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.

We sort of blew Kyoto. I don’t blame Kyoto. This was our fault.

We were going to Kyoto because we wanted to ride the shinkansen. I have been wanting to ride the shinkansen since I first heard of it in fourth grade, when we did a class unit on Japan. We learned a whole lot about textiles, as I recall. I’m not sure the word “textile” was ever defined for us, or maybe I slept through that part. We also learned about sushi, which scared the hell out of me, since I was a picky eater.

There are lots of shinkansen lines, but we decided to do Kyoto because we got a reasonably priced train/hotel package and because Kate Williamson’s book [A Year in Japan](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1568985401/?tag=mamstesgrubshack) is set there. The book is an illustrated chronicle of Williamson’s year spent living in Kyoto, and one of the most memorable pages shows people skipping across stepping stones set in the Kamo river, which runs through central Kyoto. Iris really wanted to cross those stepping stones. (Me too.)

You don’t need me to tell you that the shinkansen is completely awesome. Painted stripes on the platform show you where to stand, which is important, because the train arrives precisely on time and dwells on the platform for less than two minutes before proceeding.

We rode the Nozomi, which is currently the fastest shinkansen service. Top speed: 186 mph. I was a little worried that the shinkansen might seem anticlimactic, just fast rather than really fast, or worse yet so smooth that it didn’t even feel fast, like a plane that happens to be flying on the ground.

No worries, I felt totally sick. It felt every bit of 186mph, ten times more of a thrill ride than the recycled Disney submarine ride we went on the previous day. We whipped through town and countryside and mostly lots and lots of tunnels. A woman in a smart uniform walks through the train selling tea and coffee and sandwiches and candy, and Iris bought some chocolate sticks with embedded rice crackers–like Japanese Nestle Crunch, except they come four tiny sticks to a package and sixteen tiny packages to a box. Each cellophane pack has a different animal on it. “Here,” said Iris, “you can have wild boar and I’ll take pygmy hippopotamus.” We opened our candy. “Hey, they’re the same,” said Iris, apparently disappointed that her chocolate was not hippo-flavored.

When I caught my first glimpse of Mt. Fuji, [I kind of flipped out](http://twitter.com/mamster/status/11342392228), but no more so than the middle-aged Japanese women across the aisle. Something about the mountain undoes the stiffest upper lip. The train goes preposterously close to it; it’s the opposite of a zen view. You can practically lick it. (We got much, much closer than in the photo, but after I took this picture I was too busy panting against the glass to take any others.)

Before boarding the train, we bought our bento boxes at Tokyo Station. Somehow I’d envisioned Tokyo Station as being like Grand Central Terminal, with soaring ceilings. It’s actually Penn Station–the current one, not the old one–but clean and with better shopping. Like, insanely great shopping. We skipped the fancy chocolates, but the delis alone are worth the trip. Iris chose a tonkatsu bento and I got assorted sushi. She liked her pork, and ate little else, but I think the side dishes make the bento. I had an oden-like stew of assorted fish cakes and burdock root. Iris had a little seaweed salad and some kinpira gobo to go with her pork. It was really just as good as I imagined it.

We rested for a while at our hotel in Kyoto before heading to Gion, the preserved historic district.

Here’s how we blew Kyoto, item one: we didn’t really do any research before arriving there. So when we got to the river, no stepping stones.

Later I looked it up and they were maybe a mile upstream. But we did find the river, and walked across a bridge and down a cherry blossom-lined lane. Which was pretty and, well, kind of boring. On the west bank of the river, however, is an alley full of restaurants, called Pontocho. We stopped at the first place that looked good, a sukiyaki restaurant that was mildly disastrous.

At home, we serve sukiyaki with a bowl of beaten raw egg on the side for dipping the beef and other ingredients in before eating. Well, I do, at least. Iris and Laurie aren’t into that.

So we went into this place and asked about sukiyaki, and they took us up to the fifth floor, overlooking the river. This was the view _from our table:_

The waitress asked if we wanted egg with our sukiyaki. I said sure. She cracked eggs into two bowls and beat the eggs, cooked our sukiyaki, and then, to Iris’s horror, pulled out nearly all the beef and plunked it right into the bowl of raw egg. This was the only thing in Japan served to Iris that she refused to try. And can you blame her?

So we did the only sensible thing. I wolfed down all the sukiyaki, and then we had a second dinner of stuff grilled on sticks: chicken wings, yakitori, shishito peppers, and chicken skin. The place took great care to expose every fatty bit of chicken to the heat of the grill, and it was all terrific.

The next day had similar ups and downs.

**Next time:** The Fox Goddess and Uji.

I’ve just made my fourth batch of homemade kimchi, and it’s the first one I’m totally satisfied with. I have been going around telling everybody about my kimchi. Some people want it. Some people want me to keep it away from them.

Here’s the recipe, which I’ve cobbled together from three different cookbooks: [Momofuku](http://www.amazon.com/dp/030745195X/?tag=mamstesgrubshack), [Eating Korean](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0764540785/?tag=mamstesgrubshack), and [The Korean Table](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0804839905/?tag=mamstesgrubshack). But I also have to thank my friend Kye Soon Hong, who supplied a key ingredient.

