For a taste of Tokyo that costs less than air-fare to Japan try: IN NYC - Jo An - Takahachi - Taste of Tokyo IN BOSTON (outside of Porter Square) - Café Sushi - Gyuhama - Matsu-ya

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.-It is a warm September Tuesday and Japanese graduate student Kuniaki (Kuni) Takahashi is back in town, nursing an iced coffee at Cafe Mami and waiting for his lunch of miso and "Tokyo hamburg steak."

Kuni, a twenty-three-year-old master's candidate at M.I.T., finished the grueling twenty-hour trek from Tokyo just last night; he and his visiting baseball teammates from Japan couldn't wait to chow at the Porter Exchange, a minimall-cum-Japanese food court about a mile from Harvard Square. Drawn by what he terms "cheap and authentic" fare, Kuni frequents the Exchange weekly for comfort food and Japanese comic books. "We just sit and read and don't talk to each other," he says of these ritualistic cultural infusions. "...I try to order something different every time."

Kuni is part of the Labor Day student tide that deluges greater Boston and its cheap haunts. Few of these places draw as many Asians as the Exchange, where twenty-somethings pack cash-only, smoke-free stalls the size of dorm rooms lining a long, dimly-lit corridor. Seated on folding chairs at Cafe Mami, they inspect (or ignore) each other's postings for used cars and beds; heads bowed to the noodle gods at Sapporo Ramen, they sip and slurp; perched on sushi-bar stools at Kotobukyia, they pick and gnaw. Seven or eight dollars will buy a bowl of beef donburi or udon soup with chicken strips.

This most multicultural of places evolved from something much more mainstream. The art deco Exchange building housed a Sears store from 1928 until 1985, and then nearly became a bloated late-eighties mall/multiplex. Instead, the southwestern-style Cottonwood Cafe (branches in Boston, Tucson, and Bethesda, Md.) and a Smithsonian astro-physics lab moved in. Around 1990, Japanese fast-food businesses started opening.

The allure of Japan Town, as some call the Exchange, transcends chewy ramen and plump rice-maker rice. You'll find scrumptious Japanese and French pastries at the Japonaise Bakery counter, green tea ice cream at Hana, and fried tempeh at the popular macrobiotic restaurant Masao's Kitchen. (Coffee As You Like It, a cafe serving drinks like Mocha MacBeth, accepts the Japan Bureau of Credit card.) The boutique Tokai stocks Japanese handicrafts, and Kotobukyia, a thriving Japanese market which runs the building's only sushi bar, sells $30.99-per-pound shrink-wrapped yellowtail sashimi. Across Massachusetts Avenue, Japanophiles study the language at the Boston Japan Link and buy imported books at the Sasuga Japanese Bookstore.

At last, Kuni's steaming Tokyo burger arrives, glistening with an all-American meatloaf sheen. The critic/engineering student proclaims his patty "kind of overcooked and burnt." But then, perhaps revealing how inevitably one adjusts to Tokyo prices, he adds: "For seven dollars, it's reasonable. It tastes better than Burger King or Pizza Hut. That's not much of a compliment, is it?"

Coming soon to a minimall near you...McRamen? Udon Hut! The Porter Exchange (1815 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Mass.) offers free validated parking on Roseland Street. The Red Line subway and MBTA commuter rail stop in Porter Square.