Tokyo's "apartheid of price"

Is it because journalists are generally from the upper middle class, or that they are the stupidest people who ever managed to struggle through a university course, that they are able to make ridiculous comparisons between something as trivial as the differing cost of different restaurants, and something as serious as apartheid? I don't know, nor would I ever dare crawl inside the hulking shell of stupid that is the average journalist's mind long enough to try to understand how, but this is what one of these geniuses of print managed to produce in the Sydney Morning Herald today. Matthew Thompson wrote a review of Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai's Tokyo restaurant in today's Sydney Morning Herald, but in fact most of the review consisted of a complaint about the high cost of food in Tokyo.

Since, in fact, food isn't that much more expensive in Tokyo than in Sydney, this article presents an excellent opportunity to display precisely how terrible and deliberately deceptive much reporting on Japan can be.

First we consider the basic task which Matthew Thompson set himself, which was

We had thought we could cope on a daily food and transport budget of $100 or just under ¥10,000

which anybody who knows Sydney can tell you, is a pretty much impossible task to achieve in Sydney. So why try to do it in Tokyo? So you can make your article conform to a pre-defined script, perhaps? Matthew Thompson's first observation is that "our only affordable meal seems to be tiny watery noodle meals with small servings of beer or sake", which he claims cost a combined $30 for him and his partner. Putting aside his desire to have beer with his lunch, one has to ponder if when he chose these noodle dishes he had not, perhaps, looked at the rice, tenpura and noodle sets which every such restaurant also serves, and which cost less than $30 for 2. Or perhaps he had not bothered to find a 3-course Italian lunch for $10? Every time I go to Tokyo I manage to find a 3 course Italian lunch including drink for $10; I can also find curry/soup/espresso lunch sets in snazzy malls in Shinbashi for $12. Perhaps Mr. Thompson wasn't looking?

Mr. Thompson then commences with the deception. In order to "make it through the day", they buy boiled eggs at the convenience store for 70 yen, which is less than a dollar, and

"wash them down with ¥190 convenience-store cans of beer-like alcoholic drinks; brewers keep them cheap by using pea matter instead of malt or wheat to avoid a beer levy."

Perhaps Mr. Thompson is unaware that in Japan there are these things called "supermarkets" which are cheaper than convenience stores. But in any case, even in his ignorance he can get a real beer - real beer in convenience stores starts at 157 yen, 30 cents less than the beer-like drinks he is forced to consume. The quality beers start at 200 yen. And how much is a 200 yen beer in Australian dollars? $2.10, considerably less than a single beer will cost you in Oz, where 6 packs of beer are now $20. Even buying in bulk, Australian beer is more expensive than Japanese. But by avoiding either an intra-store or international comparison, Mr. Thompson is able to pretend that he is doing something terribly expensive. How tricky!

Then Mr. Thompson tells us that at night he and his wife would raid the supermarkets for "discounted sushi". He doesn't mention the price, and why would he? A pack for 2 would set him and his wife back a combined total of $10. It's not often in Australia that two people get to eat a sushi meal for $10. In fact, toting up the total of all the food he has eaten during the day, and generously including the $30 for their watery noodle lunches, we discover that Mr. Thompson and his wife have spent a total of $50, half their allowance, on 2 meals for 2 people. He claims to be always hungry because of the "tiny" serves of noodles - perhaps he should have bought a "setto" (set meal) at the same restaurant where he bought his tiny bowl of noodles - an extra $1 will probably get him rice and some tenpura prawns. Never mind, not everyone can read a picture menu, especially if they only have a journalism degree to bolster their feeble intellect.

Having read such deceitful dross, are we really to believe Mr. Thompson when he talks about Tokyo's "prestige-obssessed consumer culture"? I think not. But moving on, we find that this man who is so shocked by the pursuit of prestige decides to finish his time in Japan with a trip to the restaurant of the famous Hiroyuki Sakai, the French Japanese chef on Iron Chef. This, I presume, is what we are reading for. Mr. Thompson reveals that the meal for both he and his partner came to a grand total of $300 - and Mr. Thompson did not choose the cheapest course, either. That puts it a staggering $90 cheaper than the only comparable restaurant in Sydney, Tetsuya's, which is $195 per person. So, in Tokyo Mr. Thompson paid $300 to eat in a world-famous restaurant; in Sydney $390 to eat in a locally famous restaurant. And the food, he tells us, was exquisite.

Is this the apartheid of price to which Mr. Thompson refers in his last paragraph? No, the apartheid of price is his comparison of the normal cost of food and the cost of his expensive restaurant experience. He and his partner struggled to eat normal food for less than $100 a day, but they could eat at one of Tokyo's world renowned and best restaurants for $300. Clearly, the discrimination in Tokyo is heartbreaking in its proportions, so heartbreaking that one can eat like a king for $400 a day, or eat like a peasant for $100 a day. I'm sure it was just such a 4-fold difference in price which led the French to the Bastille in 1792...

This is the quality of routine Western reporting on Japan, and the reason it is best to believe nothing one reads from Western newspapers about Japan.