See, the first couple of times I made kimchi, it wasn’t spicy enough. So the third time, I got smart. But not very smart. I put it a ton of chile powder. Now the kimchi was spicy enough, but it was gritty from too much chile powder. I asked Kye what to do. She asked her mother, who lives in Korea. “She said you need to use a spicier kind of red pepper…chung yang peppers,” said Kye. But she didn’t stop there. Kye’s mom sent her a bag of chung yang the other day, and Kye passed some on to me. “It was picked, dried, and crushed by a friend of my mom’s,” she reported. So it’s local! Sort of.

You can likely find spicy chile powder at a Korean grocery. If you can’t find it, make this anyway; it will still be great.

**CABBAGE AND RADISH KIMCHI**
Makes 2 quarts

_You’ll need two one-quart glass canning jars. They sell these at my local supermarket, so hopefully you won’t have trouble finding them, either. I follow David Chang’s nontraditional practice of putting the kimchi directly into the refrigerator instead of aging it at room temperature; I can’t taste any difference, and I am reasonably patient._

1 small to medium head napa cabbage (1.5 to 2 pounds), quartered lengthwise and cut across into 2-inch lengths
2 tablespoons kosher salt
1 Korean radish (or a 6-inch length of daikon), peeled, quartered lengthwise and cut into 1/4-inch-thick wedges
4 scallions, halved lengthwise and cut into 1-inch lengths

**For the seasoning paste:**
1/4 cup Korean chile powder (gochugaru)
2 tablespoons water
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced ginger
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons sugar
4 tablespoons fish sauce

1. Toss the cabbage and 2 tablespoons salt in a large bowl. Cover and refrigerate overnight or until cabbage has wilted and collapsed, at least 4 hours. Drain the cabbage in a colander, pressing down gently to release excess liquid.

2. Stir together the seasoning paste ingredients. Combine the seasoning paste, drained cabbage, radish, and scallions in a large bowl and toss together with your hands, making sure the vegetables are well-coated. Place the kimchi in the jars (press hard to squeeze it in there; the vegetables will lose more water and settle as it ages). Refrigerate. This starts to get good after 3 days and will continue to improve for up to 2 weeks. After that, it’s still great for fried rice or kimchi pancakes or soup for several more weeks.

Susanna is a travel nanny. She specializes in traveling overseas with her clients and looking after their young charges in unfamiliar surroundings–including Japan. She read my book and emailed to ask if I wanted to meet up before we left. Did I ever.

She loaned me some books and gave me helpful advice about Japanese toilets. When it came to breakfast, however…

“Breakfast is going to be tricky,” said Susanna.

Everything I know about Japanese breakfast is a stereotype: dried fish (himono), rice, miso soup, and natto. Maybe some grated [nagaimo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagaimo), which is a type of tuber that turns sticky and runny when grated. In [A Cook’s Tour](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060012781/?tag=mamstesgrubshack), Anthony Bourdain describes this type of meal in excruciating detail, comparing the nagaimo to all sorts of secretions.

Anyway, breakfast turned out not to be tricky, and I didn’t get any natto or himono, not that I would have minded. Our hotel had a choice of Western or Japanese breakfast. Iris got the Western, which featured a sausage link, potatoes, salad, scrambled eggs, and a sweet roll. “That was a good sausage,” she said. “I think it was a fake meat sausage, like for vegetarians.” I’m sure this was not the case, but I couldn’t convince her otherwise. She also got a bowl of strawberries, which she doused with cream and sugar and congratulated herself for inventing a new taste sensation.

Meanwhile, my breakfast was awesome! Rice, nori, two kinds of pickles, miso soup, sauteed fresh fish, and soybeans. I could eat this for breakfast every day, and for the rest of the week, I did. I think it was $13. If you got this at an American hotel it would be $30. Oh, and there was tea.

There is tea everywhere. Tokyo is a freely flowing tea fountain. There was tea on the plane. It wasn’t very good, but it was certainly better than any tea I’ve had on a plane before. But everywhere we went, there was wonderful bancha or sencha, usually complimentary, with the right amount of leaf dust at the bottom of the cup. I felt exactly like a coffee lover from nowheresville USA vacationing in Seattle: you mean I get to drink this stuff everywhere, all day?

The hotel breakfast kept getting better. Every day, a different fish, different vegetables. There were always both pickled and cooked vegetables, which made me extremely happy and gave new meaning to the phrase “part of this complete breakfast.” Simple boiled potatoes one day, a complex vegetable stew another. One day I got a fried egg. But on our last morning, just to be different, I took Iris to Denny’s.

There are no Grand Slams on the menu at Denny’s in Japan. In fact, it’s mostly Japanese food and Japanese-style western food. There’s no English menu. Iris zoomed right in on that koala pancake. The nose, which assumed would be butter, is ice cream. The eyes are Cocoa Puffs. Can you even imagine a more absurdly kid-pleasing breakfast than this? (I had French toast, and we ordered two sausage links, because, at that moment, I remembered the word for “two” but not the words for “three” or “four.”)

I have a bunch of Japan-related posts in the works, and here’s the link to all our photos:

[Japan 2010](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mamster/sets/72157623832188072/)

What would you like to hear about next?