Tokyo Costco

Well, I finally made it to Costco yesterday. Sarah and Robert have been once before, but this was my first visit. Getting there is a bit of an adventure, as it takes 90 minutes by train, and involves several transfers. Ultimately however we arrived, and it was a little slice of home -- well, a Costco sized slice, actually.

When shopping in Japan, you grow accustomed to not recognizing brands and having a difficult time understanding package labeling. Costco is refreshing, in that it's more-or-less just like its American equivalent, right down to the American brands and English labels. The biggest differences we spotted were that the largest package of "bulk flour" is a 3kg box, and the sushi selection is slightly improved:



There is a bit more emphasis on fish in the meat department, and a few other "ethnic" items sprinkled throughout, but on the whole, the Tokyo Costco might have been plopped down in Kirkland, San Francisco, or just about anywhere else in the US and the average shopper might not notice the differences.

Interestingly, and I can not remember if I've already blogged about this so please indulge me if I have, the only rice available is Japanese domestically produced, the largest bag available is 5 or 10 kg, and the cost is probably 4x what an equivalent quantity of rice would cost in the US (current global rice prices notwithstanding). It seems strange to me that for a people who consume as much rice per capita as the Japanese, rice would be so dear. However, I have it on good authority that this anomoly is due to there being no demand for rice in Japan that is not domestically produced. People here prefer to purchase domestically produced rice over imported rice, no matter the price.

At any rate, the biggest difference US and Japanese Costcos became clear shortly after check-out when we stopped for snacks:



Yes, this is an unattended shopping cart parking lot for newly purchased groceries, and the photo does not do justice to its scale. Details like these are what I enjoy the most about Japan.

And no post would be complete without a picture of Robert to keep the grandparents (and the rest of us) happy, so without further ado, here he is, sporting a sweater knitted by Sarah's mother:

The first Cherries of the year...

Sarah and I took Robert out in the stroller after lunch today to see if he would go down for a nap. We wandered around our neighborhood, admired some of the late season cherries coming into peak bloom on the campus of a medical school near our place, and browsed the 100¥ shop. Robert succumbed, so we decided to grab a few groceries before heading back home.

It was shaping up to be a routine trip to the market, but that changed when we passed by a display of fruit on our way to check out. The display included a single box of cherries...

As you may or may not know, I used to work at a fruit stand at the Olympia Farmer's Market while attending high school and college. I spent 7 fantastic summers working at Sullivan's Homestead with a crew of exceptional individuals, and we sold cherries. Lots of them. Our boss purchased the cherries in Eastern Washington, one of the finest cherry growing regions in the country, if not the world, and trucked them back to Olympia to sell. During peak season, we would sell upwards of 3000 lbs of cherries per day, and every pound was hand sorted by myself, or one of my illustrious colleagues.

Sorting cherries for hours on end is mind-numbing business, so to pass the time we came up with some vocabulary games in order to keep our minds engaged, but I think it's probably fair to say that we spent most of our time gossiping about the crew members who weren't sorting cherries at that instant, and coming up with imaginative back-stories for the folks on the other side of the counter. The market was perfect for people-watching, and we were a crew of mostly high school and college aged kids, so there was never a shortage of dramatic happenings to be recounted.

Over the years, I became something of a cherry connoisseur. Our boss Sully (is every man who's last name is Sullivan nicknamed Sully?) chased cherries from one end of Washington to the other. Through an extensive array of connections, Sully was able to procure a steady stream of cherries from around the 3rd week of May, right through to the end of July, or even early August. Over the course of the season, varieties would come and go, and I had opportunities to sample them all: Burlot, Chinook, Bing, Van, Lambert, Ranier, pie cherries, Black Republicans, and probably a few more that I'm forgetting. And did I sample? Oh, did I sample! I imagine my bowels looked at the arrival of cherry season in much the same way as a soldier might eye an advancing army, with a combination of dread and resignation.

By the end of the season, you're so tired of sorting cherries (get up, go to work, sort cherries all day, go home, go to sleep, dream about sorting cherries all night, wake up, realize that you have to go to work and sort cherries all day, cry) that you're glad to be done with them, but by the time next spring rolls around, after spending a fall and winter devoid of cherries, I at least, am always impatient for the first cherries of spring.

Why am I telling you all this? So you can believe me when I tell you that as fond as I am of cherries, my passion pales to that of the Japanese. Today I saw a flat of 40 cherries on sale for 98 dollars -- almost 2.50 per cherry. Granted it is barely the middle of April, but these cherries didn't even have stems. Bah.

I took a picture with my phone, but it is being a bit recalcitrant at the moment, and I can not download the image to my laptop. I will amend this post with the image once it is available.

In the meantime, if you made it this far I applaud your attention span. My guess is that you are either family, you worked with me at market, or both. If you do have any favorite market anecdotes, please post a comment and share, I would love to read them.

Hanami

Cherry blossom viewing -- Hanami in Japanese -- is serious business. The Sakura Zensen, or cherry blossom front, is tracked with the same care and precision that might be given to an approaching hurricane. The nightly newscasts run elaborate maps depicting front lines, percentages of blossoms, and expected peak dates.

In early March, Starbucks began carrying their "Sakura" line of mugs and music. By the time I got around to taking a photo, sadly, they were no longer the featured display:



I am currently reading a great book called "Hokkaido Highway Blues", written by a fellow named Will Ferguson. After teaching English in Japan for a few years, Will took some time off and hitchhiked from the extreme southern tip of Kyushu, through to the northernmost point of Hokkaido, following the cherry blossom front the whole way.

We engaged in Hanami last weekend with some friends at Shinjuku Gyoen, one of the most famous areas in Tokyo for cherry blossom viewing. Predictably perhaps, it was a bit crowded:



This picture was taken toward the front of the park. Shinjuku Gyoen is a large park, and as we wandered through toward the back, we eventually did find a patch of grass near a grove of cherry trees to call our own. We sat down, ate our lunch, and spent the rest of the afternoon chatting, sipping Kirin beer, and enjoying the cherry blossoms.

Robert had a great time running around and around the little glade where we were sitting. The Japanese ladies sitting near us gave him plenty of attention, of course, and he ate it right up. Sarah and I took turns chasing him down whenever he wandered off; by the end of the afternoon, we were tired, and Robert was so exhausted that he took a second nap and still went to bed early without complaint. Here's a picture of our little tree-hugger at Shinjuku Gyoen just before his second nap:



On Sunday afternoon, my boss hosted a get-together in the party room at his apartment building for his employees. He lives in Northwest Tokyo, about a 45 minute trip from our apartment, on a street famed for its cherry blossoms. The street is divided, with a wide median between directions. The median was planted with cherry trees many years ago, and has plenty of space for laying out blankets beneath them. Even though the trees were mostly spent, there were still crowds of people camped out beneath them.