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Japanese / Japanese Noodles / Sushi/Sashimi

Eating my way around Japan, part 1 – Tokyo and Kyoto

This Japan-focussed article is a break from The Picky Glutton’s usual London-based coverage

For a country on the far side of the world with a reputation for being expensive and inscrutable, Japan holds an outsized place in our collective culinary consciousness. Its quixotic and singular culture might be one reason, becoming the archetype of the exotic East – familiar yet faraway, just over the horizon and yet tantalisingly out of reach. A more prosaic reason is evident once you sample even a middling California roll-YoSushised version of the country’s food – Japan’s distinctive and diverse cuisine tastes fantastic, straddling the world like a yukata-wearing colossus.

While it looks deceptively small on a map, Japan is 50% larger than the UK and has an even broader gastronomic diversity. That makes it all but impossible to get more than a brief taste of what the country has to offer on a single, average-length visit.

The following two-part overview of dining out in Tokyo, Kyoto and the southern part of Wakayama prefecture is thus far from a systematic survey of what Japan has to offer. It’s more a chronicle of three Westerners bumbling their way around the land of Hokusai and Kurosawa with exceedingly basic Japanese language skills, dog-eared JR Passes and stomaches bigger than their brains.

There was one modest hiccup though – a change in my financial circumstances just before the trip meant my budget for dining out had become a lot tighter. Sterling’s unprecedented weakening in the exchange rate from ¥170 to the pound just before the referendum to a mere ¥127 to the pound at the time of my autumn trip certainly didn’t help either. This meant that my initial plans for non-stop haute kaseiki and kappo ryori dinners (think multicourse tasting menu-style meals, the former in a private room and the latter at a counter facing the kitchen) went out of the window.

This hiccup turned out to be a blessing in disguise though – it made everything much more interesting.

I could upload a nighttime Shinjuku or Shibuya cityscape photo, but that's been done to death. Here's a shot of Tokyo's surprisingly interesting wholesale catering supplies district, Kappabashi, instead.

I could upload a nighttime Shinjuku or Shibuya cityscape photo, but that’s been done to death. Here’s a shot of Tokyo’s surprisingly interesting wholesale catering supplies district, Kappabashi, instead.

Tokyo tonkatsu – Tonkatsu Santa

For a start, it made me realise that the seemingly more-mundane Japanese dishes that I usually overlook back home due to their dreariness are actually cruelly misrepresented. Tonkatsu, breaded and deep-fried pork cutlets and not to be confused with tonkotsu ramen, is the epitome of this. Little more than a thicker, smaller schnitzel in London, or perhaps a porcine kiev but without the retro charm, it’s a much more accomplished yet elegantly simple dish at Tonkatsu Santa in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district.

The panko batter was beautifully done – crunchy, crisp and airy yet free of excess oil. The moist hunk of pork underneath was a revelation – unctous and tender, glistening with rendered fat, yet not at all greasy or heavy. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was what every London version of tonkatsu has never been – delicious and multilayered. It didn’t really need the sweet molasses-like taste of the brown sauce served on the side in a giant pot, but it was welcome in moderation.

pork tonkatsu at tonkatsu santa

Santa baby

If you’re averse to pork for whatever reason, Vicious Alabaster’s big, firm and fresh tiger prawns were an exceptionally worthy substitute. The accompanying scallops were creamy and sweet in their own right, but these qualities were lost admist all the crunchy batter – a rare misstep for Tonkatsu Santa’s kitchen.

prawn tonkatsu at tonkatsu santa

Sign your ‘X’ on the line, Santa cutie

scallop tonkatsu at tonkatsu santa

I’ll wait up for you dear, Santa baby

If you’re aghast at the idea of eating something deep-fried despite having inexplicably wandered into a tonkatsu restaurant, then the sauteed and batter-free pork loin is by no means a consolation prize. Tender, moist strips of meat had rinds of quivering fat rendered just-so. A sweet and umami glaze of soy and mirin isn’t a cherry-on-top, but an integral part of this deeply satisfying dish.

