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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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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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 […]
Read moreBefore I moved to Japan I never ate much in the way of fried foods due to the image I had of fried foods not being healthy. I ate the occasional French fry or fish and chips, but that was about it. No KFC or other fried chicken, no fried donuts, and no tenpura, not that I had many opportunities to do so. Once I lived in Japan I still tried to not eat much fried food, […]
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