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November 13, 2000
A QUICK TRIP TO JAPAN
Living in Denver, there isn't the kind of large, established Japanese community you can find in almost any major city on the west coast. Because the coast was the destination for the original wave of Asian immigrants, there are long-established Pacific-rim communities, especially for Chinese and Japanese, and in the case of the Japanese and Japanese American population, central areas with names such as "Little Tokyo" (in Los Angeles) and "Japan Town" (in San Francisco).
| We loved the food so much that one evening we had dinner twice. |
Denver has a one-block downtown development, Sakura Square, which is a fine focus for the Japanese community, with a high-rise apartment building for seniors, one grocery store, the Denver Buddhist Temple, a couple of restaurants and stores. I love Sakura Square. But it's a tantalizing taste of Japan, with more of a Japanese American flavor (because of the area's JA population, who settled in Colorado after internment). When I visited Little Tokyo earlier this year, I was astounded at how, well, Japanese, it is. Instead of just a taste of Japan, it was a feast.
Last weekend I had a similar experience when Erin and I traveled to San Francisco and stayed in the Best Western Miyako Inn on the perimeter of the city's J-Town, or "Nihon Machi." I felt in a way as if I was visiting Japan without leaving the United States. Many of the signs were in Japanese, and everywhere we heard Japanese being spoken. Even the Denny's Restaurant in J-Town, a typical American diner everyplace else, fit the local culture. Beneath the sign was "Deh-nee-zu" spelled out in Japanese katakana characters. The restaurant also served a special Hawaiian-style breakfast menu with eggs and Portuguese sausage, fried rice with Portuguese sausage (which is delicious) and saimin noodle soup.
From the view of a visiting tourist, J-Town was a dream. We hit some of the San Francisco tourist hotspots - Fisherman's Wharf, the Muir Woods redwood forest, Golden Gate Park with its Asian Art Museum and beautiful Japanese Tea Garden - but the main attraction was always J-Town and its Japanese shops and of course, its many restaurants. Everything was thrilling and new to me, from the four - four! - Japanese grocery stores within a several-block area to CD stores that exclusively sold Japanese recordings.
Highlights included the comfortable Benkyo-Do, a small diner and pastry shop that sells wonderful manju, traditional pastries made with sweet bean paste enclosed in sweet sticky rice dough or other wrapping; Kinokuniya, the Japanese bookstore chain (there's also one in LA's Little Tokyo), with its wealth of books and magazines in Japanese, plus an impressive section of English-language publications about Japanese culture, arts and history.
We spent time and money in a great shop called Nikkei Traditions that Erin had visited the previous year, which sells a variety of artsy items, gifts and clothing that combine Japanese and Japanese American traditions. One of the popular items in the store, for instance, is a CD, "Club Nisei," of popular post-World War II Japanese songs recorded by Japanese American bands and artists in Hawaii in the late 1940s and '50s.
There are stores featuring antiques, handicrafts, toys, Japanese office supplies, and one specializing in pop culture collectibles such as Hello Kitty and Ultraman. A shop that we explored on our final day, Soko Hardware, turned out to be a treasure trove of cool stuff. A family owned hardware store in the grand tradition with goods stacked everywhere, the shop carried not only ordinary hardware items such as brooms and tools, but it stocked Japanese appliances and kitchen gadgets, washi (hand-made paper) and calligraphy and ink-brush painting supplies, lots and lots of ceramics and lacquerware and crafts including dolls. The Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California (JCCCNC) may have an unwieldy name, but the center is a vital resource for the community, and it's also located right there in J-Town.
Scattered throughout are "puri-kura" photo booths (a Japanized version of "print club"), a Japanese invention that allows you to take pictures of yourself that are printed on sheets of tiny stickers for a couple of dollars, an improvement on the familiar passport photo booths.
The restaurants were terrific, though instead of sushi places we sought out ramen restaurants. The winner out of several ramen shops we dined at was Iroha, Erin's favorite from previous trips. The ramen we tried at Sapporo-ya and at Tanpopo was also good, but no match for Iroha's robust servings and full flavor.
Fresh ramen is a bracing comfort food, and nothing like the instant ramen everyone knows from low-budget college days. Fresh ramen is served in a huge bowl, with house-made noodles topped with ingredients such as napa cabbage or moyashi (bean sprouts), green onions half a boiled egg and thin slices of chashu, or barbecued pork loin. Curiously, the ramen was relatively inexpensive in J-Town - Denver's lone ramen shop, a Tokyo-based chain called Oshima's, charges $8-10 for its ramen but all the J-Town shop charged around $6, and we were more than satisfied.
We loved the food so much that one evening we had dinner twice. We ate early at Mifune, ordering tempura and soba (buckwheat noodles in a different broth from ramen) and "sukiyaki udon" (sukiyaki ingredients served in a sweet-flavored broth with fat udon noodles). A few hours later, after seeing a movie, we were curious enough about Sapporo-Ya that we had a second dinner, this time ramen. It was fine, though the noodles, which the restaurant makes every morning using an old machine at the front by the entrance, had a different flavor and texture than we were used to.
We even discovered a Japanese dessert creation. A new store, Sophie's Crepes, is a chain from Tokyo which in typical Japanese fashion takes a Western concept - the French crepe - and turns it into a new product, rolling crepes into a cone for ingredients including gelato, sweet azuki red beans and whipped cream.
We liked Sophie's Crepes so much we returned for another dessert after lunch our final day, a last stop before heading to the airport. I think I have enough of a Japanese cultural fix to last me a while, but I can hardly wait to go back to Japan, via J-Town.
Since this piece was written in 2000, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco has moved to a new building. Be sure to visit at: Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin Street San Francisco, CA 94102. 415-581-3713, www.asianart.org
(Note: Special thanks to my old friend David Weinstein, a longtime San Franciscan. He met us for dinner one night -- one of the few non-Japanese meals, at the garlicky Stinking Rose -- and drove us around the city on our final day before taking us to the airport. David hosts a Web radio show that recalls the days of freeform FM radio station of the late 1960s and early '70s: Great music and great talk too, called Davidswebcast.)