Does this look good to eat?The plastic food in restaurant windows really didn't look all that good to me. But it was useful since I can't read Japanese. I did not eat at this restaurant, which I think was a chain.…
Food is not MagicalHaruki Murakami's new book 1Q84 conforms to his normal genre: magical realism. It's also very long: 925 pages, described as a doorstop in one review. In an earlier version of our real world, a book this huge would have been completely impractical as airplane reading -- but I bought the Kindle versio…
Wagyu Beef !For dinner we found a Wagyu beef restaurant not far from the guest house where we are staying. The extremely marbled and tender beef is sliced thin so that you can quickly grill each piece on an in-table wood fire. The kitchen (shown above) also prepares a number of dishes from other parts of the co…
Sushi ChefWe sat at the sushi bar in a tiny restaurant while this chef made us sushi -- he bought this amazing piece of tuna at the Tsukuji market this morning.…
Street FoodIn the temple grounds at Asakusa we passed a number of food stalls, with many varied types of food that people could eat as they walked. Later, on our way from the Ueno subway station to our guest house, we passed another row of such stalls near the temple in Ueno Park. The food ranged from complete…
Lunch at AsakusaAfter a water-taxi ride on the Sumida River we arrived at Asakusa, a huge shopping district surrounding a temple and pagoda. It was time for lunch, so we selected a very traditional looking restaurant named Tatsumiya specializing in Edo Hot Pot. Unlike our experience at yesterday's traditional resta…
Traditional JapaneseIn Ueno Park we found a traditional Japanese restaurant named Insho-tei (or Innsyoutei). we ate there this afternoon, after viewing the special exhibit of Kamakura Buddhist art and other exhibits at the National Tokyo Museum nearby. We enjoyed a variety of mysterious small bites of food, miso soup, …
Japanese Food!For lunch today, I had a bowl of ramen noodles, as described on the sign above (click on it to enlarge). At the counter in the noodle shop I happened to sit next to a Buddhist monk named Malcolm, whose father is the hereditary head of a nearby Buddhist temple. His American mother went to the Univers…
Conference BanquetThis is Japan, where the luxury food for a really high quality banquet is French. In fact, we have been her 2 days without having any Japanese food! The first night was a smaller dinner, at an Italian restaurant. Many of the details of this banquet showed how the Japanese have adapted French food to…
Tea BowlsSeveral collections of tea ceremony items appear in the Tokyo National Museum which I visited this morning. Tea ceremony items are also depicted on other works such as on one sword hilt in the room of swords and sword accessories. The first bowl above is so famous that it has a name: "Hashihime" -- …
