Rice, Noodle, Fish (29 page)

(Matt Goulding)

Chicken thighs marinated in soy, garlic, and ginger, then floured and fried. Also made with shrimp, octopus, and other sea creatures.

(Matt Goulding)

Filled with everything from mashed potatoes and mincemeat to curry and cream of crab. Like a Spanish croquette but executed with Japanese precision.

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Fried meat on a stick eaten elbow to elbow at a bar and washed down with rivers of cold beer: What's not to love? Osaka invented the form, but you'll find it everywhere.

(Matt Goulding)

Panko-breaded pork loins fried to a greaseless crisp, served with hot mustard, sweet Worcestershire, steamed rice, and shredded cabbage. The best is made with
kurobuta
(black foot) pork.

(Matt Goulding)

Shokunin
dedicate entire lives to tempura, turning battering and frying into a high art form. For the full experience, go to a tempura-only restaurant and order the
omakase
—the chef's tasting menu.

Japanese chefs use panko bread crumbs—large, flat flakes that create a shattering, greaseless crust—on
tonkatsu
,
korokke
, and other golden-brown gems.

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Japanese department stores (called
depachika
)—wondrous centers of gastronomic greatness—trade in the entire spectrum of fried specialties. A fine place for
korokke
,
katsu
, or tempura. (Be on high alert for free samples of each.)

 

 

I wake up on top of the sheets of my cheap hotel bed, fully clothed, smelling of whisky and lamb. Not lamb, actually, but grilled mutton, possibly a few days or weeks past its prime. I struggle to bring the details of last night into focus. If I squint hard enough, I see a pocket bottle of Suntory, an old woman with a pile of raw onions, a smoky bar with karaoke and cheap wine.

But then I find this e-mail, sent to me sometime during the last night's stupor:

Dear Matt,

I have arranged for the complimentary tickets on the SL (Steam Locomotive) Niseko, which travels from Sapporo to Niseko on the weekends during autumn only. This is designed to let people enjoy the nostalgia of travel from days gone by, enhanced with dramatic scenery and with a variety of different specialty products available in the dining car as you go through the different regions en route to Niseko.

The e-mail is from Paul Haggart, the sole representative of Niseko Tourism, who insists that I need to come to his tiny mountain community to appreciate the full pastoral majesty of Hokkaido. Paul informs me that the tickets are on hold at the information counter at JR
Sapporo Station, arranged for by one Mr. Yoshitaka Ito from JR Plaza in Tokyo. The train people will be expecting me.

In the harsh glare of the Hokkaido morning light—not to mention the throbbing weight of an all-world hangover—all of this sounds like too much effort. But I have made promises, and nowhere are broken promises more perilous than in Japan, so I roll out of bed, stuff my clothes into my suitcase, and wobble my way toward the station. After days of grilled mutton and bad decisions in Sapporo, maybe a bit of mountain air will do me good.

The SL Niseko is a reptile of a train, muscular and elegant, black as a starless night, spewing thick plumes of smoke from her nose—a seasonal beast ready to slither her way through the jumbled topography of this island. A conductor in a throwback uniform stands guard at the front, his posture so stiff it could slice a soft tomato. All around, people snap photos and film videos and generally lose their shit over the old-world elegance and enduring mechanical mastery of the steam locomotive Niseko.

I fight past the crowds, who look genuinely confused and disappointed that this disheveled gaijin has in his greasy, lamb-stained palm the golden ticket. Inside, the train cars sparkle with the “nostalgia of travel from days gone by.” In true Japanese fashion, the interior looks to be lifted directly from 1856, with all the tiny details Hollywood-ready: the polished oak paneling, the meticulous ironwork, the authentically uncomfortable wooden seats.

The train pulls out of Sapporo with a few proud whistles and winds its way southeast along the Sea of Japan. It's barely 8:00 a.m., but my train mates waste little time in breaking out the picnic material. But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of
local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbrews rich in hops and local iconography.

From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate.

We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy three more.

Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.

As I sit there, sipping my wine and snacking on cheese, soaking up the cornucopia of autumn views and the bonhomie of my train mates, one troubling question bounces around in my brain: When did I leave Japan?

米 麺 魚

Hokkaido is roughly the size and shape of Maine, a land of towering mountains, lush valleys, and rugged, lonely coastlines. Imagine Switzerland, if Switzerland were an island in the Sea of Japan instead of a landlocked country in Europe. Separated from Honshu by the Tsugaru Strait, Hokkaido is large and sparsely populated, making up 25 percent of Japan's landmass but just 5 percent of its population. Host to the 1972 Winter Olympics, the island is known to outsiders primarily as a place to ski, its prodigious snowfall legendary as some of the world's lightest and driest powder.

Locals call Mount Yotei “Hokkaido's Fuji,” for obvious reasons.

(Matt Goulding)

I did not come to ski. I first came to Hokkaido for two reasons: miso ramen and
uni
, the island's most famous foods and two items on my short list for Last Supper constituents. The only thing they share in common, besides a home, is the intense fits of joy they deliver: the former made from an unholy mix of pork-bone broth, thick miso paste, and wok-crisped pork belly (with the optional addition of a slab of melting Hokkaido butter), the latter arguably the sexiest food on earth, yolk-orange tongues of raw sea urchin roe with a habit-forming blend of fat and umami, sweetness and brine. Fall for
uni
at your own peril; like heroin and high-stakes poker, it's an expensive addiction that's tough to kick.

