Cooking in Tokyo on one burner and a small fridge

You come home from the first big shop with three bags, and the fridge takes about half of it.

The fridge in a furnished Tokyo apartment sits under the counter. The handle is at your knee. Inside there are two glass shelves, a drawer at the bottom for vegetables, and a rack in the door that holds a one-liter milk carton standing up and not much beside it. The freezer is one drawer underneath, and the ice trays are already in it. On the counter above, there is a single induction ring. There is a rice cooker. There is no oven.

So you stand in a small kitchen at nine at night holding a bag of cabbage that has nowhere to go, and you decide the problem is the burner.

It isn't.

The fridge decides

The burner looks like the limit because it is the thing you can count. One ring, one pan, one thing at a time. That holds for about a week, and then you work out that the rice cooker is the second burner. It heats, it holds, and it does not need watching. You press the switch and the pan on the ring is free to do the other half of dinner. Somebody thought about that before they put a rice cooker in a kitchen with one ring.

What you cannot work around is the storage. A burner limits what you can cook at once. A fridge limits what you can keep, and keeping is the entire idea behind a weekly shop. Seven days of dinner has to sit somewhere between the day you buy it and the day you eat it, and in this apartment there is no somewhere. The cabbage goes on the counter. The counter beside the ring is also the only surface you have to cut on. By Wednesday you are working on a chopping board balanced on a bag of onions.

The thing that breaks in a Tokyo furnished apartment is not the cooking. It is the shopping.

Half a cabbage, three carrots, one block of tofu

Walk into the supermarket nearest your building and look at the sizes rather than the prices. Cabbage is sold as a half, often as a quarter, wrapped tight in film. Carrots come three to a bag. Pork is sliced thin and laid flat in a tray that is one dinner for two people. Fish is two fillets on a foam tray with a sheet of absorbent paper underneath. Tofu is a single block. Milk is a one-liter carton, and the big plastic jug you are used to is not on the shelf at all.

None of it is sized for a week. It is sized for tonight, and maybe tomorrow.

The other half of that design is the walk. The supermarket is not somewhere you drive to on Saturday. It is under the station, or halfway along the covered shopping street, or on the ground floor of a building you pass anyway coming back from the train. In a residential ward like Nakano, Suginami, or north Setagaya, there are two or three inside a ten-minute walk. Ozeki, Maruetsu, Summit, Life, Seiyu. The names change by ward and the shape does not.

Once the shop is on the way home, buying for a week stops making sense. And once you stop buying for a week, the kitchen stops being small. The fridge is never full because it does not need to be full. The vegetables never go soft in the drawer, because they are only in there overnight. You cook what you bought forty minutes ago. I tried the big Sunday shop three times in my first month and never once got it into the fridge.

Maruetsu, Gyomu Super, and the basement of the department store

Three kinds of shop, three separate errands, and the mistake is asking one of them to do all three.

The ordinary neighborhood supermarket carries the near-daily shop. Fresh things, small packs, a fish counter, a shelf of pre-marinated meat that goes straight into the pan. It is the only one of the three you have to be able to reach on foot in the rain.

The discount chain is a different job. Gyomu Super (業務スーパー, gyōmu sūpā — "business supermarket," the discount chain), or an Olympic: bigger packs, restaurant sizes, frozen and dry goods. Almost nothing you buy there will fit in the fridge, which is the point of going. You go once every two or three weeks with a backpack, and you buy for the cupboard and the freezer drawer. Rice. Pasta. Frozen vegetables. Canned beans, which the small supermarket does not always carry.

The third is the depachika (デパ地下, depachika — the food floor in the basement of a department store). Isetan in Shinjuku, Takashimaya in Nihonbashi, Tobu in Ikebukuro. This is not a grocery shop, and you will lose money treating it as one. It sells one meal, finished, in a box: tempura, grilled fish, small dishes of vegetables, a piece of beef somebody else already cooked. It is for the evening you got home at nine and are not going to cook, and for the evening somebody is coming over. Once a week it is a good part of the month. Three times a week and you have quietly rebuilt the eating-out problem one floor below ground.

Late afternoon, at the back of the store

Sometime in the afternoon a member of staff starts going round the edge of the shop with a small sticker gun. They go along the prepared food, then the fish, then the meat, marking the packs that will not sell today. The word on the sticker is 値引き (nebiki — a reduction off the marked price). Later in the evening some shops put a second sticker over the first, and the word on that one is 半額 (hangaku — half of the amount).

Your store has an hour for this. It is not published, it is not the same as the shop one station away, and nobody is going to tell you. You learn it the way you learn which carriage lines up with your exit: you are there twice at the same time and you notice. The people standing at the fish counter at that hour are mostly the same people. They live in the buildings you live in, and they have come down for dinner.

It helps to be clear about what this is. It is not a bargain hunt, and you will make yourself miserable arranging an evening around it. It is a fact about the hour, the way the 7:30 train is a fact about the morning. When you happen to be in the shop then, the fish is cheaper. When you are not, it isn't. The evening shape of Suginami has one specific store's clock written down, if you want to see what a real one looks like before you find yours.

Buy for tomorrow, not for Sunday

On the first evening, do not shop. Walk to the nearest supermarket and go round it once, buying nothing except that night's dinner. Find the eggs, the tofu, the fish counter, the rice, the small section of cut vegetables near the entrance. You are learning where things are, and you will be back tomorrow.

For the first three days, buy one dinner and one breakfast at a time. That is enough to show you the habit works, and it is the cheapest way to find out what your fridge actually holds.

Do the discount-chain run in week two, not week one. You need to know what you cook here before you buy a large bag of it. In August the walk home is the harder half of that errand: buy the frozen things last and walk quickly.

Keep the counter clear. It is your only work surface. If the vegetables live on it, you have nowhere to cut, and the kitchen will feel much smaller than it is.

If you are vegetarian, vegan, or keeping halal, the store list is different and the dietary logistics guide has the shops that cover it. The kit you will be cooking with is in what's in the cabinet on arrival night.

The walk home with one bag

By the third week the shop has stopped being an errand. It happens between the ticket gate and your door, and it takes about as long as waiting for the next train. You carry one bag. Some evenings there is a sticker on the fish and most evenings there isn't. You know which of the two supermarkets has the better tofu and which one has the better bread, and you know that neither of them has both.

You stop planning meals for the week. You decide what dinner is somewhere between the second station and the third.

The kitchen was never too small. It was only ever too small for the week you kept trying to put in it.