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Japanese Food I used to go quite often to Japanese restaurants, but I cannot say that I ever got to like the food since a purely Japanese meal, apart from rice, consists almost entirely of various kinds of fish, many of which are eaten raw. I cannot say how the number of Tokyo's restaurants compares with the number of its inhabitants, but it always seemed that it contained more eating houses of one kind and another than any other city that I know. There are certain quarters where every house is a restaurant, and in no part of the town does one have to go far to find one. This is partly due to the fact that the Japanese do not entertain much in their own houses; but since the war the use of restaurants has increased tremendously, as indeed it has with us, in order to eke out home rations. The best restaurants are very small; many of them cannot accommodate more than a dozen guests at a time. Not a few are hidden away in dark little alleys and are difficult to discover. A foreigner has little chance of enjoying the more exclusive ones unless guided to them by a Japanese friend. Everybody has, I suppose, his own peculiarities, and one of mine is that I always like to know what I am eating, with which is coupled an unfortunate lack of courage in being able to tackle exotic foods. The first time I was taken to have a Japanese meal we started with slices of raw pink fish, which made me feel definitely sick. These were followed by soup which looked and tasted like a scoopful of deep-sea water heated up. Floating about in it were bits of assorted seaweed (for which the Japanese have a passion), and various small bi-valvular objects, half detached from their shells, and other small marine creatures. I was able to deal with this by drinking off the liquid and leaving the garnitures at the bottom of the cup. The taste was not actually unpleasant, but I felt none the less as though I was turning into an aquarium. Soup was followed by a cooked dish, the nature of which I was quite unable to determine. It tasted rather like an oily variety of pork, but yet was obviously not meat. Seeing my perplexity my host attempted to explain, but unfortunately his English had got a bit rusty. "It is a long and writhing creature," he said, "the exact name of which I have forgotten." And then after a pause, "Ah, yes," he continued, "now I recall its name. It is what you call a serpent." It transpired, however, that we were not eating snakes but eels. This is one of the greatest of all Japanese delicacies; but in view of my first unfortunate experience with it I was never able to overcome my original nausea. The eel was followed by further varieties of fish and finished in the traditional manner with rice and tea. Rice, incidentally, is not generally eaten with other things but comes at the end of the meal, so that one can go on eating bowl after bowl until hunger is completely satisfied. Most of the good restaurants specialize in certain dishes. There are, for instance, hundreds of restaurants that devote themselves to the eel in various guises, while others specialize in such fare as bees or full frogs. I never had the courage to try the latter, which are kept alive in a pool beneath the counter. A friend of mine said, however, that they were delicious and tasted rather like chicken. He also added that they were the size of a well-fed lap-dog and had protruding eyes the size of golf balls, and that when the chef had succeeded in dragging one out of the pool and placed it on the counter, prior to knocking it on the head, it was highly desirable to look the other way since the creature goggled in the most unpleasant manner; it did almost everything except bark. I must in fairness add that many foreigners acquire a great fondness for all kinds of Japanese food. That I was never able to do so is doubtless due to some psychological factor, but I did reach the stage of being able to tackle raw fish without being actually sick. There are, however, two Japanese dishes which the most hide-bound can eat with pleasure. The first of these is known as Sukiyaki, strips of beef cooked with vegetables on a small brazier, generally electric, which is placed in front of the guests, who attend to the cooking themselves. The other is known as Tempura, and consists of various kinds of shell-fish, lobsters, shrimps and so on, fried in batter and served very hot. It is delicious. A good Japanese meal consists of a great number of courses, but many of these contain hardly a mouthful of food. The result is that the average foreigner rises still feeling hungry, for very few have the Japanese capacity for consuming large quantities of rice at the end. So much for the purely gastronomic point of view. But there is also an aesthetic side to the matter, and a great part of the pleasure to be derived from eating in famous restaurants lies not so much in the actual food as in admiring the varied assortment of plates and bowls in which it is served, and the decoration of the room. The utensils are nearly always extremely beautiful and are often the work of famous artists. In the really good restaurants there is no public dining room, but only a series of private rooms. These can normally accommodate about four persons in comfort, but, as in the case of a Japanese house, it is always possible to throw two or three rooms into one by merely sliding away the partitions. In a purely Japanese restaurant there is, of course, no furniture other than the low tables off which one eats, and, as in a Japanese house, shoes are discarded in the vestibule. There is one famous restaurant in Tokyo known as the Gajo-en which is to provincial Japanese what any of the bigger Childs Restaurants in New York are to American country visitors. It is famous chiefly for its size and for the astonishing display of "art" which adorns its walls. It is much patronized by the rich