My wife and I recently went down to Atami, a small city on the ocean in Shizuoka prefecture just an hour—at most—away from Tokyo by shinkansen. Atami is one of those Japanese cities that looks like it was booming back in the bubble period but has since fallen into a state of disrepair, at least compared to cities such as Kyoto, Karuizawa and Tokyo. I can’t say for certain as I was not in Japan back in […]

Sunday, December 6, 2020. It being a beautiful late fall day, my wife wanted to go out and see and enjoy some local kōyō, known in English as autumn foliage. We didn’t want to leave the city, so we decided to head towards some parks in the Shirokanedai area or Minato-ku. Our first stop was Ikedayama Koen, a small park with a nice traditional Japanese garden built around a pond on the site of a secondary residence […]

Kara-age USA I was at Mitsukoshi’s main shop at Nihonbashi last night. In the basement food section in an area that always has various foods from all over Japan there was a shop selling what they billed as Oita Meibutsu kara-age (大分名物唐揚げ). It looked good, both the boneless and the bone in. I know that kara-age in Japan began at a shop in Usa, Oita, some time ago, and that the shop most famous for having the […]

A couple months ago after eating lunch in Kagurazaka at Kohaku, part of the Ishikawa Group of restaurants, my wife and I made reservations for lunch at Ishikawa’s nearby sushi restaurant Hatō (波濤). A friend had been once or twice and really liked it, so we decided to give it a shot. Despite the heat, I rode my bicycle to the restaurant and met my wife on the main street nearby. The restaurant is in a small […]

One of the longest running businesses in Ningyōchō as well as Tokyo, Coffee Shop Ron, has closed. What until a week or two ago was a coffee shop that offered simple yōshoku dishes (Japanese takes on western recipes) served by older gentlemen dressed in matching attire that included vests and bow ties and of course well sun-bleached plastic food in the front window is gone after 240 years, not all of which was as a coffee shop. […]

Hiro-o The Restaurant: Eat, Play, Works (Photos coming soon) The other day an editor I have worked with sent me an invitation to a pre-opening party at a new space in Hiro-o called The Restaurant: Eat Play Works. Never one to pass up a fun evening of eating, I immediately replied to her that I would be there. The evening of the event I checked the location, put on a mask, and caught a Hibiya line train […]

For some unknown reason I seem to be eating a lot of sushi lately, lately being since the invasion of the corona virus. There’s been a lot of Sugita Sushi takeout, some local neighborhood sushi, the kind where a meal costs well under ¥10,000 per person, and several high end places I have been to for the first time. Included in the last type is Takagaki no Sushi (高柿の鮨) in Nihonbashi Kakigarachō (adjacent to Ningyōchō), a small […]

The other day heading back to Ningyōchō from Asakusa on my bicycle I spotted a fish and chips restaurant I had never seen before. Fish and chips is rare in Japan, and something I usually eat at least once for lunch every time I visit Portland. Come to think of it, I may have eaten it once in my years in Japan, if even that many times. So I made a mental note of the shops location […]

Food in the Time of Coronavirus (in Japan) With a nod to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera. Futomaki Sushi Recently, during the time of coronavirus, a lot of local, Nihonbashi sushi shops have been offering take out sushi. There is nothing unusual in that, as many sushi shops will deliver to homes and businesses any time. What is remarkable lately is that at least four local sushi shops—Sushi Sugita (Kakigarachō), Sushi Kimura, […]