Asia Watch/ Tokyo Curry
Singh, Ajay
Tokyo Curry by Ajay Singh F first come the onions—peeled, sliced, and fried all morning long. Mounds of onions: twelve kilos filling three large aluminum stock-pots. I sprinkle in some spices—a...
...The chefs and waiters watched as the customer dipped into his meal...
...In the eighties, they flocked to Europe and Australia...
...Musa, a Burmese, was a former tanner...
...He called me over...
...This is what saves us a lot of time and effort...
...All were making more money than we ever dreamed possible...
...He knew our food for what it was...
...And when I worked at Indoya, I am proud to say, I made three times the salary of the president of India...
...We lived comfortably and ate and dressed well...
...Some customers thought they knew Indian cuisine...
...he asked mockingly...
...At Indoya, we logged 390-13 hours a day, seven days a week...
...The chefs never washed their hands, taking the faster expedient of licking them clean...
...Foreign men tend the bars of Japan's cities and towns...
...Most foreigners can't hope to settle there, but they can work a few years and earn a nest egg...
...I said I couldn't: I didn't know how to cook...
...housewives came with their neighbors...
...I am from India...
...he asked...
...This wasn't as easy as it sounds...
...In fact, Japan tolerates these "illegals" to bridge a gap in its labor market...
...At first he refused...
...At home, we scrub dishes well," he explained one morning...
...There was no need for the devil at my restaurant...
...The top-of-the-line dishes were the chicken and mutton curries...
...Technically, foreign restaurant workers have violated Japanese immigration law and can be arrested at any time...
...None of us had worked in a kitchen before...
...All the dishes are good...
...Its most exquisite recipes are unrecorded, culinary secrets passed down through the generations by word of mouth...
...We sliced so many onions every morning that the storeroom became supersaturated with onion fumes...
...He leaned back in the chair and swore in disgust...
...he'd ask...
...When a customer asked which curry was being served, the waiter would be forced to scoop up the onion blanket and peer underneath...
...But he was the only one I met in two months who did...
...The implement used was a paddle large enough to propel a canoe...
...Javed pulled a plate from the rack...
...Pumpkin curry: I chopped two pumpkins, boiled them to a mash, and added onion mixture on top...
...And they have flooded Japan with new ethnic restaurants...
...Our entire lives—minus commuting and sleeping—were spent at work...
...S peed was the sine qua non at Indoya...
...Steep steps led to a large, open room with seven tables seating thirty-five people...
...He sat at a table near the kitchen and scanned the menu with an air of knowledge...
...Then he took a piece of meat and chewed it slowly...
...Javed was a former factory worker in a Japanese car plant...
...Indoya's staff was pulled to its kitchen by the mighty Japanese yen...
...If you've ever wondered about the authenticity of the food at your local Indian restaurant, I am here to tell you my tale...
...The employThe American Spectator September 1994 45 Closing the BCCI Curtain by James Ring Adams ees were never allowed to sit—except for 15 minutes at the lunch break—which left a throbbing in the back that one waiter described as an arrow in his muscles...
...Indian cuisine is centuries old but it didn't take me long to learn it...
...B ecause the onion mixture was added to every dish, the curries tasted and looked identical...
...I was an oddball: a journalist interested in the lives of such workers...
...Authenticity was not our strong point: In lieu of Indian breads we used packaged pita bread shipped in from New Jersey...
...But our work wasn't the sheer exploitation Orwell described in his chronicle of the underclass in pre-war France and England...
...It was an upstairs restaurant on a small lane in Tokyo's Shinjuku section...
...Yet most people liked Indoya...
...Vegetable curry: I diced eggplant, fried it in oil, and poured onion mixture on top...
...All of us were illegal...
...Now it was time to go on to the main job: making curries...
...He pointed to the red, blue, and green willow pattern on the plate...
...The first task was to peel them, all 12 kilos, and push them through a cabbage slicer...
...A donkey works hard but he's still called a donkey...
...When the curry arrived, he broke a piece of bread, dipped it into the gravy and put it in his mouth...
...Japan is famous for hard work, of course...
...He tipped his head back and laughed...
...foreign women work as prostitutes for the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia...
...the dishwasher washed plate after plate as if he were dealing a pack of cards...
...I thought things were going too fast...
...In my country, an office worker makes $100 or less per month...
...We were allowed a day off every week and many chose to use that day to work more...
...You need two things to be successful in Japan," he said, "humility and guts...
...According to the old saying, God sends meat and the devil sends the cooks...
...But I soon found Javed had been telling the truth...
...Medical care is virtually unaffordable...
...Javed saw the scene...
...A top journalist makes about $2,000, including perks...
...They would ask for a spicy dish, or even the spiciest...
...Then came more grunting and squashing and pulping until the onions were reduced to a mushy, dirty-brown mixture...
...We had a dignity Orwell's plongeurs did not...
...The number of patrons increased every month...
...Speed was especially important in dish washing because the restaurant had a limited supply of crockery...
...Then the onions had to be stirred in a stock-pot over a high flame for 90 minutes without burning...
...Waiters raced from table to table, balancing half a dozen dishes in both hands...
...Now it's Japan's turn...
...the chef stirred the onions with the vigor of a man possessed...
...Suddenly I was churning out shrimp curry, chicken and mutton curry, eggplant curry, fish curry, pumpkin curry, not to mention various side dishes...
...After two months, when my own visa was about to expire, I had become an Indoya veteran: at least four employees had joined and quit in the meantime...
...One evening, a bespectacled middle-aged Japanese came to the restaurant...