and uncultured and specializes in providing rather ostentatious wedding banquets. It prides itself particularly on being able to accommodate a thousand guests in the principal room. This is built in the form of a very long but wide corridor with five hundred little tables on one side and another five hundred on the other. I never saw it filled with guests; but when empty it reminded we of one of the halls in a large Tibetan monastery. The restaurant is entered through an artificial grotto which strikes the keynote, as it were, of the whole building. The rocks of which it is composed are "bigger and better" than in any natural grotto; in fact the aim of the proprietor has been to make the whole place "bigger and better" than any similar institution in Japan. Guides await one in the hall, for it is considered necessary first to undertake a conducted tour of the building. There must be nearly a mile of corridors, every square inch of which is covered with pictures, most of them apparently chosen for their size. Enormous goggling Geisha by the square foot stand side by side with gigantic cows and outsize shrimps and lobsters; anything commends itself that is big. A Japanese friend of mine rightly said: "It is necessary to see the Gajo-en in order to realize the depths to which our art can sink." There are special rooms where only Chinese food is served, and many in which other foreign dishes are obtainable. The largest of the "foreign rooms" is furnished with a huge red lacquer table and chairs and gives the impression that it was designed for a film set. It looks exactly like the traditional Hollywood conception of an oriental banqueting hall. But the pride of the whole restaurant is the lavatories, which came at the end of our conducted tour. These were such as to make even a film star envious, for into their construction there entered onyx and mother-ofpearl. It seemed almost a desecration to put them to use, but we could hardly turn a deaf ear to the urgent and reiterated "Please, please" of our guide. She then took us into the toilets, which were constructed of similar material. They were the most luxurious I have ever seen, and it was odd to find them devoid of paper. As a matter of fact this is seldom provided in Japan since everyone carries about his own supply. In addition to its numerous eating rooms, the Gajo-en also contains a number of consecrated shrines and temples, so that if it is desired to have a religious wedding ceremony this can be carried out on the premises. For this purpose the restaurant has its resident staff of priests. Although the matter is not actually mentioned in the prospectus, I do not doubt that, if necessary, even a bride could be provided. In addition to the thousands of purely Japanese restaurants in Tokyo there are also large numbers of so-called foreign eating houses. In three or four famous ones the cooking is in fact European and excellent; in the others it answers to the Japanese conception of what occidental food should be. They have done to our food what they have done to our language; assimilated odds and ends and adapted them to their own needs. The majority of these places are named after well known London and New York restaurants. Thus, there is in Tokyo a Scott's, the walls of which are decorated with menus from its famous London prototype, and a Rainbow Room, where, unlike the New York original, the most highly priced meal costs rather less than half an American dollar. Incidentally, Tokyo's Rainbow Room, far from commanding a view over the city, is situated underground. There is a regular chain of Florida Kitchens and a host of other places which specialize in various American dishes, waffles, strawberry shortcake, and so on; but everything is a pale and sickly copy of the original. The art of making good coffee is the one thing the Japanese have really mastered; until the war put a stop to all supplies, it was as easily obtainable as it is in New York. At the time I left, however, it had deteriorated into an ersatz mixture (made largely from soya beans) which tasted like an infusion of sawdust. The cheaper places are patronized chiefly by the student class. The food obtainable in them is definitely inferior to that provided in Japanese restaurants at a similar price; but they are popular because they would seem to fulfil some sort of psychological need. There is a desire not only to absorb western culture, but also to move in a western atmosphere. It is only the fortunate few who can afford to spend some years in a foreign country, and these restaurants, together with the cinema, are the next best substitute for the less fortunate majority. There was to me something pathetic about them; the spectacle of a people torn between two ways of living is always discomforting, and in these places one sensed the conflict at its worst. The more expensive foreign restaurants are popular even with the more old-fashioned type of Japanese. One of the reasons for this is that even in the best of them, the food is very much cheaper than it is in a Japanese restaurant of similar class. In the New Grand, for instance, which is the best of its type in Tokyo , one could formerly get an excellent meat for the equivalent of one dollar, and there, except for drinks and tips, the matter ended. But in a Japanese restaurant of similar class there are so many extras which are by custom considered an indispensable part of the meal; a private room, Geisha, and a car (provided by the restaurant) to take each of the guests home. The bill for quite a small dinner in a place of this sort can easily amount to eight to twelve dollars a head, so that it is not difficult to understand why the foreign style restaurants have now become so popular, especially for entertaining, with all classes of Japanese. Japanese Sushi Meal Photographic Print Buy at AllPosters.com Hydrangeas w Japanese Teapot & Fan Art Print Buy at AllPosters.com