For the "foodie" in all of us: a snapshot of Japanese cuisine

I probably should have remembered to keep my camera with me at all times. Or, I could even remind myself to use my Japanese camera phone (it is 5.1mpx after all) when I don't have my regular camera. But, fortunately, I have managed to snap a few good shots of the food here. Not much to say about the food, except it's good.



These bread bowls filled with chocolate looked pretty tasty at the French bakery. This bakery is located in Shinigawa Station, a local train station on the JR (Japan Rail) Yamanote line. The larger train stations are actually a pretty good spot for good food and shopping. After all, most Japanese spend the majority of their lives (this is not documented, just a personal assessment) on the trains.


Here's a larger shot of the pastry shop. The yellow one is pretty tasty - it's a croissant filled with custard.


Snacks are a big part of the Japanese lifestyle as well. Every store, and 99yen (dollar store) is filled with a variety of snacks. This is a shot of apple pie cookies. While these are pretty tasty and offer a real likeness to apple pie, it's not my favorite.


This right here is the snack of the century. Pancake cookies are like little butter laden cookies with Log Cabin syrup dripping off of them. These cookies are unreal and actually taste just like a pancake (of course, the cookie is crunchy). I must bring some of these home with me!


I didn't get a chance to buy this "Deep & Mild" ice cream, but it sure sounds tasty.


These chips claim to be the hottest chips ever made; I disagree. While these chips are pretty spicy, I'm not sure they deserve the hype or the super scary packaging - nonetheless, pretty tasty.


This is a bowl of Paitan (white soup) Ramen. This is no cup of noodle soup, but it is fast food. This ramen comes from a small restaurant about a block from school.


This is a typical fast food meal consisting of a beef bowl (beef over rice), miso soup, cabbage salad, tea, and a raw egg for the beef bowl. I was not a fan of this establishment, but the same meal, only tasiter, can be found elsewhere.


Everywhere I go vending machines are available. This one actually has a television inside of it (center of the machine) serving up advertisements. If you click on the picture and enlarge the image you'll be able to see that some of the items are listed in red and some in blue. The ones listed in red let you know that the beverage is hot, and the items listed in blue are cold. Getting a hot beverage out of these machines is awesome because it's always perfectly hot.

Green curry with chicken at a nice Viet-Thai cafe in Kamakura - I liked the curry serving bowl.



Maybe I should have been a food artist - the curry looks too good to eat.

This picture was taken when we went to all one can eat Mongolian Bar-B-Que in Sapporo (located in the Northern Island of Hokkaido). Our meal consisted of peel and eat prawns, scallops, salmon, beef, and pork. In Japan, it's pretty common to do tabi-ho-dai (all-you-can-eat), but it always comes with a time limit. Our limit on this night was two hours, which was plenty of time to get stuffed.

Three fried minnows - not my favorite dish, but it looked tasty.

Basashi - horse sashimi. This is one of my favorite dishes here. The items to the right of the sashimi are ginger, scallions, and minced garlic. These items are mixed with soy sauce to make the maranade for the sashimi - so tasty. Horse sashimi has nice smooth, tender texture with the flavor of a salty beef.

Here's a dish I can never pass up, meguro no sashimi (tuna sashimi).

Here we have chicken and onion skewers (lower left) and fried squid legs (upper right)

This is asparagus wrapped in bacon...so good. These last four dishes are all from the same Izakya (I'm not sure what this translates to). An Izakya basically has lots of different appetizers to eat, and we just selected a bunch of different items until we got full.

This is my new favorite fast food. I don't eat fast food in the States but, here, it is impossible not to, as the food is good and typically good for you. This is a seafood jambalaya burger - not its technical name. It has sticky rice buns and is stuffed with various tempura and veggies: scallops, crab meat, and squid. I get these at Mos Burger. The burger joints here sell really tiny burgers and I'm not very impressed with the burgers, but this sandwich is excellent.

Tsukiji Shijo is home to the local fish market. Fortunately, that means the freshest sushi on the planet has a very short distance to travel to get to this conveyor belt sushi restaurant. I am in food heaven when I eat here. The sushi is fantastic and the sushi chefs are awesome and really add a lot of character to the place. The conveyor sends around sushi, but if there is something you want that's not on the belt, just order it up and the chefs are happy to make it. And, when I order something they wouldn't expect a gaijin (foreigner) to order, the chefs get excited and then yell my order for everyone to hear and applaud me for making such a good choice. The plates you can see in the picture have a sensor built into them. When I'm finished eating my fill the waitress will come by and scan my plates. The scanner tells her how many plates and what I owe. The plates are also color coded. The color corresponds to the price for that plate of sushi. I can't rave enough about this place; it really is the best sushi I've ever had, and I eat sushi as often as possible.