...Even in recession there are too many jobs and not enough employees: currently Japan has more than 300,000 illegal workers...
...Shrimp curry...
...He threw some bills on the table and left the restaurant, shaking his head...
...Voila: with a half day's training, I-am a chef at an Indian restaurant...
...Is he absolutely sure...
...He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder...
...See this...
...Tahir, a Pakistani, came to the restaurant from a nickel factory...
...My older co-workers disagreed, "These people will eat anything," said Deepak, a Gurkha from Nepal...
...Javed asked if I'd take his job...
...The work was hard and, at 13 hours a day, long...
...Then I take three shrimps, slice them up the middle, lay them on a plate, and ladle the onion mixture on top...
...In fact he was the sanest man to enter the restaurant while I worked there...
...Okay, we'll give it to him...
...Unregistered foreigners cannot own a car...
...In the 1970s, Tokyo had only a handful of non-Japanese or non-Western restaurants...
...rice or nan (an Indian bread), cost two dollars...
...Why do you think we don't use white plates...
...They ate heartily and rarely complained...
...Now there are hundreds serving virtually every cuisine of Asia...
...A lot of us had Japanese girlfriends...
...What do they know about Indian food...
...But here I stood, doing a job my family in India would consider ignominious, getting lots and lots of material, stirring lots of onions—and making lots of Ajay Singh is a writer living in New Delhi...
...What do you recommend...
...It's people like me who cook the tandooris and nans that people like you eat in San Francisco, New York, or London...
...I'm sorry," I said...
...Lots of onions...
...At seven dollars an hour, we made at least $90 per day, and, with overtime, up to $2,000 a month...
...The waiters could rarely distinguish one curry from another...
...He said the work would be too tough for me, which I thought ludicrous...
...money...
...The pay was less than average for blue-collar workers in Japan...
...44 The American Spectator September 1994 When a worker accidentally left the storeroom door open, the fumes would seep into the restaurant and the patrons would start fishing into their pockets or purses for handkerchiefs...
...Javed, who came from Larkana, Pakistan, favored rural bromides...
...Then I added oil, canned tomatoes, canned ginger, canned garlic cloves, and some common spices...
...I was washing dishes full-time when one of the chefs quit...
...A second helping of rice came free...
...Curries cost six to ten dollars...
...Bean curry: I opened a can of mixed beans, ladled onion mixture on top, and heated it...
...When the waiter relayed the request to the chef, he'd normally laugh...
...Some workers refused to take a holiday—or, when they did, they went and worked another job elsewhere in Tokyo...
...A few minutes later I found myself in the Indoya kitchen, wearing the special chef's apron...
...At the far end was a counter and behind it, in public view, the kitchen...
...Is this your best curry...
...Recently, a Japanese tobacco corporation agreed to pay $370,000 to compensate the family of an employee who had literally been worked to death...
...I suggested mutton curry...
...Which is your best dish...
...I happened to be waiting that night...
...college students brought their girlfriends...
...Work without speed is no good," Javed liked to say...
...He's mad," he said...
...Sometimes to relieve the pain I would squat on the floor pretending to pick something up...
...and England...
...If he became uncomfortable—wiping his forehead or gulping glasses of water—they would laugh loudly...
...I made them by stewing raw chicken and mutton with Indoya's famous onion mixture for about 40 minutes...
...Spicy...
...Not many people lasted...
...D uring the sixties and seventies, poor Asians in search of jobs migrated to the U.S...
...The minced meat curry was a special preparation: I took frozen packets of stinking minced lamb from Australia, boiled it to reduce the smell, and combined the meat with the onion mixture...
...The dishwasher, who also was in charge of salads, often dispatched salads with as much soap-suds as salad dressing on them...
...I took the paddle in both hands and attacked the onions, squashing and smashing them until they had lost some of their fight...
...I sprinkle in some spices—a minimum—and stir...
...But maybe I wasn't such an oddball...
...He hired me one rainy Sunday morning, when I climbed the steps and begged for a job...
...The big distinction between us and Orwell's slaves of the 1920s and '30s was money...
...Never had I cooked in my life except on camping trips...
...Office workers introduced their colleagues to the place...
...And then he would sprinkle two or three tablespoons of red chili powder into the dish, often without reheating it...
...Javed taught me a cardinal principle...
...This offered only a temporary respite, but it was as satisfying as a sip of cool water on a hot day...
...After conquering the onions I was promoted...
...He ran his finger up the menu...
...These workers—from Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, the Philippines, and African countries—work in factories, ports, and construction sites...
...In restaurants, we do not...
...Its name was Indoya and it was located in one of the busiest commercial districts of the world's most bustling city, Tokyo...
...I also got my training by word of mouth...
...I took a job at Indoya to find out if these workers were really the unhappy, exploited individuals of popular myth...
...I announce to a waiter: "Ebi no curry...
...I was assigned onion duty every morning...
...We lived, to quote Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London, "in a rhythm between work and sleep, without time to think, hardly conscious of the exterior world...
...There are problems for the illegal workers, including loneliness, alienation from the Japanese, and the remote possibility of being caught and deported...
...But compared to what people make in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or the Philippines, it was a fortune...
...All the cleaning was done by hand...
...A stereo blared Indian music into the street...
...This is the sorry truth: I am Indian food outside of the subcontinent—well, me and onions...
...This made Indoya's food among the cheapest in Tokyo, which assured a steady clientele of artists, musicians, and office workers on a budget...
...The employee had worked 400 hours a month...
Vol. 27 • September 1994 • No. 9