sauteed pork loin at tonkatsu santa

Next year I could be just as good

Each of the mains above cost just ¥1300 each (£9 approx. at the time of writing), with an extra ¥500 (£3.50) getting you a ton of soft and fluffy small-grained boiled rice, a bowl of inky miso soup that overdid the umami and a choice of either hot or iced tea. The former was a so-so oolong, the latter was a far superior brew of crisp, sweet and refreshing roasted barley. Although the cantaloupe sorbet was small in size and uncomfortably cold, it wasn’t excessively icy and captured the distinctive taste of the fruit well.

canteloupe sorbet at tonkatsu santa

there’s one thing I really do need, the deed – to a platinum mine

The Lensman, who sadly wasn’t able to accompany us on this trip, was right – tonkatsu outside Japan just doesn’t compare. At all.

speaks volumes about the value of restaurants focussed on a single dish

Tokyo tempura – Tempura Tsunahachi

Although tempura isn’t nearly as shoddily represented in London as tonkatsu is, it rarely reaches the heights that it does at Tempura Tsunahachi. Although there are branches dotted around Tokyo, with additional outposts in Kyoto and Sapporo, the original in Shinjuku is almost certainly the most atmospheric. The old-fashioned wooden building sticks out amidst Shinjuku’s neon like a country gentlemen in tweed twirling his handlebar moustache at a rave.

The tempura batter here was so magnificent, it acted as a stinging rebuke to every leaden, bland, greasy and heavy deep-fried dish you’ve ever had anywhere else. Crisp and creamy, yet with very little excess oil and not at all stodgy or bloaty despite the small dumpster truck’s worth of tempura that I’d ordered.

A knot of shimeji mushroms were creamy and a little tart, while lotus root was exceedingly crisp and lightly starchy. Honkingly big tiger prawns had crispy little legs and quiveringly tender body flesh. A big clump of smaller shrimp arrived together in a big ball all intwined together, a tender aggomleration that I won’t soon forget.

mushroom tempura at tempura tsunahachi shinjuku

Mushroom kingdom.

prawn tempura at tempura tsunahachi

This article’s procrastination was brought to you, in part, by Westworld.

shrimp tempura at tempura tsunahachi

Golden age.

Thick and meaty scallops had a light creaminess that wasn’t obscured by the batter at all. A whole sardine was salty and tender, while an oyster arrived after having been battered and fried in its shell. The oyster flesh itself was briney and surrounded by the complimentary tartness and earthiness of little mushrooms and an umami sauce.

sardine tempura at tempura tsunahachi

Fishing for opportunities.

oyster tempura at tempura tsunahachi

It’s not an egg tart.

whole oyster tempura at tempura tsunahachi

Tokyo is your oyster. If you can figure out the insane address system.

Thanks Tempura Tsunahachi. You’ve ruined all other tempura for me.

Kawagoe street food

The timing of my trip to Tokyo with Vicious Alabaster and Templeton Peck proved fortuitous as we got to experience the Kawagoe Matsuri, the annual festival of a medium-sized town located a 45 min train ride to the northwest of Tokyo. Given the incomplete nature of the English-language information online about the Matsuri’s religious meaning, Kawagoe’s festival was odd, surreal and even a little creepy to our eyes. Around a dozen floats were pulled around the town’s pedestrianised streets, with teams of ritual musicians and masked dancers onboard, competing against each other musically for the approval of a small lantern bearing crowd.

Float like a weird funky-ass butterfly.

Despite the immense crowds, the festival was supernatural in its orderliness. No litter, public drunkenness, random scuffles or misbehaving tantrum-throwing children could be seen anywhere. Another surprise was the street food. Although dozens and dozens of market stalls occupied almost every major thoroughfare, the fare on offer was surprisingly repetitive by London standards – takoyaki, okonomiyaki, various seafoods on skewers and the occasional yakisoba. The only foreign muck on offer, not that we were looking for it, was – surprise, surprise – doner kebabs. I almost regret not having one, if only to find out what meat was used – lamb is almost non-existent in Japan.

