Not sure how you want to think of our day. In 13 hours, we went 25 hours into the future. It’s no Dolorean, but we still left on a Monday afternoon to land on Tuesday afternoon without seeing the sunset.
The only stressful part of our vacations was making it to Jiro. If you haven’t seen the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, go and watch it now. I’ll wait. Don’t have the time to watch an 81-minute documentary on one man’s obsession with making the perfect sushi and owning his craft relentlessly? Let me give you the cliff notes version: Man obsessed with doing the best possible sushi with the best ingredients to the point of not doing anything else. He managed to have a three-Michelin-star restaurant in a subway station that seats 10 people.
We didn’t actually make it to the original. We made it to the mirror image managed by the youngest son (Takashi). It’s located in an open-air shopping mall and seats a grand total of 8. Reservations are pretty hard to obtain and must be made by someone local. Through Karine’s wealth of human connections, somebody was kind enough to arrange it for us, but the only available spot was on the day we land, two hours after our expected landing time. We were really worried that a delay would make us miss this vital appointment, and that would be the only stressful part of our trip, we hoped.
I’ll kill the suspense right away and reveal that we made it with time to spare! Google Maps really helped us by providing a picture of the facade. Since there’s very little signage, and it’s all in Japanese, a picture of what you’re looking for really goes a long way. Probably the first time I looked at anything other than the picture of food on Maps.
The experience itself is challenging to describe. The first thing you notice is that, for the six customers present during our service, there were 3 people (including Takashi) behind the bar, at least one other person in the kitchen, and someone at reception. Takashi himself describes everything you get. You’ll hear him one minute giving what seems like a running commentary track in Japanese to his apprentices and the next minute explaining what you’re having, how it’s prepared and how to eat it. The attention to detail is a staple of this place. For example, one of them noticed that Karine was left-handed and immediately rearranged everything in front of her to accommodate it. The food itself is, of course, incredible. It’s hard to describe what makes his sushi so perfect. It goes above the simple fact that the fish is incredibly fresh, of high quality and expertly prepared. You get a range of fish textures and flavours that are utterly unexpected. It’s definitely not a place for a lively conversation while eating; one feels deference is due to the care taken in preparing the food.
After the meal, we decided to walk home. Google predicted a 31-minute walk that turned into an hour, even though we followed the directions diligently and stopped only to take two pictures. The weather was warm, the streets quiet (something unexpected based on the image we had of the city), so it wasn’t all bad to spend more time outside. Still, we’re ending our day with a mission to investigate how reliable the walking time estimates are in Tokyo, and the only way we see we can do that is to go out and explore the city.