Look inside my lucky bag

At the beginning of every year, most Japanese retailers sell fukubukuro “lucky bags” filled with excess merchandise they want to unload. Customers can’t see what is inside the bags, but it is generally understood that the price of one bag will be much lower than the ordinary price of its contents. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

You could look at this as a combination of two vices: retail therapy and gambling. Or, if the price isn’t too high, you could look at is as a harmless bit of silly fun.

Over the many New Year’s seasons I have passed in Japan, I have merely looked on at this phenomenon with puzzlement. But this year I actually bought a lucky bag for the first time.

Japan is divided into 47 prefectures, and the governments of most (probably all) of them maintain “antenna shops” in Tokyo that showcase local products and promote tourism. I recently visited the Iwate Prefecture antenna shop in Ginza, hoping to buy a new soy sauce flavored dessert that I had read was being produced in that prefecture. There were none available, but I did see lucky bags on sale.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have given the bags a second glance, but Iwate is one the three prefectures hardest hit by last year’s tsunami, which makes me think that buying frivolous Iwate products is a way to do an economic good deed while also being self-indulgent. Besides, the price was amusing and not too high: 2,012 yen.

Although I couldn’t see inside the bags, there was nothing to stop me from picking several of them up one after another to see how heavy they were. The Iwate antenna store sells many types of local sake and microbrew beer, and I was hoping that a heavier bag might indicate some of those goodies inside. Each bag did seem heavy enough to contain at least one can or bottle, but more than that I couldn’t tell. I picked a bag at random and hoped for the best.

In retrospect, since there was no notice prohibiting people below the age of 20 from buying the bags, I was foolish to hope for alcohol. Here’s what I did get:

Top row

A handkerchief with a poem printed on it. The poem is by Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), one of the most famous people to come from Iwate.
A bag of rusks – slices of bread baked a second time to become hard and long-lasting. Rusks are a Western invention, used long ago to provision ships, but Japan is the only country I have ever seen them in.
Jajamen – fat udon noodles with chunky, spicy sauce. This bag contains servings for two.

Middle row

“Seagull egg” petit fours – little round cakes with a white chocolate shell and yellow anko filling.
Youkan – a thick, heavy, gelatinous, bean-based confection that in this case has a sesame flavor.
Soba noodles.

Bottom row

Horohorozuke – spicy minced vegetable pickles to put on top of rice.
Pickled wakame seaweed snacks – rubbery and sour.
A mixture of a dozen types of grain, including millet, barley and amaranth, to mix into plain white rice before cooking to make it more interesting.

Was it worth it?

On the one hand, the usual retail prices of these items probably add up to about twice the amount I paid. I do intend to eat and/or share all of the food items shown above. As for the handkerchief, I have a friend may have a bit of an interest in Miyazawa, so I’ll probably give it to that person.

On the other hand, NONE of these items are things I would have chosen to buy if I could have seen them first.

Such is the nature of lucky bags.

Purple potatoes

A little over a year ago, I wrote a blog post that mentioned a purple potato salad I had found sold as a dessert item in a supermarket just outside of Tokyo. (See it here.) A little over a month ago, a reader posted a comment asking where he could buy the purple potatoes themselves in Japan.

Ever since then, I’ve had my eye peeled for murasaki imo, as the colorful spuds are called, every time I set foot in a grocery store’s produce section. But I had no luck.

Then, a wise person suggested that I try the basement food halls of the Mitsukoshi Department store in Ginza. Sure enough, there was a specialty produce corner on floor B3 where murasaki imo were avaiable. They were labeled as produce of Chiba Prefecture.

At 100 yen for 100 grams, these are probably the most expensive potatoes I have ever purchased. The two smallest ones, shown here, cost me a total of 403 yen (about U.S.$5.25 or four euros).

If I had been feeling ambitious as well as extravagant, I could have used them to make a colorful bisque, but instead I simply baked them to serve as a side dish to meat.

