Sushi love, and a 98-yr-old kimono maker & Canadian tech guy interview
I love sushi! Who doesn't? As a long time pescatarian sushi suits me just fine. And if you're in a vegetarian mood then no problem: cucumber, eggs (or not vegans!), avocado. Now all of this enthusiasm is based on the rice foundation of sushi, sushi rice! If it's not right then it just not sushi.
In Japan, sushi disappointment is rare. In North America and Europe, in 2024, sushi disappointment is low, provided you pay for quality. Fresh fish or seafood ingredients comes first nature to the Japanese. Afterall, eating meat was Buddhistically off the table until the 1870s. Japanese fishermen here are very careful how they catch, process, and deliver their often still-living cargo of swimming sushi to be. Fishmongers at central wholesale markets across Japan are critical, almost beyond belief. And so are their customers, the sushi chefs.
Look for fish with clear eyes (yes, dead fish!), deep-red gills, and muscles that ripple a little when you prod a fish body with your finger or a pen. And be a bit suspicious if the smell of fish, the negative smell of fish, is a bit thick in the air.
Eating sushi is easy. Use your fingers but discretely. And use the condiments, the shoyu or soy sauce and wasabi hot green horse radish, sparingly. Focus on the ingredients in your sushi, piece by piece. Don't dip the rice in the sauce. Dip the edge of the top ingredient in the sauce. Savoring the natural delicacy of the fresh fish is, after all, the point of sushi and sashimi. I tend to use very little, if any, soy sauce, as the combination of flavored rice, fish, and wasabi is just right for me.
The next question is what to eat. Logic dictates that you start with the mildest-tasting fish, and work your way up to stronger-flavored ones. White-fleshed fish and shellfish are milder than red or oily fish, so by color let's say white, red, and then the so-called blue fish. In between courses you can clean your palate with the provided slices of pickled ginger.
When you think you're just about 80% full, which takes your body about 20 minutes to signal, order a bowl of akadashi or red-stock miso soup.
Whether you're going out temple-shrine-history viewing, or just to picnic and enjoy the scenery, sushi is the perfect picnic food. Just remember to keep it cool and to eat it fairly soon after buying it. Your best bet is the basement floor of any decent big department store. Or just go to the biggest supermarket you can find and search for the best sushi you can find (plus everything else you need for a great picnic). For outings chirashi-zushi, or "scattered" sushi, is ideal. Think sushi rice sprinkled with a variety of things, such as thin omelette slivers, cooked and sweetened shiitake mushrooms, fish flakes, cooked shrimp, and sometimes pieces of sashimi. All this flavor and colorful wonder comes neatly and compactly packaged in a cardboard box to go.
The rest of this post consists of two great interviews.
Content by Ian Martin Ropke, owner of Your Japan Private Tours (est. 1990). I have been planning, designing, and making custom Japan private tours on all five Japanese islands since the early 1990s. I work closely with Japan private tour clients and have worked for all kinds of families, companies, and individuals since 1990. Clients find me mostly via organic search, and I advertise my custom Japan private tours & travel services on www.japan-guide.com, which has the best all-Japan English content & maps in Japan! If you are going to Japan and you understand the advantages of private travel, consider my services for your next trip. And thank you for reading my content. I, Ian Martin Ropke (unique on Google Search), am also a serious nonfiction and fiction writer, a startup founder (NexussPlus.com), and a spiritual wood sculptor. Learn more!
A Talk with Kinzo Tanaka: A 98-year-old professional men’s kimono maker
This interview took place in August, 2001 in Mr. Kinzo Tanaka's apartment in the Yamashina valley, just east of the Gion geisha district. He was 98 and yet . . .
YJPT: How did you get started in the men’s kimono-making business?
Mr. Tanaka: My father was a hakama maker and I took over from him. He taught me everything I know. My father was one of the best kimono tailors in Tokyo. He even had a special license to make kimono coat collars. When he got that license things became very, very busy in our house, because kimono coats with European collars were all the rage then.
I started studying my trade from a very early age. By the time I was 17, I was already working fulltime. For men, this was fairly common. Most of us didn’t go to high school. But I studied English reading and writing in when I was a middle-school boy. Never did learn to speak though [he laughs].
