Every year around New Year’s we order a big boxes of spices from [Penzeys](http://penzeys.com/). We’ve been doing it for at least ten years. I love getting packages–who doesn’t?–and this is my favorite of the year. It offers pleasures both culinary and clerical: we get to unpack, sort, date, sniff, and shelve each spice. Every year we consult the spreadsheet (like I said, clerical) and determine what needs to be restocked and whether we want to try something new. Iris has mostly taken over the unpacking and dating duties, and she enjoys it even more than I do.

This year, for the first time, we didn’t order the box. Penzeys opened a store in downtown Seattle, near Pike Place Market. Iris was apprehensive about missing out on the unboxing (so was I), but I told her she could be in charge of the shopping. She took so seriously, it was like I’d asked her to look after the nuclear football. She stalked around the shop, referring frequently to her printed list and crossing items off as she put them in her basket.

Naturally, in the store you can sniff any spice before buying. That’s how we ended up upgrading our cinnamon from Chinese to [Vietnamese Extra Fancy](http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/p-penzeysvietnamesecinnamon.html). Now we’re cinnamon fiends. The Extra Fancy makes great cinnamon toast, coffeecake, cinnamon rolls (we’re stuck in a breakfast holding pattern).

And despite the name, it costs less than supermarket cinnamon.

If you’re thinking about taking your kids to Japan, here are a few clerical odds and ends that may be helpful.

### Get a PASMO card

Some cities are blessed multiple train lines. Tokyo has multiple train _systems,_ each of which has multiple lines. There’s the Tokyo Metro lines, the Toei lines, the JR lines, the Keisei lines, and some idiosyncratic stuff like the rubber-tired Yurikamome line. And the pricing is incomprehensible. You don’t care about this, right? Just want to get on whatever train goes to your destination?

Good, then get a PASMO. It’s a smart card that lets you ride basically any train or bus in the Tokyo region. Adults can buy them at a machine; for a kid, you need to bring the kid to a JR ticket office and fill out a simple form. There is also another card called Suica, which works just as well; I have no idea where you buy it, and “PASMO” is more fun to say.

Kids get a personalized card. Iris will be mad that I told you that they wrote IRIS AUNSTER on her card. Close enough. We loved using our PASMOs. You just hold it hear a blue card reader at the station gate and the gate flips open. Iris never got tired of this. Me neither. It made us feel like total professionals.

There are lots of other travel card options, like day passes and Metro-only passes and the like. Forget it. Get the PASMO.

### Sucka MCs

Japan is a cash-oriented society. Most places don’t accept credit cards. We exchanged some dollars for yen at our local Chase branch before leaving; I think we bought 50,000 yen (about $600). The exchange rate was terrible, of course, but it was worth it not to have to worry about figuring out the Japanese ATM situation right away.

All 7-Elevens in Japan have ATMs. Unfortunately, our card didn’t work at them, and my understanding is that Mastercard-logo ATM cards won’t work there in general. If you happen to have a Visa-logo ATM card, bring it. (In my capacity as a personal finance columnist, I have had many people recommend the Charles Schwab Investor Checking card for this purpose; I will try it on our next trip abroad and let you know.) We ended up with ATM success at the post office. There are a lot of post office branches; obviously they don’t keep 7-Eleven hours.

It’s safe to carry a lot of cash in Japan, and I recommend it, especially if you’re traveling with a kid (or with me) and don’t want to find yourself hungry, cashless, and with no idea where to find the nearest usable ATM.

### How much cash, then?

We budgeted $175 a day in spending money for the two of us, to cover meals, souvenirs, and entrance fees (mostly meals), but not transportation or lodging. This turned out to be a perfect amount.

### Get squishy

You’ve probably seen photos or videos of people being pushed onto Japanese trains by professional people-pushers. We only once got on an overcrowded train; it was the Yamanote line during rush hour. It was pretty sweet.

