Japan and food • Folksy Travel (in my Borsalino) by Bill Smale

They really cleaned up the local shrine by trimming the trees

Having some good food and drink with good friends who used to be my neighbors

The next day I went for some YAKINIKU, which is the Japanese version of Korean food, grilled meat and some other things. You could see the marbling in the beef, which makes it very tender and rich in flavor. Since it is so rich, you don’t really want to eat too much.

This sign is almost very true

I went out drinking with an old grad school friend and we had a great time. You can see I was so busy yak, yak, yak I forgot to take the photo at the beginning of the meal at the Izakaya (drinkery)

The local inexpensive Korean barbecue place, US$13 for as much as you can eat between 1 and 10 PM

a lot of people still think Japan is expensive which is an image they got from reality back in the 1980s. Actually now it’s very inexpensive. The Korean barbecue cheapest lunch is less than six US dollars and you can re-order rice at no extra cost

at this Izakaya you can drink as much as you want for two hours for less than six US dollars

With old friends, one is visiting from New Zealand

With Cornell graduates and one member of our alumni group

I took a friend to try MONJA, an old Edo (Shitamachi) food which you never had before at a very expensive tourist restaurant. The food was fine, but the description indicated a certain price and it wound up being triple. But we didn’t have time to go look for one of the old shops that don’t cater to tourists

in Shinjuku this is one of my favorite Izakaya called SANPEI (三平). this one is downstairs and it’s closer to the train station than the other one. Almost everybody working there is from Myanmar and I know the people who used to work there pretty well.

Guess who likes to show off their gangster look at their own bar , K Bar , in Shinjuku Goldengai. I don’t want to mention her age since that would not be polite, but I have known her for 26 years

You see the signs from time to time. The one up above is educating mostly people from China and Southeast Asia but it used to be, back in the 1970s, Japanese would also sit on the western style toilet this way because that’s how they knew how to use a public toilet. Number two is for people from countries that have sewage pipes that are too narrow to carry toilet paper down the line. Japan doesn’t have those narrow pipes so you can throw the toilet paper directly into the toilet.

When you think you have seen almost every kind of fast food imitation and idea you can come across something like this. A taco hamburger with avocado. I have had quite a few hamburgers in Japan over the last 50 years and it is definitely one of the last things I ever want to eat again. I don’t know what the hamburger patty is made from but it is definitely a level below McDonald’s, which many people think is the absolute lowest level.

a seven US dollar noodle lunch at the local oily and spicy noodle shop. It’s actually very tasty

a very popular Japanese style Chinese food restaurant has extremely reasonable prices as you can see below.

A little over five US dollars is very reasonable for that lunch, very filling

Here is the second version and the newest one of Hummer

There is a new series of holidays strung together, I kind of takeoff on Golden week and it is called Silver week. During this week, my local town had a festival so it was very crowded

You can see still some people dress in more traditional clothing, but the tennis shoes kind of don’t fit the style

You can see how crowded this main street is

After that I again forgot to take the photo before eating. It was very tasty at my local neighborhood sushi bar.

Near my former home is a very good quality deep fried pork restaurant (TONKATSU)

This is their lunch menu. My lunch was eight US dollars

Here is the TO KATSU at the chain restaurant, which is less expensive than my neighborhood restaurant. The price is below

Just less than US six dollars

The local tricycle shop has Batman’s tricycle

This is a traditional way to serve sake with the overflow box under the glass. This is kind of nice and modern with a plexiglass box

You can also get deep fried chicken in lunch set for US $6.60

This is one of my favorite SHOCHU, alcohol made from barley. Traditionally, this kind of alcohol is distilled from potatoes, but it could be from rice or something else

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