A good lunch choice in Shinyokohama for vegetarians 14 Apr 2013 6:27 PM (12 years ago)

Memories of Nakagusku 7 Apr 2013 6:25 PM (12 years ago)

Metpod link 31 Mar 2013 10:19 PM (12 years ago)

Related to the article, here's a podcast with me and Dr. Laurence Kominz, my source for the article, a kabuki expert, and a beloved former professor.

Metropolis on Kabuki 24 Mar 2013 10:18 PM (12 years ago)

A feature on kabuki over at Metropolis mag!

Pierre Herme Aoyama 17 Mar 2013 4:25 PM (12 years ago)

Pierre Herme's Bar Chocolat on Japan Travel.

aizu kannon 10 Mar 2013 6:23 PM (12 years ago)

A visit to the Aizu Kannon for Japan Travel. Love the white lady!

japan tourist cafe shozo 3 Mar 2013 5:22 PM (12 years ago)

I wrote about Nasu Shiobara's Cafe Shozo up in Tochigi for Japan Tourist. Great place!

coffee lounge 24 Feb 2013 5:36 PM (12 years ago)

How I love coffee, and lounging.

There is such a lot of good coffee and lounging to be had in Japan.

Jenny does wine 17 Feb 2013 8:06 PM (12 years ago)

My friend Jennifer Julien is a food expert, NHK TV personality, wine connoisseur, and lovely lady! Her recommendations are in Kaldi wine shops, and at a bargain too! Look out for them.

Lunar New Year 10 Feb 2013 4:59 PM (12 years ago)

Happy Lunar New Year!

Have a dragon-butt-shaking year, just like these bored gong bangers cold-weather revelers.

We celebrated by eating annin soft serve and delicious Taiwanese sesame noodles served by a persnickety jichan in Chinatown.

Solex 6 Feb 2013 1:40 AM (12 years ago)

Update: SOLEX has been adopted by a wonderful family!

Solex is a 2-3 year old Shih Tzu who was pulled from a high-kill pound in Okinawa by the rescue group Doggies Inc. He is a very friendly and sociable boy who gets along with other dogs and kids. He is great on a lead and is puppy-pad trained. Solex has short legs so he has a hard time jumping on your furniture! He has been neutered and vaccinated (8 way combo shot, rabies) and has received his first dose of Frontline and Heartgard. Solex wants to snuggle you and sit on your lap. You know you (or someone you know) wants to adopt an adorable Muppet-pup! He is being fostered at my place in Tokyo and is looking to meet his future family. Adoption fee is 14,000 yen. Please contact me or Doggies Inc. and please share!

http://www.facebook.com/doggieincソレックスがあなたを待っていますソレックスは飼い主さんを探しています！

種類はシーズーで現在２～３歳の男の子です。この犬は沖縄の保健所から動物保護団体Doggies Inc.によって助けられました。とても人懐っこく社交的で、他の犬や子供とも仲良くできますよ。足が短いので、椅子やテーブルの上にのって暴れることもありません（笑）。また、トイレもペットシートの上にできるよう訓練されています。去勢手術、８種類のワクチン、ダニの処理、フィラリアの注射も既に済ませ準備万端。あなたに寄り添い、ひざの上に乗ることを待ち焦がれてます！とっても可愛い子なので、きっとずぅ～っと一緒にいたくなるはず！現在は東京にある私の家で過ごしながら、新しい家族を探しています。養子縁組にかかる費用は￥14,000です。ご興味がある方は是非、私（もしくはDoggies Inc.）までご連絡のほど、お願いいたします。シェアもお願いします！

Thank you Doggies Inc., Bedell family, and Blaine and Nobuko Hoy for rescuing/sponsoring/helping with his vetting and transport fees!

back in Manila 30 Jan 2013 1:21 AM (12 years ago)

Back to Manila, sprawling city with lots of people. Friendly people! With really great English (one of the PI's national languages). I learned a few phrases of Tagalog but even Tagalog is only one of the many languages and is not spoken everywhere.

Sewer wanted.

Vegetarian food was kind of hard to come by in PI (most of the food is very meaty). However, one place we found was the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital cafeteria. A weird place to eat on vacation, I know, and kinda hard to find, but I was really happy once we did. The entire cafeteria is vegetarian, and included many veg versions of local dishes. Score!

Manila, you are pretty.

Boracay 22 Jan 2013 10:41 AM (12 years ago)

We decided to try Boracay, from reading the tourism bureau's recommendations as the place that locals favor. We arrived to find that this is decidedly a resort island, with a few grand hotels and lots of touristy restaurants. While some (not all) parts of the island were sanitized and resort-y, I did appreciate the availability of food options.

