“Did you spend all your time in Los Angeles?” I asked Mr. Sonoda. He slurped his noodles, Japanese style, making a great deal of noise as he ate them. I’ve never been able to do that, but to my surprise Mariko was able to pick up the slurping routine rather quickly. She doesn’t do that when we eat noodles in Los Angeles.
“Mostly. I loved it in Los Angeles, but the place I love most in the world is Kyoto. I’m glad I was in a position to retire here when my working days were over. Now I follow my interests, especially collecting old Japanese swords.”
We finished our noodle course and the shoji screen slid open and the next course was ready to be served. I don’t know how the waitress knew we had finished. I looked around to see if there was a camera or a window or somewhere she could be observing us, but there was none. Yet somehow she knew the exact time to serve the next course.
She came into the room and starting putting oval-shaped plates before us. I got mine first, then Sonoda-san, then Mariko. On each plate was a smooth round river rock. Sitting upright on the plate was a grilled fish, complete with scales, head, and tail. The fish was sort of bent in an S shape so that it looked like it was swimming upstream towards the rock.
I didn’t know what to do, but wasn’t about to ask. All sorts of studies have been done about why men don’t ask for directions when they’re lost on the road. Many of these studies are very scholarly and erudite, but I think the basic reason is that we’re stupid.
I looked at the fish, puzzled for a second, then I picked it up with my chopsticks and bit the head of the fish off. Japanese have some fish snacks where they eat an entire fish: head, tail, scales, and all. Unfortunately, this was not one of them.
Mariko, being a woman and much more sensible than me, asked Sonoda-san, “How do you eat this thing?”
Sonoda-san said, “It’s very simple.” He demonstrated. “You flip the fish on its side, hold the head down with one chopstick, and use the other chopstick to peel off the fillet.” He did exactly as he said, stripping off the fillet with one expert swift motion. “Then you eat the flesh with your chopsticks, avoiding the bones and the scales.”
As he finished his explanation there was a lull in the conversation and the only sound that could be heard in the room was the crunch, crunch, crunch of me chewing on the head of a fish. Sonoda-san looked over at me in surprise, then he looked down. There, on my plate, was half a fish. The head was bitten off and the insides of the fish, which had not been cleaned, were sort of spilling out on the plate.
In a traditional restaurant in Japan you may get to use slippers and fancy teacups and chopsticks made of beautifully polished wood, but what you don’t normally get is a napkin. So there I sat with a half-chewed fish head in my mouth, trying to figure out how I was going to get out of this situation gracefully. Of course, the answer to that is there was no way to get out of this situation gracefully.
Mariko, seeing my condition, reached in her pocket and came out with a couple of tissues. She handed them to me like a mother dealing with a child and I was able to spit the fish head out into the tissues. During my entire performance, Sonoda-san sat there transfixed, watching me totally frozen. When I was finally able to spit the fish head out, I looked up at him and sort of shrugged. That opened the floodgates.
First a few explosive snickers seemed to escape from him in short gasps. I think he was trying to be polite and not laugh at me, but I could tell it was a losing effort. The snickers started coming out with increasing frequency until finally his face exploded in gales of laughter. I looked over at Mariko and she was laughing. I looked over my shoulder at the waitress, who had not yet left the room, and she was laughing, too. After considering all my options, I did the single thing left for me to do. I started laughing, too.
The fact that I was laughing seemed to set Sonoda-san off even more. He started laughing so heartily that he was rocking back and forth on his cushion. Finally he literally toppled backwards off the cushion, flopping back on the tatami mat and dissolving into a fit of merriment. The laughter would seem to die down periodically, only to flare up again when we heard one of the other people in the room laughing. In the end, we all had tears in our eyes and our sides were actually aching.
As soon as she was able to compose herself, the waitress put her hands before her and bowed very deeply, actually putting her forehead to the mat. She murmured something to me and I could tell it was an apology for laughing at me. She left the room, closing the door behind her. My assumption was that she wanted to hotfoot it down the hallway to the kitchen to tell the rest of the staff about what the crazy gaijin had done.
“I picked this restaurant to show you some unique dishes,” Mr. Sonoda said to me, “But I have to admit that I am now the pupil and you are the master in terms of teaching me about unusual ways of eating.” That set the three of us off again.
16
When our giddiness over my fish-eating antics subsided, I thought it would be a good time to get down to business. “Can you tell me about the swords?” I asked.
“Ah, the Toyotomi blades.”
“What’s that?”
“Those are the swords that you’re so interested in. Do you know who the Toyotomi were?”
“No.”
“Do you know who Hideyoshi was?”
“Wasn’t he the person who united Japan right before Ieyasu Tokugawa established the Shogunate?”
“Very good. Most Americans wouldn’t know that. Hideyoshi was a peasant who worked his way up to general while he was a vassal of Nobunaga. That would be hard even today, but it is a measure of his brilliance that he was able to do it when birth and family meant almost everything in Japan.
“Nobunaga was a feudal lord who tried to unite Japan in the late fifteen hundreds by killing his enemies. He was very good at killing, so he came close to his goal of unifying the country. Unfortunately, when you act like that you also make new enemies and Nobunaga was killed by one of his own subordinates before he could finish the job of uniting Japan. There was a scramble for power and several generals, including Ieyasu Tokugawa and Hideyoshi, rushed to take power. Hideyoshi managed to come out on top. The Toyotomi was the clan that Hideyoshi belonged to.
“Hideyoshi was a brilliant general, so he wasn’t adverse to killing, either. But he was also a great politician and he realized that he could unite Japan faster through bribery, alliances, and political maneuvering rather than constant war, which is exactly what he did. Instead of fighting leyasu, for instance, he made him his ally.
“Because Hideyoshi was a commoner and not a noble, he couldn’t take the title of Shogun. Although he couldn’t get all the titles he craved, Hideyoshi was still able to amass considerable power and wealth. At one point he had a tearoom made of solid gold, and he was famous for the opulence of his court and castles. When he died in 1598, he left a young son as his heir, with Japan governed by a council of five regents. This led to a dangerous and unstable political situation.
“leyasu Tokugawa was one of the five regents. He had been waiting for years for his chance to rule Japan and he eventually became the chief opponent of the Toyotomi clan. Through threats and victory in battle, he gradually eroded the Toyotomi’s power. It took him almost fifteen years to eventually destroy the Toyotomis. During this unstable period the legend of the Toyotomi blades was born.
“According to the legend, in 1614 the Toyotomis hid a portion of their treasure as a hedge against future battles with leyasu. They wanted a financial reserve because their battle with leyasu was a protracted one. A message revealing the hiding place for the treasure was cut on the blades of six swords by the sword-smith Kannemori. Each sword had a piece of the message, and all six swords would be needed to find the treasure. The swords were given to six trusted retainers of the Toyotomi clan. Each retainer given a blade did not know the exact identity of the other five, only that there were six blades in all. Only Hideyoshi’s widow and his son knew which six families had a blade. That way, no one would be tempted to change sides, taking the treasure with them.