Vince and Connie Patchwork often received visitors who were passing through Japan as part of some Asian tour. Vince was patient but slightly exasperated by their one-dimensional view of the country. If they stayed there for a week or less, the Japanese were the most warm-hearted people on the planet. If they remained longer, the locals became the biggest bunch of ratbags the world had ever known. He also knew from past experience that these people would be the most vocal experts on Japan when they returned to Australia, laying blanket fact on blanket fact about the place. He had had similar experiences with Japanese tourists who had lectured him on the finer points of Australian culture, after only five days in the country on a New Zealand/Australia group tour that took in Melbourne, Phillip Island, Sydney and the Gold Coast. For Vince, the more he stayed in the country, the less he could say he knew and he believed that this was the way it should be. Such short-term tourists also assumed that the first cultural accomplishment of anyone in Japan should be the language. He would patiently try to explain that food was the first cultural hurdle anyone had to overcome. They'd look at him with disbelief as they turned up their nose at octopus balls, tuna sushi or natto fermented soya beans. They had seen the McDonald's and the Kentucky Fried Chicken in front of every railway station. It was obvious that western food was more popular here than it was in the west.
Admittedly, the first experience most visitors had of food in Japan was in restaurants. Vince and Connie had been lucky to stay their first week in the country with a family. The mother, Mrs. Suzuki, had insisted on providing Vince with such a wide variety of dishes that he had learned to love Japanese foods, particularly mentaiko with rice and nori laver and oden stew.
If you came at Japanese food through the restaurants of outer Tokyo, you soon discovered that Japanese restaurants fell into two categories - those that plunged you right into the heart of Japan and those that Vince referred to as Tokyo Escapes.
The former could be found everywhere. They were the little ramenya, the sobaya, the teppanyaki shops down narrow alleys, around every corner, all through the underground arcades near the subways. Vince knew enough of these places. He often went to a shabu shabu place with Connie where they dipped finely sliced meat into hot stock and dipping sauce. He had a favourite sushiya where he and the Atsukawas went on a regular basis. It was called Okinozushiya and had introduced Vince to such delicacies as jellyfish and the red akagai shellfish which Osamu warned him were dangerous. He loved soba restaurants with their rich noodle dishes and the refreshing soba cooking juices which he drank afterwards. Vince actually found the tenpura he had tasted in Australia was far better than the normal tenpura served in Japan. This was probably because it was more freshly cooked.
However, for all the restaurants in Yokohama, the one that amazed him most was Ichiban Sakaba. Sakaba really meant pub, in this case, a working man's pub and this was where you found the ordinary grub like the meat pies and pasties of old pubs back home, those ones that didn't feel they had to offer something more culinarily exquisite.
It was a rowdy joint and Connie for one soon realised that she was the only woman there apart from the waitresses. Each table was crammed and there were men waiting at the doors for a vacant seat. Osamu had really romanticised Ichiban Sakaba. The food here was excellent, it was like nothing you'd ever tasted, far better than any food you could get in Australia or America or France. Vince looked around at the other clientele. They hardly looked like connoisseurs, finicketty gourmets. Indeed, they appeared too drunk to even taste the food.
As soon as they were seated, Osamu ordered two platters of horumonyaki, which he told Vince was the finest dish in the house.
Vince would point to an item on the menu and ask what the kanji stood for, "What's that?" "That's cow ovaries, but horumonyaki is much better." "And what about the one below it?" "Pigs' ears, but horumonyaki is much better." ett "And below that?" "Cartilage, but ..." "Yes, I know, but horumonyaki is much better." tte When the two platters of horumonyaki finally did arrive, Connie took one look and promptly excused herself.
"Osamu," she said politely, "I'm not going to eat that. In fact, I'm not even going to look at it. I'm going home." If Osamu was at all upset by Connie's sudden departure, then it was more than made up for by the sight of two magnificent oval plates brimming with horumonyaki. Vince had to admit that he had never seen anything quite like it. It was a slimy substance consisting of cow's liver, stomach and intestine marinated in a sauce that contained more garlic than anything else. You could, Osamu assured him, also get chicken or pork horumonyaki, but he knew that Vince would like this best as westerners traditionally preferred beef.
