豊川市

My adopted hometown is called 豊川 or Toyokawa-shi.  Toyo is a word most often translated to mean “rich,” but in a non-financial way.  It is, perhaps, most accurately “plentiful.”  Kawa is “river.”  As one might imagine, we are situated along the banks of the Toyokawa River in southeastern Aichi Prefecture.  Rather than states, Japan’s smaller administrative regions are prefectures.  Rather than counties, each prefecture is broken into cities.  One might say, I live in Toyokawa or Toyohashi when they actually live in a very small village far from the city center.  It’s confusing for foreigners that are used to the county system, until they realize it’s essentially the same concept.  The largest “cities” in Aichi Prefecture are Toyota and Shinshiro.  The latter is very much a quiet rural area that is sparsely populated.  Speaking in Western terms, Aichi’s largest city is Nagoya.  Nagoya city proper has about 2 million residents while the metropolitan area is around 8-10 million, similar to that of Los Angeles. 

Toyokawa is about an hour from Nagoya and is much smaller, at about 130,000 residents.  For the most part, it has a very suburban feel and is a comfortable and quiet place to live.  However, like in any Japanese city, everything talks.  Crosswalks chirp and women’s voices address you from signs, billboards, elevators, and shampoo displays in drug stores.  Japan itself is a symphony of theme songs, repetitive jingles, voices, and unfamiliar sounds.  In Toyokawa, love hotels, pachinko casinos, and shopping malls glow in the fierce neon colors that one can only find in this country.  Tiny cars zip around crowded streets, young and old cruise the sidewalks on their bicycles, and locals peruse vegetable stands which are as easy to find as a Starbucks in Seattle. 

As in all Japanese cities, there are countless restaurants serving everything from Western-style hamburgers and ice cream to Japanese sashimi and Korean kimchi.  What visitors need to understand is that food in Japan is nothing like food in America.  A dish may include familiar ingredients but, as with all aspects of Japanese life, the preparation is a perfect science.  Many people say that the Japanese have never invented something of their own.  They leave the ideas to Westerners and the Chinese.  What people in this county do best is to take something and work it until it is perfect. 

Food is prepared in the most traditional of ways, presented in the most balanced fashion, and respected to its full worth.  やきとり, yakitori, is one of the most simple and popular of traditional dishes.  The word yakitori, in my mind, means anything edible on a stick.  From chicken, fish, and pork to cartilage, liver, and heart, they do mean ANYTHING.  One sits at a table and orders any variety of things along with a Sapporo or Asahi beer.  The chef, as in most Japanese restaurants, is no ordinary chef.  Eateries here are manned by masters of the form that often prepare each order over a carefully monitored coal fire.  Cooking is more than a job, but an art. Grilling wonderful creations over a uniform fire year after year is something to take pride in, and the restaurant patrons benefit from this pursuit of perfection. No piece is overcooked, no section of flame too hot.  Each mouth-watering dish is prepared and presented in identical fashion. 

The ability to do one thing and only one thing is fascinatingly alien to me; to look at one thing and see many, all but impossible.  The focus, discipline, and respect for the form required to do something perfect is mind boggling.  This is what I most envy and admire about my host nation.  It seems that the longer I’m here, the more acute my senses become.  I see more and hear more.  Maybe this just means my Japanese is improving, or perhaps, just maybe, I’m beginning to see why so many foreigners visit this place and never go home.