In the end, I think every serious seafood cook must turn toward Japan. No other culture understands fish and seafood better than the Japanese, and the beauty and simplicity of Japanese food is unsurpassed. I eat a lot of seafood for my About.com adventures, and while I adore the traditional way fish are served in the Mediterranean, even I can get tired of tasting the Holy Trinity of salt, olive oil and lemon. I have a strong feeling that revelations lurk within Asian cuisine.

So I am turning Japanese, to take a line from The Vapors. I intend to take an extended look at Japanese cooking techniques, ingredients and styles to, hopefully, make me a better cook when I return to my more comfortable Italian, Spanish and regional American dishes.

M.F.K. Fisher recommended that I use as my guide Shizuo Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. Yes, I know Mary Frances is no longer with us physically, but her introduction to Tsuji’s book is worth the cover price alone. I’ve found no better essay than Fisher’s on why a Westerner should want to understand the often arcane rituals of classic Japanese cooking.

Now Hunter Angler Gardener Cook is not going to morph into a sort of “cook the book” blog, of which Nose to Tail at Home is my current favorite. I have too varied a set of interests to be so monomaniacal — or my inner dilettante overrides any hope of such focus, depending on how I am seeing things at any given moment.

But I plan on learning a bit more about Japanese techniques each week. I started by buying a fine Japanese sashimi knife (left-handed, of course) to go along with the fine Japanese chef’s knife Holly bought me for Christmas. I have designs on a hocho knife to complete my set.

These knives are a joy to work with — far sharper than Western knives, they also hold an edge twice as long. The problem is they are not easy to sharpen. I botched my first attempt at sharpening my chef’s knife, but have since bought a set of Japanese sharpening stones. Once I get the technique down, I plan on writing about how to properly sharpen a Japanese knife.

Next we made a pilgrimage to Oto’s, the temple of Japanese cuisine in Sacramento. It is a medium-sized supermarket dedicated entirely to Japanese food. Ain’t California grand? There I bought staples, such as wasabi powder, good soy sauce, sake, konbu (dried kelp), flakes of dried bonito, salted smelt roe, white miso paste. I feared buying anything too perishable because I wanted to ease into this at my own pace.

I decided to start small. I made tosa soy sauce, which is a foundation of Japanese cooking they way olive oil, garlic and onions are to the Italian food. Tosa soy sauce is regular soy sauce, with the sweet cooking wine mirin, konbu, sake, tamari soy sauce (something I had not used since college!), plus a little dried bonito flakes.

But even this simple sauce requires precision. You must burn off the alcohol in the sake and the mirin, then let it cool before you add it to the rest of the sauce. You must wipe the kelp off with a damp (not wet) cloth. Then you must cover the mixture and let it sit on the counter for 24 hours. Finally you strain it through cheesecloth and bottle it. Tsuji says tosa soy sauce is not at its best until it is between 6 months and a year old.

I made a large batch. I am sorry to say I dipped into it right away, however, to sauce a simple Tsuji salad: Savory Okra. I know, I know — EW! Okra!!! Get over it. Okra is good, if a bit gooey in this recipe. You boil the pods (I grow a variety called Hill Country Red from the Southern Exposure Seed Savers catalog) for 2 minutes, then shock cool them. Slice the okra, then toss it with the tosa soy sauce mixed with a little wasabi powder.

I added a dash of seven-spice mixture, which is often incorrectly called togarashi (even by me until I read this book) because chiles are its main ingredient; togarashi is the Japanese word for peppers. The result? Tasty, but I am guessing the fact that I did not thoroughly cool the okra made them slimier than they might otherwise have been. Served immediately, the mucilage gave the sauce body. But 15 minutes later, it was, well, slimy. Precision, precision.

To go with the savory okra, I made vinegared cucumber with a cuke from my garden, plus one my friend Bill gave me. Again, precision. You must peel and seed the cukes; I left one-half with skins to add a different texture and some color. Slice very thinly with a mandoline, then knead with salt until they give off water. That’s right, knead. Like bread dough. It worked.

I then mixed tosa soy sauce with some sugar and rice vinegar and mixed half of that in with the sliced cukes. You then gently squeeze out the moisture from them and put them into another bowl. Finally, you add the rest of the sauce and serve at once. My touch was a dollop of masago, or smelt roe.

All this for a cucumber salad. Was it worth it? You bet.

Where, you may ask, is the seafood? If you’ve been following closely, it is everywhere: Kelp and bonito flakes are a chief flavoring agent in the tosa soy sauce, and I added the masago to the cucumber salad. Such is the subtlety of the Japanese. As for a piece of fish, that comes later.