I have to report that the main pleasure this vegetable offered was visual. The flavor wasn’t too different from that of an ordinary sweet potato. (If anything, it was blander.) I had to load it up with butter, honey and a generous dusting of cinnamon to make it satisfactorily interesting.

Still, if you are having guests over, murasaki imo might make an interesting conversation piece, especially if you serve them in their skins so that the purple color isn’t revealed until your guests cut into them.

Finally, just for the record, I should mention that you can also buy murasaki imo powder online in Japan through sites including Amazon and Rakuten.

A new way to use a yuzu

A yuzu is a fragrant Japanese citrus fruit that looks like an orange but has a mild lemon-lime flavor. The one in the photo above is a rather pretty specimen, as yuzu are often lumpy and sometimes oddly shaped.

Bits of the rind are used to flavor the ozoni soup that is traditionally eaten at New Year’s, and yuzu is also used to scent hot baths in this season.

I recently learned a new way to use a yuzu, thanks to Tamako Sakamoto’s “Taste of Home” cooking column in The Daily Yomiuri. Her latest installment includes several yuzu recipes, and the one for yuzu madeleines sounded like something I just had to try.

Here are my results:

The recipe calls for two tablespoons of yuzu juice, but the baseball-sized specimen I used yielded just a little bit less than that amount. (Yuzu are juicy, but less so than other citrus fruits, and they have very large seeds that take up space inside.) I compensated by adding extra grated rind, and the citrus flavor came through loud and clear in the finished product.

Getting the madeleines out of their pans was a little difficult, but this is probably because I didn’t butter the pans before pouring the batter in. Since the batter itself is nearly one-third butter, I thought it wouldn’t be necessary. Live and learn. They still tasted delicious.

Read Sakamoto-san’s yuzu recipes here.

Asian zodiac animals

Two days from now, the Year of the Rabbit (2011) will end in Japan, and the Year of the Dragon (2012) will begin. To mark this occasion, I made this silly little video introducing all twelve zodiac animals in the order of their upcoming appearances.

Intellectual property fight: A tale of two cookies

Last month, Hokkaido-based Ishiya Co. sued Yoshimoto Kogyo Co. for trademark infringement. Ishiya has been selling its “Shiroi Koibito” cookies since 1976, and Yoshimoto Kogyo began selling “Omoshiroi Koibito” cookies last year.

The name of the original cookies means “white lover.” The new cookies have nearly the same name, except that the addition of an extra character at the beginning changes “shiroi” (white) to “omoshiroi” (funny). Yoshimoto Kogyo is an Osaka-based entertainment company best known for its comedians. So if you might find a “white” lover in snowy Hokkaido, perhaps you’d find a “funny” lover in Osaka.

Shiroi Koibito cookies are famous in Japan. If one of your coworkers in this country takes a trip to Hokkaido, there’s a good chance they’ll bring Shiroi Koibito cookies back as an omiyage treat. According to an article in The Daily Yomiuri, the Shiroi Koibito name has been trademarked since 1980, and its packaging has been trademarked since 2004. The brand managed to maintain its popularity even after an expiration-date mislabelling scandal described in a Japan Times article from 2008. According to an article in the Mainichi Daily News, Ishiya sold 7.2 billion yen (more than 90 million U.S. dollars) worth of the cookies in fiscal 2010.

Ishiya says some people have accidentally purchased Omoshiroi Koibito cookies after mistaking them for Shiroi Koibito cookes. It is easy to see how this might happen. The name of the new cookies is nearly identical to the original cookies, and the packaging is extremely similar.

However, a spokesperson for Yoshimoto Kogyo said the company was “bewildered” by the lawsuit against it. Perhaps this remark was meant to be omoshiroi.

The packaging may be confusingly similar, but the cookies are surprisingly different.