### Where to chill

My biggest worry before the trip was that Iris and I would be out doing stuff and getting overstimulated by blinking lights all day and wouldn’t be able to find anywhere to just sit down and relax and read a book for a while. No worries. There are coffeehouses everywhere–Starbucks, pre-Starbucks-era Japanese places, and Starbucks competitors. Also Mister Donut. Japan loves kids; no one ever made us feel like we were overstaying our welcome.

### Does not compute

We found wi-fi to be very rare. Don’t count on finding it when you need it. We bought some international wireless data (100MB) before leaving, and that worked out well.

### What to read

A few books and web sites we found helpful:

* [Sunnypages.jp](http://www.sunnypages.jp/) is an online Tokyo entertainment directory. It’s not updated often enough, but it led us to some good restaurants.

* [Squeamish About Sushi](http://www.amazon.com/dp/080483301X/?tag=mamstesgrubshack) and other books by Betty Reynolds. These are awesome illustrated guides to Japanese food and culture. Great to read with kids before the trip, although they do contain a bit of adult content which will probably fly over your kids’ heads. (There, that should sell a few copies, right?)

* [What’s What in Japanese Restaurants](http://www.amazon.com/dp/4770020864/?tag=mamstesgrubshack). Will help you identify what type of restaurant you’re looking at and what to order there.

* [Tokyo City Atlas](http://www.amazon.com/dp/4770025033/?tag=mamstesgrubshack). If you don’t carry this, you will never come back.

We read a few popular guidebooks, but we mostly knew where we wanted to go before the trip and stuck to that. If you want to be more spontaneous than us, try the [Frommer’s guide](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470537647/?tag=mamstesgrubshack).

What am I leaving out? Ask and I’ll be happy to answer.

On Friday, our last full day in Japan, my friend Kristin Yamaguchi invited us to meet her and her three kids on [Odaiba](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odaiba), an artificial island in Tokyo Bay.

There are a couple of ways to get to Odaiba. We were hoping to take a boat down the Sumida River. Specifically, this boat, the _Himiko,_ designed by a famous manga artist:

I didn’t take this picture, because we didn’t take this boat. The forecast called for high winds, and the boat trips were canceled. We were bummed. But we perked up on the Yurikamome Line train, the other way to get to Odaiba. This is one of the newer trains, and it’s elevated. While transferring to it, we followed a huge crowd of people who, we figured, must be heading the same way we were. We ended up at a security turnstile in the lobby of a bank building. They were heading to work. The guards pointed us in the right direction.

The Yurikamome line goes across the Rainbow Bridge, which is spectacularly lit at night but just your basic suspension bridge during the day. (Its awesomeness is further limited by the fact that if you Google for “Rainbow Bridge” you will find many copies of a poem about how you will be reunited with your dead pet in the afterlife.)

Right about the time we disembarked and met up with Kristin and her son and two daughters, the windstorm hit. Odaiba is known for being the windiest place in Tokyo, and this was one of the windiest days of the year. For a few moments, it was so windy we couldn’t stand up. I was pretty sure we were going to die. Iris thought this was completely awesome. We took cover inside Starbucks, where Iris and the kids went to work building elaborate spitball guns while I drank my favorite Japanese Starbucks beverage, the [Hojicha Latte](http://everyonestea.blogspot.com/2010/04/hojicha-latte-at-starbucks.html).

Kristin is from the midwest, and her husband is Japanese. Her kids are totally delightful. Iris made friends with Julia, the middle daughter, immediately. They went inside a haunted house, the kind where people in costumes jump out at you, and retreated the same way they’d gone it, clutching each other in terror. Now it was my turn to laugh.

Kristin had asked what we’d like for lunch. “I asked Iris about lunch and she said gyoza, which sounds good to me too if it’s not too boring for you,” I wrote.

“My children all just cheered!” she wrote back. “There is plenty of gyoza to choose from in the Little Hong Kong area that takes up two floors of one of the shopping areas.”