Snow report for Hakkaisen, Japan: It's going to be "bus-high" outside today, enjoy!

This is the view outside our private bus ride to the mountain. Notice the snow bank is as high as the bus coming in our direction.

A couple of weeks ago, we took our second trip up to Echigo Yuzawa in the Nigata Prefecture and stayed in Hakkaisen. If word hasn't gotten out yet, let me be the first to say that it snows a ridiculous amount in Japan. We started out our trip by heading straight to Kagura, a resort near Hakkaisen. Kagura is actually a resort we had intended to reach during our last trip to Nigata, but we were unable to get there due to timing. After getting off the train, we hopped a bus to the mountain. It's really interesting how the Nigata Prefecture maintains its roadways during the winter time. Instead of running salt trucks all the time, which would be futile given the amount of snow that falls, the townships simply put sprinklers on the ground. These sprinklers are everywhere from the roadways to the sidewalks. But even though this melts most of the snow people are still out shoveling snow constantly to keep up with the daily snowfall. We had a clear day at Kagura, but Kagura had just received two feet overnight and about 10 inches per day the prior three days. I was excited when we got to the mountain because to get from the base to the top we got to ride in a sweet tram (I've never ridden in a mountain-tram before). Most of my day was spent teaching three friends how to snowboard; all of them were able to get some basics down and we had a blast on the hill. Afterward, we caught a bus back to the train station and headed to our hotel. A nice gentleman from the hotel came to meet us at the station and took us to the hotel. The hotel was quaint but in need of some refurbishing. Our package with the hotel included a massive meal for both dinner and breakfast, which is pretty common for a Japanese style hotel. During our two night stay at the Japanese hotel, it snowed 1.5 feet each day. From the moment we arrived in Hakkaisen to the moment we stepped on the Shinkansen (bullet train) to leave, it continued to dump snow. When we woke up for our first day in Hakkaisen, the same gentleman that picked us up from the train station took us in a van to the mountain, see picture above. It was amazing too ride around with so much snow on the ground. In fact, on the mountain there was a bit too much snow on the lower parts to really get going. Nonetheless, we had an absolute blast. The pictures really tell it all.

This kind lady has been shoveling all day to keep her establishment open for business.


Here's a sprinkler that's party of the snow removal system in Echigo Yuzawa.

A quick tram ride up to heaven at Kagura.


Inside the tram from left to right: Mike, Saori, Evan, Jen, Hickory, and Nick.


This is the lobby of our hotel in Hakkaisen.

This car was not covered in snow the day before. And the shack where we kept our snowboards and skis had no snow by the door. I wish I had taken the picture before trampling a route to the door, which could not be opened until we removed the snow.

This rock had no snow on it when we arrived. The morning brought good news for the mountain.

As you can see from this tram picture (taken at Hakkaisen), people were aware that it had snowed the night before.

I know this picture looks dreamy, but it was totally real and really fun!

Nikko

This past Sunday we took a trip to Nikko. This is a nice side trip away from Tokyo. It's amazing what a difference two hours from Tokyo makes. Tokyo is a real hustle and bustle kind of place and two hours in any direction leaves one in the rural beauty of Japan. This trip to Nikko was spent looking at the Tshogu shrine. The Toshogu is the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, which ruled Japan for over 250 years until 1868. The shrine is dedicated to the spirits of Ieyasu and two other of Japan's most influential historical personalities, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Minamoto Yoritomo. The lavishly decorated shrine complex consists of more than a dozen Shinto and Buddhist buildings set in a beautiful forest. Initially a relatively simple mausoleum, Toshogu was enlarged into the spectacular complex seen today by Ieyasu's grandson Iemitsu during the first half of the 17th century. The wood relief of the monkeys symbolizes the saying "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil." The shrines were pretty spectacular. But we'll have to go back. We did not get a chance to visit the famous onsen (hot spring) or the lake that is supposed to have exceptional senic views.

