Iris and I stayed at a popular Asakusa tourist hotel called Ryokan Shigetsu. Everyone seems to have heard of the place, and with good reason: they took very, very good care of us.

By the time we arrived at the Shigetsu, it was about 3am Seattle time and each of us was shocked that the other was still awake. We snuggled into our futons and went right to sleep…and woke up at 5am, just like everyone warned us we would. So we read our books ([Neuromancer](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0441012035/?tag=mamstesgrubshack) and [The Pirates’ Mixed-up Voyage](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0140371281/?tag=mamstesgrubshack), respectively) until breakfast.

The Shigetsu is a little six-story hotel in the middle of Asakusa. We chose Asakusa because we’d heard it was a classic, old-school Tokyo neighborhood, which it was. Every time we went out, we walked past a new interesting window to peek in, which is not an experience unique to Asakusa, but it made going out that much more fun. We saw an old man hand-cutting soba noodles in the window of a restaurant, and a knife shop with a sharpening stone in the window that I happen to have at home. (Iris and I were, for some reason, unreasonably proud of this.) We saw people making red bean cakes using a device very similar to a sandwich press my parents had when I was a kid, used for cooking sandwiches over a campfire. The red bean cakes smelled fabulous, and we stopped to buy some on the way to dinner one night. They tasted like cake with beans in the middle. Red bean paste is a Japanese taste I haven’t acquired yet.

One nice thing about Asakusa is that the blocks are very, very short. What looks like a long walk on the map is probably a short walk. Just east of the Shigetsu is Nakamise-dori, the tourist shopping street:

That’s Nakamise-dori one morning before most of the shops opened. (We were waking up before 6am for a few days before we got onto Japan time.) It’s mostly junky souvenirs, but there are many makers of _senbei,_ rice crackers, which are exactly like the soy sauce-flavored rice crackers you get in an assortment at the supermarket, but much fresher; the most popular kind is larger than a silver dollar and must be eaten in several hearty bites. These are addictive. Iris, of course, loved Nakamise-dori, and she took her spending money and promptly bought three different stuffed cats. Mission accomplished.

Now, back to the Shigetsu. Iris and I are still reminiscing about how comfortable the futons were. We slept fabulously, and not just because we wore ourselves out on a daily basis. The room was absolutely tiny. A real estate ad would have called it “cozy.”

In the corridor on the way to the elevator was a tiny plant that the staff changed daily. And on the sixth floor was the hot bath.

Public baths are Japanese tradition, and if the public bath is a big wooden bathtub on the top floor of a small hotel, that’s good enough. Or better. Every night, we put on our yukatas:

and went up to the hot bath, which was almost always deserted. (I took Iris into the men’s bath with me; next time she’ll be old enough to go to the women’s bath alone, so I’m glad we went when we did.) The bath was very hot, and it had a view of the temple spire and some nearby skyscrapers. When we got into the tub, water spilled over the edge and seeped through the floorboards, something I’m always warning Iris not to do at home but which is totally expected in a Japanese bath.

On [the day we got lost in Uji](https://www.rootsandgrubs.com/2010/05/03/udon-with-the-fox-goddess/) and got back to Tokyo late and hungry, we got to the Shigetsu and Iris said, “I’m so glad we’re home.” It’s that kind of place.

**Next:** A day on Odaiba. Oh, and I wrote about [chicken tail](http://www.culinate.com/columns/bacon/yakitori_grilling_meat_on_a_stick) on Culinate.

One thing I wondered about Japan was whether we would get tired of Japanese food. This sort of thing has happened to me before–I’ve had pizza in Bangkok and pancakes in Paris–and I don’t see any shame in it. Here’s what happened in Tokyo.

On our third or fourth day in Japan, while we were walking back to our hotel, I said to Iris, “You know, if you’d like to have Western food for dinner one night, that’s fine with me.”

“Then I’d like to have Western food tonight,” said Iris.

“Okay, sure,” I said. “What are you thinking? Burgers? Pizza?”

“Hmm…Chinese dumplings.”

“Uh, okay. I bet we could ask the front desk to recommend a gyoza place in the neighborhood.”

“Great. Hey, _that_ looks good.” It was a display of plastic tempura shrimp at a place right next to our hotel. “Let’s have that tonight.”

“Works for me.” When we came down for dinner, the place was closed. But they’d left a map on the door, pointing around the corner. We followed it to an old two-story house. _”Tempura ga arimasu ka?”_ I asked tentatively. “Hai!” We left our shoes at the bottom of a ladder-like staircase that would have made an American building inspector laugh hysterically. We ascended to a tatami room, sat on the floor, and ordered off a picture menu.

Iris ordered four enormous tempura shrimp with rice; I had the combo, which consisted of three items on rice: (1) a small whole fish, (2) a shrimp, (3) and a bunch of random vegetables and seafood formed into a patty, battered, and fried. We also had tea and pickles. I didn’t get a picture of any of this, so just imagine shrimp bigger than your face.

I don’t know if this was coincidence or a known fact, but every time we ate in an upstairs tatami room, the waitstaff consisted of elderly women with the demeanor of gruff diner waitresses. This was not at all unpleasant. I especially enjoyed my fried kisu fish (a small whiting). Iris ate two of her shrimp and ate the batter off the other two, presenting me with two naked shrimp. The total price was about $40.

Later, after we survived the trip downstairs, I looked up the restaurant and found that we’d eaten at [Daikokuya](http://www.tempura.co.jp/english/index.html), which has been serving giant shrimp in that location since 1887.

You can watch a short video about the restaurant [here](http://www.japan-in-motion.com/jim/item/mov_195/).