Although Vicious Alabaster enjoyed the takoyaki, the dough of these little octopus balls was too squishie for my liking. The limp bonito flakes, kewpie mayo and brown sauce didn’t impress either, but at least there was a reasonably firm octopus tentacle amidst all that excessively soft doughiness.

takoyaki at kawagoe matsuri

The okonomiyaki was another disappointment with an excessive amount of cabbage, not enough batter and tame pork belly. There was plenty of bonito flakes and sauces, but it’s a sad okonomiyaki when the most enjoyable thing here was the pickled ginger.

okonomiyaki from kawagoe matsuri

Our piss-poor Japanese meant that we couldn’t identify the names for any of the stands here. Soz.

okonomiyaki from kawagoe-street-food market stall food truck

Not visible: giant sacks of cabbage filler.

Squid body on a stick was a tad too rubbery and needed more glaze too, making for a disappointing chew. Far better was the firm and umami squid tentacles and cuttlefish. The highlights of the evening for me, apart from the crazy musical floats, was the firm, then tender and briney whelks and the exceptional geoduck which was even more evocative of the sea. London needs more geoduck.

squid on a stick at kawagoe matsuri

One day Vicious Alabaster will get over her squid fixation.

skewered seafood at kawagoe matsuri

The Incredible Whelk.

geoduck at kawagoe matsuri

It’s pronounced ‘gooey-duck’.

An unremarkable chocolate-coated banana dusted with sprinkles wasn’t the oddest thing we ate on a stick – that honour goes to the lightly brined cucumber dressed with a punchy, somewhat bluntly umami miso sauce.

chocolate banana pic

If you wanted dessert, it was this or something from the very occasional ice cream shop.

pickled cucumbers at kawagoe matsuri

Not the best that the world of Japanese pickles has to offer.

The street food may have been mostly shrug-worthy, but the festival itself was well worth it. I hope to return to Japan in the not-too-distant future, if only to hopefully find Japanese street food that wasn’t as disappointing as Kawagoe’s.

Little Okinawa, Tokyo

This trip sadly didn’t have time for an jaunt to Okinawa, Japan’s southern archipelago which has a very different culture from the rest of the country and, due to Imperial China’s influence and its tropical climate, looks more like Taiwan than it does the rest of Japan. We had to instead be content with Little Okinawa, a restaurant in the middle of Tokyo’s Ginza district.

Little Okinawa’s pub-like surroundings couldn’t feel more different from its much pricier neighbours. The squidgy then silky tofu served with vinegary onions and mushrooms might possibly be found in the ‘mainland’ restaurants next door. ‘Grape’ seaweed, with tiny little translucent spheres dangling off the stem, almost certainly wouldn’t. Although you wouldn’t think its sweet and sugary taste would be complimented by the gently umami soy sauce served on the side, it most certainly was.

tofu with onions and mushrooms at little okinawa

Ginza is weird. Personal shoppers tote bags with their hands encased in white gloves, while besuited pimps loiter in the shadows.

grape seaweed at little okinawa

Grapes of wrath.

‘Okinawa-style’ onigiri tasted like little more than fried rice shaped into a triangular arrangement. Far more impressive was the seaweed ‘tempura’ – not the battered indulgences we’re all familiar with, but deep-fried patties resplendent with the umami, salty taste of concentrated seaweed. The soft and oil-free patties were neatly emphasised by a dipping sauce of soy and vinegar.

onigiri at little okinawa

Striking out.

seaweed tempura patties at little okinawa

Oddly familiar.

The Chinese influence was most evident in the stewed pork cubes. Reminiscent of both Sichuanese twice-cooked pork and braised hong shao rou, the tender, fat-laden pork belly here was drenched in a sticky, gently umami sauce. Although not quite as multi-layered as the best hong shao rou, it was still a joy to savour – especially with the julienned parsnips and vinegared onions cutting through the unctuous porcine richness.

stewed pork at little okinawa

stewed pork belly at little okinawa

If you cut the fat off, then I will have no choice but to cut you.

Peanut tofu was somewhat similar to the Chinese dish, but with a firm creme brulee-ish crust, a creamy interior and a gentle, but still distinctively nutty sauce.

peanut tofu at little okinawa

May contain nuts.

