A Japanese Welcome

This is a story about hospitality.

First, some scene-setting: Our first day in Japan, jet lag woke us up at 4:30 in the morning.  That gave us enough time to squeeze three days of activities into one.  By 8:30 that night, we had explored Tokyo's early morning fish market, spent four hours on trains and as many hours hiking around the mountainside shrines of Nikko, and navigated Tokyo's subway system during rush hour to meet someone for drinks in one of city's flashy high-rise districts.  By the time we made it back across the metropolis to our quiet neighborhood, our legs were jelly, our brains were fried, and our old friend jet lag was back with a vengeance.  We also had not yet had dinner.

Problem is, our hotel was in such a traditional neighborhood of the big city, there was no English anywhere in sight.   This was one of the few times in Japan where we had to struggle to decipher Japanese characters, and the hand-drawn map from our innkeeper that marked all his favorite local restaurants was defeating our travel-weary eyes.  Add to this that the Japanese, like the Dutch, tend to eat early - so by 8:30 on a Monday night, many of the noodle shops and family restaurants had already closed.

The Yanaka neighborhood

So there we are, on a poorly lit backstreet in the Yanaka district, looking back and forth from our crumpled little map to the name of an establishment as though it would all suddenly become clear to us, even though it assuredly wouldn't.  We were totally spent.

It was then that a man talking on his cell phone next to us gestured with his other hand and said, "Go in! Go in!"  We hesitated - the place looked dark and private, like someone's house.  But he held open the door for us and waited expectantly.  Inside was a tiny itzakaya, a Japanese pub, with a short bar in front and a tatami room in the back that was totally empty.  The only patrons were the man who ushered us inside, who returned to his beer, and an overweight businessman shiny from drink and happily working his way through snacks and sake.  

We awkwardly slid onto a couple stools at one end of the bar.  A kindly looking woman perched on a bar stool, who seemed to be the only English-speaker present, asked us what we would like.  I never did figure out if she was the daughter of the owner or simply a proactive patron.  When it became clear that what we really needed was food, not drinks, she called an older woman out of the kitchen for an extensive conversation in Japanese, over the course of which the older woman grew increasingly emphatic.  They had nothing that could serve for a meal.

"What do you like to eat?" asked the kindly looking woman.  Flummoxed, we looked at each other.  All our travel instincts were setting us on our guard: is this woman going to take advantage of us, or send us someplace where dinner would cost us more than our hotel?  We tried to convey that we were on a budget, but that we eat everything - "except raw fish," Jeff added.

"I know," the woman said. "Follow me."  

We left the itzakaya and headed down the quiet street with her.  With limited English, she queried us more specifically on our eating preferences: do we like fish? Salmon? Chicken? Eggs?  After she ran through her food vocabulary, she confided in us that she's a big Yankees fan and spends sleepless nights watching their live games.

At the end of the street was a gently lit little restaurant, friendly looking but entirely Japanese - the type of place we would be too shy to enter on our own.  The small interior felt like someone's house, with just a handful of tables and a few counter seats next to the open kitchen.  Two later middle-aged men with gray gristly hair, square faces and thick eyebrows - clearly brothers - waited on the mostly male clientèle. Our new friend pulled one of them aside and, I presume, explained our predicament, including any dietary restrictions she had managed to wring out of us.  

He took us outside to their display of plastic food and had us point to what we liked.  (Japan's ubiquitous plastic food would prove key to our success in overcoming the language barrier, food being, of course, our highest travel priority.)  He nodded and said "mmmm"  (a typical Japanese expression), and pointed to more items.  We started to worry they were going to bring us everything in their kitchen.

Back inside, the other brother was working the kitchen with a short, wiry old man with a bandanna twisted around his hairless head.  I decided he was their father and that he had very strong opinions about things.  I could see the brothers trying to convince him to retire and him insisting that their cooking would drive the customers away.

Fairly quickly, they brought us two huge trays of food (what the Japanese call a set meal): the requisite miso, rice, and pickles; for me, a plate of tonkatsu (pork cutlet coated in panko and deep fried) and a huge bowl of a buttery tofu stew with green onions and bean sprouts; for Jeff, fried chicken thighs, a cool cube of silken tofu with a soy-based dipping sauce, a small salad and an additional dish of greens dressed with soy sauce.  It was a personalized combination of multiple set dinners displayed in plastic out front, and the sheer quantity of it defeated us: ravenous as we were, it looked in the end like we had barely touched it.  And for this customized dinner, they charged us their lowest dinner price, making this one of the cheapest meals we had in Japan.

But that wasn't the important part.  What mattered was that, as soon as the kindly woman took us under our wing and passed us on to her friends the heavy-browed brothers, I felt taken care of.  These strangers made a special effort to make us feel at home, even though we would never see them again.

Random acts of hospitality like this marked our entire trip. People on the street would not just give us directions, they would walk us to our destination; they wouldn't just tell us the train they were on was not the train we were looking for, they'd get off their train and let it depart while they helped us find ours.  That sort of graciousness is contagious - and isn't it a lovely thought, to come back from a trip infected with kindness?