Eat, drink, travel Japan.
Etiquette, traditions, festivals, and the culture around drinking in Japan.
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
I ordered otōshi three times. I didn’t realise I’d ordered it once. The first time I sat down at an izakaya in Tokyo, the staff brought a small dish of pickled mountain vegetables I hadn’t asked for. I ate them, smiled at the bartender, and wondered if I’d accidentally eaten someone else’s food. Twenty minutes … Read more