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Not a single grain of wheat flour goes into the noodles at the Tokyo soba shrine — I mean restaurant — called Kikouchitei. The noodles are hand-cut from freshly rolled dough containing buckwheat and only buckwheat.

If that doesn't strike you as unusual, then there's something you should know about buckwheat dough: It is the world's most temperamental substance. Without the glutinous binding properties of wheat, the dough becomes so prone to shredding that learning how to make it takes a staggering three years of training — after which one attains the status of "soba master."

That's what chef Matsamura did. But then his soba-dough-rolling expertise is only one example of the fetishistic, borderline maniacal culinary philosophy at Kikouchitei. After all, this is a chef who insists on grinding his own buckwheat flour with his own granite millstone. A millstone that sits behind glass like some monument in the middle of the restaurant.

His noodles — supple, faintly grainy and cottony soft — are served Zaru-style. This means they are dipped into a broth that is its own mixture of absurdly rarefied ingredients, including a Japanese sugar that costs $250 a kilogram, rice vinegar aged for more than 2 1/2 years, and donko, the most expensive dried shiitake mushroom on the planet.

Of course, the land of the rising sun has long been known for its culinary excesses. Raw blowfish, anyone?

But lately Japan's obsession has caught the attention of the ultimate in establishment gourmands. In November, Michelin — the restaurant-rating publication that has been known to drive chefs to suicide — came out with its first-ever Tokyo guide. And what a guide. The 150 restaurants it rated received no fewer than 191 Michelin stars, almost triple the number bestowed on Paris. All of which suggests that when it comes to good eating, Tokyo is tops. At least, according to the French.

Not that the Japanese are in the habit of caring what other countries think of their food. They're too busy worrying about it themselves: About 40 per cent of the shows on TV involve cooking, in Tokyo alone there are 160,000 restaurants and in and around the city are theme parks such as Sweets Forest and museums devoted entirely to fruit, curry and ramen noodles.

In their spare time, the Japanese also go on culinary tours — to Hokkaido to eat the freshest sushi, or to the coast in winter to soak in hot springs and eat crab. According to one local food critic, the Japanese mania for eating even has a name: "the madness."

Being a perpetually hungry sort of person, the first thing I did upon hearing all this was book a flight to Japan. The second thing I did was plan a three-day eating tour of Tokyo with Michi Travel, a Japanese company that specializes in culinary trips and serves English-speaking customers.

Guiding me on my quest would be Mari Okada, a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa and probably the only person among Tokyo's 13 million residents who thinks the city is sorely lacking in beaver tails, poutine and Montreal-style bagels.

FISH FUNDAMENTALS The point of the tour was to taste the fundamentals of Japanese cuisine, and our first stop was the famous Tsukiji fish market.

The world's largest fish and seafood bazaar and the site of the famous tuna auction, it is well on its way to becoming a cultural cliché. Japanese people find it a tad odd, in fact, that so many foreigners make pilgrimages to see fish being sold at 5:30 a.m., and on the day I visited there were at least as many tourists as actual Japanese.

But as cultural clichés go, Tsukiji is worth it. It's not every day that you get to witness a swarm of fish buyers set upon a warehouse full of dead tuna with little pickaxes, chopping tiny wedges into the tails of 120-kilogram bluefin tuna to assess the level of fat — the more, the better — or that you get to stand next to a man who enters a winning bid of $18,500.

It's not every day, for that matter, that you have the opportunity to taste sushi of such high quality. Which is precisely what we did around the corner at a restaurant packed with locals called Tsukiji Sushisay. We each ordered a sushi platter that included prized flesh from the belly of the bluefin. Known to Japanese as otoro, it is so fatty as to be pink in colour. And it does not taste like fish. It's more like a savoury rectangle of succulence that melts on the tongue and slides down your throat like a satin gumdrop.

It takes just a stroll down one of Tsukiji's narrow streets, however, to realize that Japanese food fervour extends well beyond sushi. There are clams for sale as big as dinner plates, wooden bins piled with fluffy mounds of dried tuna shavings, and a staggering variety of pickled fish eggs. One store specializes exclusively in dried seaweed. A little farther along, I came across a butcher shop selling the most marbled beef I have ever laid eyes on. The meat hailed from Iwate Prefecture and was selling for $100 a pound.

SOY, BEEF, HEAVEN Here's another thing you should know about Tsukiji: It's just one foodie neighbourhood among many.

Next up was Ningyocho, where we loaded up on Japanese sweets at a shop that has been run by the same family for 101 years.

From there, we walked around the corner to Futuyaba, a tofu shop that has been in the same family for 102 years. The store is, as you might expect, rather picky about its soy beans. It sources them from Hokkaido, chooses only the largest ones and painstakingly transforms 100 kilograms of them every day into the finest bean curd.

As tofu goes, it shares little but appearance with the supermarket variety available in Canada. It's primo stuff: silky, fluffy and with a discernible soy taste. I ate from a little bamboo cup filled with it, then washed the tofu down with a steaming cup of amikaze, a sweet sake that's served hot in winter and cold in summer.

For lunch, we ate just down the road at Imahan, a restaurant that has been in business precisely 12 years longer than Futuyaba. Since it opened more than a century ago, it has been famed for high-quality beef like the marbled Japanese wonders I had witnessed in Tsukiji. Their specialty: hot pot, which the Japanese call shabu shabu — and if you can get over the embarrassment of saying shabu shabu to a total stranger, it's not to be missed.

