Rice, Noodle, Fish by Matt Goulding Read Free Book Online Page B

city”; other guidebooks have similarly grim tidings to share with readers.
    But Osaka doesn’t seem to mind. After 1,500 years of wildly yo-yoing fortunes, the city has developed something of a thick skin. In 645 Emperor Kotoku bestowed upon Osaka, then known as Naniwa, the honor of being Japan’s first capital, only to abruptly move the government seat to Asuka just ten years later. In 744 Osaka was once again the capital of Japan, but this stint was even shorter: by 745 Nara had taken up the mantle as Japan’s political center.
    Come the sixteenth century, Osaka was back on center stage. In 1590 Hideyoshi Toyotomi, considered Japan’s second great unifier, completed construction of Osaka Castle, the largest and grandest castle in the country. His son and successor, Hideyori, chose Osaka as his base, but his rival Ieyasu Tokugawa had other ideas. He laid siege to the castle in 1615, driving Hideyori and his mother to suicide, and established as Japan’s capital Edo, which lives on today as modern-day Tokyo.
    Osaka remained an important commercial center but suffered a series of blows over the next three centuries,including a peasant uprising in 1855 that razed a quarter of the city, and the brunt of the American attack on the Kansai region during World War II. The Americans may have spared nearby Kyoto, but they hit Osaka with the full force of their firebombing campaign, taking aim at the city’s railways and extensive industrial complex. Two thousand tons of bombs and ten thousand lives later, the city was reduced to a skeleton of its former self. The rebuild was hasty and in some ways haphazard, robbing Osaka of the pockets of old-world charm that contrast so brilliantly with the modernity in most of Japan’s largest cities.
    One thing that never changed in millennia of misfortune: Osaka’s place as the eating center of Japan. Osaka earned the moniker “the nation’s kitchen” as early as the fifteenth century, when its privileged position on the Osaka Bay created a rich, thriving merchant class with the means to eat well (even today mokarimakka , “Are you making money?” is a standard greeting in local dialect). Rice, seaweed, and other staples arrived from all parts of Japan, sent by feudal lords to sell in Osaka’s massive system of commodity markets. The city also served as an entry point for Chinese, Korean, and other foreign ships bearing important edible cargo, deepening Osaka’s place as a breeding ground for new tastes and big appetites. The table was set for a feast that continues today.
    I’ve barely finished my bento from Tokyo Station when I step off the train in Osaka’s Tenma district. Yuko Suzuki, a friend who works with high-end food producers in her adopted city, meets me at the station, and we plunge directly into Tenma’s narrow, snaking streets in search of sustenance. Yuko was born to undertake these types of high-calorie missions; not only can she direct you to the city’s best place for duck soba but she can also tell you where the restaurant buys its duck and how it grinds its buckwheat.
    Our first stop is Tsugie, a smoky pocket square of a bar built around a large charcoal grill covered in unfamiliar anatomy. Tsugie serves horumonyaki , an Osaka specialty focusing on offal and other off-cuts left behind by most restaurants (and cities with less discerning palates). “In Kyoto, they’d throw this stuff away,” Yuko says as we settle into a corner of the bar, “but in Osaka it’s the star of the meal.”

    Grilling odd cow parts at Tsugie, one of Osaka’s many offal dispensaries
    (Michael Magers, lead photographer)
    Yuko tells me about the breed of young Osakan restaurateurs, the kind who have bucked the austere traditions of Japanese restaurant culture to focus on more pressing priorities, namely fun and deliciousness. That means open kitchens, louder music, more banter, less staff, bigger