Recently 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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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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Sonoji 浅ノ字 My wife and I just finished a wonderful lunch of tenpura and soba at Sonoji, a Michelin one-star restaurant that is only a few second walk from our home in Ningyōchō. When Sonoji first opened I often went for soba lunch, with a piece or two or three of ala carte tenpura. But those days are long gone; it is now course only, although in the evening there are two choices for the course, one […]
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KYOTO DINING This past weekend my wife and I decided to go down to Kyoto to celebrate the 2682nd anniversary of the birth of Japan. At least according to the ancient histories. The trip was actually more about taking advantage of the current dearth of foreign tourists and an opportunity to try out some restaurants for the first time. And for my wife, a chance to do hakamaeri (visiting her parent’s graves). She easily made reservations at […]
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The other night I had dinner with my wife and a couple of friends at a nice little soba izakaya in Meguro called Kawasemi (川せみ). The occasion was to have a night out with ‘Y’’ a Japanese friend who now lives in New York who had to come to Japan due to her ninety-five year old mother’s recent death, the dinner not just an opportunity to honor her mother, who the rest of us all knew, but […]
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WASABI ENDANGERED!!! The front page of today’s (February 9, 2022) New York Times International Edition featured a story that took up over half the page about Japanese wasabi being endangered, mainly because of environmental factors (“A Fiery Delicacy in Peril”). Native to Japan, wasabi has been eaten for over one-thousand years, not so much as a food but as a condiment with beneficial medicinal properties. Until quite recently, wasabi was grown only in Japan, making it, in […]
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