Another earthquake in Tokyo Tuesday –this one stronger than a few weeks ago, but with the epicenter further away, so it didn’t feel as strong. I planned all day to write about that, but later something more interesting and positive happened.

My wife and I walked around the busy evening streets of Ginza looking for a particular udon noodle place we’d read about, and eventually found it on a relatively quiet side-street. The address was nondescript, to say the least –the second floor of a very small, dull-looking office building. But there was a line out the door and down the stairs, so we figured they must be doing something right. We waited in the dull, fluorescent-lit, slightly dirty stairwell, developing a healthy hatred for one particular table that had already eaten when we arrived and was still there chatting when we were seated over an hour later. Some of the people in line in front of us gave up and left. At one point a man who appeared to be the owner or head chef opened the door to let in a couple, looked down the stairwell at the line, and let out a dismayed sigh. A few minutes later he squeezed past the crowd on the stairs to put up a closed sign.

When at long last we reach the threshold of the udon Promised Land we’re standing on a landing outside the restaurant, in front of a glass door through which we can the people who have been taking up a table this whole time. One fellow, who clearly seems to be the ring-leader, smirks. One of the negative things about being a foreigner in Japan is often getting looks that seem to say “Oh you, I know all about you.” The content isn’t always clear, but it generally doesn’t seem positive. So, at this point it seems like torture: we’re watching these people order MORE food while they’re watching us wait and, perhaps only because we’re getting very hungry at this point, I feel that we’re enacting some kind of insider/outsider allegory.

But then things start to look up. To begin with, when the waitress brings these people their next round of food, she brings along with it not only a bottle of oil with hot peppers floating in it but a green shaker of Kraft parmesan cheese. This is inexplicably delightful to me and convinces me, against all reason, that the food will be very good.

The man we’d seen rush by earlier then comes out with two stools, which we take as a nice gesture but we have no desire to sit in the hall. He then immediately returns with two small glasses of a delicious brown beer and insists we take a seat. A moment later he returns to fill our cupped hands with dried shrimp, which I don’t really care for, but . . . they say hunger is best sauce –these were garnished with hunger and gratitude.

Before long we were seated at the counter inside. The man –it is now clear that he really runs the place in addition to doing seemingly everything– brings sake for me and, when my wife declines hers, roasted barley tea for her. This is accompanied by grilled fish cakes and grated ginger. The owner’s English is slowly expanding –he asks where we are from, etc. I’ve been in Japan about seven weeks, eaten almost every meal out, and this is only the second time someone in a restaurant has asked me anything --and the first time involved a fair amount of open hostility, mocking American accents, etc.-- so this is a pleasant surprise. We order two bowls of tempura udon and an appetizer of freshly made sweet-potato chips, which we’d seen other customers eating.

While we’re waiting, the owner, apparently delighted to discover two Americans in his restaurant, brings us a stack of American baseball cards and tells us how much he loves Ichiro Suzuki but, alas, hasn’t been able to get an Ichiro card. He then brings out an Ichiro figurine mounted on a Pepsi bottle cap and a Japanese newspaper with a headline about Hideki Matsui hitting a homerun for the Yankees.

This is all wonderful, but then out comes a business card from a Columbia law professor –for no reason other than to show us that the man was there. At this point we get out our cards as well. He then brings us a magazine called Tokushima Graph, which is about his home prefecture of Tokushima on Shikoku Island –a prefecture of a total population well under a million, pretty small for Japan. He then recalls having been to the United States fifteen years ago for a series of food industry seminars while he was a franchising supervisor: three days in LA, three in Chicago, where he had a thick-crust pizza, four days in New York, where he had hamburgers at “Hollywood Planet.”

While the hot udon we ordered and have been eating is fine, he explains, the house specialties are two cold udon dishes that we should try. I tell him in Japanese that we’ll come back, maybe tomorrow, and he laughs, disappears into the kitchen, and returns with two small bowls of each of the specialties: one a cold thin broth with grated daikon, ginger, and scallion, sprinkled with sesame seeds, the other also cold, but thicker and sesame flavored, almost like a thin tahini, also sprinkled with sesame seeds and tiny bits of scallion, and larger pieces of moist seaweed. What we had ordered was worth waiting for, but these dishes are in a different category and even though we are both stuffed we empty all four bowls.

Toward the end of the meal the man gives us his card and we realize that the restaurant is named after him: “Sakata,” the last syllable written in kanji, the first two in kana. When my wife asks if she can take a picture of him, Mr. Sakata insists we go out onto the landing so that we can take a picture in front of his shop sign. Once we’re all outside, he goes back inside and returns to the landing with a customer to take a picture of the three of us. Finally, my wife is able to take a picture of just him.

In many ways this is a typical travel story, but in the context of so many weeks of little interaction beyond “please,” “thank you,” and “pay at the register” –at a time when being an American abroad can be awkward or worse-- it was refreshing, almost magical. When Mr. Sakata recalled his culinary experiences in Chicago and New York, I tried telling him that American food has gotten a lot better over the last fifteen years, but it quickly became clear that he wasn’t interested in that sort of thing. He was reliving his America, a place where, he recalled, Patrick Ewing plays for the Knicks, and Michael Jordan plays for the Bulls –a place where people eat pizza and hamburgers. It was almost enough to make me nostalgic for a time when such things were the major motifs of America's image abroad. The simplicity of that place and time never really existed, of course, but Mr. Sakata clearly had a wonderful time when he was there and wanted us to have one in his Japan. We did.