YJPT: What was it like growing up in the days before electricity?
Mr. Tanaka: When I was young, we used oil lamps. And almost nobody had a bath at home. We all went to the local sento [public bath], which were big, exciting centers of the community in those days. Going to the bath house was cheap too!. To get in, you only had to pay 5 sen [one sen in one-tenth of one yen]. Everything was cheap back then.
YJPT: What was the worst experience of your life?
Mr. Tanaka: The worst experience of my life was the Kanto Dai Shinsai [The Great Tokyo Earthquake] which happened in September, 1923. Over 100,000 people died and most of the city was destroyed. I was living with my 7 sisters and brothers at the time, and as the oldest son, I had to take care of the family. I was only 20 years old.
YJPT: What was the best experience of your life?
Mr. Tanaka: If I had to answer that, and you know it’s not an easy question for anyone, especially someone who has lived as long as I have, I would have to say that the happiest days of my life were when I was in my 40’s. After the earthquake I moved to Kyoto to help my younger brother. He was a successful actor and in those days the center of the Japanese film industry was in Kyoto.
It was very exciting for me to be able to be in the film world through my brother. It was so much fun, that I took a 15-year break from kimono making to become my brother’s assistant. Those were great times. It was so thrilling to be involved in the romantic and always changing world of movie stars, directors and film. I even got to meet the head of one of Japan’s leading studios at that time.
At the end of the war, my brother worked on a film in China and Korea. I travelled with him. Towards the end of the film, the situation became quite unstable so I hurried back to Japan. I returned to Japan on the Hikawa-maru. That boat is now docked in Yokohama. It’s a restaurant! Life is strange.
YJPT: What do you think are the secrets to staying young and healthy?
Mr. Tanaka: I am 98 years old. I guess the secret is being regular, having regular habits. I am one of the most regular guys in the world. I work steadily every day until ten or eleven, even now. I always get up around seven. I usually start work, in this room, around nine. I take breaks for lunch. But mostly, I am just stitch away. I don’t take holidays, except on special occasions.
My food habits have, however, changed a bit. I don’t have any teeth now. So my favorite food is hamburger, because it is so soft. I also love crab meat. I never eat too much of anything. Just enough.
Basically, I love my work and gardening. I have quite a few bonsai that I tend, and I have been raising morning glories, and other flowering plants for nearly 40 years. I have won quite a few awards for my plants. I also teach the elderly at a nearby nursing home how to raise morning glories, chrysanthemum and irises. I have been doing that for 18 years. I still go.
With the kind of morning glories that I grow there is only one flower: one very big flower. The biggest beauty I ever raised was 28 centimeters wide. To get it right, the timing of the fertilizer is the key. Lately, though, it is becoming difficult for me to work with the plants alone. The pots are getting too heavy for me.
YJPT: It’s amazing that you still work. Where do you get your orders from?
Mr. Tanaka: Most of my customers are private individuals. But I occasionally get orders from companies. But the work is slowly fading away. Very few people, as you probably know, wear kimono anymore, especially men. But there are still people who come to me. I have special skills. I can make men’s kimonos exactly like they used to be made at the end of the 19th century, or in the 1920s. I am the only one left in Japan, I think, that can make those old, classic styles. One of my customers said that my kimono fit him like his own skin.
YJPT: Why don’t Japanese people, especially men, wear kimono anymore?
Mr. Tanaka: Very few Japanese nowadays live double lives. By double life, I mean a life that is both modern and connected to the old Japanese ways. Of course, some people lead double lives. Some men and women practice tea ceremony or flower arrangment seriously and for that they sometimes or often have to wear a kimono. But such double people, as I like to call them, are rare. Everyone else, which nowadays means almost everyone, has no idea how to put on a kimono. If you don’t know how to put on a kimono yourself, which hardly no one does, then you have to pay a pro about ¥10,000 for the 40 to 90 minutes it takes to properly put on a kimono. That’s simply too expensive and far too inconvenient and troublesome for the average person. Western cloths are much easier to wear. And kimono are difficult to clean.
YJPT: What do you think about the younger Japanese generation today?