Outside of breakfast, the subject of Western food never came up again.

I have a lot more to tell you about Japan and will do so as soon as I have time. Right now I’m neck-deep in an article about how to buy insurance on your grilled chicken, or something.

-Matthew

Look, I’m not the most well-traveled guy in the world. But I get around. I’ve been to four continents, a lot of top tourist destinations, and a few unusual ones. I’ve eaten gumbo in New Orleans, pad Thai in Bangkok, fish and chips in London, French onion soup in Paris, and lobster rolls in Maine.

Tokyo is very, very different from those places. I’ve struggled to figure out how to explain it, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

Throughout Tokyo there are drink machines, squat, refrigerated vending machines selling small bottles of various beverages for a dollar or two. We often bought water and other drinks: citrus soda, apple juice, iced green tea. It seems like there’s always a drink machine when you want one.

That’s not the magical part. Lots of cities have vending machines.

At a typical Japanese vending machine, you can pay in three ways: coins, transit card, or 1000-yen bill. About a dozen times during our trip, we slid a piece of paper money into the slot on the front of the vending machine, and not once did it ever spit the bill back at us.

That is Tokyo: _the least annoying place I’ve ever been._

You know how at a good restaurant–the kind that is in love with making customers happy, not in love with itself–it seems like the staff knows what you need a moment before you realize it yourself? That’s Tokyo. The trains don’t stop in the tunnel without an explanation. We never had trouble finding something good to eat, usually within a few paces of where we were standing. And Tokyo is the most walkable place I’ve ever been in my life.

Tokyo has ruined me. I had a list of other places I wanted to go on future trips. I crossed them all off and just wrote Tokyo six times.

More soon, including Iris’s favorite food of the trip: grilled chicken tail.

On Thursday we took the JR Nara line two stops to Inari Station, which is just outside the Fushimi Inari shrine. Or as Iris calls it, the Fox Goddess Temple, which is sort of wrong but close enough. As [this web page](http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/fox-inari-university-of-wiscon.htm) puts it:

> Usually when one refers to Inari the two general images are of an old man sitting on a pile of rice with two foxes beside him, or of a beautiful fox-woman.

Temples are Buddhist, and this is a Shinto shrine–although the two religions are totally mixed together in Japan. Anyway, whether you’re interested in religious iconography or not, there are two excellent reasons to visit this shrine.

**Torii.** Torii are red wooden gates. You’ve seen them before in pictures of Japan. The Fushimi Inari shrine has over 10,000 of them. Here is the famous picture that everyone takes:

The story I have been told is that Inari is the goddess of rice and therefore prosperity, so if you want your business to prosper, you donate a wooden gate to the Fushimi shrine. If [Spilled Milk](http://www.spilledmilkpodcast.com/) ever hits it big, we are totally donating a torii. You can hike for miles on Inariyama, the hill where the shrine is perched, and hardly ever emerge from under a tunnel of torii.

Eventually I started to get burned out and told Iris I was ready to head back. Iris would have none of it. I was getting hungry. We pressed on. Finally we came to the second reason to visit the Fushimi shrine.

**Udon shacks.** In Japanese folklore, foxes love to eat _aburaage,_ fried tofu, which is in turn frequently served in a bowl of udon. Iris and I shared a big bowl of the stuff for our morning snack. Look, if there are two things I have no interest in, they are religion and hiking. But Iris sums up our feelings about this place as follows:

You can buy souvenir torii in many sizes at the gift shop. We did not.

We hopped back on the train and continued a few more stops to Uji. I wanted to go to Uji because I wanted to visit Tsuen tea. Tsuen is the oldest tea shop in Japan. It’s been operating at the end of the Uji bridge since 1160. That is a while. I expected Uji to look exactly like this picture from Tsuen’s web site:

It’s actually just a suburban town, but one unusually devoted to tea. To find Tsuen, we stopped in at the tourist office, where they gave us a map entirely in Japanese and seemed very surprised that we were in Uji–not in an annoyed way, more like how I would briefly make a face to indicate, “You live in Tokyo, and you came to _Seattle_ on vacation?”

We found Tsuen, which is just a tea shop. They gave us free samples of gyokuro, which is the highest grade of Japanese tea. Iris took her cup politely and then passed it off to me. I bought some random tea, and I think the guy who helped me was [the 24th generation owner of the shop](http://www.tsuentea.com/english24th.html). He looked kind of like me.

Uji is very pretty:

We walked across the bridge and laughed, because there’s a coffee shop on the other side. We tried to find a good place for lunch, maybe some gyoza, but every restaurant seemed to be showcasing food made with tea. So we shared a pork cutlet bento box from the Circle K, where we also discovered Dino Bars, a chocolate bar with white chocolate dinosaur bones and other skeletal images impressed into the top. Good stuff. We brought home half a dozen.

Uji was the low point of the trip for Iris. We got lost, got tea, and got a mediocre convenience store lunch. That’s as far wrong as we ever went in Japan. If you mention Uji to her, however, she will say “grrr,” like a fox goddess.

We caught our shinkansen back to Tokyo and had a late dinner at Yoshinoya, the beef bowl chain, near our hotel. I’d been to Yoshinoya in California, but the original is much better. We sat at the counter and each ordered a bowl of fatty meat, onions, and rice. Iris ate all her meat and asked if she could have more. I mustered enough to Japanese to ask if we could pay for _motto gyuniku,_ and the waitress showed me that there’s actually a section on the menu for more meat. Iris was thrilled.

Meanwhile, I put a bit of pickled ginger into my bowl and wondered whether I might be overdoing it. Then I looked around and saw that everyone else was shoveling a big mound of the stuff on before digging in.