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My friend Nick Currie, the musician, artist, and writer best known as\u00a0Momus<\/a>, has enjoyed a variety of roles in his career, most recently that of the Japan Times<\/em>\u2018s Unreliable Food Critic<\/a>. While he\u2019s long\u00a0engaged his own fascination<\/a> with Japan in the service of his music, he only moved to the country relatively recently, about five years ago. (You can listen to a radio interview I did with him on the subject of going there at the bottom of my collection of podcasts related to Japan<\/a>.) I met up with him yesterday in Osaka, his home as well as one of my favorite cities in the world \u2014 in a league with the likes of Seoul and Los Angeles \u2014 for what he calls his \u201cprostitution and destitution\u201d tour, an afternoon stroll through a few neighborhoods that happen to sustain those two conditions.<\/p>\n
For all their fascination value, neither of these areas have much in the way of high eating. (Though the signs hanging outside the countless tiny, immaculately presented, and open-fronted brothels of Tobita Shinchi<\/a> do present the businesses as \u201crestaurants,\u201d and, word on the street has it, will actually order in food from elsewhere should a thoroughly oblivious foreigner wander in hungry.) But that makes them no less fertile ground for the Unreliable Food Critic, a title the food-indifferent Nick crafted for himself that comes with a mission, stated in his debut column<\/a>, to \u201cexplore back alleys where gimlet-eyed men in baggy carpenter pants glance up from enormous bowls, surprised to see a foreigner,\u201d to \u201cshop at garish supermarket chain Tamade,\u201d and to \u201chead to Osaka\u2019s Korean district and rhapsodise about the cheap eats in the market.\u201d<\/p>\n