One of my coworkers brought a box of each type to the office recently, and I sampled them both. Ishiya’s original Shiroi Koibito is the small square cookie in the photo above. It consists of two buttery langue de chat cookies, baked until brown at the edges, sandwiching a small tablet of either white or dark chocolate. Yoshimoto Kogyo’s Omoshiroi Koibito is the large round cookie. It consists of two thin waffle cookies sandwiching a layer of maple cream that smelled and tasted like it was artificial.

I don’t claim to be an authority Japanese intellectual property law, but I am interested in seeing how this case plays out in court. My gut tells me Ishiya should win.

My taste buds tell me they already have.

Architecture alert! Go see Tod’s while you can

A defining characteristic of the Tokyo cityscape is that it is always changing. Stay away from any given neighborhood for a few months, and you may not recognize it when you go back. I was reminded of this for the 9,000th time a few days ago when I walked along the Omotesando shopping street for the first time in quite a while and saw what was happening around the Tod’s building.

Since its completion in 2004, the Tod’s building has been a major landmark of the area, and a darling of architectural critics. It was the designed for the precise spot on which it stands, but that spot is now changing around it.

As the Tokyo flagship store for a luxury Italian shoe brand, this building had a mission to be eye-catching, but the facade had to be squeezed into a narrow sliver of street frontage. Architect Toyo Ito’s design, however, doesn’t look squeezed at all. The building’s exterior is more window than wall, especially near ground level.

The building is criscrossed by seemingly random strips of concrete that, at second glance, turn out not to be random at all. A few thick pieces at ground level branch out and become thinner as they climb skyward, just like the trunk and branches of the zelkova trees that famously line the boulevard out front. (In Tokyo, a tree-lined street is something of a novelty, and Omotesando is by far the most famous one.)

Watch this video I quickly shot the other day and see if you think the design works for you.

When the Tod’s building was new, a video with these views would have been impossible. The building sits on an L-shaped peice of land, with most of its bulk set back from the street. Until recently, an unrelated building standing in the crook of the L (which you can see on the second page of this presentation) prevented Omotesando pedestrians from seeing much of Tod’s sides.

But now that other building has been torn down.

With its neighbor out of the way, you can now see two more of Tod’s walls – each bigger than the front — and thus appreciate an otherwise hard-to-discern aspect of Ito’s design. He took one silhouette of one tree and repeated it at irregular intervals to create a forest motif that wraps all the way around the building in one continous pattern.

But these views won’t last.  According to signs posted on construction barriers, a new 8-story retail building is set to go up in the crook of the L. The planned completion date is April of 2013. And right next door, on an even larger lot that is slightly uphill, work has begun to build a 9-story office and retail building. In a further sign of how quickly Tokyo changes, there is another active construction site right across the street, and even the famous Kiddy Land toy store nearby has been demolished to make way for a new incarnation of itself.

So if you want to see the Tod’s building’s wraparound design with your own eyes, don’t wait too long. This chance may never come again.

2011 Tokyo Truck Show

Today was the opening day of the 2011 Tokyo Truck Show, so I dropped by the Tokyo Big Sight convention center to have a look. At the time of this post, the show has two days left.

There were dozens of trucks on display, many inside the exhibition halls and even more parked in a large fenced area outside. In addition to the standard cab-in-front-of-a-box arrangement, there were a great many specialized trucks to examine, including tanker trucks, dump trucks, garbage trucks, tow trucks, the car carrier in the photo above (which looks even cooler to my eye than the snazzy sports cars it has aboard) and the giant vacuum-cleaner truck in the photo below.

Most of the trucks just sat there, gleaming, but a few put on demonstrations, such as the logging trucks equipped with robot arms in this video:

Perhaps because this is a trade show aimed at representatives of companies (even though it is open to the public), there was no trace of Japan’s fantastically individualistic deco-tora decorated truck subculture. However, I did see one truck that had some artwork on its side:

Walking around to the other side of the truck, I discovered the amazing machine that had been used in creating this artwork. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. It was the biggest ink-jet printer I have ever seen in my life:

The drive-in printer, made by the Tokyo-based LAC Corporation, is called an Auto Body Printer in Japanese, and Vehicle Art Robo in English. According to the company’s website, the same technology is also used to print designs on refrigerators, surfboards, suitcases and cell phones – basically anything with a hard surface. It takes just under two and a half hours to complete a 10 meter by two meter image.

