There is sushi and there is design. And then there is designer sushi. There’s no better way to describe the beautiful seafood and vegetables on offer at the minimalist restaurant A-Womb. The eatery specializes in high quality, DIY hand-rolled sushi (temaki), featuring many local vegetables and unique food combinations not often found at your standard sushi joint.
How does one type a trumpet fanfare? Dun dun dun daaaaaaaaaaa, dun dun da dun dun daaaaaaaaaaaa. Hmmm, perhaps not. 😛 Why the celebration? Glad you asked. 😀 After over three years of blogging, I have arrived at the milestone 500th post!
Two years ago, I gave a quick profile on Sumiko Enbutsu’s tiny but fantastic guidebook A Flower Lover’s Guide to Tokyo. As we really swing into the spring flower season, I wanted to do the book a bit more justice and hopefully give garden lovers out there (like myself) an additional resource to track down some …
We’re coming to the meat of Golden Week right now, with Greenery Day (Midori-no-Hi) drawing to a close today. Tomorrow, May 5th, marks Children’s Day, one of the more visually exciting holidays of this period.
How is it that, given my acknowledged love of Japanese gardens, I rarely seem to write many up on this blog? Let’s change that, shall we? 🙂 Today starts the first of my Great Gardens series, and no better spot to begin with than the currently blooming Kawachi Fujien.
Ahhh, it’s upon us. The most wonderful – and dreaded – time of the year. No, not Christmas. Not even Obon, the summer holiday that sees Japanese returning to their ancestral homes in droves. Rather, I am talking about Golden Week, the string of holidays that falls between April 29th and May 5th/6th.
Kurashiki is a lovely canal town in Okayama Prefecture that doesn’t always get the press it deserves. It has a beautiful neighborhood (the Bikan district) of old rice storehouses that have now been converted to shops, museums, restaurants and comfortable ryokan (traditional inns). Boats drift lazily down the central canal while willows on the bank …
During our trip to Tohoku earlier this month, we encountered shops and shops of kokeshi dolls. Kokeshi are wooden dolls with heads and bodies only, traditionally made only in the six northern prefectures of Japan’s Honshu Island.
Six years into my time here in Japan and I have to admit, I am leery of free tours. Granted, I am an “info junkie” and all around history nerd so I often feel that these tours, given by enthusiastic but somewhat unqualified guides, never seem to satisfy. Still, I’d been curious about the Tokyo …
I’m a total garden nerd. I don’t know how it happened, as we had more mint and parsley growing in our front yard garden than ornamental flowers. But for some reason, the palette of colors in the flower gardens here in Japan simply takes my breath away.
My daughter is a pretty easy-going traveler, but there is a limit to how many museums you can drag a toddler to. Sometimes you just have to build in a little bit of playground time. Luckily, there are some fantastic recreational areas scattered around the islands that will entertain adults almost as much as their …
Japan is chock full of temples and shrines and frankly, not all of them are worth adding to your itinerary. In some cases, they’re too old or run-down or out of the way to make the effort. In other instances, visiting in one season may leave a bland impression … while visiting at just that perfect … Continue reading
I’m not a vegetarian but I do love my vegetables. And I’m even more willing to consume them when they’re presented to me in a unique way. Continue reading
It’s been a busy spring with not much time for blogging, and for that I apologize. In late February, I had the chance to return to my “home” of Kumamoto, leading a small group of travelers on a tour to support the region. Continue reading
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to support one of those crowd-funded projects that seem to be ever-more popular these days. Sure, many of them sound cool, but this one in particular caught my eye. Continue reading
Two years ago, my husband had a work event in Shikoku and as luck would have it, he could bring the family along. So we trekked off to Kochi, with a long winding sidetrip through Tokushima and Ehime on the way back to Kyushu. And while we took the ferry over, we decided to drive … Continue reading
Winter in Japan means mikan season! Thanks to Courtney for a mouth-watering recipe this month. I’m off to the kitchen! “Everyone is getting sick,” said my Japanese coworker. “You should eat a mikan.” Continue reading
Alright, I’ll admit it, I am a sucker for good food photography. If you can style your food and photograph it in such a manner that it makes me start drooling all over the page/screen, you’ve done your job VERY well. It does also help to have a “gimmick”. Not in the way that you’re … Continue reading