Templeton Peck was sceptical of the sliced bitter melon, but came to appreciate these vegetables. Bitter, gently softened gourd slices were classily combined with bready, eggy tofu for a light, yet satisfying series of mouthfuls.

bitter gourd vegetables at little okinawa

I have a a book, a gourd and a bunch of twigs.

The generally excellent savoury mains made the shoddy desserts all the more disappointing. Stodgy, stale and almost hard bits of doughnut mixed in with bland ice cream that was a touch too icy made for a poor pairing – each half of this dessert tended to bring out the worst in each other.

doughnut ice cream at little okinawa

Okinawan ceramics are hypnotically sparkly. I wish I’d bought some.

A doughnut served by itself was slightly better – served warm and much softer than the hard scabs dotting the ice cream, it was still a bit too crusty and definitely too bland.

doughnut at little okinawa

You wouldn’t know it from this, but there are some top-notch bakeries in Tokyo – of both the Japanese and Western varieties.

Tokyo soba – Kanda Yabu Soba

Kanda Yabu Soba is a remarkable soba restaurant. For starters, it’s a surprisingly tranquil and classical-looking place despite being located amidst grey office blocks 10 minutes walk away from the frantic cyberculture of Akihabara. Although its sliding paper doors and timber beams are a reconstruction (the original building burnt down a few years ago), something else is even more distinctive – the waitresses sing. Not in the canned operatic canto of numerous gimmick restaurants in London and other European cities, but a soft, gentle melodic hymn that somehow carries from a station in the airy main dining room to the kitchen. It’s certainly a damn sight more charming than an iPad or notepad.

All of that would be nought if the soba wasn’t up to scratch, but it was and then some. The restaurant’s trademark nameko soba is served cold, ideal for a hot Tokyo day. Surprisingly light buckwheat noodles faded into the background, allowing everything else to shine. Mushrooms were sticky, richly umami and lightly creamy. The cool soup had a deep, layered umami with an undertone of sweetness best enjoyed in short slurps. Nori shavings and crisp spring onions were the cherry on top. It’s all deceptively simple, belying the kitchen’s adept artistry.

nameko cold soba at kanda yabu soba

Kicking ass and taking nameko.

‘Fish paste cakes’ turned out to be fish sticks, effectively a lighter, creamier and more subtle antecedent of surimi ‘crab’ sticks. Served cold, it acted as a carrier for top-notch wasabi – subtly sweet and creamy, then hitting you with a modest nasal heat. The fish paste cakes turned up again as a topping for Templeton Peck’s hot soba. The broth was a warm version of the one served with my cold nameko soba and was just as satisfying, although a little something in the broth was lost in translation from cool to hot.

fish cakes at kanda yabu soba

Cut and paste.

fish cake hot soba at kanda yabu soba

Copy and paste.

Don’t dawdle if your order the hot tempura soba as Vicious Alabaster did – the tempura prawns will quickly get soggy in the piping broth, depriving you of the opportunity to savour the batter. This did at least allow her to see that whole chunks of fresh prawn had been used underneath the coating.

tempura hot soba at kanda yabu soba

Soggy bottoms.

Fresh yuba skin cubes were served chilled, yet were still creamy and refreshing – quite a surprise as I’m more used to the heartier nature of the dried and fermented versions of this tofu-esque soybean preparation.

fresh yuba skin at kanda yabu soba

This article’s procrastination was brought to you, in part, by Led Zeppelin.

Slices of duck breast served cold were nonetheless very dense and lightly smoky. It was made even more delectable by the light tingly heat of mustard and a dipping sauce with layered, sophisticated umami. All in all, it’s one of the best duck dishes I’ve had to date.

smoked duck breast at kanda yabu soba

I still try to keep abreast of Tokyo restaurant news.

The water in which the soba noodles were cooked is served after the meal as a drink. It’s an odd but utterly slurpable libation – sort of like a tea that had somehow been made from eggs, it was simultaneously refreshing and eggishly creamy. It’s one of the most delightfully distinctive drinks I’ve downed.