The printer was just one piece of truck-related merchandise on display. Other exhibitors were promoting everything from leaf springs to drivers’ uniforms. The Tokai Denshi company, based in Fuji, Shizuoka Prefecture, was demonstrating its ALC-Lock device (photo below) that will prevent a driver from starting a truck while drunk.

Two other devices impressed me with the idea that there is always room for innovation, even regarding the most everyday objects or situations.

For drivers who have to spend the night sleeping in the back of their cabs, the Tokyo-based firm Taiyo Kogyo, aka Mak Max, will introduce next year an inflatable sleeping bag attached to a personal air conditioner. According to the company’s website, their other inflatable products include Tokyo Dome. (No, that’s not a typo. Taiyo Kogyo specializes in membranes as a building material.)

And the Moriyama Tekkou company has taken a device so simple it would seem impervious to further design – the wheeled dolly – and redesigned it. Their new, lightweight dolly folds up into a compact package resembling a trumpet case. A member of the staff at their booth was kind enough to let me make a video of her demonstrating it:

I was especially taken with item this because I used to use dollies and hand trucks long ago in my 1980s summer job as a mover. Not surprisingly, a lot of things at the truck show brought back memories of my moving days. When we movers were not actually out on the trucks, we would be put to work in the warehouse, where a van would stop by each day selling sandwiches, drinks and snacks that we’d buy for lunch. We called it “the roach coach” (which must have been an ancient joke even then), and it looked something like this:

The truck in this photo was displayed at the show by Ohpado, a Yokohama-based company whose website shows them to specialize in baked goods rather than trucks per se. In fact, I have once or twice glimpsed such a truck selling baked goods to office workers in Ginza. Perhaps it was an Ohpado truck. In any case, despite the nickname we gave the van, my fellow movers and I eagerly ate many of its sandwiches back in the day, and the pastries shown at Ohpado’s website look like they’d be quite nice.

Want to go?

The 2011 Tokyo Truck Show runs through Saturday, Oct. 29, at the Tokyo Big Sight convention center. The hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and admission is 1,000 yen. It is not aimed at children, but I did notice one man there with his very small son, and I think a kid who likes trucks would get a kick out of seeing so many in one place. The show is entirely in Japanese.

A little Tokyo nightlife with Bob Arnold

Singer-songwriter Bob Arnold was part of the entertainment this past Sunday night when I went to a book launch party for “Calling All Shadows” at What the Dickens, a British-style pub in Ebisu, Tokyo.

Bob is friend of mine, so I won’t pretend to be an impartial observer, but I always enjoy his songs.

Bob is a versatile lyricist whose work ranges from the silly (Toe Jam”) to the profound (“The Beautiful Americans”). He also touches many points of the spectrum in between. Some of his songs make you think, and many of them make you smile.

His short set on Sunday tended toward the cheerfully playful side of his oeuvre. In the videos below, he plays “Suzy’s Just a Little Floozy” with accompaniment by a Canadian flautist, and “Mike Rides a Bike,” a new song he was performing in public for the first time.

“Calling All Shadows”

This past Sunday night I went to a book launch party for “Calling All Shadows,” a collection of 97 photos by Leigh Norrie with poetry by Adam Touhrig on the facing pages. Leigh is a friend of mine, so I won’t pretend to be an impartial observer.

