How do you say awkward in Japanese?

Hot springs bubble all over Japan, and the Japanese have tapped into most of them to create onsens.  Entire towns have sprung up around the hot springs, filled with public onsens and private ones in ryokans (traditional Japanese inns).  We even saw people soaking their feet in an onsen foot bath in the center of town.  I’d heard that people stroll around town in their yukata robes and wooden geta sandals, but we didn’t see this in any of the onsen towns we visited.

Foot bath in the Shibu Onsen town

I’ve been dying to try a hot spring ever since we visited Colorado a couple of years ago and didn’t get a chance to go to any of the hot springs.  I wasn’t going to be deterred in Japan, even after I learned that onsens have a complicated set of rules.  First, there’s the whole rule about not wearing clothes.  Me, pasty pale and flabby in a hot spring full of naked trim Japanese women. Um, awkward!  Then there’s the whole rule about making sure nothing impure goes into the onsen, which means you have to scrub down publically at a sit-down bath/shower contraption before you enter the water.  Fun times.  Neither Sean nor I had a choice when we stayed at a ryokan in an onsen town in the Nagano prefecture; the only bath was the public one in the onsen room.

After I survived the onsen at the relatively uncrowded ryokan, Sean and I split up for the day so I could voluntarily subject myself again to the onsen.  I visited the popular onsen Tenzen in Hakone.  This time, there was no hoping and praying that you were the only one who decided to use the onsen at the moment.  I tried to relax in the onsen’s steamy sulphur waters, which are said to have healing properties, but couldn’t get my mind off of the fact that I was surrounded by at least thirty naked Japanese women.  When a mother started undressing her children in the changing room to bring them into the onsen, I couldn’t hightail it out of there fast enough.  While the Japanese are completely comfortable with this public form of bathing – some of them even using it as their sole method of cleansing themselves – I still prefer my very private shower.  I hope the Colorado hot springs allow bathing suits.

Tenzen's grounds. Obviously I don't have any pictures of the onsen baths themselves. The only thing more awkward than an anxious naked American girl would be an anxious naked American girl with a camera.

Shirakawa-go

High up in the Japanese Alps sits a little village called Shirakawa-go.  There, because of the snow that falls every winter, villagers built homes with steeply pitched thatched roofs.  The quaint little mountain town is a World Heritage site.  Although tourists, mostly Japanese, traipse through the town, people still live there, lighting fires on the first floors for warmth and nurturing silk cocoons on the second floors for income.  The day we visited, a house’s roof was being re-thatched.  We went to Shirakawa-go to see the houses, but I found another pleasant surprise.  The town is bursting with flowers, meaning that I ended up with just as many pictures of the flowers as the houses.

Random images from Japan for your Saturday viewing pleasure

Wooden building in the adorable town of Takayama.

Field trip!

Fall Festival Parade, Nikko

Eating black eggs at Owakundani volcano valley

Sean in the crowd at Nikko

Fall Festival ceremony, Nikko

Peace at Nikko Fall Festival

Adventures in Eating in Japan, Part Two

Undoubtedly, eating in Japan is a big part of the adventure of traveling through the country. Yesterday, I shared five of our most memorable meals during our Japanese travels. Here’s another five to finish up the list:

Budget Buster

Knowing that we are headed to India next, where the cow is sacred, and being less than an hour train ride away from Kobe, we decided to splurge on the infamous Kobe beef in Kobe.  Allegedly, to get the Kobe beef designation, cows are bottle fed beer and massaged.  I never could get a straight answer on whether this is true, but for the price we paid, let’s all pretend that it is.  The Kobe beef label is slapped on every expensive piece of beef back home, but apparently in Japan it just means quality beef that comes from one specific area in Japan.  My research indicated that Kobe beef can be somewhat hard to find in Kobe, but The Google led us to Steakland Kobe, located close to the train stations.  Steakland Kobe reminded me of American Japanese steakhouses more than any other place at which we ate in Japan.  We took seats around a grill and watched the grill master slice up the raw beef and cook it before us.  Before you even eat it, you can tell that the beef is going to be incredibly rich from the intense marbling.  In the end, we’re not sure that we were big fans.  Naturally, they charge insanely high prices for Kobe beef in Kobe – our meals were a whopping $143!  I’m not sure if it was the crazy high price we paid or the super beefy taste that made us disappointed, but within 45 minutes of entering the restaurant, we were back standing back on the streets of Kobe, trying to make ourselves feel better about our budget-busting meal, saying, well, I guess it was worth it just once, right?  Right?

