Summer eating in Japan
The 15th International Turfgrass Research Conference is this month in Karuizawa, Japan. A few delegates have asked if I have some advice about foods to try for those making their first visit to Japan.
Here goes. It’s hot in Japan in July. In the summer, I like cold soba (noodles).
Soba is delicious, not too heavy, and these noodles happens to be a specialty of Nagano prefecture, where the conference is, and where a lot of buckwheat for the noodles is grown. Perhaps have with some tempura. You dip the chilled noodles into a sauce, usually with some wasabi.
Grilled eel served over rice is another popular dish in the summer. Apparently eel provides extra energy to deal with the exhausting summer heat.
I eat soft cream year round. But it’s especially good on a summer afternoon. Soft cream is common all over Japan. It’s typical to find milk flavor and matcha (green tea) flavor and perhaps some local or seasonal flavors. In Karuizawa, the famous flavor is mocha from the Mikado Coffee shop—you’ll find the shop, probably with a long queue, between the Karuizawa Station and the conference hotel. The Ministop convenience store chain also does a respectable soft cream, and is worth a visit to try the current flavor.
At the entrance to some restaurants, you’ll see plastic models of the popular food items served at that restaurant. For tourists, I think this can be a good way to choose restaurants—walk around and look at food models until you find the type of dish that you want to try.
I’ll also recommend large department stores, or perhaps even large electronics stores. There will generally be a floor or two devoted to restaurants, and it is common to have a ramen restaurant, a family restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a sushi restaurant, an udon and soba restaurant, an okonomiyaki restaurant, a tonkatsu restaurant, a coffee shop, and so on. You can find a selection of restaurants covering a range of cuisines if you find yourself in this type of building. Tall buildings near major train stations will often have these type of restaurant floors.
Tokyo is the world’s largest metropolitan area, and you’ll find great food all over this vast region. When I am in Tokyo I often stay in the area near Ginza, Nihonbashi, Tokyo Station, and Shimbashi. I’ve always found it fun to walk at street level along the Yamanote Train line (the Yamanote and a lot of other train lines are elevated through this section of Tokyo) and under the train tracks it is restaurants for kilometers. Specifically, the Yurakucho to Shimbashi area, I have many times walked until I found a restaurant I wanted to eat at.
It’s easy to find a lot of restaurants near large train stations.
There are a wide selection of alcohol-free beverages in Japan—tea and coffee and juice and various carbonated beverages such as Asahi Dry Zero. You can’t drink and drive in Japan, so if you’ll be driving, be sure to choose non-alcoholic beverages.
A common type of restaurant is an izakaya, where one can get food and drinks. You can have dinner with friends or with colleagues at an izakaya, and this type of meal usually goes slowly, with lots of conversation, and drinks.
You wouldn’t order all the food at once, but would keep ordering dishes until everyone has had enough.
May I then recommend, for those age 40 and younger, or perhaps occasionally for those even older, go for ramen or sushi after dinner. That’s a nice treat to make sure you are full before bed.
Chu-hi means “shochu highball,” shochu being a distilled spirit somewhat like vodka. There will be a lot of lemon sours on the menu—I believe this is a type of chu-hi. There are canned chu-hi available too, with all kinds of fruit flavors. These can be quite refreshing in the summer.
Now, if you’ve read this all the way to the end, here’s a little more advice, especially for those going to golf or turfgrass events in Japan.
It’s typical to exchange a business card (name card) when meeting people in a business setting. If you are going to visit Japanese golf courses or meet people from Japanese companies, you won’t go wrong by having a business card to exchange.
I wrote another post about golf course grass in Japan. Check that out so you know what you are looking at.
The two green system is not on every Japanese course. Maybe 30% of the courses in Japan have two greens per hole. Today these are usually going to be two creeping bentgrass greens per hole. It’s not so much a winter green and summer green system. See my two green system posts so you can speak with assurance about this topic.
Korai is manilagrass (Zoysia matrella) and noshiba is Japanese lawngrass (Zoysia japonica). The vast majority of golf courses in Japan have tees and fairways planted to korai, rough planted to noshiba, and greens planted to creeping bentgrass. Sports fields in Japan, if they are grass, will usually be a type of bermudagrass (Cynodon). Cool-season grasses are found at high elevation and in the northernmost part of Japan.