Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo Read Online Free Page B

fish grill and scream. Surprise! Rancid, congealed fish grease.
    Japanese cuisine has a small footprint. Home cooks have been preparing it in tiny kitchens for generations. Some of the best parts of a Japanese meal, such as the pickles, just sit around waiting to be eaten. The same goes for rice: everyone has a rice cooker, and at any time of day it tends to be on the keep warm setting, full of cooked rice. While the two burners of the stove are occupied, the rice cooker sits quietly in the corner and treats your rice with the proper respect.
    For my first home-cooked meal in Tokyo, I took an assortment of beautiful Japanese ingredients and did what came naturally: I made Chinese food. I stir-fried some beautifully marbled
kurobuta
(Berkshire breed) pork with bok choy, ginger, and leeks
,
sauced it with soy sauce, mirin, and vinegar, and served it over rice, sprinkled with
shichimi tōgarashi
seven-spice mixture. This seemed like a reasonable act of Japanese-Chinese fusion. I made some quick-pickled cucumbers on the side. This was before we discovered that anything you do to a Japanese cucumber diminishes it. I should have known this; once I interviewed a Japanese-American farmer who grows more than a hundred Asian vegetables in Washington state. Naturally, I asked him about his personal favorite. Cucumber, he said.
    “How do you prepare it?” I asked.
    “Slice and eat.”
    The whole meal was about the same as something I’d make at home, but I cooked it in Japan. It was like the SpongeBob SquarePants episode where SpongeBob has to work the night shift at the Krusty Krab, and he keeps saying things like, “I’m chopping lettuce...at night!” I was slicing cucumbers...in Tokyo!
    When we moved in, our landlord, Mac, handed us an official four-page color guide explaining how to sort our garbage. “Even Japanese people have trouble,” he said. “Hang in there.” He flashed the thumbs-up. Then he walked off into the Nakano sun, leaving us alone with this document; it was like being a new parent all over again.
    I’d heard people complain about the byzantine rules of Tokyo garbage and recycling, but honestly, I had no idea. In Seattle, we sort our discards into three categories: recycling, compost, and other. The first two categories go on to theoretically productive reuse, and those unredeemables in the last category go to the landfill. I’ve grumbled about Seattle trash policy in the past; I will never do so again.
    In Tokyo, there are five main categories of trash, with multiple subcategories and exceptions. Each category is collected only on certain days. The apartment manager puts out the proper cans on the proper days, and if you don’t take the stuff out in time, it’s like missing a ferry, only smellier.
    The catchall category is Combustible waste, meaning stuff that should go to the incinerator: food scraps, nonrecyclable plastic, diapers, small yard waste (“pruned brunches,” according to the guide). The existence of this category led to many iterations of the following conversation:
    Matthew: Is this Combustible?
    Laurie: No, I think it’s Plastic.
    Matthew: Everything is combustible if you get it hot enough. That’s just physics.
    Plastic is not just any plastic. It has to be recyclable and clean without food stains. It is your responsibility as a citizen to make a good-faith effort to wash food residues (say, takoyaki grease) off the plastic before putting it in the Plastic bin. It took me a couple of weeks to realize that there’s a Plastic recycling symbol. It looks like the first two syllables of “purasuchikku” written in katakana. You’re welcome.
    Oh, but wait. Not all plastic is Plastic. PET bottles go in a separate bin and are collected on a separate day. Summer in Tokyo is high season for drink vending machines, which are so common it’s as if they’re following you. Don’t tell any of our environmentally sensitive friends in Seattle, but we probably went through 250 PET bottles over