Hokkaido: the Northern Island of Japan

Two weekends ago I had the chance to experience Japan's most prized mountain area, Hokkaido. Hokkaido is known for some of the lightest powder snow on the planet and phenomenal tree runs. It is also home to Sapporo, the capital and fourth largest city in Japan. We took a plane from Tokyo's Heneda airport (the intra-Japan airport) to Sapporo. On our walk to the hotel in Sapporo, I was taken by how much snow was around. The streets are literally lined with snow, the sides of the road have 8-12 foot snow drifts that have been pushed to the side of the road to clear the road ways. In fact, on the streets the city places boxes with salt bags that the public is free to spread around if a spot is too icy. But the snow does not phase the locals: everyone goes out like it's 65 degrees and sunny; women are walking on 3in of snow and ice with heels and think nothing of it. I guess when people live in an area that gets pounded with snow for six months of the year they tend to adapt. Sapporo is known for it's beer, snow, and ramen noodles - they invented ramen in Sapporo and even have a place called "Ramen Alley" where one can get ramen cooked just about any way possible. This isn't your standard Cup-o-Noodle soup. Ramen (or chashumen as they call it here) is pretty much a staple food in Japan. One can find a Ramen restaurant pretty much anywhere in Japan. The hotel here was not quite as fancy as the one we stayed at in Nigata, but it was still quite nice and had a sento (faux hot spring - more like a massive hot tub). The first day of our trip was spent at Teine, a local mountain in Sapporo. This mountain was pretty small but it did have a ferris wheel on it, and we could see the ocean from the peaks. The tree runs here were nice and filled with about 2 ft of powder, but the trees were pretty close together and there was quite a bit of underbrush making for slow tree riding. It's pretty interesting how foreigner's go skiing here. We bought a package from the train company, which included our train ticket, ski bus ticket, lift ticket, and a discount ticket for renting equipment. People here buy an entire package here from the train company that can include hotels, rental cars, and pretty much anything else one might need. The second day in Hokkaido was spent at Rusutsu, which is touted (rightfully so) as the best lift-served mountain resort in all of Japan. This resort did not let us down. The tree runs were wide open and the snow was light enough to blow right out of my hands. The views from the top were breath taking and riding around on this mountain was incredible. We did not see another American on the mountain and only saw two Austrailians who were in the "semi-backcountry" with us. Semi-backcountry is how the mountain refers to it's non-groomed runs that are still in bounds. Traditional backcountry skiing is prohibited. Finally, before leaving Sapporo, I was able to see most of the ice sculptures that were erected for the 59th annual snow festival.

Pictures from Tiene:



Pictures from Rusutsu:



Pictures from the Sapporo Snow Festival:

Kamakura and the big Buddha

Recently, we took a day trip to Kamakura to see the temples and the biggest Buddha in Japan. When visiting a temple it is proper to cleanse one's hands and and mouth by washing and drinking from the washing stand (not a technical term). Also at the temple is a giant incense burner that always has incense burning. The smoke from the incense is to be taken in by waving the smoke into one's face - this is meant to ward off sickness. Other than that, the pictures really say it all.

Want to get away?

Sorry for the delay in updating my blog...we've been heading out for many trips. Recently we went to the Nigata Prefecture, which is in Northern Japan. The trip was meant to be an overnight ski trip. But it turned out to be an amazing experience. We started out on the Shinkansen (Bullet Train), which traveled over 200mph. We arrived in Nigata about two hours after departing Tokyo and found ourselves in a winter wonderland. The area was covered in snow and the snow was still coming down. Our ryokan (Japanese-style hotel) was located a short walk from the train station. We were greeted at the ryokan by a person asking us to remove our shoes and to put on the hotel-provided slippers. The hotel did not have size 12, but I managed squeeze into what felt like a size 7. Because check-in wasn't available till much later, we quickly put on our ski clothes, tagged our luggage to be placed in our room when it became available, and headed off to Kondatsu (Pine Ridge ski resort). Kondatsu is pretty small by Northwest standards, but the knee-to-chest-deep powder made up for anything the mountain lacked in elevation. We found a tree run that continued to provide Evan (fellow student) and me with fresh, untouched lines to run all day. Most Japanese skiers and riders do not veer off of the groomed runs and almost never enter the tree runs, bonus in our favor. We took a short break for a crepe on the mountain and then headed out for more snow. After a full day of riding, we headed back to the ryokan. The hotel staff had placed our bags in our room, which was spectacular. The room was complete with tatami mats (straw mats) and a back massaging chair (the massage chair is probably not a traditional item). Our hotel even had an onsen (natural hot spring) for us to soak in after the long day of riding. The hotel also provided special robes for us to wear before and after enjoying the onsen. This onsen was not as hot as I had heard most onsens are in Japan (scalding hot); fortunately we were able to spend about a half hour in the onsen before heading to our room for dinner. A really nice woman came to our room and prepared it for dinner. She spent about a half hour setting up our dinner for us and another twenty minutes explaining what each of the dishes were. As you can see from the pictures the dinner was nothing short of elaborate. Notably we had fugu, which is Japanese blowfish. If the fugu is prepared improperly, the poisons in the fish's organs can be fatal to humans: thankfully we had capable hands preparing our fugu. In the morning we were served another elaborate meal in the room. But for some reason, fish just doesn't seem too appetizing in the morning. This was my first ski trip in Japan, and I was definitely not disappointed.