At around ¥1000 per bowl of soba (£7 approx. at the time of writing), you’d be mad not to eat at Kanda Yabu Soba.

Tokyo izakaya – Sakagurakomachuu

Templeton Peck has a bizarre fascination with salarymen. This proved to be almost our sole reason for stumbling into Sakagurakomachuu, an izakaya a few blocks northeast of the famed Tsukiji fish market. The place was indeed packed full of besuited blokey desk drones, ties loosened and banter flowing, with very few women present. It was a nonetheless welcoming place with an English language menu, allowing Vicious Alabaster to indulge in her new-found ginkgo nut fixation – a peanut-sized snack akin to a cross between cashews and potatoes in taste. Give ’em a try – they’re addictive.

gingko nuts at sakagurakomachuu

That seems like an excessive amount of salt to me.

Neither Templeton Peck nor Vicious Alabaster would touch the squid innards, but I love the funky, bitter, sour and mildly astringent taste as well as the somewhat gooey texture.

squid innards at sakagurakomachuu

Good to know that some things are reassuringly, stridently funky no matter where in the world you are.

Breaded pork cutlet on a stick was forgettable. It initially appeared that the tofu might turn out that way too, but underneath its anonymous fried exterior was the pleasingly silky, squidgy texture that I’ve come to appreciate over the years. Shame the bonito flakes weren’t up to much though.

pork cutlet at sakagurakomachuu

Frankly, I’m surprised that this hasn’t caught on somewhere in the North already.

fried tofu at sakagurakomachuu

Fool’s gold.

fried beancurd at sakagurakomachuu

As much as I’ve grown to love tofu over the years, I’m not having tofurkey for Christmas.

The exotic sounding ‘fried fish paste’ was really just fish cakes, but these were squidgy, light and umami fish cakes that were well worth having.

fried fish paste at sakagurakomachuu

Paint it black.

Thinly sliced octopus sashimi was meaty and firm, while the surf clam sashmi was firm then tender with a gentle, beguiling sweetness.

octopus sashimi at sakagurakomachuu

Leg work.

surf clam sashimi at sakagurakomachuu

Enjoy the silence.

Although the saury, also known as sanma, was in season, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the grilled version here. Very bony with mackerel-ish flesh, but without mackerel’s distinctively flavoursome punch. Serving it with the guts intact or adding a touch of pickling Wakayama-style may have added more of a flavour profile.

grilled saury at sakagurakomachuu

Japanese kitchens usually have wee little fish grills instead of ovens. I find that quite amusing, for some reason.

The poultry used in the karaage tasted anonymous, even after allowing it to cool down – more resting time after emerging from the deep fat fryer would’ve been beneficial. The batter was truly superlative though – free of excess oil, crispy and then simultaneously unctuous and fluffy. Pair this sumptuous batter with better meat and you’d have a fried chicken for the ages.

chicken karaage at sakagurakomachuu

Partially devoured.

The best of the assorted yakitori had to be the wonderfully textured hearts and gizzards. Very similar to the yakitori that Yumi Izakaya used to serve back in London (before its sad closure), these bits of offal somehow managed to be taut, crisp and tender all at the same time. It’s different, but no less delectable than the chicken yakitori from the famed Birdland in nearby Ginza.

yakitori at sakagurakomachuu

Identity parade.

Not everything at Sakagurakomachuu was a resounding success, but there were more than enough delights to go around to make this izakaya worth a visit if you’re in the neigbourhood and don’t want to spend more than around ¥4500 per person for dinner (approx. £31 at the time of writing).

Bento lunch boxes from Tokyo Station and Kyoto Station – Bentoya Matsuri/Ekiben-ya Matsuri and Awaji-ya

Long-distance train travel in Japan can mean only one thing – a bento lunch box, with those eaten on trains known as ekiben. The Daimaru department store just outside Tokyo Station is purported to be one of the best places to get an ekiben with a larger selection and lower prices than shops inside the station past the ticket gates. A time crunch meant that we had to be content with ekiben from Bentoya Matsuri/Ekiben-ya Matsuri (different sources give different translations for the name – any help from Japanese speakers would be appreciated!) which is located in between platforms 6 and 7, but this choice turned out to be far from a burdensome one.