Mr. Tanaka: They are very selfish, and seem to have no patience at all. They have no manners either, or morals, or ethics. Many of them seem cold and empty to me. When we were young, we had respect for and generally were a little afraid of our teachers, and parents. Before the war, Japan’s problems were completely different. There wasn’t much crime. Everyone respected their elders. After the war, things began to change quickly. We took on more and more Western ways and we somehow slowly, but surely, forgot thousands of years of traditional living.
YJPT: What is the difference between the old days and now?
Mr. Tanaka: I think that people nowadays are not as warmhearted or caring. In the old days, we were very careful about these things and we made great efforts to teach these things to our children in school and at home. I don’t really think there is anything about modern Japan that I think is really good or admirable. The war changed everything in a tremendous, very deep way. For someone like me, and most people of my generation, it has been a shocking thing to watch this change.
YJPT: What do you think about traditional Kyoto?
Mr. Tanaka: I think Kyoto’s pottery traditions will survive, because we use pottery on a daily basis. But the clay we use for our ceramics are getting hard to find in Japan. Most of it is now imported from China. This also changes the feel of the work.
And Kyoto cuisine will also survive. Kimono may survive too, but I don’t know in what way. But I don’t think very much else of traditional Kyoto culture will survive. The pressure of the modern world and the car and the phone and all those things are simply too great.
Sept. 2001 interview with Ian Shortreed, Mercury Software Japan Inc.
This September 2001 interview with Ian Shortreed was to promote Ian's updated Kyoto Garden CD ROM, and I was happy to help. Ian Shortreed, who is from Canada, has lived in Kyoto for more than 40 years. His company, Mercury Software, Japan, localizes and republishes consumer-related software in the Japanese market. Mercury Software has been particulary useful in the Apple software worlds but also others. Ian Shortreed is one of the most jovial and positive individuals I have ever met.
YJPT: What brought you to Japan?
IS: I first came to Japan to study Japanese. I was also really interested in Zen and Kyoto was the natural place to do that. I don’t sit meditation anymore, but I have continued to maintain a deep interest in Zen Buddhism and gardening.
YJPT: How is the second edition of the Kyoto Gardens CD-ROM different from the first version?
IS: Basically, we rewrote the software for the second edition from scratch so it could run on QuickTime 5.0 and the Windows operating system. Now everything runs much faster. We basically re-sampled all the data, added a bunch of interesting notes and essays about the gardens. The first version was good, given the technology available at the time, but the second edition ‘rocks’.
YJPT: What’s on the CD and how did you create it?
IS: The ‘walk through’ is created with a normal analog camera. In each garden space, 18 shots are taken which comprises a single node. These are then seamlessly joined together with a special software program and we repeat this process until we have mapped the whole garden.
For the photographs, we brought over an old friend of mine, Paul Scrivener, from Victoria, British Columbia, who is a dedicated garden photographer. He was in Kyoto for 6 months shooting every day. Paul had an incredible eye for the gardens. He somehow managed to capture what the Japanese refer to as ‘wabi-sabi’, that absolutely perfect moment when nature looks like a painting, yet no hand has touched the canvas.
Preston Houser did all the background research and that was a huge job. On the surface, the gardens we selected look simple enough, however, when you start researching them, you find layers and layers of information with different layers connected with different lines of monks and garden designers.
Gardens relate to so many things. There is Buddhist history, Kyoto history and then the actual history of Rinzai Zen itself. Preston hunted it all down and turned it into a superb textual guide. And to really appreciate these gardens you need to know this kind of information because these are a lot more than just gardens.
They are, in short, symbols of life and wisdom. Rinzai Zen gardens are maintained and cared for by Zen monks. It is part of their practice. In this way, the gardens are both ancient and yet very much alive. They play an active, ongoing role in Zen mental training.
Also on the CD, we have 5 essays by well known Buddhist scholars who live and work here in Kyoto. There is a fine translation of original Zen texts done by an Urrs App, a scholar of classical Chinese Buddhism. We also have an essay by Tom Wright who has been practicing and teaching Soto Zen in Kyoto for 30 years. Mark Keane, a professional Japanese gardener designer who did his gardening apprenticeship here in Kyoto contributed an essay that is rich in insight and experience.
