Eat, drink, travel Japan.
Smoke first, then sound. Charcoal smoke pushing out from under a corrugated awning, mixing with cooking-fat steam and someone’s cigarette. Then the noise: tongs clinking, a ten-second burst of laughter, the staticky beep of an order screen, a salaryman saying otsukaresama three times to someone he’s never met. I’m standing in Omoide Yokocho at 19:30 … Read more
Japan has roughly 56,000 convenience stores. That’s more outlets than McDonald’s has worldwide, and the country sells about a third of the world’s 7-Eleven coffees out of them. The drinks fridge in any one of them runs four metres long, stocks more than a hundred SKUs, and rotates seasonal flavours in and out about as … Read more
The first time I got a Japanese toast wrong, I was at a wedding reception in Yokohama. Ten of us at a round table, a glass of champagne in front of every plate, and a microphone open to a senior colleague who took ninety seconds to thank his hosts before raising his arm and saying … Read more
The first sound is the knock of the wooden bath bucket against the stone rim, and then the slow tip of the small ceramic flask into a cedar cup the size of a large thimble. Steam comes off the water at a height somewhere around your collarbone. It is January in Akita, the bath outside, … Read more
Is drinking alone in Japan awkward as a woman? I asked myself that on the bullet train to Tokyo with three nights blocked off and no one to meet, and the honest answer turned out to be: less awkward than at home, and more interesting than I’d expected. Walk into a Shinjuku basement bar by … Read more
A lemon sour at an Omoide Yokocho stall costs about ¥500. Six counter seats away from the cook, no English menu, you point at a skewer and a cold glass arrives without ceremony. The same drink does not exist on the list at Birdland in Ginza, where an omakase yakitori course starts north of ¥10,000 … Read more
The first person to write the recipe for otoso was a third-century Chinese physician named Hua Tuo, and he wrote it for a man who probably did not deserve it. Hua Tuo was the personal doctor to Cao Cao, the warlord whose name still echoes through every Three Kingdoms novel and video game in East … Read more
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
I came into Nagoya planning one meal between Tokyo and Kyoto. I left three days later, full of red miso, with a notebook of bar addresses I still had not visited. The city does not market itself the way Osaka markets street food or Kyoto markets tea. It just feeds you, hard, with a regional … Read more
Is umeshu actually wine? Short answer: no, despite the bottle saying so. Long answer is the entire reason this drink is worth a chapter of your trip. I’ve ordered umeshu in shoulder-to-shoulder izakayas in Shinjuku, in a quiet ryokan room above a hot spring in Wakayama, on a rooftop terrace in Osaka, and out of … Read more
The first time hot sake actually surprised me, the steam came up off the cup before I tilted it, and the smell hit before the heat did. Cooked rice. A whisper of caramel. Something almost mushroomy under the alcohol. Not the sharp clean snap of a cold ginjo. Something rounder, broader, the same liquid wearing … 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
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
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
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