Spending around ¥1000 on a boxed lunch (approx. £7 at the time of writing) seems like a costly extravagance indicative of all the stereotypes about pricey Japan, but these ekiben more than justified their price as a travelling treat. Seasonal vegetables gently simmered to bring out their natural earthiness were joined by a choice selection of pickled root vegetables which were eye-opening in their dynamic range. From sharp to sweet, tangy to vinegarish, Japan’s pickling arts deserve to be more widely appreciated.

Reasonably crisp, light and oil-free vegetable tempura and a hefty helping of soft and fluffy small-grained rice provided the bulk. Gingko nuts had been softened, increasing their resemblance to potatoes while retaining their distinctive cashew-like quality, while tamago was sweet and fluffy. Meat made a brief but memorable cameo in the form of a dense, umami, jerk-like hunk of slow-cooked pork. Lightly glazed and gently cooked salmon teriyaki was pleasant enough and a couple of chewy sweets finished things off.

ekiben from bentoya matsuri ekiben ya matsuri

It must be quite the culture shock for Japanese tourists to arrive at a British train station and be confronted by the solidified dust that is an Upper Crust sandwich.

A cheaper ekiben at around ¥750-800 (approx. £5) consisted of a lot more rice, but there was still plenty of simmered and pickled vegetables to chuff down as well as fillets of neatly grilled snapper. It may be a cheaper and less varied option, but certainly not a lower quality one.

shinkansen bento from bentoya matsuri ekiben ya matsuri

There was a camera crew at Bentoya Matsuri/Ekibenya Matsuri, for some reason, when we were there.

Bentoya Matsuri/Ekiben-ya Matsuri spoiled me as other ekiben I tried from other vendors just couldn’t compare. A bento box of gyudon from Kyoto Station’s Awaji-ya was certainly big, but it didn’t do enough to justify its ¥1000 price tag – especially as gyudon outside the station confines can be had for as little as ¥300. The saucey beef was tender but dull-tasting, leaving it to the firm prawn and slice of octopus, as well as the reasonably earthy vegetables to pick up the slack. One admittedly neat, small touch was dividing the carb bedding in half between fluffy rice and wrinkly noodles.

kyoto gyudon ekiben shinkansen bento from awaji ya

Take your beef outside.

Kyoto tonkotsu ramen – Hakata-Nagahama Ramen Miyoshi and Seiryu Ramen

By some quirk of fate or geography, almost every ramen eatery we spotted in Kyoto appeared to be dedicated to tonkotsu ramen – which is fortunate as I have an obsession with it. Hakata-Nagahama Ramen Miyoshi is little more than a dozen stools facing onto a tiny kitchen. With some seats, there’s little more than a curtain separating your back from the bustle of Kiyamachi-dori street, but everything we ate was worth this minor inconvenience – heck, it was worth crawling over broken glass for.

Kyoto is a surprisingly low-rise and unassuming city when viewed from above. If this was the high-res version, you’d just be able to pick out Nintendo’s headquarters.

There are few things in this world more slurpable than this shop’s tonkotsu broth. Wonderfully fatty, rich, umami and creamy, it puts the vast majority of London’s efforts to shame. The thin noodles were firm, cooked just-so, while the thin slices of char siu pork were moreish and lightly sweet. Due attention had even been paid to the cabbage – each and every one of the earthy and slippery leaves was devoured.

tonkotsu ramen at hakata nagahama ramen miyoshi

Bone broth.

It would be a grave error to skip the side dishes. Bamboo shoots were earthy with a gentle musky sweetness, their texture slightly fibrous and then gently yielding. The kimchi was a little unusual, with a taste reminiscent of funky fermented bean paste rather than the tart, spicy sharpness I was expecting, but no less scoffable for it.

bamboo shoots at hakata nagahama ramen miyoshi

Shoots to thrill.

kimchi at hakata nagahama ramen miyoshi

There’s a Mexican restaurant just across the road. I was in no way tempted to try it.

