Tonight, we took a long, swift, and smooth shinkansen ride from Hiroshima back to Tokyo, where we will be spending our last two nights in Japan. It’s always such a bittersweet feeling when I know a trip is near its end; for most of the places we have visited, I’ve always felt like there was never enough time to see, do, and taste everything we wanted. But then, there are always those amazing things that happen you never expect that you will always be able to look back on and remember, and realize how much it has the ability to change the way you view life.

For our time in Tokyo, that event was the ability to have an extremely notable meal at Sushi Yuu, which was recommended to us by one of Chris’s colleagues who works in their company’s Tokyo office. He met us during our dinner at Sushi Yuu, where he used to work as a sushi chef and of course is still friends with the owner, Daisuke Shimazaki, who personally prepared each and every one of the pieces of fish we ate tonight. Sushi Yuu does not have a Michelin rating, nor is it on any major top sushi list of Japan I have found, but it is one of the most amazing dining experiences of my life, very likely made even more exciting since we got to sit right in front of Dai as he prepared our sushi and told us about each little dish’s preparation and how it should be eaten. We were treated as special guests, which truly was so special for us. It helped that he spoke pretty good English to describe all these little details to us.

Before coming to Japan, I never really thought much about things like salmon roe or fish eggs, nor did I ever genuinely enjoy uni (sea urchin). Salmon roe was one of those things that I just ate because it might be on the side of my sushi platter in New York; uni always tasted like the guts of the ocean, and not in a good way. I would take a quick sniff, place the uni into my mouth, and swallow. And that weird, gutty taste would linger in my mouth after that I’d need to wash away with sake or green tea. Well here, Dai has showed us what very good salmon roe can taste like and how big and juicy the little individual orange-colored eggs can be. And when the juices squirt out in our mouths as we bit into the little eggs, it actually tasted sweet, like juices from the ocean. He carefully prepared the most delicate pieces of uni, all picked himself at Tsukiji Fish Market where he buys pretty much all of his fish every morning. I watched him as he removed each piece from a wooden box lined in bamboo strips; he made the entire sushi preparing and sashimi cutting process look so easy. The pieces were smooth and silky, not oozing and intestine-like the way the pieces back in New York were. Watching him cut and prepare everything was like real live entertainment, but with a huge learning experience woven into it.

Dai introduced us to anago, the sea eel that is leaner than its cousin unagi, which most of us know and have at Japanese restaurants. Unagi is river eel and is known for its high fat content. He’s the reason we ate actual, real bonito sashimi, as I’d only ever had bonito in the flake form at Japanese restaurants. And he also explained to us the growing and harvesting process for wasabi root; it takes about two to four years to grow wasabi that is just a couple inches long, and because of this, a kilo of wasabi that, on a busy day, only lasts him a single day to feed his customers costs him about 15,000 yen, or about $125 USD. He’s clearly not skimping out on good ingredients for his business.

He ended the meal by serving us some of his mother’s homemade plum wine, which she’d been fermenting for the last eight years, and serving us each a single slice of honeydew, cut up into bite sized pieces. For the first time in my life, I actually witnessed my Chris eating an entire piece of melon voluntarily, and not only that, but enjoying it. I guess it was a life-changing experience for both of us. Who knew how complex the sashimi world really was?