Ryogoku on an Empty Stomach

Watching VICE Japan’s YouTube channel is a reliable way to feel bad about wherever you’re currently eating lunch. In one video, Yuka Uchida from Trippple Nippples eats her way through Ryogoku in Tokyo alongside sumo champion Konishiki Yasokichi—marinated squid, fried chicken wings, thick slabs of raw fatty tuna, large cold beers—and I sat there working through a sad cheese roll thinking about how profoundly unfair the distribution of good food is on this earth.

There’s something cosmically right about a sumo wrestler being the authority on where to eat. The man has spent his entire career taking the act of eating seriously, professionally, as a form of discipline and mass accumulation. Of course he knows every counter in Ryogoku. Of course the food looks like it would make you cry. Japanese cuisine already has no real competition on a philosophical level—the precision, the understanding of fat and acid and temperature, the textures that arrive in sequences—and watching it consumed with that kind of uncomplicated joy just makes it worse. Or better. Both.

The cheese roll did not recover its dignity.