Free Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo by Matthew Amster-Burton Page A

fashion, an oasis that makes the adjacent brutal urbanism invisible. Ukai is a huge restaurant, but they seat every party out of the line of sight of any other, so for the length of your meal, the place is yours.
    If the level of service at a Tokyo doughnut shop is comparable to the best restaurant in most countries, the service at an upscale tofu restaurant is positively disarming. I found myself thanking the waitresses in a girlish whisper for each course: the sashimi, the fried tofu slathered with miso, the perfect little pickles, the single fresh loquat hidden inside a
hōzuki
lantern plant. Then came the cold tofu course. I had come to Ukai to taste the freshest, creamiest tofu Tokyo could serve up, and now it was before me, two lumps of tofu made from Hokkaido soybeans, in a large bowl of kombu dashi with some sort of greens floating in the broth.
    I asked about the vegetable. “Junsai,” explained the waitress. She transferred the tofu to a smaller bowl, ladled dashi over it, and then went after every last bit of junsai with a miniature swimming pool net. No one, this gesture implied, would want to miss out on one bit of junsai, although it looked more like thorny prunings than anything edible.
    Here is the good news: junsai does not have the texture of woody twigs. It is, however, the most mucilaginous food I can possibly imagine. Okra thinks junsai is too slimy. As Wikipedia understates it:
    It is identified by its bright green leaves, small purple flowers that bloom from June through September, and a thick mucilage that covers all of the underwater organs, including the underside of the leaves, stems, and developing buds.
    Yes, junsai is certainly distinctive: each tiny leaf and bud is fully encased in a snot bubble. If you make it through that alive, the texture of the twig itself is snappy, easy to chew, not bad at all by comparison.
    And I had a lot of junsai to make it through. I started by dispatching the tofu, which was everything I’d hoped for: creamy, light, and redolent of fresh soy milk. It was the best tofu of my life, and I was about to ruin the memory of it by turning to the junsai. It was like capping off a beautiful wedding with a series of chainsaw murders. I grimaced through each morsel of slime.
This is a beautiful restaurant where people come to eat great food,
I thought to myself.
They wouldn’t deliberately play a trick on me. People pay good money for a hearty serving of junsai.
These mental gymnastics failed to convince me I was eating anything other than pond snot. At one point I really thought I might throw up and get deported.
    Reader, I ate all the junsai. When the waitress came over to take my bowl, I smiled and said, “
Oishikatta
.” Delicious. The quiver in my voice was more defeat than awe.
    Junsai is a seasonal delicacy. You know how some people annoy you all year by talking about how excited they are for rhubarb or tomato season? If I lived in Japan, I would spend all summer anticipating the end of junsai season.
    Having defeated my viscous nemesis, I sat back in my chair at Ukai and relaxed. Now I could enjoy dessert: slimy
kuzu
starch noodles in sugar syrup with pickled apricots.
    If the most common knock on tofu is that it is bland, odd-textured, and incapable of starring in visceral food memories, my lunch proved that false. When I think back on the best meals I ate in Tokyo, that creamy tofu keeps insisting on its proper place. Anyone could love tofu.
    Junsai, maybe not.

Just an American Girl
in the Tokyo Streets
子供
    It was probably when Iris put on her lab coat and prepared to stick a thermometer up a cat’s rectum that it struck me just how much responsibility and freedom kids enjoy in Tokyo.
    OK, the cat was fake, but the look of concentration on Iris’s face was genuine. We were at Kidzania, an international chain of theme parks where children work at realistic fake occupations: veterinarians, airline pilots, firefighters, pizza cooks, building maintenance