The platters were as yet raw and Osamu showed Vince how to cook this gooey mix by placing it with chopsticks on the yakinikku grill. Vince hadn't eaten liver or tripe since he was a boy and could remember that they were hardly delicacies. He noted as Osamu placed the offal on the grill that a good part of it oozed through into the tray underneath and burnt to cinders there. Other flacks of cow innards adhered to the grill. Vince wasn't particularly upset by this. In fact, he preferred the thought of losing a sizable portion of his meal in the tray than later in the evening. The very thought of it travelling through his throat twice was enough to turn his stomach.
Osamu drooled as he watched this concoction bubble away sticking to the grill. Before it was even cooked, he had scooped it into a bowl of rice and was bucketing down horumonyaki domburi. Vince took it more tenderly. For someone who prided himself on being able to stomach anything, he felt distinctly queasy. He needn't have worried about the taste. The garlic was too strong. It was the texture that he found harder to take, the chewiness. He had never really liked liver, but now he found himself picking out the pieces of ox-fry to eat. "Oishii ne?" Osamu said, as he ordered yet another platter.
"No, no, no," Vince pleaded, "have some of mine." But Osamu couldn't possibly steal such delicacies out of Vince's mouth. Somehow, Vince managed to get through his one platter of horumonyaki and prevented Osamu who was on his third from ordering him another one.
Quite unwittingly, Vince got his revenge. When they left Ichiban Sakaba, Vince was surprised to discover that it was still only 8:00 p.m. It was time, he announced to Osamu, he tried good old-fashioned, Australian tucker. Osamu might have assumed that he was safe from such delicacies in Yokohama, but, as it turned out, Vince knew just the place only three stops away on the Negishi line. Aussie was indeed just around the corner from Ishikawacho station, very close to Yokohama's fashionable Motomachi Shopping Mall. Of all the Australian pubs Vince had seen in Japan, it was the most fair dinkum. It was the only one that has any Australian staff and the bar was cluttered in true pub style with Australian memorabilia, everything from "Koalas Next Four Kilometres" signs to souvenirs of the 1983 America's Cup win.
Aussie offered a menu that has kept pace with real Australian taste buds. The meat pies, lamb chops and fish'n'chips were there, but so too were calamari and chips, chicken satay, foil baked fish, oysters natural, garlic prawns and roast chicken. And you couldn't beat the Aussie seafood, beef or lamb barbecues.
The manager, Chikako Nakano, had opened the restaurant in 1985 after working in Australia for several years. She always made a point of coming over to talk to Vince, and was always quick to tell him that she wanted to retire in Sydney. Vince had been born in Melbourne and had a natural animosity towards the more northern city. He was never game to enlighten Chikako about this prejudice. Chikako was the first to admit that most Australian food didn't appeal to Japanese tastes. A case in point had to be Osamu himself. He was obviously full to the gills with horumonyaki, but Vince made a point of ordering a good old Aussie meat pie complete with tomato sauce for him to taste. Osamu examined the small bronzed oval thick with pastry with brown meat sauce inside and a dash of read on top for some moments Finally, he prodded it with a fork, "Is this an Australian delicacy?" "Well," Vince admitted, "not exactly. It's to Australians what grilled squid on a stick is to the Japanese, or hot dogs are to the Americans. It's the sort of food you'd eat at the cricket or the footy." "Oh!" Osamu prodded at it again.
In the end, Osamu declined to try the pie and Vince had to eat it. The pie didn't sit well on a full stomach of horumonyaki and he had to admit that it didn't taste the best either. The idea of an Australian restaurant in Japan still fascinated him. Like most Australians, he was bewildered that anyone would want to eat his native food. The final word on Australian food in Yokohama came with the bill. A pie in Australia would cost less than $2.00. Here in Japan, it weighed in at over ?2000. So, Osamu's horumonyaki feast had cost less than ?1500 with four bottles of beer while their half hour stop at Aussie came to over ?4000.