As I mentioned in the first part of this article back in December, Japanese food isn’t just about the sushi.
Or the fugu.
There’s a whole lot more, starting with the biggest meal of all – that consumed by... the sumo.
Sumo is one of Japan’s more internationally famous sports, probably because the spectacle of two exceptionally plump men – in a nation of exceptionally skinny people – wrestling one another, clad only in loin-cloths is, well, fascinating.
Sumo wrestlers would be nothing without their diet, though we do dangle the word “diet” here in an ironic sense.
Chanko-nabe is the food of the sumo. It’s a huge, simmering hot-pot that is chock-full of meat, fish and vegetables, best mixed with soy sauce, but sometimes also blended with mirin, miso, sake, and dashi stock (shavings of dried skipjack tuna mixed with edible kelp).
Leftover broth is often then consumed with a hefty plate of noodles.
It’s as highly nutritious in protein as it is gut busting, and is the principle dish gorged by sumo wrestlers to extend their hefty waistlines and add to already-impressive girths.
Some wrestlers enjoy the concoction so much that they quit the ring and instead become the chanko-cho, or chief chanko chef, for their wrestling stables, and eventually open their own restaurants – often with sumo memorabilia from their workhorse days adorning the walls.
READ MORE @ FORCES OF GEEK, with commentary from Japanese DJ/producers DJ Wada, Jin Hiyama & Lili Hirakawa.
Alternatively, if you’re a child of the ‘90s you may recall an episode of The Simpsons titled “One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish”.
It’s the episode in which Bart Simpson and family make a visit to a new sushi bar called The Happy Sumo, and Homer demands fugu while the chef is out canoodling Edna Krabappel on the backseat of her car.
Cue assistant chef’s stressful splicing and dicing of the deflating delicacy.
For those who may have missed this cartoon, fugu is the Japanese name for blowfish or pufferfish of the Tetraodontidae family, the majority of which have extremely high levels of a neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin in their ovaries, liver, intestines, gonads and skin.
The Encyclopædia Britannica has labeled fugu the second most-poisonous vertebrate in the world and there is no antidote to the poison – a fact that doesn’t seem to faze Japanese consumers, however, since some 10,000 tons are eaten here each year.
When I first arrived in Japan in 2001 I really had no choice but to play Homer Simpson and indulge in the expensive dish, which can cost anywhere between ¥4,000 (US$50) and ¥20,000 (US$250) depending upon the restaurant, the quality of the serving, the size, and the kind of dish.
The most common way to have fugu is sashimi-style, sliced exceptionally thin and raw and served with a special dipping sauce called ponzu (a canny blend of citrus juice and soy sauce). Each piece is almost transparent and the texture softer than most other fish. The impression is that it discreetly dissolves in your mouth.
The delicacy is also deep fried or conjured up in a nabe (hot pot), and often combined with fugu hirezake: Toasted fugu fin served in hot sake. It smells a wee bit fishy, but has quite the celebratory kick to it.
You can usually tell the fugu eateries by the huge storefront tanks full of the fish: Swimming, carousing, looking a little the worse-for-wear, and occasionally floating listlessly upside down.
The allusion of those bottom-up types runs a little close to home when it comes to fugu.
Both in fiction and reality the fish has had a huge impact on the culture of this country and fugu is quite often lauded in traditional haiku. While its price sets the dish up as the foodstuff of kings (but not the emperor, who is not allowed to partake), many Japanese office workers with big annual bonuses aspire to tuck into the marine delight.
Even so there is a hint of the morbid and fatalistic involved. Fugu, while outrageously priced, could be viewed as the Russian roulette of the wining and dining set – and mortality is, after all, the great leveler.
YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT TASTY FUGU, ALONG WITH HACHINOKO (BEE LARVAE) AND INAGO (LOCUSTS) IN THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE @ FORCES OF GEEK.
Sumo is one of Japan’s more internationally famous sports, probably because the spectacle of two exceptionally fat men - in a nation of exceptionally skinny people - wrestling one another, clad only in loin-cloths shaped like sexy G-strings is, well, hilarious.
What most accidental spectators don’t realize is that there’s so much more to the sport than its remarkably hefty rikishi (wrestlers).
Behind the bulldog bravura of cataclysmic grappling that goes on in the ring are centuries-old traditions like the Shinto-related throwing of salt (that one’s for purification).
And sumo competitors’ hair - which is precision-slicked into top-knots - is coiffed using a waxy substance called bintsuke abura, the main ingredient of which comes from the berries of the Japanese wax tree, Toxicodendron succedaneum - a member of the same family as poison ivy. It’s been used cosmetically and in hairdressing in Japan for around a thousand years, and is also used by geisha as a waxy base for their make-up.
Incidentally, in July 2008 the Japanese newspaper Nikkan Sports reported that a 15g container of the oil rose from ¥685 to ¥735, prompting sumo stars to demand a pay raise.
Even that remarkably revealing loincloth, known as the mawashi, has a story: it’s made of silk, approximately 30 feet long, weighs up to 11 pounds (about 5kg), and sometimes bears the name of a sponsor.
Ryōgoku, located here in Tokyo near the historic centre of this monolithic metropolis, is the home of the sumo. Right outside the west exit of Ryōgoku JR station stands the mammoth Kokugikan, the Sumo Hall, with a capacity of 13,000 people. Three of the six national Grand Sumo tournaments happen here.
Unlike ogling geisha in Kyoto, train spotting sumo sorts in the streets around Ryōgoku is relatively easy, especially since the practitioners of the sport aren’t exactly the waif-like types that geisha or maiko typically are.
But sumo wrestlers would be nothing without their diet, and - yes - we dangle the word “diet” here in its most strictly ironic sense. You won't find these people anywhere near a Diet Coke or low-fat mayonnaise.
