Japan travel — off-season, mountain regions, and seasonal picks.
Sake, decoded , grades explained in plain English, breweries worth a detour in Fushimi and Nada, Tokyo and Kyoto sake bars with yen prices, etiquette that matters around the cup, and why the best bottle you find in Japan is the one you can’t take home.
Okinawa is a separate food country , former Ryukyu Kingdom kitchen, Chinese pork tradition, US-base taco rice, and a rice liquor nothing like sake. Named restaurants in Naha, Makishi Public Market, Ishigaki beef, and where to skip the touts.
A fish-first guide to eating in Japan , from the ¥1,800 izakaya sashimi platter and standing sushi bars to Toyosu breakfast at 6am, Hakodate market donburi, fugu in Shimonoseki, and the seasonal rules that explain why the menu keeps changing. Specific prices, named venues, honest calls.
The story of how Japanese beer went from four near-identical macro lagers to nearly 700 breweries in 30 years, plus a working field guide to where to actually drink it , Tokyo temples like Popeye, Osaka craft gardens, Kyoto taprooms, Sapporo beer halls, and konbini shelves that stock better craft cans than most Western bottle shops.
Fifteen Japanese foods ranked from surprisingly fine to genuinely hard, from pickled plums and giant raw oysters to fermented squid guts and kusaya. Each entry with why it is hard, when on your trip to try it, where to find it, and whether you should actually bother. A field-note hub article for the rest of the Japan food set.
Hakata is the home of tonkotsu ramen , eighteen-hour pork-bone broth, pencil-thin noodles, kaedama refills, and a riverside tradition of wheeled yatai stalls that sell ¥800 bowls under red lanterns at midnight. An opinionated, first-person guide to Fukuoka ramen: named shops (Shin-Shin, Ippudo Daimyo, Hakata Ikkousha, Ichiran, Nagahama Number One), the kaedama and harikata ordering rituals, and what else to eat between bowls , motsunabe, mizutaki, mentaiko.
Osaka is the kuidaore capital , “eat yourself broke.” This is a map to where to actually eat: Dotonbori after 9pm for the neon and kani-man at the giant crab; Kuromon Ichiba before 2pm for sashimi at Maguroya Kurogin and A5 wagyu skewers at Kurogane; Shinsekai for ¥150 kushikatsu at Yaekatsu with the no-double-dipping rule; Ura-Namba for the back-alley standing bars the locals actually use. Named stalls, yen prices, metro exits, and what to skip , including the sit-down Dotonbori places the tour buses drop you at.
Takayama in the mountains of Gifu packs six working sake breweries, A5 Hida beef on street-stand nigiri, two morning markets, and houba miso cooked on magnolia leaves all within 300 metres , a mountain town built around eating and drinking. Here’s where to go, what it costs, and how to plan three days of it.
A Kyoto food guide that skips the ¥30,000 kaiseki and points you to the ¥900 obanzai set that actually matters. Where to eat yudofu at Nanzenji, yuba in Higashiyama, matcha at Nakamura Tokichi, and kushiage on Pontocho , with prices, bus routes, and the one-night itinerary I would follow.
A yakitori counter under the Shimbashi tracks, a natural-wine bar in Nakameguro, a six-seat Golden Gai room at midnight. Tokyo sorts itself by neighbourhood and by hour, and this is the map I wish someone had handed me on my first real trip up twelve Tokyo food districts, named restaurants, station exits, real prices.
