Japan’s Kamikaze Kuisine by Nancy Lyon

Japanese maxim: “To throw away life, eat blowfish.”

It’s the very definition of slime: an ugly, squat, fat, scaleless fish with sneering lips and gooey skin. Yet for millennia the deadly blowfish or puffer fish (genus Fugu and Sphoeroides) has been feared and revered. The tomb of the Fifth Dynasty Egyptian Pharaoh Ti was engraved with the puffer’s bloated image. The Bible warned against eating fish without fins and scales, like the Red Sea puffer. Yet Haitian voodoo bokkors who trade in zombis, and Japanese gourmet fugu chefs who trade in Shirakoyaki (grilled soft fugu roe), revere it for commerce. Of all the world’s eating habits, who would not say that the Japanese tradition of eating a fish loaded with a nerve toxin 500 times deadlier than cyanide is most bizarre of all.

Centuries of Japanese fugu gourmets have dropped dead at their chopsticks, inspiring such Haiku as:
“I cannot see her tonight,
I have to give her up,
So I will eat fugu.”

And...
“Last night he and I ate fugu,
Today I help carry his coffin.”

The Kabuki actor Mitsugora Bando VIII, declared a Living National Treasure by the Japanese government until his death in 1975, had a penchant for forbidden chiri - fugu fillets cooked in a kettle with toxic fugu livers, skins and intestines. For years he’d survived bowl after bowl served to him clandestinely by sympathetic chefs - until one night in a Kyoto restaurant, his fourth helping abruptly released his spirit from his body.

Some people travel to sample exotic tastes and textures. I am not one of them. Though I’m proud to say I’ve sampled Manta Ray in Malaysia, jellyfish salad and alligator jowls in Florida, gristly boiled pig’s tails in an Irish tinker’s camp in Ballyfermot in Dublin. And in Montreal, at a gala white-linen degustation of insects, I swallowed a crunchy roasted “locust brochette” - a winged migratory locust with bulging eyes impaled on a toothpick - and I washed it down with Chinese ant wine - fermented liquefied ants! But I draw the line at fugu. Despite my fascination with Japan’s Culinary Roulette, I have always sworn that I would never, EVER risk my life for a fish.

Remember those three California chefs who collapsed in 1996 after eating a morsel the size of a quarter? The frozen fugu they sampled had been highly processed in a Japanese factory, smuggled back to them by one of their co-workers. Twenty minutes after they tasted it, they were whisked away in an ambulance.

Fugu has long been praised in Japan as the most delicious of all fishes, but that doesn’t account for this death defiance. The Harvard University ethno-botanist, Wade Davis, proffers an explanation. For the sake of medical science he risked his life in Haiti investigating the voodoo practice of zombification. (If you think zombies are just the stuff of 1950’s B horror movies, read Davis’s spellbinding ethno-botanical travelogue ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’, (made into a terrifying movie by Wes Craven.)

The chief ingredient in the voodoo zombi potion is tetrodotoxin, the same nerve poison that makes fugu deadly to touch or eat. Tetrodotoxin is found in the puffer fish or blowfish inhabiting the warm waters off China, Taiwan, and Japan, the Philippines, Mexico, and the Sea of Cortez off Baja California. It’s also present in the Australian Blue-ringed octopus and Xanthid crabs, and the California newt and the Eastern salamander. Tetrodotoxin is 160,000 times more potent than cocaine.

A lethal dose of tetrodotoxin - one to two milligrams - can rest on the head of a pin. But here’s the strange thing: a certain non-lethal but very toxic dose can mimic death - causing total physical paralysis and simulating a brain-dead state for a few days, or more than a week. Even certified medical doctors cannot tell that the person is still alive!

Buried alive! Edgar Allen Poe called it the most hideous of all human fates... “The unendurable oppression of the lungs - the stifling fumes of the damp earth - the clinging to the death garments - the rigid embrace of the narrow house - the blackness of the absolute Night - the silence like a sea that overwhelms - the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm”, he wrote in The Premature Burial. He describes the living inhumation of Mademoiselle Victorine Lafourcade in France in 1810... cataleptic trances... skeletons found in strange twisted postures in catacombs...

Wade Davis compares the zombie death trance induced by Haitian voodoo bokkors, to the death trance brought on by fugu consumption. He relates how one Japanese consumer of fugu was left for dead while Japanese authorities waited to transport his corpse to another district for burial. The man woke up eight days later, having been totally conscious of everything. Another regained consciousness at the crematorium - just as his body was being lifted off the burial cart. In certain regions of Japan, the body of a person who “dies” after eating fugu is left lying beside his own coffin for three days before being buried - just to make sure. If the body doesn’t decompose, it isn’t dead.

Why do the Japanese risk premature burial and death for a lousy fish? Why do they consume 20,000 tons of blowfish a year - 6,800 tons of it imported, and pay up to $500 for it in special fugu restaurants? On a junket to Tokyo, I vowed to track down a Fugu chef and learn more about this Japanese culinary roulette - without actually playing it myself.

I’d been told that I could see fresh fugu at Tokyo’s sprawling Tsukiji (skee-jee) Market - the largest fish market in all of Asia. The Japanese consume four different species in the genus fugu, all of them violently toxic. The toxin in one prime-sized tiger fugu could kill over 30 people. The puffer claims 70 to 100 lives each year, mostly in rural areas and from fish improperly cleaned at home. Even handling the organs is dangerous. Nevertheless, at the Tsukiji Market, brave gourmets have a ready supply for home preparation and consumption.

