One of the most fun discoveries I’ve made in Japan are the food theme parks. The culture that brought you Iron Chef doesn’t restrict its gustatory obsessions to a made-for-TV “Kitchen Stadium”; they bring it to you in real life as well. So far, I’ve discovered two food theme parks worthy of mention: The Shin Yokohama Ramen Museum, and the Namjatown food theme parks. Namjatown has not one, but three food theme parks: The Ikebukero Gyoza Stadium, Ice Cream City, and the Tokyo Dessert Republic. Worthy of note, Namjatown also has a massage / relaxation theme park, “Healing Town”, where you can sample various massage techniques from around the world 20 minutes at a time (or longer).

The Shin Yokohama Ramen museum is particularly close to my heart, as I am myself a noodle fanatic (if ever my career in electronics fails, I will open a hand-made noodle joint). The museum features an exhibit about ramen, a gift shop, and most importantly, a theme park area modeled after Old Tokyo where premium ramen restaurants from around Japan can be sampled in one area. Their exhibit currently features eight different restaraunts, and you can stop by each one and order a “mini Ramen” bowl to save room for sampling multiple shops, or you can order a full meal and indulge in your favorite shop. They have a multi-lingual brochure that you can read on-line, with descriptions of each shop.

My favorite ramen shop is Ryushanhai. The homemade noodles are thick, al dente, and slightly rippled, and their broth is delicious. Their signature ingredient, “karamiso”, is a served as a single mound of red in the middle of your soup. This firey miso paste can be mixed into the soup to adjust the spiceness to your liking. However, my favorite aspect about Ryushanhai is its char shiu pork. Instead of giving you small circles of tough pork, you are served veritable slabs of juicy char shiu, laid across the bottom of the bowl, so that the same strip of char shiu pokes out of each side of the bowl. As you can see from the photo below, the char shiu is beautifully marbled and it has a wonderful texture.

My second favorite shop is Shinasobaya. The chef is knicknamed the “demon of ingredients”. The dish itself is very simple, so that you can focus on the refinement of each ingredient. The noodles are sublime, and of particular note are their soft-boiled eggs. The centers are just barely runny, and they also had this specially flavored egg whose name I couldn’t translate, but it was particularly tasty.

To give you a flavor for the other restaraunts, photos of the noodles plus a corner of the pamphlet that describes them is shown below.

The shop above has a peculiar order as you enter, and it’s the smell of the lard used in the cooking of the dish. The broth is very rich, and as the pamphlet recommends, is very good with the garlic sauce.

The shop above serves their ramen with a tonkotsu broth that is quite delicious. They also served a kimchi soft boiled egg which I quite enjoyed.

While I like ramen, one cannot live on ramen alone. On my recent trip to Tokyo, my girlfriend developed a hankering for gyoza. I had never visited Ikebukoro before, so I thought maybe we’d kill two birds with one stone and check out this funky suburb of Tokyo while gyoza hunting in back-alley ramen shops. Serendipity struck, and we stumbled upon the Gyoza Stadium at Namjatown thanks to her persistence in trying to figure out these gyoza ads posted in the passage from the subway. Namjatown is a relatively unknown tourist attraction; I had never read about it in any of the tourist guides, but it’s part of the “Sunshine City” mega-complex about a 10 minute walk away from the JR Ikebukuro station.

Namjatown is actually an indoor theme park made by Namco (yes, that Namco which brought you Pacman and Soul Caliber — woot!). The staff wears these costumes that would be appropriate on the set of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and they all seem to carry around a stuffed doll version of Namja.

“Namja wants you to drink this beer!”

Beer is available in the Gyoza Stadium for about 510 yen per cup, and you are allowed to carry the beer around the premises. The Gyoza Stadium is actually more like a small, densely packed set of alleyways crammed with restaraunts that serve, of course, gyoza.

They have a dozen total gyoza restaraunts, and their characteristics are documented, unfortunately in Japanese only, below.

From what I can read out of the pamphlets, each restaraunt is listed with a brief bio, and stats on the gyoza it serves: length, weight, wrapping thickness and how garlicky the filling is.

The restaraunts use a special stove for cooking the gyoza: it’s sort of a combination between a steamer and griddle. The griddle in recessed and has a dedicated faucet above it. First, the griddle is filled with water; then, the gyoza are laid in and a hinged lid is dropped down. The gyoza steams in boiling water for about five minutes, and then the whole griddle is lifted up, dumping the water out, and the gyoza are cooked with oil only for about another minute or two to make the skin crispy.