An aside: I don't like pretending that I'm not a tourist when I am. When I'm traveling I try to give my money to people who will notice it and use it in their local economy, just like I do at home. I try not to use big international chains especially when I travel. But I am still a tourist and a stranger and someone who is not fluent in the language and culture. I try hard to be thoughtful and have a low impact and considerate of others and mindful of my surroundings, but the fact remains that I am a relatively privileged person with the means to travel. I know there is a pretentious notion against being a tourist, of being a "traveler" instead and hating on other people who have the gall to visit some secret place that the traveler feels they are the first outsider to have ever visited. Suck it up. If you don't actually live there, if you are not from a place, if you are visiting not because of work but because you have the relative freedom and money to travel to somewhere you don't live, you are a damn tourist. Fine, don't be a loud obnoxious person in Tevas and Bermuda shorts, but you are not a special snowflake. Be kind and learn things and get over yourselves.

Boracay is just beautiful. Beaches, sand, a few restaurants, a few moto-taxis, but it's not over the top. There are plenty of places to get away with just a short taxi ride.

All I wanted to do was drink calamansi juice.

Lots of boats on the clear water.

Grilled vegetable sandwich at one of the cafes in town.

Beach treasures

Toilets are euphemistically known as "comfort rooms" in the PI.

This is what it felt like.

winter is coming 16 Jan 2013 10:38 AM (12 years ago)

Finally got some snow. Yada. I'll take the sweat and humidity of summer any day.

Philippines 13 Jan 2013 7:53 PM (12 years ago)

It occurs to me that I never talked about my trip to the Philippines. I think because it was the fall of 2010, and I didn't get around to sorting the pictures right away, then the holidays, then the earthquake, and then we were all pretty busy for awhile.

The Philippines in kind of in our neighborhood out here. It's another archipelago in this neck of the ocean generally, and you could just about island hop down there from here. In fact, the very bottom of Japan is only a couple hundred miles from the very top of the Philippines. If you could drive across the ocean, you could do it in less than a day. If you count all the tiny islands (and whether you do depends on who you talk to), it's about 240 miles between the two countries. That's less than from the top to the bottom of Oregon.

Here in Japan, we get a lot of our tropical fruit from the Philippines. Some stuff is grown down in Okinawa, but it's really common to see stuff like bananas and pineapples and mango with PI labels. Stuff that in the States comes from Mexico, in Japan comes from PI.

It turns out that because it's so close, air tickets there are relatively inexpensive. I regularly see deals going for around ¥30,000 ($300). It also means that the cost in miles is pretty cheap. A intra-Asia ticket costs the same as a domestic US ticket at about 20,000 miles.

For the first hotel night too, I was able to book a place using some miles rattling around in a different account for an airline I never use. Not enough for an air ticket and about to expire.

The hotel was fine. I almost never stay in big chain hotels like that unless someone else is footing the bill. I'd rather spend my money elsewhere but also I don't have enough money to give it to places like that.

The next night, we moved to a pension in Malate. The building was beautiful, old dark wood, with friendly staff and in a pretty, if gentrified, neighborhood. There are a lot of small businesses and lots of street life, night life. Big grand old churches.

Food is kind of hard for vegetarians in Manila I think. Seems like a very meat-centric cuisine, but Manila also has an international streak and I managed to find stuff to eat. Most of it was not very traditional. Something I did manage to get though were these cassava fries. Delicious.

Took a walk by the ocean.

Took in a free concert in the park. Pinoys love music, people are doing karaoke and jamming all over the place.

Love this sign.

Next stop: beach. This is a country made up of over 7,000 islands. We have to visit at least one of them.

flix and fam 6 Jan 2013 1:46 PM (12 years ago)

I was able to go to Oregon for a few days over the holidays to hang out with the fam. One cool thing that we did was hire a friend who has a freelance photography business to take some family shots. We went to the park near the house with the dogs and took a bunch of pictures. Snapshots are great but it's nice to be intentional sometimes and make pictures with everyone present and accounted for.

あけおめ 3 Jan 2013 4:19 AM (12 years ago)

Happy new year peeps. Hope this one is better than the last.

Juno 25 Dec 2012 12:40 AM (12 years ago)

Juno was my first foster dog through Doggies Inc., the organization down in Okinawa for which I transported Miller/Bowie to the U.S. on that ill-fated trip back in September (He's so happy now! He has his own Facebook profile.).