The intense marbling is what gives Kobe beef its strong flavor.

No flaming onion volcanoes here.

There it is, in all of its $143 glory. And we wonder why Japan killed our budget.

Mmmm….burgers

Our second foray into Japanese beefland was a little more budget friendly.  You can get burgers all over the world, but most of them are sorry, greasy imitations of the burgers you can get back home.  Who would have thought that we would find one of the best burgers of the trip in Takayama, a small (and adorable!) town in the Japanese Alps?  It is rare, but sometimes some of the best meals in a country are not the native cuisine.  (I’m remembering you, delicious Italian anniversary meal in Prague).  Wanting to take a break from noodles and the like, we decided to check out Center 4 Hamburgers one night.  The shop is decorated in an Americana country-western theme, which right there transports you far away from Japan.  The burgers were juicy and flavorful, the cheese was actually cheddar, the tomatoes ripe and fresh, the fries were crispy, and, best of all, they had Heinz ketchup. Sean still maintains that our Irish beef burger in Donegal, Ireland is the trip’s best burger, but I think this burger in Takayama is a strong contender.

Are we in Montana or Takayama?

Burger and fry perfection

Big Apples

While we struck out on seeing lots of koyo (autumn leaves), the best part of being in Japan in the fall was the apples.  Once we got over the sticker shock of paying a couple of dollars per apple, we ponied up the money to try them.  The apples in Japan are huge, juicy and sweet.  As we were eating Fuji apples in Hakone, a town with views of Mt. Fuji on a clear day, it suddenly occurred to me where Fuji apples got their name.  Duh.

The Japanese seem to be very particular about their apples.  Most places, even roadside stands, wrap the apples individually in styrofoam netting.  When we pursued the apples to find a small one we could afford, the woman selling them kept repeating in broken English, hai, hai, find a good one.  No bruises.

Apples all cozy in their protective packaging

Organic yumminess

I am drawn to any organic restaurants, cafes, or shops I see on the road like a fly is drawn to honey.  We came across two in Japan, and both were tasty treats.  My favorite was Myogaya, a little homey place in Takayama.  It took forever to get our food because it was made from scratch by the owner.  I thought it was worth the wait.  The brown rice was a nutty diversion from the bucketloads of white rice we’d been consuming, and it was fun eating the variety of little organic dishes on my plate.

As I think the first two mentions in this post shows, I could never fully commit to vegetarianism, but I like to dabble in vegetables from time to time. The organic veggie platter at Myogaya.

Meals that Look Back at You

A quintessential Japanese experience is staying at a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn where you receive impeccable service, sleep on the floor on futons, walk around in slippers, and bathe at the inn’s onsen.  We stayed at Kamesei Ryokan in Chikuma City, located in the Nagano Prefecture in the mountains.  While the inn turned out to be a little more dated and less rural than we thought, the service from Tyler, an American, and his Japanese wife and in-laws was fantastic, and our meal was a great experience.  We were served dinner on a low table in our room.  We sat on the floor to eat, as Tyler paraded in dish after dish after dish.  Our table was covered with little dishes by the time he was done, and he took the time to explain them all to us.  The next morning, we had breakfast in a similar fashion.  It was fun sampling all different kinds of Japanese food in one meal.  After several weeks in Japan, we even felt brave enough to sample one of the dishes containing little tiny squid, with their little beady eyes staring back at us.

Our dinner in our ryokan room

Local fish

Vegetable tempura on a pretty little plate

Baby squid, eyes and all, at breakfast

Adventures in Eating in Japan, Part One

All of our meals in Japan proved to be an interesting experience.  Some of the food is familiar, like sushi, teppanyaki, or ramen,  but most of it is never exported off the islands.  The problem with Japanese food is that you never know what you are going to get.

