Eat, drink, travel Japan.
drinkingjapan 
Can you day-trip a sake brewery from Tokyo and actually be back in Shinjuku for dinner? Yes, and you do not need a JR Pass, a tour guide, or a single word of Japanese to make it work. The harder question is which brewery, because the answer reshapes the day. A 90-minute Ozawa Shuzo tour … Read more
The first time I met someone who really knew awamori, his name was Tanaka and he was the kind of cellar guide who calls every barrel by its volume in kame, the earthenware jars Okinawan distillers have used for centuries. I was standing with him in the wooden cellar at Chuko Distillery in Tomigusuku, fifteen … Read more
Walk into the Sapporo Beer Garden’s Genghis Khan Hall on a Tuesday and a 100-minute all-you-can-drink-and-grill plate runs about ¥5,200, lamb included. Walk five blocks south to a private counter in Susukino and a single pour of 25-year Hokkaido whisky comes in over ¥6,000 with no food at all. The same city, the same evening, … Read more
It’s 21:30 on a Wednesday inside Bar Benfiddich, four floors up a Nishi-Shinjuku building with no English sign. Hiroyasu Kayama, the bar’s owner, is crushing fresh wormwood with a brass pestle to garnish someone else’s drink. In front of me sits a Yoichi 12, neat, with the kind of hand-cut ice ball that costs the … Read more
The brewer at Matsumoto Shuzo poured the first cup, watched my face, and said: “Kyoto sake is not Niigata sake. It will not punch you. It will sit beside what you eat and let the food do the talking.” That sentence rearranged how I drink in Kyoto. I had been chasing the bigger, drier, mountain-rice … Read more
How does a city smaller than Yokohama end up with the loudest, most stubborn street-food culture left in Japan? Fukuoka does it the same way it does everything else: late at night, on a stool that wobbles, with a paper lantern over your head and a bowl of pork-bone broth that came out of a … Read more
The first kushikatsu I had in Osaka was a single skewer of pork belly at a counter in Shinsekai, around 18:30 on a Wednesday in October. The man behind the fryer dropped six bullets of breaded skewers into the oil at once, lifted them out about ninety seconds later, and slid them onto a wire … Read more
The bartender at Bar Lupin in Ginza doesn’t speak. He carves a cube of ice into a sphere, sets it in a chilled coupe, pours a clear liquid over it, and the sphere rotates once, twice, then settles. The whole bar smells of cold lemon peel and old wood. Down a basement stair under the … Read more
It’s a Tuesday, half past nine, and I’m at the counter of a fourth-floor walk-up bar in Ginza, watching a bartender carve a sphere of ice with a bread-knife the length of his forearm. The pour costs ¥1,800. The bottle behind him is a thirty-year-old Hibiki, and the back wall is racked four shelves deep … Read more
I poured my own beer first, knocked back a long swallow before anyone else had a glass in hand, and watched the proprietor at a small Yurakucho counter freeze for about half a second. Long enough that I noticed. Short enough that he was already smiling again by the time the next person sat down. … Read more