Juno was pretty scruffy when he was brought in. He had obviously been very neglected or on the street a long time. Long matted hair, sores on his skin where the mats had gotten really bad.

After a stint down in Oki with no takers, he came up to Tokyo to try to find a home here.

Within a short period, we had made contact with an adopter who adopted cats from JCN, whose father was interested in getting a dog after losing his cherished Yorkie a year or two ago.

Mr. A had suffered from some depression, but after Juno came, he felt much better having a companion. They take care of each other.

Jenny Jenny spinna spinna 17 Dec 2012 2:14 AM (12 years ago)

Jenny got adopted by a great family! I love that girl.

I have this tape in my car (yeah my car has a tape deck, what) that I found in my house that someone in the family made. It's probably been around since before Buddha.
It's a mix tape of hits from the early '60s and has a bunch of great oldies. One of the songs is called "Jenny Jenny" and it's by an artist called Yasushi Suzuki.

When I was in Fukushima we would drive around and sing along to the tape. We'd get back to the shelter and we'd sing it to her. We'd sing it and dance around in Yuuko's kitchen.

Jenny was picked up in Minami Soma with her brother Kenny and about ten other puppies that were in the road.

She's gonna be such a great forever friend.

soy milk story 7 Dec 2012 4:04 PM (12 years ago)

Little flavored soy milk boxes are common in Japan, easy to find in supermarkets and drug stores for about 90yen a pop. I'm determined to try them all. This is an incomplete list.

Banana

Coffee

Annin (apricot pit)

Fruit mix

Grapefruit

Cocoa

Kinako (roasted soy powder)

Vanilla

Almond

Strawberry

Black sesame

Yuzu

Black tea

Sesame honey

Sweet red bean soup

Roasted sweet potato

Chestnut

Vanilla ice cream

mo' mayo 30 Nov 2012 10:06 PM (12 years ago)

It's a mayonnaise graduation. I had earlier spouted the virtues of this nice, vegan albeit expensive soy mayo. But now! A new vegan mayonnaise has come over the horizon!

Enter:

卵使わず作りましたマヨドレ
(Mayo dressing made without eggs.)
http://www.nisshin-oillio.com/goods/mayodore/index.shtml

At my local grocery, this dude scans for a mere 288 yen. An almost 500 yen savings compared to its competitor. And it is very nice. It's made by a mainstream company which should make it pretty easy to find.

No longer do I have to shell out mad bux nor import Nayonnaise in my suitcase. Hurrah!

milk hall kamakura 23 Nov 2012 10:31 PM (12 years ago)

Wave first showed me this place a few years ago. She brought her bike, because she is a local. It's in an alley, and if you are a tourist you probably wouldn't find it.

Outside Milk Hall in the alley. Photo by Nami.

I came again with N a year or so later, but it was under renovation. There was a tiny corner open for business, with a handkerchief bar. We ate ice cream, they played records.

From their website

Matt and I have met here for coffee a couple of years in a row. It's dark wood and glass, a kissaten juke joint. It's moody and varnished and they have good taste in music. Milk Hall Kamakura.

cafe shozo nasu 17 Nov 2012 10:27 PM (12 years ago)

We decided to make the trip up to Nasu to see Matt's show there and I'm so glad we did.

Pulling into the town on a crispy fall evening, we found a warmly lit cafe with a rustic clothing shop below. Glass jars of coffee beans gleamed on the shelves next to packets of handmade shortbread biscuits. Once upstairs, we chose a corner table next to a heater in the yellow glow, with pretty lamps and stylish clientele scattered around. The Wien coffee and cake set was delicious.

When it came time for the doors to open, we made our way next door and up the narrow staircase to the venue. A bar was positioned in the back, serving drinks and hot soup and a few other nums. Mismatched chairs lined the area in front of the stage, which was lit by dozens of candles.

This country is filled with the most beautiful of little shops and cafes in the unlikeliest of places. Cafe Shozo in Nasu.

fleas abound 12 Nov 2012 1:42 PM (12 years ago)

At our flea market booth at the Koenji festival, we met many dog friends who were happy to snack on the rawhide Crunchkins greeting cards that were our stand's special omake.

bar derek and the dominoes 7 Nov 2012 10:28 PM (12 years ago)

On a small shotengai leading from Shin Maruko station in Kawasaki there is a tiny roots bar called Derek and the Dominoes.

It's small and dark and offers many kinds of whisky and frequent live music, specializing in artists and styles from the U.S. American South.

I saw my friend Matt there this time and Scrappy Jud Newcomb three years ago. You can find the coolest stuff in the unlikeliest and most unassuming of places.

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