The other day I went to a recently relocated sushi shop behind Suitengu Shrine in Ningyōchō, Sushi Masa. My wife and I had been to the former place, located one block away, several years ago and found it to be okay but a bit on the expensive side. But after going past the new location nearly every day for the past couple of months and seeing their lunch menu outside, I finally decided to go. I don’t […]
Read moreRecently my wife and I headed out to Katsunuma City in Yamanashi prefecture for a winery hopping event. My wife had learned of it via a friend who had recently done it. It wasn’t cheap–¥7,000 per person, plus another ¥5,000 or so for train fare—but it was a fun event, with warm and sunny weather and the chance to a bit of winery touring. I started doing winery visits in Oregon back in 1977, I believe, at […]
Read moreBettara is Back! After a three year absence due to the pandemic, one of the longest running market festivals in Tokyo, the Nihonbashi Bettara Market festival, is back! The markets is a celebration of bettara, or more formerly bettarazuke, a semi-sweet pickle made by curing daikon in a mix of sake, sugar, salt, and rice kōji. The bettara is ready to eat after fermenting for a couple of days, the sticky mix it has been in not […]
Read moreIt seems that lately, every time I travel, either alone or with my wife, I come across a craft beer brewery. When I first came to Tokyo the only craft brewery I was aware of was TY Harbor, near Shinagawa. Even though it was quite a way from home, I used to go anyway for some quality beer, something that was seemingly everywhere back in Portland, Oregon, where I am from. These days, there are nine actual […]
Read moreLast weekend I went down to Kyoto to hang out with my friend Matt, who I hadn’t seen in five years or so. Zooms don’t count. Matt is currently a professor of Japanese language and culture at a university in Australia, but also is director of a traditional performing arts program held in Kyoto each summer. Each summer save for the last two. The program consists of lessons in noh, kotsozumi drumming, and rakugo, each class taught […]
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After nearly two and a half years, I finally was able to make soba again this past Saturday with the Nihonbashi Konanokai (日本橋粉の会). The group had made soba a month or so ago, but I was in Oregon at the time. There were only ten of us this time, down from the usually fifteen or twenty people. And while we did have a small party after finishing making soba, we did not eat any of our production. […]
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The other evening my wife and I went out to celebrate a birthday. Nothing too fancy this time, just unagi at a well known place in Kanda, Kikukawa. The restaurant doesn’t take reservations, which isn’t usually a problem. Unless, that is, you want to eat the extra-large serving of unagi, which tends to sell out early. The place being close, and the weather dry but with rain forecast for later in the evening, we rode our bikes […]
Read moreI was reading The Guardian newspaper online yesterday when I came across this headline: Major New Zealand salmon producer shuts farms as warming waters cause mass die-offs Actually, it wasn’t the headline itself that caught my attention. News like this is becoming all to common lately. It was what I read a few lines into the article that stopped me in my tracks: New Zealand has a huge Chinook salmon farming industry! The biggest in the world. […]
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Over the course of two and a half years or so nine friends of mine—all Japanese—and I walked the old Tōkaidō road, from Nihonbashi in Tokyo to Sanjō Ohashi in Kyoto, finishing in November, 2020. All fifty-three post stations (juku), all 500 km, plus side trips, in twenty-six days of walking, basically two post stations per day of walking. And no, we did not do it all at one time, but broken up first two juku a […]
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Tansōan Soba Lunch 丹想庵蕎 I happened to be in Asakusa around lunchtime today so I decided to swing by one of my favorite soba shops, Tansōan, for a good—and cheap—tenpura and soba lunch. I’ve been a fan of this place for over ten years, since a year or two after it opened, back when I was trying to eat lunch at every soba shop in the area, way back before Kenji san, the owner, received a Michelin […]
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