Eating Japan

   Some of what we ate in Japan: 


   A bag of little dried fish chips. 

   Freshly made rice crackers dipped in soy sauce at the market in Asakura.  

   Sweet black beans and tiny dried fish in the open market, and then a terrific sushi lunch, around the corner from the Tokyo fish market.  

   A bento box lunch on the train from Tokyo to Nagoya, with sushi and bits of cooked shrimp and eel and noodles and pickled vegetables.  

   A can of melon soda.  

   Three hot, steamed buns from a small shop in Takayama, one with beef, one with red beans (so much better hot than cold), and one with pumpkin.  

   Also in Takayama, a perfect cup of sake sherbet, maybe the single most surprising and delightful thing we ate the entire trip, unless it was the Japanese marshmallow, a warm square of meringue, which we got from the vendor along the river the next day.  

   At the ryokan in Takayama, the simple, soothing, hot, green tea we were served in our room when we arrived and two enormous dinners featuring slices of tender, fatty Hida beef, which we grilled ourselves on the petals of the shabu-shabu pot in the middle of our table in the tatami-matted dining room, and corn, onions, peppers, greens, three kinds of mushrooms, four kinds of picked vegetables, a giant raw sweet shrimp, two kinds of raw fish, a small curious dish with chopped mushrooms and walnuts, soba or udon noodles, miso soup, rice and a desert of strawberry mousse; and a breakfast at the ryokan with its own array of small bites, and grilled trout instead of beef, and a perfectly poached egg. 

   In Kyoto, in our own little dining room upstairs at a restaurant on Pontocho Street, overlooking the river, sukiyaki for the three girls, which we cooked at the table, and eel, more eel, for me.  

   Chocolate croquettes at the Nishiki food market in Kyoto.  

   The satisfying pancake-noodle-cabbage-egg-sauce mash-up that is okonomiyaki, first in Hiroshima and then in Osaka.  

   One of the plums that Noburo and Akiko had put up in a jar, soaked in strong sake.  

   A fine kaiseke dinner in Himeji, which featured a blissful soup with corn tofu, and a warm-potato-salad-stuffed eel –- better than it sounds, and indeed, one of the best dishes on the trip.  

   And everywhere the different styles of little monju cakes and the essential vending machines with their cold, little cans of sweet iced coffee, and cold bottles of water and tea. 

   The crowded McDonald’s on the Ginza is a sad sign of things to come in Japan.  It seems will take their sushi and green tea (and excellent cars and electronics) in trade for our hamburgers and heart disease (and washed-up baseball players).

   

Time to make some tea.