When I tried to find a decent, cheap sushi place in the U.S., it was very hard to do. Most places charge several dollars per plate, a lot more than the dollar-a-plate I’ve become used to in Japan. The best I could scrape up was a few all-you-can-eat places in San Francisco, and they were still more expensive, in the end, than the Japan dives (even if I starved myself prior), and the quality just didn’t match up.

Before I came to Japan, I thought as many Americans do–that I would really hate it. Raw fish? Come on. And you know what? I still do, much of it. Sorry. Especially the maki-sushi (rolled sushi) or any other kind with seaweed. Never got used to that stuff. But there is one kind that I do like, and I like a lot: tuna. That’s either in the standard form–red tuna, or maguro–or in the high end menu selection, fatty tuna, called toro.

Toro, when you get good stuff, is heavenly. Tastes like butter, almost. I get it whenever it is priced reasonably at the supermarket. It comes in slabs; I chill it while I cook rice, then as the rice cooker indicates that the rice is done, I take it out, slice it (you need a really sharp knife), and eat it as sashimi, the rice on the side. Of course, I can’t afford to get what is called “oo-toro,” the highest-quality toro, but “chu-toro” (literally “medium fatty tuna”) is often available and I get that every few weeks.

Strangely, the toro available at the kaiten (conveyor belt) sushi joints is, almost uniformly, not very good. I’ve never ordered the 6-dollar-a-plate variety, but the 3- or 4-dollar varieties never have the right taste. A friend of mine who lived in Osaka once treated me to toro at a good sushi place near where he lived, and that was great–but the conveyer-belt places can’t seem to get it right.

But they do the regular tuna just great, and so that’s what I usually load up on when I stop by the place, every week or so on the way back from work. They know me there now, just like the folks at Akiyoshi yakitori-ya do. I’ll come in, order two plates right off the bat. They combine the two into one plate, putting the four sushi together, and the two plates one on top of the other. If the first set tastes good, I’ll order another four to six plates. I’ve come to notice, however, that they give me the best sushi first….

When you’re finished, they tally up the plates you’ve left stacked; price per plate is determined by the color and pattern on each plate. Since maguro is the cheapest, the tab usually comes out to a bit more than 6 or 8 dollars. Not bad.