Game 51: Junji Tanaka - Crab Rolls
Junji Tanaka, self-described “Lakers Super Fan.” That’s all I could find about the man who contribute this recipe for fried crab rolls to the World Champion Los Angeles Lakers Are Cookin’ Family Cookbook. He was Japanese and he liked sushi. I also like sushi, but I’m not Japanese. You didn’t really learn much about either of us, did you?
Given his age, which I can only guess was at least 45 due to his inclusion in the book, there’s a very good chance that, unless he himself was an immigrant, Junji or his parents were stripped of their possessions by the U.S. government and forced to live inside an internment camp. I still vividly remember the exact moment I learned about Japanese internment camps. The brutality, the illegality, the sheer cruelty of rounding up over 100,000 Japanese -- most of them U.S. citizens -- from the West Coast and throwing them into camps shocked my 11 year old brain.
I read about it in a fictional children’s book from the POV of a young interned boy that I happened to select during reading time. How was this not required reading? Why did we not spend an entire month learning only about Executive Order 9066? I was inundated with stories from my years in Hebrew school about Jews being rounded up into camps and massacred during the Holocaust. This was no different to me. Christian kids have their “When did you stop believing in Santa Claus?” moment. Japanese internment camps were my version for the United States of America. Would it shock you that Rage Against the Machine became my favorite band around the same time?
One of the most inspiring stories to come from that stain on this country was that of Ralph Lazo, a half-Mexican, half-Irish teenager who voluntarily joined his Japanese-American friends at Manzanar Relocation Center. His life was unknown to most when I first discovered his Wikipedia page in 2008 (my senior year of high school was really wild!). But thanks to a recent feature in The New York Times’ “Overlooked,” a series of obituaries written about people whose deaths were not covered by the Times, this Angeleno’s life story is finally getting the audience he deserved.
Lazo was born in L.A. in 1924 and raised on Temple St., the hilly 4-mile long stretch from Filipino Town to Little Tokyo that scrapes the undercarriage of Silver Lake and Echo Park. Owing to the diversity of that route, Lazo befriended the Mexicans, whites, blacks, Japanese, and Filipinos at Belmont High School, the rival school of my alma mater John Marshall. Much of the city west of Belmont was still lily white, but Temple St. reflected the multicultural L.A. of its 19th century beginnings and its late 20th century future. With his mother dead and his father constantly working, Lazzo found an extended family in the Japanese-American friends who invited him to dinner after school and the Filipino friends he spent hours with on the basketball court.
These same friends told Lazzo about the discrimination and mistrust they and their parents received shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the federal government began “evacuating” Japanese residents from their homes, he saw his fellow citizens forced to sell their homes, businesses, and personal possessions before being forced into prison camps. One neighbor even told Lazo that he had “Jewed down a Jap” who was selling his lawnmower before giving himself up to the government.
“Internment was immoral,” he told the LA Times in 1981. “It was wrong, and I couldn’t accept it.” So, after telling his overworked father he was heading to summer camp, Lazo went down to the train station and offered himself up. They didn’t check his papers. He was brown, mixed race, and could pass for Japanese to the government official. Off he went to Manzanar with friends and strangers, all Japanese except for him. A simple act of solidarity, a journey into the unknown as protest. Nobody had any idea when they’d be free, if they’d be freed or shipped off to post-war Japan or even killed. Lazo later told reporters that his friends jokingly told him to come along. It was the most extreme case of “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it?” ever done.
It wasn’t hard for his fellow camp inmates to realize he wasn’t Japanese. For one, he barely spoke Japanese. But he gradually became one of the most popular people locked away, even being voted class president of Manzanar High School in 1944. I mean, if you found out some random Mexican kid voluntarily gave up his freedom to protest mass imprisonment of your race, how could you dislike him? For two years, Lazo lived in the 100+ degree days and freezing nights in California’s bone dry Owens Valley. He made life better for his fellow inmates by planting trees and throwing holiday parties. But in 1944, his draft number came up and the U.S. government tracked the 19 year old to Manzanar and discovered the truth.