Chanko-nabe (ちゃんこ鍋) is the food of the sumo - a huge, simmering hot-pot that’s chock-full of meat, fish and vegetables, best mixed with soy sauce, but sometimes also blended with mirin, miso, sake, and dashi stock (shavings of dried skipjack tuna mixed with edible kelp).
Leftover broth is often then consumed with a hefty plate of noodles.
It’s as highly nutritious (think protein city) as it is gut-busting, and is the principle dish gorged by sumo wrestlers to extend their hefty waistlines and add to already impressive girths.
Some wrestlers enjoy the concoction so much that they quit the ring and instead become the chanko-cho, or chief chanko chef, for their wrestling stables, and eventually open their own restaurants - often with sumo memorabilia from their workhorse days adorning the walls.
And, to my blinkered eyes at least, there’s no finer chanko-nabe to be had in Ryōgoku, than at a fine establishment called Yoshiba.
The building that houses Yoshiba was erected in 1948 as a prominent sumo wrestling club and practice stadium for the famous, 200-year-old Miyagino stable, and nine years later the premises were handed down to the stable’s coach, former distinguished yokozuna (sumo grand champion), Yoshibayama, who passed away in 1977.
After that, the building was recast as a restaurant (in 1983), maintaining the sumo ring and the practice rooms in their original state.
Kappo Yoshiba, named after the aforementioned yokuzuna, is hardly a small place itself. The restaurant can seat up to 250 people, it boasts a sushi bar and a voluminous fish-tank, and while the place is invariably busy, the service from the staff is brilliant - so much so, it leaves you despondent that the custom of tipping is a foreign one in Japan.
There’s also daily entertainment in the sumo ring in the center of the restaurant, which veers from guys in yukata (summer robes) singing traditional sumo songs, to a group of rowdy musicians strumming away on a shamisen in a more quirky, contemporary style.
But the focus here, of course, is the chanko-nabe, and the seriously skewed attempts to finish this herculean dish. Give yourself a day or two to recover - and try not to remember that sumo champions and their lesser ilk guzzle gallons of the chunky nectar on a daily basis.
Ouch.
So anyway, this may be completely unrelated but here's the sexy Suburu commercial from a few years back - featuring a bunch of sumo washing a car:
Well, I kind of had no choice, what with the plethora of Top 10 lists that currently bamboozle the senses, all focused on the decade known as the Noughties, the Naughties, the Aughts, the 00s, the 2000s or the Zeros, depending on your cultural upbringing or sense of humour; it seems everyone and his dusted-down and/or bedraggled dog is conjuring up one list or another, and I keep expecting to read one that highlights the ten best kinds of staple (I'm talking stationery apparatus, not food product) over the past 10 years.
In that case my vote goes with Zebra, the Japanese stationery manufacturer established in Japan in 1897, since theirs are the only ones I've actually been able to use over the past 8 years anyway. And I have a soft-spot for the name still, exactly a decade after I was editor of a little magazine of the same moniker back in Melbourne.
What a somewhat mad 10 years it's been over the intervening period.
For what it's worth - which is likely extremely little in these circumstances - here's my ¥2 worth of Top 10 inanity, even if these tens don't exactly restrain themselves to the past decade but count towards something in the atmosphere at least (maybe they've tainted the water supply?):
TOP 10 JAPANESE ARTISTS Seiji Fujishiro Yayoi Kusama Yoko Umehara Shirow Masamune Maharo Yoshitomo Nara Yumiko Kayukawa Takashi Murakami Aya Takano Ryoji Arai
TOP 10 JAPANESE FILM DIRECTORS Seijun Suzuki Akira Kurosawa Yasujiro Ozu Mamoru Oshii Satoshi Kon Ryuhei Kitamura Takashi Miike Hayao Miyazaki Mamoru Hosoda Shinichiro Watanabe
TOP 10 JAPANESE ELECTRONIC MUSICIANS Hifana Takashi Watanabe (DJ Warp) Tatsuya Oe (Captain Funk) Toshiyuki Yasuda (Robo*Brazileira) Shin Nishimura Shuji Wada (DJ Wada) Kenji Kawai Gadget Cassette M-Koda DJ Krush
TOP 10 JAPANESE MOVIES IN THE 2000s Millennium Actress Spirited Away Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence Battle Royale Azumi Casshern Zatoichi Tekkon Kinkreet Tokyo Marble Chocolate Mind Game
TOP 10 ANIME SERIES 2000s Ghost Hound Fullmetal Alchemist Paranoia Agent Gankutsuou Samurai Champloo Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Samurai 7 Wolf's Rain Le Chavalier D'Eon Zenmai Zamurai
TOP 10 JAPANESE FOODS Takoyaki: Octopus balls swamped in mayonnaise, special sauce and dried bonito flakes Ikura don: Salmon rose with wasabi, chopped shiso and Kikkoman soy sauce on rice Yakitori: Grilled chicken and the bird's assorted parts on sticks Mori soba: Chilled buckwheat noodles served on a bamboo mat with a dipping sauce Ramen: Noodle soup, especially tonkotsu (pork broth) Fugu sashi: Blowfish served up super-thin and raw with a lip-smacking ponzu dip Hachinoko: Bee larvae snack, great with beer. Really. Basashi: Raw horse served sashimi style, often with ginger and daikon radish Ikayaki: Grilled squid, often served with lemon and Kewpie maynonnaise Tsukemono: Japanese pickled vegetables
TOP 10 TOKYO PLACES Tokyo Parasite Museum Tsukiji Fish Market Nihon Minkaen Open-Air Folk House Museum Jiyugaoka cake shops National Film Centre Nakagin Capsule Tower Tin Toys Museum Yakitori Alley, Yurakucho Yamamoto-tei Tea House Shibamata