So, all in all, we really have an excellent range of people on the CD-ROM with first-hand knowledge of Japanese gardens and Zen Buddhism which is not easy to pickup. Sure there are lots of different books about these subjects, but this CD-ROM is unique in that you have a very specific body of knowledge illuminated by experienced scholars all based here in Kyoto.
YJPT: How did you get the idea to do this unusual CD ROM in the first place?
IS: When QuickTime VR was announced at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose in 1995, I was in the audience. And I immediately realized that this technology would be perfect for ‘walk throughs’ of geometric spaces like Zen gardens, especially the old Rinzai gardens. As a pretty serious student of Zen for over 20 years, Zen gardens have always fascinated me. So it was a perfect marriage between a technology I understood and a non-technological world I loved.
We showed the first version of this CD-ROM at E3 in Los Angeles in 1996. It was the first commercial CD-ROM in the world to be shipped using QuickTime VR.
Unfortunately, since the first version only ran on Macintosh machines we had a very limited market. Now that Apple has successfully ported QuickTime to the Windows platform, we hope this second edition will get in front of a lot more eyeballs. You’ve got to remember, Apple only represents 3% of the world market. When we launched this new version last month, we shipped quite a few units for placement in 64 bookstores throughout Japan which was a great way to kick things off.
Having said that, though, I should add that we never expected to retire on this project. This was clearly a work of love!
YJPT: What does your company do to make money?
IS: We make most of our money off of a multi-lingual word-processing package called Nisus Writer, written in the U.S. by Nisus Software. Basically we function as a product manager here for the Asian versions of the software. Nisus is perfect for people working with two languages simultaneously. Right now, it is one of the few remaining word processors that competes with Microsoft Word. Naturally, our market share is quite a bit smaller.
We have also authored a couple of other products including an outlining software package called iLiner that summarizes articles into outlines automatically. We also have a lightening-fast Japanese-English dictionary which we are now trying to get on the DoCoMo imode wireless telephone service.
YJPT: Do you think Kyoto is a high-tech center?
IS: This is not something you have to think about. Kyoto is Japan’s high-tech center! There’s Nintendo which controls a lot of the world’s game software and hardware. There’s Omron, Kyocera and Rohm which control 80% of the world’s IC chip casing market. All of Matsushita’s international computing research is done at a facility near Kyoto Station. Sharp does all of their PDA research and design near Kyoto. Dai Nippon Screen is basically the best in the world for color separation, and is used for nearly all high-end printing worldwide. Horiba is considered to be one of the best companies in the world for building chip lines. Kyoto basically has the highest concentration of hardware related technologies in Japan. The city is an exciting place to work and play: you have the old and new right beside each other. Never a boring moment, as they say.
YJPT: What is the most exciting thing happening in Kyoto for you right now?
IS: One interesting thing that has happened recently is the phenomenal popularity of machiya townhouses as places to set up great Japanese restaurants. Part of the trend has to do with the incredible low land prices since the bubble burst in the early 90’s. Basically land values have gone down so much that owners don’t want to sell. For tax purposes they could level the place and turn it into a parking lot. Luckily for us, many of these places have been rented out and renovated into wonderful inexpensive, innovative very stylish restaurants. The area north of Oike between Kawaramachi and Karasuma, called Nakagyo-ku, has lots of these places. I walk through the area in the evenings after work as often as I can. This is a great area for visitors to explore to get a feel for the old Kyoto which is fast disappearing somewhat like an endangered species.
- Indexed full list of all my blog posts | articles.
- Indexed full list of all my Japanese culture essays.
Content by Ian Martin Ropke, owner of Your Japan Private Tours (est. 1990). I have been planning, designing, and making custom Japan private tours on all five Japanese islands since the early 1990s. I work closely with Japan private tour clients and have worked for all kinds of families, companies, and individuals since 1990. Clients find me mostly via organic search, and I advertise my custom Japan private tours & travel services on www.japan-guide.com, which has the best all-Japan English content & maps in Japan! If you are going to Japan and you understand the advantages of private travel, consider my services for your next trip. And thank you for reading my content. I, Ian Martin Ropke (unique on Google Search), am also a serious nonfiction and fiction writer, a startup founder (NexussPlus.com), and a spiritual wood sculptor. Learn more!