Mari and I were seated across from each other on tatami mats, with a pot of bubbling seaweed broth on the table in front of us. We took turns dunking the beef — presented in raw, thin slices, the veins of pure fat permeating the flesh like filigree — into the savoury broth for a duration of no more than 10 seconds. Say what you want about grilling over a wood fire, the truth is nothing amplifies the rich, heady aroma of beef the way a dip in hot seaweed broth does.

Like the otoro at Tsukiji Sushisay and the tofu at Futuyaba, shabu shabu is, fundamentally, the experience of a sublime texture married to a complex but gently expressed flavour. You sit there for minutes at a time on your tatami mat, in a kind of reverential silence, concentrating on the sensation of holding it in your mouth. Then you grab the next piece with your chopsticks and dunk again.

A PERFECTLY NORMAL BITE Still, I couldn't help but wonder what average Tokyo food was like. Does this level of perfection extend to a regular family dinner? What do normal people eat when they step out for a quick bite on a Tuesday night? My hotel wasn't far from Ningyocho, so one evening, after I had said goodnight to Mari, I ventured out for yet another bite to eat.

I walked past sushi bars, soba restaurants and steak houses and turned left down a particularly narrow alley lined with small restaurants. The smallest was barely larger than a big walk-in closet, and every table but one was taken up by Japanese businessmen hunched over big steaming bowls. The ones who weren't eating were smoking. I took a seat and pointed at a faded photograph at the top right of the menu.

Minutes later, a large bowl was placed in front of me. It was filled with steaming broth, thin slices of roast pork belly floating on top — and submerged beneath, a nest of thin white noodles. I brought the first noodle to my mouth and had a revelation: These are ramen noodles, I thought, the real, fresh version of the dried and processed Ichiban I consumed voraciously in my university days.

The noodles were so soft you could swallow them almost without chewing. The pork belly was crispy on the edge, but the fat practically melted between my teeth. And the broth was right up there with Vietnamese pho and an oxtail reduction I once had in the Swiss Alps. I slurped down the noodles, drank the broth and finished a tall bottle of Asahi beer. The bill: $10.

I had another question: Why do the Japanese eat so well? Like the Italians and French, they seem unwilling to tolerate anything other than delicious food.

THE $3 MANDARIN THEORY One theory holds that the Japanese make it their mission to perfect the things they love — jeans, electronics, animation, knives — so it only makes sense that they would take the same approach to food. As The London Times noted when Tokyo's triumphant Michelin status was announced, the city's culinary prowess is a "natural extension of the national spirit of monozukuri — 'the making of things.'" When I put the question to Mari, she also told me that from a young age Japanese children are taught to thank farmers before they eat. It's hard to buy any Japanese ingredient, be it fish, fruit, buckwheat or sake, without being informed what prefecture it hails from. This is a country, in other words, that has a very real connection to its land.

Finally, there is what you might call the Iron Chef theory, which is that high-quality ingredients aren't just about flavour, they're about prestige. This could explain why exquisitely packaged food items are often given as gifts, and why Madeleines at one patisserie in Tokyo are stamped with the exact time they were made.

Nowhere, though, is food's cachet more evident than at a store called Sembiyika. Famous across the country, this is the most luxurious, exclusive fruit shop in all of Tokyo and likely the world. How luxurious? How does a pair of melons for $314 sound? They're muskmelons from Shizoka Prefecture, and they grow only two to a vine. Or what about mandarins at $3 each? If that sounds like a lot of money for a mandarin, consider that they have a sugar content of 15 per cent.

At Sembiyika, even a box of hand-dried persimmons goes for $120. Like everything — whether it's the kiwis the size of a pro boxer's fist, the $20 mangoes from Australia or the $400 fruitcake — the persimmons are all perfect in shape, texture and colour. As you behold each piece of fruit, you have to fight the urge to hire a hand model to pick it up for you, so as not to sully it with imperfect digits.

As far as taste goes, I can comment only on the $3 mandarins, of which I bought precisely one. I took it back to my hotel, undressed it and placed it in my mouth, one segment after another. It was as faultless as a mandarin can get — a sublime balance of flesh and juice, sweet and tart, and the peel practically unzipped itself.

It was so good, in fact, that as soon as I had swallowed the last segment, I went out to buy another. Sembiyika was too far away, so I scoured the streets until I found a local fruit store. There were mandarins, and they were very fine looking mandarins, mandarins you would be more than proud to bring home to Mom. But, to speak frankly, they weren't mandarin supermodels like the ones at Sembiyika. They didn't taste as good, either. They were delicious all right, and would sit comfortably in the top one percentile of Canadian supermarket mandarins. But the fact is, I had tasted better, and that's what I wanted.

And it wasn't just mandarins. I never wanted food to stop tasting this good. As I sat there, eating that excellent-but-not-quite-perfect mandarin, I thought of tuna that goes for $18,500, beef that costs $100 a pound and buckwheat noodles that take three years to learn how to make. A few days ago, these things all struck me as the ridiculous enthusiasms of an eccentric people. Now that I had tasted it all, I had a different opinion: It's worth it.

Toronto writer Mark Schatzker is working on a book about steak.