tall glass-enclosed wine rack with attached ladder built into one wall. In any case, I ordered what I believe was some variant of Navy Bean Soup (as I say, the menu was in French) steak tartar, and cassoulet, along with a small carafe of red house wine. I’d never had steak tartar (it was good) and the cassoulet was pretty much how I’d remembered it. Of course, I’ll need to run further experiments to be sure, or maybe I can try some of their other specialties, like boudin noir (blood sausage, if I recollect, but my French is more than a little suspect). I'll have to bring my friend Sonja, who is very much into French food, being, you know, French.³  I'm sure she'll love it.

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Notes:
¹I looked it up when I got home, and sadly, it looks like the developers rejected Isozaki's proposal in favor of a much blander proposal by a German architect named Albert Speer. No, not THAT German architect named Albert Speer: this one is his son. Speer the Younger’s much duller proposal for the project, in my opinion, looks like it would fit in, say, Berlin – East Berlin, that is, before the Berlin Wall. Blah.

²A cassoulet is ”a rich, slow-cooked bean stew or casserole originating in the southwest of France, containing meat (typically pork sausages, pork, goose, duck, and sometimes mutton), pork skin (couennes) and white haricot beans” says Wikipedia.  The first and only time I had ever tried this was during my vacation in Paris, and I was still unsure about how authentic it was. If that sounds strange (“How could you be worried about whether you got authentic French food in FRANCE?!?”), it’s because the cassoulet I had was frozen.

Really. Short version: while in Paris, I was listening with my iPod to an episode of the radio show This American Life (previously recorded, of course) featuring an American expatriate named David Sedaris who’d moved to Paris to be with his lover, not because of any inherent love of the place. In fact, he bragged that he’d never been to any of the obvious landmarks such as the Louvre (“Why go to the only place in Paris that won’t let you smoke?”) – which struck me as a really annoying reverse snobbery, but neverthemind. In the course of the show, Sedaris mentioned the Pantheon. Nope, never had been inside, but he knew about it because it was across the street from a frozen-food store he frequented.

Now, it so happened that a few years ago I had heard a radio news story about a relatively new chain of stores in Paris that sold frozen foods – but high-quality frozen versions of classic French dishes, or so the report had it. I filed it away mentally, but had no recollection of the name of the store or where to find one – now, with Sedaris’ mention, I now had a landmark and knew exactly where to find one: across the street from the Pantheon, just down the road from my rented apartment in the 5th. So late one afternoon during one of my rambles I aimed myself in that direction.

The Pantheon, it turned out, was fairly large, so “across the street” covered a LOT of territory, meaning that I had to almost completely circle the Pantheon to find it. But there it was: Picard, a modern and spacious store with wide aisles and nothing but frozen-food cases. I went in and browsed, but since the store also had one entrance and one exit (through the cashier stands), I felt somewhat impelled to actually buy something rather than run the risk of having to explain to a cashier I had to pass that no, I wasn’t actually shopping, I was merely playing tourist in a frozen-food store. So I picked up a frozen duck-sausage cassoulet, frozen broccoli florets, and raspberry sherbet for that evening’s dinner. And you know what? It was good.

³Okay, technically she's American, but her parents are French and she spoke French at home in rural northern California where she was raised. so it's pretty close.