I got to try about five different types of gyoza when I visited. My two favorites are shown below.

The restaraunt above features a hearty gyoza, with thick skin and a crispy browned finish. The round gyoza actually each contain a shrimp inside the filling, which adds a nice touch of juiciness to the flavor of the dumpling.

The restaraunt above features a delicate, lacy crisp across the entire serving of gyoza. From the photo it almost looks like a single solid sheet, but actually the gyoza themselves are just the dark circles in the sheet. Somehow they get the juices inside the gyoza to come out while cooking to form the crispy sheet as it reduces. I like the crunch of the gyoza…it’s sort of like, well, eating a bacony potato chip with a meatball attached to it.

I didn’t get a chance to explore the other offerings of Namjatown, since the place was closing right around the time I finished my last order of gyoza. The massage village alone seems like a place where I could spend a couple of hours exploring; I’ll have to make it back there again someday to check it out!

While on the subject of food, I would also note that the Japanese-style Italian food is actually really good. I’m not quite sure what the Japanese do to the Italian food out there, but it’s not quite Italian, but still very good. One of my favorite aspects about eating Italian in Japan is that they have no problem with serving raw eggs, due in part to the traditional “Tsukimi” (“moon viewing”) style recipes. So, when you order a pasta Carbonara, it’s served with a crown of an uncooked egg, the yellow yolk glistening on top like a luxurious gem (or a full moon, perhaps!). The taste of a raw egg just mixed into the sauce is unparalleled; uncooked egg yolk has a certain delicious richness to it that’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t tried it. I know it sounds strange to western ears to eat uncooked eggs, but really, give it a try in Japan if you ever get the chance!

I thought the photo below was particularly poignant to me.

This is a photo of a billboard that sits above the main exit of the Shibuya JR station. The patch of rectangles in the middle of the billboard is a QR code — essentially, a 2-D barcode.

This is poignant for a few reasons. This is the first time I’ve seen a major advertisement installation like this where one of the most prominent features of the advert is a machine-readable only data format. This has the feel of one of those “Animatrix” motifs where machines have gained a first-class citizenship alongside humans — just a little bit eerie to see a piece of very expensive advertising real estate occupied by a data format that my wetware cannot natively process. The QR code on the billboard actually encodes a URL for the band’s website. In the US, this would have to be a text URL. But, in Japan, every mobile phone — at least the ones used by the sub-40 demographic (the dominant population of Shibuya) — has built into it a QR barcode image recognition program. Since every Japanese mobile phone has a camera built into it, and they all have QR barcode software in it, it’s entirely reasonable to put data that is exclusively machine-readable on expensive advertising real estate. I tried the QR code out on my Japanese cell phone and it worked wonderfully.

This leads to the second reason why this is poignant. While the Japanese system may have many flaws, the massive uniformity of the mobile phone feature set has as one of its benefits the ability to drive pervasive new standards like the QR code into just about everything — from QR codes embedded in vending machines for coupon distribution, to QR codes embedded on the wrapper of a MacDonald’s cheeseburger to give rapid access to a URL for nutrition facts.

Normally, when you think about Japanese cuisine, you think about Sushi — or maybe Ramen, if you are like me. One of the things you wouldn’t expect to find in Japan is a diversity of boutique gourmet burger shops — but there is! While on my vacation in Japan, I decided to take a couple of days and scope out some of the best burger joints in Tokyo.

My favorite so far is Zats Burger Cafe. As far as I can tell, they only have a few locations around Tokyo. I’ve only eaten an the location just outside the west exit of the Yoyogi JR station, but every burger they have there is masterfully crafted and some of their recipes are quite creative. My favorite burger is shown below, the avocado cheeseburger.

A picture of the grill at Zat’s is shown below.

Watching them make the burger is a lot of fun. Their grill master and burger dresser has all the skill and precision of a sushi chef. For the avocado burger, they cut an avocado in half, remove the seed, and slap a teaspoon of butter into the hole. They then drop this onto the grill flat-face down, adding a little teriyaki sauce along the way. As the avocado grills and develops a beautifully charred surface, they are also preparing the meat and the bun to perfection. The result is a wonderfully tasty burger with a texture and character that is unforgettable.

