When you need to tell a New Yorker what places to visit in Japan. Always a work in progress.
Oh, yes, and “/s”
(click on the picture for the family size)
Category Archives: Japan
You, too, can make sushi
I made sushi tonight.
There was no great reason behind it. I was bicycling around doing errands when I thought, hey, if I’m in Japan, I should try to make sushi.
So I gathered up what I thought were the ingredients. Wasabi, fish, rice. Then I found a recipe for sushi rice and went back to the convenience store for vinegar and soy sauce. Just follow the directions, cut up the fish really thin, make mounds of rice and attach each slice of fish to each mound with a dab of wasabi. Done.
There’s really no great ritual to it. No school you have to attend to be considered capable of making sushi. No certificate necessary to legally make sushi. And certainly no nationality test.
Bring a sweater next time
Wikipedia does not have an English page for Shin-Shimashima Station.
Which is interesting, because the train fans have spent years making hundreds of new pages for each and every train station in Japan. There’s a page for both of the unused stations in the underwater tunnel between Aomori and Hokkaido. There’s a page for both stations at Narita Airport, because each requires a separate entry. There’s a page for every station on the Hokuriku Line, and the smallest of those stations probably service a population of 28 each. There is, of course, a page for that station that had only one passenger every day.
There is no page for Shin-Shimashima Station. Not remarkable enough or important enough to foreign tourists, I suppose. So on this trip around Nagano, I said let’s go there.
Second best always tries harder
You already know what I think about the touristy places. Besides, I’ve already been to the major cities in Japan. Matsumoto is not a major city, but that’s why I decided to go there for Golden Week.
Rainy day writing
Nagoya’s not the most beautiful city in Japan. Probably not in the top five. Or the top ten. It’s a city dotted with industries that happen to be on the main shinkansen line, so they might as well spruce it up, select a famous food (their meibutsu is tebasaki; think Buffalo wings with a lot less meat and not nearly as spicy) and drop a couple of shopping complexes with international brands so people on the way east to Tokyo or west to Kyoto or Osaka can drop by and pass the time at an intermediary stop.
It’s not an ugly city, either. A number of rivers cross both edges of the city center, and there is plenty of nature along the streets so it doesn’t look like a dark and gray Dickens novel. The city is convenient with all the creature comforts first-worlders need and desire, so it’s not some middle-of-nowhere truck stop/bedroom community that just takes up space. They have those in Japan, too, but so does every other developed country that is large enough to have built up a few major cities. If Tokyo is New York, Nagoya is Delaware. Nice enough, but not a top destination.
It’s in the middle, is what I mean.