Last 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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Eating Along the Old Tōkaidō Road 旧東海道食べ歩き
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 丹想庵蕎麦
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 Soba & Tenpura 浅ノ字 蕎麦&天ぷら
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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A Weekend Dining in Kyoto, August, 2022
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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Kawaseri (Teuchi Soba) 川せり手打ちそば
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!!!
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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Sushi Sugita
An interesting thing happened back in mid-December; thanks to the corona virus, my wife and I were able to eat at Sugita Sushi twice in a week (actually, the full name is Nihonbashi Kakigarachō Sushi Sugita, which is really way too much to write over and over). I had talked to Sugita san’s wife (Okamisan) sometime in November about making reservations, and she said there were plenty of openings and to give her a call. So my […]
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Setsubun (節分): The End of Winter
Today is Setsubun (節分), the last day of winter according to the traditional lunar calendar in Japan. So as has been a custom for several hundred years on this day, I did mamemaki (豆撒き), which consists of throwing dried or roasted soy beans out of each window and outside door of one’s house while saying “oni ha soto, fuku wa uchi!,” meaning something like “demons out, fortune in!” before eating one bean for each year of your […]
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Day Trip to Enoshima (江の島)
This past Saturday I took a short trip down to Enoshima, a small island just south of Kamakura that is famous for being home to Benzaiten, the deity associated with music and entertainment, and a popular travel destination for the Kantō region for hundreds of years. It’s also where the 1964 and 2020 Olympic sailing competitions were held. I’d been there once before several years ago. This time the plan was to meet two friends, one Japanese […]
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