Lazo fought with distinction in the Pacific Theater, winning a Bronze Star, until 1946. Following his discharge, Lazo returned to his hometown, earned a master’s degree from Cal State Fullerton, and spent his remaining years a teacher. Lazo’s simple philosophical outlook of right vs wrong, moral vs immoral, informed him as a teacher, counselor, and activist for the rest of his years. He continued to fight for the rights of formerly interned Japanese-Americans, amplifying their fight while attempting to diminish his role. “Please write about the injustice of the evacuation,” he told an L.A. Times reporter in 1981 covering his youthful show of solidarity. “This is the real issue.” Before he died of liver failure in 1992, Lazo got to see his work pay off: An unprecedented apology from the United States of America for their "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership" and $20,000 in reparations to each surviving member of internment.
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Japanese Crab Roll
½ pound crabmeat, chopped
1 teaspoon cornstarch, mixed with a little water
2 green onions, chopped fine
½ teaspoon MSG
4 sheets nori (seaweed)
Mix all ingredients except nori and set aside.
Batter:
1 egg
¼ cup flour
½ cup cold water
Mix all batter ingredients. Mixture will be lumpy. Spread crab meat mixture on nori and roll. Dip rolls in batter and fry in hot oil 1-inch deep for 4 to 5 minutes, until crab turns a bright color. Drain on paper towel. Slice diagonally and serve hot or cold.
I remember the first time I attempted to roll a joint. It was October 2003, game 1 of the NLCS featuring the Florida Marlins at the Chicago Cubs. After the Cubs lost an extra innings thriller despite Sammy Sosa’s 9th inning heroics, I walked several blocks to Vermont Ave to grab some McDonalds. On the way back, I found a tiny matchbox at the bottom of my house’s stairs. The bottom of my house’s stairs was (and I assume still is) a haven for weed smoking teens in my neighborhood. Completely blocked from the quiet street (Sqirl was still years away), people would come through to smoke and drink, leaving their blunt wrap guts on the steps and empty Mickey’s bottles in the bushes.
I opened this tiny matchbox and found what I’d later learn was about 1/25th the amount of a regular sized bowl of marijuana. Maybe it was closer to 1/50th. But it felt like a pound of sticky icky had fallen into my lap. I took it upstairs and tried to figure out how I’d smoke it. I had never smoked weed before. I was desperate to blaze, but was too shy to ask my friends who smoked to let me try it. Earlier that year, however, a Christian group passed out tiny Bibles to us kids waiting for the school bus. I remembered that someone mentioned that Bible paper was a perfect substitute if you didn’t have any rolling papers. So I took out a page and broke down the tiny amount of weed I had. These days when I pack a bowl, the amount I spill on my coffee table dwarfs what I “rolled” into this piece of scripture. After my mom went to sleep, I sparked it up and inhaled a piece of paper. I did not get high.
These days, I consider myself a GREAT joint roller. My friends in high school and college were masters of rolling blunts, but I stuck with joints. I’ve been a daily weed smoker for about 15 years now and my preferred method of ingesting (blazing) cannabis (kind herb) is a nice solo joint. It took me years to perfect my method, but I roll a nice clean joint -- with no crutch, unlike 95% of joint rollers -- that lasts for two solo sessions. When Kid Cudi said “the lonely stoner likes to free himself at night,” I felt that.
When I got to the point of Junji Tanaka’s recipe where it came time to roll it, I thought about Jiro Ono and all the other expert sushi chefs in the world. Rolling sushi is not unlike rolling a joint. It’s a solitary experience, even if you're making something for others. It takes years of practice to get down right. And even when you roll a great one, the satisfaction comes in knowing you’re going to try to top it tomorrow.
Anyway, this dish wasn’t too bad. Though I knew the batter wasn’t going to stick. I’ve made enough fried chicken over the last year to know that the Flour → Egg → Panko step is integral to coating the food you’re about to fry. But mixing egg and flour together with water… and then dipping the product in it with no Panko? It was pretty pointless. I thought I was making tempura rolls. Turns out, I was just heating up the roll.
If you make this, I’d recommend two alterations. For one, coat it in Panko just before you fry it. And secondly, the recipe goes sans rice but it badly needs the rice. It’s like a joint without weed, kind of like my first joint.