Their signature burger, the “sasebo burger”, is also very tasty, but it has a lot going on. Perhaps my Californian background has caused me to have a disposition toward avocado burgers.

An honorable mention is Pakuch! burger. Aside from having a cute logo (see below), their burger is a veritable tower.

This burger shop is near the Shibuya station, although I don’t remember the exact directions to it — I seem to remember it is somewhat north of the station. The burger is, as you would expect, a huge mouthful. The patty meat is well done, although I feel like the burger didn’t quite have the same soul as the Zat’s burger had.

The other two standbys that I visited were Mos burger and Freshness burger. The Mos burger store that we visited had a chalkboard that talked about all the ingredients that they were using that day, along with the name of the farmer or vendor that sold the ingredients to that store. Freshness burger, in my mind, is still the OG gourmet burger chain for Tokyo, as I have been eating their burgers since the mid-90’s when I first went to Tokyo.

Above is a photo of a Freshness burger.

The Japanese do make one mean burger. All of these burgers were better than say, the In-n-out burger that is quite popular on the US west coast region. Leave it to the Japanese to improve on something as American as a fast food cheeseburger…even the MacDonald’s cheeseburger in Japan has a superior quality to those prepared in the US.

Here’s an interesting question.

Suppose you had a household with two cars, and each car needs to be driven 10,000 miles per year. One car consumes 34 MPG, and the other car consumes 18 MPG. Since gas is expensive, you want to replace one car. Because of utility constraints, you have two choices:

Which car replacement would save you the most gas?

Normally, I consider myself not bad with quantitative comparisons like this, yet initially I picked the answer of replacing the 34 MPG car with the 50 MPG car based on the superior 16 MPG improvement. Another seemingly more analytical approach also leads to the same conclusion: 50 + 18 MPG giving a 34 MPG household average seems more efficient than 34 + 28 MPG giving a 31 MPG household average.

This very interesting article in Science, “The MPG Illusion” by Richard P. Larrick and Jack B. Soll at the Fuqua School of Business in Duke University (Vol 320, June 20, 2008, p. 1593), points out the mathematically obvious truth that gas used per mile is inversely proportional to miles per gallon, which means that you have a steeper slope at lower MPG ratings, and diminishing returns at higher MPG ratings.

(The above image is taken from the article, available here with subscription).

When you run the numbers, replacing the 34 MPG car with a 50 MPG (a 16 MPG improvement) car saves you 94.1 gallons per 10,000 miles, whereas replacing the 18 MPG car with a 28 MPG (a 10 MPG improvement) car saves you 198.4 gallons per 10,000 miles — more than double the savings.

Or, to give an even more clear-cut example, replacing a 5,000 MPG car with a 10,000 MPG car saves you just one gallon of gas, whereas replacing a 1 MPG car with a 2 MPG car saves you 5,000 gallons of gas, using a fixed mileage of 10,000 miles driven for comparison.

There are some important policy implications of this. Relatively small MPG improvements in the most gas-hungry vehicles pay off greater than larger improvements in already efficient cars (hence, it does make sense to offer tax breaks for modest improvements in SUVs versus tax breaks for hybrids, which typically replacing already gas-efficient sedans). Also, personal driving habits, especially for gas-hungry cars, can often times add or subtract a few MPG to a car’s efficiency on average. For example, a car that may get 25 MPG “average highway” will degrade to under 15 MPG if you gun it out of stoplights in city traffic. That’s a huge increase in gas consumed per distance driven, especially for the less efficient cars, whereas for more efficient cars it doesn’t hurt as much to goose the engine a bit.

Apparently the thinking that gas savings is linear with MPG is not uncommon. A survey of college students revealed that a majority of them shares this misconception. I’m not sure what the sociological term is for such a massively accepted factual inaccuracy, but it seems like a textbook case for how common wisdom can fail the common person. It’s also a good example of why you don’t want to put policies to a vote — people just don’t have the time to run the numbers, and simple numbers can be so simply deceptive, even with the best intentions. Good democracies are probably more about the people directly controlling principles (“conserve oil”), rather than the policies (“reward car makers that achieve the greatest fleet MPG delta”). Of course, that doesn’t address the problem of creating accountability between principles, policies, and politicians that make the policies to execute the principles.