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Published: July 31st 2016
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We had a last minute change of plan after Vietnam - we'd intended to spend a month in China, but once we knew the dates that we were going to be back in the real world of work and all those kind of grown-up boring things, we decided we were going to spend a month in Canada beforehand, which left us with only a week to spare in Asia. Spending just a week in China seemed like a waste of an enormous country, so instead we jumped on a plane to Japan to spend ten days gorging ourselves on the incredible Japanese food.
We started in Kyoto, in a bid to soak up at least a little bit of cultural stuff as well as eating ourselves silly. We walked around a few temples, and they were definitely pretty amazing; unique, beautiful and atmospheric. By this point though we were just totally out-templed after a year of many, many of them, so we walked around for a little bit, agreed they were nice, and then headed to a restaurant. Our first proper meal there was at what is apparently one of the best ramen places in Japan - and when we
arrived 15 minutes before it opened to see a big queue of locals already there, it seemed we were in the right place. An unassuming little wooden building that you would never even know was a restaurant from outside, you pay at a little vending machine on your way in and quickly get served a huge bowl of absolutely amazing ramen. Watching the Japanese eat ramen is quite an experience; enormous piles of noodles disappear in seconds, accompanied by huge slurping noises that would turn everyone's heads in a Western restaurant (apparently the slurp is very important; it brings in a load of air with the mouthful to release all the flavour. Everything is done by tradition and for a reason in Japan). We were very slow in comparison, and never managed to get the slurp quite right... We felt bad taking our time over the meal - there were only 10 seats inside and a huge queue outside - but it just had to be savoured. We had delicious ramen many more times in Japan, but none of them topped this one.
That evening was the first of many izakaya meals we had; a whole district of Kyoto
is full of them, and again they were all completely unobtrusive - a quiet little street, you pick a door, hoping it's not to someone's house (the only tell is a red paper lamp outside)... If you get it right, you're suddenly welcomed by a blast of laughter and conversation, and perhaps a waft of sake. Izakaya are a sort of blend of tapas house and bar; the Japanese go after work to chat, relax, order numerous little dishes of wonderful food, and to drink. We wanted to eat everything on the menu, but settled on just a few, the highlight of which was an octopus dish, where the octopus was more tender than any I've ever known - we had no idea how it was even possible to get octopus to have that texture (we looked it up later - it turns out that the Japanese massage their octopus for 45 minutes or so to get it so tender!). Next up was another izakaya for a tasting menu of different sake from across Japan - we tried many, and came to the conclusion that they were all pretty damn good, whether dry, sweet, served warm or chilled (other than
when we bought the cheap stuff later on from a store - that stuff gave us pretty horrendous morning heads. Don't break the £1 barrier when buying a bottle of sake, is my advice...)
After Kyoto, we got on the bullet train - still looking and feeling futuristic even after over 50 years in service - and arrived very soon afterwards in Tokyo. We stayed in what turned out to be the perfect location for us - a street filled with one izakaya after another. We normally ate in at least two different places every night, just to try the specialities of as many as we could. Even at the standard bars, the food was amazing - bar snacks in Japan are a bit better than your average packet of peanuts; as a simple accompaniment to a pint we had huge, juicy oysters in one place, fresh and delicious sushi somewhere else, and horse sashimi in another. My birthday treat was a wagyu beef restaurant, which was spectacular; the highest quality beef that exists, served in a dozen different ways from tartare to steak, from a dozen different cuts - utterly delicious. After the beef we went to sample
Japanese whisky - the Japanese attention to detail and love of the finer things has apparently led to them becoming the world's finest whisky producer, overtaking Scotland. It was certainly very nice; but I tried the good Japanese stuff next to the Scotch, and as far as I'm concerned you still can't beat a good Scotch...
One of our favourite pastimes over the last year has been to wander around fish markets; always interesting, and always different from one place to the next. Tokyo has the mother of all fish markets - the enormous Tsukiji market, the largest fish market in the world, covering an area of something like 30 or 40 football pitches - and we definitely couldn't miss it. The stars of the show are the huge bluefin tuna, beasts of up to 700kg, carved up using industrial cutting equipment and sold around the world - with the best fish and the best cuts of course reserved for the sushi restaurants lining the market. But the market isn't just tuna - if it lives in the sea and is even remotely edible, it's there in Tsukiji. From every kind of shellfish up through sea urchins, large numbers
of things that we couldn't even identify, every fish you can possibly imagine along with piles of roe, enormous squid and octopus, right up to chunks of whale meat, the variety of seafood there is just astonishing. Of course we'd built up quite an appetite by the time we'd walked around all this wonderful looking food - and there's only one thing you want to be eating around there. We walked out of the market and picked a restaurant at random, and proceeded to munch our way through the freshest and most delicious sushi that it's possible to get. Again the tuna was the star of the show, melting in your mouth, but everything was incredible - yet another spectacular meal to add to our list of things we ate in Japan that we'll probably only be able to replicate by coming back again.
Stuffed full of wonderful food, completely content from belly to tastebuds, and having successfully put back on most of the weight we'd lost in SE Asia, our ten days in Japan were over all too quickly. We were sad to leave - but we'll definitely be back. Thanks Japan!
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