It was no easy task for me to arise at 4 a.m., forsaking the luxurious Egyptian cotton sheets on my giant bed fluffed with duvets at the Park Hyatt Tokyo for a slimy pile of fish. My 44th floor room was as serene as a Japanese tea ceremony. Its walls were panelled in rare water elm which had soaked in the northern lakes of Hokkaido for two thousand years. I could have lived for a week in the marbled bathroom lit with paper lanterns, hung with brushed cotton kimonos and yukata sleeping robes, stocked with padded slippers - and read Shojun from cover to cover while soaking in the extra-deep soaking tub.

But journalists must not be slothful. If I wanted to witness the spectacle of 15,000 fishmongers sniffing, pinching and eyeballing 2,500 tons of slimy raw fish flesh, I had to attend the daily 5:20 a.m. fish auction in the sprawling, boisterous warehouse district along the banks of the Sumidagawa River. The stakes are high. The bidders in dark blue overalls and high rubber boots look like factory workers - but each has paid over $1 million to obtain his bidder’s licence. The morning I’m there, a single giant Pacific tuna caught in Canadian waters goes for $US 35,000.

Wandering past giant fish being sliced into sashimi slivers, and crates squirming with octopi and eels, I’m scouting for Fugu. In Tokyo over 1,800 fish dealers sell it. “Fugu? fugu?” I call out to a fishmonger. He grunts toward a black plastic crate. I look down to see piles of sneering lips on fat toady bodies. Enough poison to kill off Tokyo’s 12.3 million inhabitants.

Later that day, I ask the English-speaking woman at the information desk of the Tokyo Stock Exchange if she knows of a fugu restaurant that brokers frequent. Fugutetsu at Ningyocho she says, and draws me a map. It looks like a maze of hieroglyphics.

“Fugutetsu?” I call out at every street corner, waving my map. The last person I ask for directions, a man getting ready to hop on his motorbike, startles me with his wide smile. He parks his bike and leads me to the door of a small building with no sign. He has closed his fugu restaurant for the day, but he wants to open it for his first Western customer, his sign language seems to say.


Inside I show him my press pass and he shows me his fugu license. Then the fugu textbook, with photos of all the species of puffer fish, their anatomies, methods of disembowelling, cleaning, cooking, and whatever else I’ll never know because it was all in Japanese. Then he leads me to his kitchen and - voilà! - he pulls trays of what look like ordinary fish flesh cooling in the fridge. I smile admiringly and snap some photos. Then before I can mumble a protest, he slices some thin strips of raw fugu and puts them on an elegant flowered plate, and offers it to me with a bow.

A bow. Ye gods. Impossible to refuse. Unpardonable offence. Eat it or cut off my head for shame. I venture a sliver, embarrassed to realize, for the first time in my life, that I’d sooner die than die of embarrassment. The fugu is as tasteless as tofu. It feels like jello rind without the cheery cherry flavor. What’s all the fuss about?

If a lethal dose can rest on the head of a pin, I’ve swallowed enough to kill a few dozen people, I’m thinking. But I’m not dead yet I notice as I hop in a cab back to the Park Hyatt. Although my mouth sure feels funny, like it’s been shot with a dose of dentist’s novocaine. I ask the concierge not to bury me alive if I don’t wake up the next morning.

Word of my fugu adventure gets around the hotel staff. Would I like to sample a complete blowfish menu prepared for me in the hotel’s Japanese Restaurant? For only about $US235 I could specially order Nikogori (blowfish jelly), Usuzukuri (thin sliced raw blowfish), Chirinabe (blowfish and vegetables in a pot), Zosui (blowfish porridge) and pickled vegetables. No thanks, but how about an interview with the fugu chef?

A few hours later, I am sitting with Kenichiro Ohe - Chef de Cuisine of the Japanese Restaurant KOZUE, and Miya Kawaguchi - who is translating for us. In the next hour, I learn about the taste of fugu, as subtle as the fragrance of spring rain dripping upon a stone. But taste isn’t everything. The truth is that fugu is addictive. After a licensed Japanese chef carefully cleans the poisonous puffer, removing the 11 deadly parts of the fish, including the skeleton, skin, ovaries, intestines, and liver, enough of the neurotoxin remains to produce a mellow tingling glow, a flush and a drug rush. Remember, tetrodotoxin is 160,000 times more potent than cocaine!!!

Chef Kenichiro Ohe practiced and studied for three years before taking the Japanese government’s three-part fugu exam. He had to pass a written test, a fugu species identification test, and a practical cooking exam in which he had to clean, detoxify and fillet the fish in split-second time. Yes, he was nervous at the exam. And it cost him a lot of money in fugu fish and disposing fees to practice for it.

The Japanese government now regulates the disposal of fugu remains as toxic waste, after several homeless people died from eating fugu remains dumped into garbage bins. Fugu remains must be bagged in two layers of plastic and kept at home in a special locked box until they are taken to a special fugu dump, where a fee is paid to have them specially destroyed. What a hazardous job - like playing with plutonium - because Fugu toxin is not destroyed by heat. Now that would make an exciting industrial tour - a Tokyo fugu waste factory.

After all this, you might ask why not just leave the bloody fish in the ocean? Why go the expense, trouble, and risk... Ah, but eating fugu is an ancient and hallowed Japanese tradition. And like a Zen Koan, it can not be explained.