The Whale Wars people would be horrified - whale meat on a restaurant menu in Hiroshima

Mmm, octopus balls

Some of it is just so foreign to our American palates that we were fearful each time we ordered that we were getting something totally weird.  If you are lucky, you will get a menu with awkward translations into English.  More often, you had to rely upon photographs of the food on the menus or the plastic replicas in the window, which usually made things look rather unappetizing.

We never ended up ordering anything too out of the ordinary, but did end up with some tasty meals.  Here are our ten most memorable meals from Japan, in two parts:

Not your college ramen

Although my college friends subsisted off a diet solely composed of ramen, I never was that big of a fan.  Perhaps it was because the college ramen was always a weak broth and a couple of wimpy noodles.  Fukuouka, our first stop in Japan, is known for their ramen noodles.  We tried it twice while we were there: once at a yakatori (a street stall) and once at Ramen Stadium, a whole floor on the top of a shopping mall devoted solely to ramen noodle restaurants, each featuring ramen from different regions around Japan.  Ramen is a good value: filling, but cheap by Japan standards.  Our favorite was the kind with red broth, which we think is from Northern Japan, but who can be sure.  We’re just lucky that we actually selected ramen noodles, considering we had to order it from a vending machine that was entirely in Japanese.

Mixing up the ramen at a yakatori in Fukuoka

Ramen at Ramen Stadium

Everything but the kitchen sink

Another “cheap” but unique experience was eating okynamiyaki.  We first tried it in Hiroshima, where it was prepared right in front of us on teppan grills.  Since we were in Hiroshima, the okynamiyaki was prepared Hiroshima style, meaning each ingredient is layered on top of the other.  (We later tried it Osaka style in Kyoto, where all of the ingredients are mixed together.  We preferred the Hiroshima approach).  While we watched, the grillmaster cooked the okynamiyaki in stages: batter, egg, pork, sprouts, noodles, brown sweet-soy sauce, corn, and cheese.  They were tasty and uniquely Japanese, but somewhat rich so we only had them a few times.

CoCo Curry regulars

It is safe to say that I enjoyed the food in Japan more than Sean, probably because it is heavily seafood based.  Sean was always on the lookout for something more familiar.  His favorite place to eat was CoCo Curry House, a chain in every city serving Japanese curry.  Japanese curry is much milder than other Asian curries, although we never got more than a 2 spice level since each spice level was an additional cost.  His favorite dish was a crispy breaded chicken curry dish served with rice.  At around $25 USD for two curry meals and salads, CoCo Curry House was a good bargain.  At the Tokyo location near our hotel, two sumo wrestlers were chowing down, so we figured they agreed.

Light and crispy

Trying to find someplace to eat one night in Kyoto, we wandered into a little neighborhood restaurant called Tempura Arima near our hotel.  The prices were on the high side, but it looked good so we decided to stay.  There were only six people in the restaurant: us, a Japanese couple, a husband cooking and a wife serving.  The four customers took up almost all of the stools at the bar.  Their specialty was multi-course tempura meals, so that is what we ordered.  Each course was artfully presented, with delicate tastes.  Despite the limited words we had in common, we managed to have a conversation with the Japanese owners and customers.  They seemed to get a kick out of us maneuvering with our chopsticks and trying new things, and the other customers bought us shots of sake.

Sashimi course

Chef Arima preparing the tempura

Prawn tempura

Going Raw

Ah, sushi.  High end or low end, the sushi in Japan never disappointed and often was the one thing that was cheaper in Japan than it was at home.  Although I shy away from wasabi at home, I found myself not only eating but enjoying the wasabi in Japan, prepared with fresh locally grown horseradish.  My favorite fish was the tuna.  If it was the good stuff – and most of it was – it was deep crimson in color and tasted so tender it was like it already had been cooked.

Among other places where we tried it, we ate sushi at a conveyor belt restaurant in Tokyo.  The sushi keeps on rolling by.  You pick what strikes your fancy and they tally up your plates at the end.

On our last full day in Japan, we wandered around Tokyo’s famous Tsukji Fish Market where the fish doesn’t get any fresher, then had sushi for breakfast at a nearby restaurant.  Yum. For a good overview of how to eat sushi in Japan, check out Mary in Japan’s post on sushi etiquette.

Three kinds of premium tuna sushi