Nonetheless I will say that I was impressed by the moody quality of his photos, which are mostly black-and-white and were taken in a variety of melancholy places around Japan, plus a few in Britain. Leigh shows us waves crashing on a desolate coast…a cast-off store mannequin lurching zombie-like through a rice field where it was repurposed as a scarecrow…and a couple of nocturnal street scenes from the city of Fukushima, with not a soul in sight.

“Fukushima” is a name most people outside of Japan had never heard last year, but now the emptiness of the streets in Leigh’s photos will be striking to almost everyone.

One of the few color photos in the book is of the Nagasaki peace statue. When personified, “Peace” usually appears as a graceful woman, but the Nagasaki statue is a muscular man in a dynamic pose. Leigh photographed him as a slightly wavy reflection in some rain-slicked paving tiles. In this image, Peace, seemingly sealed off under a blue glaze, looks distant and unreal. Leigh took a concrete representation of an abstraction, and made it abstract again.

Many of the pictures have been manipulated in deliberately noticeable ways, mostly around the edges. In one example, a jumbo roller-coaster car with passengers sitting eight abreast has just begun a steep plunge at the top of the photo. The space around it is bleached as white as the surrounding page, so that the car and tracks seem to be hovering in infinite space. And the tracks below and ahead fade raggedly into the nothingness like the trailing end of a calligrapher’s brush stroke. Where will the passengers be a moment from now?

“Calling All Shadows” is available through Printed Matter Press at printedmatterpress.com

Ginza lunch: Furutoshi

In every section Tokyo, you can usually find at least one building that is under construction or renovation. I’ve had my eye on the under-construction Solaria Hotel in Ginza for some time now, and last week it finally opened. More to the point, its restaurant opened.

The restaurant, Furutoshi, is on the second floor, and the rough-hewn wood in the stairwell leading up from its street-level entrance still smelled freshly cut when I stopped in on Sunday. A stone plaque on the landing revealed that the restaurant is not entirely new: It has just moved to Ginza after a decade of business in the upscale Tokyo neighborhood of Azabu.

The décor is very airy and relaxing. Furutoshi has floor-to-ceiling windows along the entirety of two walls, looking out onto some Ginza side streets. It’s decorated with a variety of art, including two textile collages hanging in glass frames against one of the windows.

Lunch begins with an “appetizer buffet,” a few selections from which you can see in the photo above. I had to go back for seconds on the carpaccio, and I was very impressed by the ordinary-looking but highly flavorful broccoli florets, whose dark tips tasted as if they had been well sautéed in spicy oil even while the stems remained matchstick-crisp. There was also a tureen of a creamy and mild gray-flannel mushroom soup.

There were two options for the main course at the time of my Sunday visit: duck with orange sauce or wagyu beef cheek in a faintly sweet red wine sauce. As you can see from the photo, I chose the beef, which came in a generous portion nearly the size of my fist. My place had been set with a butter knife, but the beef was cooked to such softness that even that dull blade almost fell through it.

This was an expensive lunch. On weekends, lunch at Furutoshi is 2,500 yen, which I confess is a lot more than I normally pay for a midday meal. A member of the staff told me that on weekdays the price is reduced to 1,800 yen, but the main dish on those days is pasta.

By the time I finished my main course, though, I felt I had gotten my money’s worth. And then came dessert.

Or perhaps I should say, then came desserts. When the waiter brought me a platter of five items, I thought I was supposed to pick one, and I was astonished when he left them all for me. Each was nice in its own way, but the grapefruit at upper left in this photo was especially memorable since it taught me the surprising lesson that fresh rosemary goes wonderfully well with that particular fruit.

Furutoshi info
Address: 2nd floor, 4-9-2 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061
Phone: (03) 5565-0577
Website: http://www.solaria-hotels.jp/ginza/restaurant/

A note on the Solaria Hotel: The Ginza location is the second hotel to be opened under this brand name. The first is in Fukuoka, and a third Solaria Hotel will be opened in Kagoshima in 2012. While the brand may be new, it is actually part of the well-established Nishitestsu Hotel Group.