But my dead-simple plan—to binge on both and catch the first flight back to Tokyo—has been upended by a steam locomotive and Whole Foods foliage, and suddenly Hokkaido seems much bigger than an urchin and a bowl of soup. No one told me about the rolling farmlands, the Fuji-like volcanoes, the stunning national parks, one stacked on top of another. Nobody said there would be wine. And cheese. And bread.

Few understand my sudden itch for exploration better than Ioanna Watanabe. Ioanna came to Niseko in 2004 with plans to spend a few days snowboarding, a few more drinking and eating, before continuing her tour of the Far East. Only she fell in love with the island and its underappreciated virtues, including Hisashi Watanabe, a young Japanese man from Saitama working the ski patrol in the backcountry, and never left.

Today she and Hisashi own one of Hokkaido's hippest cocktail dispensaries, Gyu Bar, a low-lit drinking cave in Hirafu at the foot of the area's biggest ski resort. The two make a formidable
team: Ioanna the resident whisky expert, Hisashi the dapper suspender-clad cocktail king. For four months of the year, Gyu Bar and every other establishment within sniffing distance of a ski slope hums with packs of Aussie boarders and Hong Kong powderhounds and the occasional Tokyoite.

But when the snow goes, so do most of the people, which is exactly why I'm here now: to focus on what really counts without the distractions of the winter-clad hordes. I meet Ioanna by chance at a wine shop in Niseko shortly after the locomotive delivers me to the mountains. When she hears about my SL Niseko revelations, she offers to take me around to experience what she calls “the mind-blowing Hokkaido.”

Yes, you can come to Sapporo, drink the namesake beer and slurp ramen and enjoy one of Japan's largest and friskiest entertainment districts, take the train to Otaru for a quick
uni
feast, then head back to Honshu, but to truly experience Hokkaido, to understand what this island is all about, you'll need to venture out beyond the handful of urban pockets and into the wild. Do that for a few days and you'll realize that, more than anything, Hokkaido is a collection of amazing shit in the middle of nowhere.

This is the kind of place where you buy your eggs on the honor system from a friend's mailbox, where supermarkets sell produce with the face of the farmer on the package so you know exactly who grew your daikon, where your neighbor raises ostriches because he spent his honeymoon in Australia and thought they looked cool and, fuck it, why not?

We spend a week crisscrossing the southern part of Hokkaido in Ioanna's well-worn Honda CRV, eating and drinking in a way that upends my understanding of Japanese food culture. Ioanna is Canadian by birth but deep down as Japanese as fermented soybeans, able to understand and decode both sides of the cultural divide with preternatural ease and grace. I learn many things from Ioanna during our time together: when
and how to bow in a variety of social scenarios, the exact combination of sounds to offer up after a delicious meal, the virtues of convenience-store fried chicken.

Ten minutes outside of Hirafu, we find Del Sole, a small cabin tucked into the woods with a world-class pizza operation inside. Kenji Tsugimoto, the owner, built brick by brick the oven that ejects puffy-rimmed, blistered-bottom pies that could rival the finest pizzas of Naples. He serves just five tables at lunch and five more at dinner. “Any more, and I wouldn't be able to make the pizza I want to make.”

Signs of Hokkaido's muscular dairy industry tattoo the terrain everywhere: packs of Holsteins chew cud unblinkingly in the sunlight, ice cream shops proffer hyperseason flavors to hungry leaf gazers, and giant silos offer advice to the calcium deficient: “Drink Hokkaido Milk!” Even better than drinking the island's milk is drinking its yogurt, which you can do at Milk Kobo, a converted red barn with cows and tractors and generous views of Mount Yotei, which locals call Ezo Fuji. Kobo sells all manner of dairy products, but you're here for the drinkable yogurt, which has a light current of sweetness and a deep lactic tang, a product so good that the second it hits my lips, I give up water for the week.

The Nikka distillery, one of Japan's oldest and largest whisky makers, rises out of the coastal flats of Yoichi like a high-proof oasis for thirsty island itinerants. Inside, the fires of distillation burn red-hot: like the great SL Niseko, Nikka still runs on coal. Whisky is Ioanna's wheelhouse, and she peppers the self-guided tour with fun facts about the virtues of barrel-aging and the vision of Nikka founder Masataka Taketsuru. In 1918 he traveled to Scotland to learn the secrets of brown liquor from its oldest and wisest practitioners. He returned to Japan two years later with a Scottish wife and a blueprint that would form the basis of Japan's entire whisky industry. He chose Hokkaido as his home base because it was the place that reminded him most of Scotland.

My favorite of these far-flung places, though, is a few miles from the Niseko train station, housed in a steep brown A-frame that looks more like an Austrian ski chalet than a soba shrine. Tatsuru Rai first came to Hokkaido in 1962, when as a high school freshman he rode his bike all the way from Tokyo. He fell in love with the island's rural charms, and four years later, after saving up enough money, he returned, making the thousand-kilometer trip on foot this time. He worked in a hotel at first but wanted to open his own restaurant. There was no soba in the area at the time, despite the abundance of buckwheat grown in Hokkaido, so he rolled up his sleeves and got to work.