Eat, drink, travel Japan.
drinkingjapan 
I walked into a kakuuchi in Kokura with the wrong instincts. I tried to take a stool I’d seen empty, then asked for a menu, then tried to pay at the end with a card. The proprietor was patient, the regulars were not unkind, but I’d done three things wrong inside ninety seconds. Nobody sits, … Read more
Hiroshima Station to Saijo by local train: 31 minutes, ¥420. From the platform, you walk five minutes to a thousand-year-old sake town with seven working breweries lined up between two thin streets. The Peace Memorial Park, the place every guidebook starts you, is in the other direction. Most foreign visitors never make it to Saijo. … Read more
Niigata Prefecture has 91 active sake breweries, more than any other prefecture in Japan. The next-densest, Hyogo and Kyoto, are still well behind, and they are giants of population and visibility. Niigata sits on the Sea of Japan with under two million people, and yet for every 22,000 residents there is a working kura turning … Read more
The bowl came down on the counter at Amatsubo just before nine on a wet March evening, kaisendon piled until the rice underneath had given up trying to be visible. Sweet shrimp, snow crab, yellowtail, two kinds of tuna, salmon roe in a glossy heap, and on top of that the proprietor laid down a … Read more
The hiss when a tallboy opens at 14:33 on the platform of Tokyo Station, two minutes before the Hayabusa pulls out for Sendai, is one of those sounds you don’t notice until you’re listening for it. Then you hear it everywhere. The salaryman in row 17. The retired couple sharing a Sapporo Classic. The two … Read more
You’re standing in the basement of a department store in Shinjuku, holding a bottle of sake by the neck, and the only character on the front you can read is ¥. The label is a wall of kanji, two numbers with a plus sign, a percentage, and a date that does not match the western … Read more
The first thing you notice is the smoke. Charcoal smoke, the lighter-fluid kind nobody admits to using, drifting between the lower branches of a hundred-year-old somei-yoshino. Then the sound, which is plastic on plastic: the click of a paper cup against a 300ml bottle of nama sake, the crinkle of a konbini bag, the squeak … Read more
Hiroyasu Kayama brews bitters from wormwood he grew in Saitama. He stands in a white lab coat behind an L-shaped counter on the ninth floor of an office block in Nishi-Shinjuku, mortar in hand, grinding spices into powder that will end up in your daiquiri. The bar is called Bar Benfiddich. There is no English … Read more
A tall chu-hi can at any 7-Eleven, 9% alcohol, lemon, ice-cold, costs ¥180. The same volume of beer at a hotel bar in Marunouchi will set you back ¥1,400 and arrive in a glass two-thirds the size. That is the gap I want to talk about. Omoide Yokocho at 19:30. Three of these stalls will … Read more
In late 2008, a struggling whisky brand started a campaign that would, within 12 months, see the number of Japanese bars pouring whisky and soda jump from roughly 15,000 to more than 60,000. By the end of the next year it was past 80,000. Suntory’s sales of Kakubin, the squat yellow-labelled bottle that gave the … Read more
It’s a Wednesday at 19:30 on the tenth floor of a Shinjuku building I would never have walked into without instructions, and the proprietor is sliding three small glasses across the counter towards me. Niigata. Yamagata. Akita. He pours each one to the brim and a little over, the way most sake bars in Tokyo … Read more
The first time I really understood sake pairing, I was sitting at the counter of a tiny seven-seat kappo in Yanaka. The proprietor, Mr Sato, watched me start with a chilled daiginjo and a piece of grilled mackerel and shook his head, almost imperceptibly. Then he poured me a cup of warm kimoto junmai from … Read more
It was the second pour of Yoichi single malt at a Hokkaido bar called Crossroad that justified the whole trip. Eleven days in, three flights, two shinkansen, six cities, more sake cups than I can count, and the moment I sat down at that backlit shelf and asked the bartender to pick what I should … Read more
In 1994 there were 11 breweries in Japan. By 2024 the country had crossed 700, more than England, more than France, and on a per-capita basis closing in on the United States. Walk into a 7-Eleven in Yokohama and you can pick from around 300 different craft beers in the fridge. Most travellers never notice. … Read more
Yamazaki sells out the moment its booking lottery opens, and you need to apply months ahead. Yoichi runs free tours all day, walk-up tickets sometimes available the same morning. The two most famous Japanese whisky distilleries are 1,500 km apart, run on opposite booking systems, and ask very different things of you as a visitor. … Read more