This was exactly as cool as it sounds. We perused a bunch of plastic food and decided on a place specializing in gyoza crowded onto a round, sizzling platter. The dumplings stick together, and you have to tease them apart with your chopsticks. Iris announced that she was going to eat thirty dumplings. She didn’t, but she ate a bunch. I ordered dandan noodles, which were terrific and spicier than I expected (“spicy” in Japan generally translates as “not spicy”).

Then Iris, Kristin, and the girls went on this ferris wheel:

Hide, age 8, and I did not. If you’re keeping score, that means Iris is ahead in the scare contest, two to one. Although I guess I didn’t go inside the haunted house, so maybe it’s three to nothing.

Then we went to this absurd Vegas-style shopping mall called Venus Fort:

By the time we headed back to the Shigetsu, Iris wanted to be adopted into the Yamaguchi family.

People often ask me about my favorite food, and I have a favorite evasive, wordy, and unsatisfying answer, which goes like this:

_Any kind of spicy noodles with vegetables and meat._

That’s actually an oversimplification. I specifically mean dry noodle dishes, not noodle soups, and they don’t have to be spicy at serving time, because I maintain an arsenal of spicy condiments. Oh, and one of my all-time favorites doesn’t actually include vegetables, unless you consider bean sprouts a vegetable.

I was thinking about this tonight as I was cooking up some yakisoba. I’d already decided to make it for dinner, and I Googled for a recipe. The first hit I got was Tara Austen Weaver’s [great post](http://teaandcookies.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-make-yakisoba-recipe.html) on the subject, complete with recipe:

> Customers entered and sat around a large communal table that was covered with a metal grill surface. The ingredients for each order were put on the grill and cooked before the customer, then pushed to where they were sitting so they could eat. I’m not sure if this early experience sealed the deal, but to this day I love yakisoba.

Me too, despite my lack of formative experiences with the stuff. Yakisoba is fast food: precooked noodles, a few common vegetables, whatever meat is on hand. The spicy, if you want any, comes from [shichimi togarashi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shichimi_togarashi). I ate my yakisoba, read the latest Everyday Food (“Have you tried: corn tortillas?” Yes. Yes I have), and started thinking about what yakisoba is. (Reading Everyday Food always puts me in a philosophical mood, what with all of Martha’s obscure biblical references and Socratic dialogues and stuff.)

You can classify yakisoba as a [Japanese noodle dish](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_noodles), of course. Two excellent Japanese noodle books were published last year: [Takashi’s Noodles](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1580089658/?tag=mamstesgrubshack) and [Noodle Comfort](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1934287571/?tag=mamstesgrubshack), and it was while reading the latter book this morning that I got yakisoba lodged in my brain.

But another way of looking at yakisoba is as a member of a family of stir-fried and otherwise non-soupy noodle dishes that cuts across Asia. It includes (among many others; these are just the ones I’m most familiar with):

* [Yaki udon](http://www.culinate.com/search/q,vt=top,q=yaki+udon/190643) (Japan)
* [Japchae](http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/pacificnw/2008680298_pacificptaste01.html) (Korea)
* [Ants on a tree](http://www.culinate.com/content/books/collections/3199/hungry_monkey/ants_on_a_tree) (China)
* [Pad thai](http://www.culinate.com/search/q,vt=top,q=pad+thai/74307) (Thailand)
* Other Thai noodle dishes like _khanom jeen,_ _pad kee mao,_ and _pad si ew._
* [Pancit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancit) (Philippines)

and, of course, chow mein, some form of which is presumably the ancestor of all fried noodles. I say this not because I have any historical evidence–it’s just that any food I like always seems to come from China if you go back far enough. It’s almost like the human race came from Africa but food came from China.

What fried noodle dishes have I forgotten? If there were a fried noodle cookbook, am I the only one who would curl up with it night after night?