The highlight of the sides had to be the stewed chunks of beef with root vegetables. Although the tender fatty pillows of bovine flesh were spot-on, the immensely moreish tendons were even better with their squidgy moistness and the absorbent connective tissue soaking up the lip-smacking sauce.

beef tendons at hakata-nagahama ramen miyoshi

Love me tendon.

Unlike much of the rest of Kyoto, Hakata-Nagahama Ramen Miyoshi stays open late well into the wee hours and becomes understandably popular. Even with the rapid rate at which most Japanese slurp down ramen, it can sometimes be tricky to snag a stool. Don’t be tempted to settle for Seiryu Ramen a few doors down though.

seiryu ramen kyoto

Avoidance strategy.

The only good thing about the tonkotsu ramen here were the firm, wrinkly noodles. The tepidly flavoured broth didn’t have anywhere close to the same levels of rich complexity as the broth at Hakata-Nagahama Ramen Miyoshi. Even the roast pork, fungus and onsen egg were underwhelming. It was roughly on par with the uninspired average level of most tonkotsu ramen in London and, thus, probably a meal of last resort for the locals.

tonkotsu ramen at seiryu ramen kyoto

That rare thing: a duff meal in Japan.

Kyoto gyoza – Hohei Gyoza

Stepping over Hohei Gyoza‘s threshold into the small dining room (just over a dozen covers or so, including the stools at the bar) brought us face-to-face with a wall-to-wall group of belligerently affable Antipodeans. Hohei is just as popular with Kyoto-ites though, who quickly replaced the Aussies and Kiwis in a surprisingly swift and wholesale customer shift-change.

As with many of our Tokyo meals, the dumplings at Hohei Gyoza were so startlingly good that it altered our perception of what this staple dish, so averagely misrepresented elsewhere, can be. It speaks volumes about the value of restaurants focussed on a single dish.

The thin yet sturdy skins, supple on one side and judiciously fried on the other, came apart under our teeth and not our chopsticks. The pork filling wasn’t the star here, with the additions of either ginger or garlic and leek grabbing the spotlight. The bold flavours of both variants were immediately appreciable – a simple thing that shouldn’t be remarkable, but most certainly was in this world of piss-poor dumplings. The umami of the recommended miso sauce for the ginger pork gyoza complimented those dumplings delightfully. The mix of soy and vinegar for the garlic and leek variant wasn’t as pleasurable due its subdued weakness, although this wasn’t a huge loss in the end given the punchy garlic and bitter, supple bits of leek.

gyoza at hohei gyoza

I’ll have a rack of gyoza, please.

The onigiri were brought in from elsewhere, but don’t let that put you off – they were well worth having while waiting for your gyoza. The rice in all of them was soft and fluffy. The kelp version was suitably umami. While the fillings in the miso pork and the cod roe variants were meagre, the former was still reasonably meaty and moreish while the latter had a pleasing, gently spicy hit to it. The meaty and salted grilled salmon went down well with everyone.

kelp onigiri at hohei gyoza

miso pork onigiri at hohei gyoza

Hog tied.

cod roe onigiri at hohei gyoza

Pink in the middle.

salted grilled salmon at hohei gyoza

Wrap star.

Following our encounter with whole pickled cucumbers on skewers in Kawagoe, we chuckled at their reappearance, without sticks, at Hohei. They were only lightly brined and dressed with a surprisingly weak miso sauce though. A far better umami dish was the chilled miso pork. Tender almost to the point of disintegration, the gentle umami of the pork was neatly offset by a bed of sharp, vinegary bean sprouts – and I usually hate bean sprouts. It was surprisingly refreshing as well as gutturally satisfying.

pickled cucumbers at hohei gyoza

If only I had managed to convince Templeton Peck to try Hohei’s potato salad.

miso pork at hohei gyoza

A single clam at the bottom of a full, if small, tea cup may not look particularly impressive – but that’s because looks can be deceptive. The clam consommé was richly earthy and yet also had a gently sweet mushroom-like flavour, with the chewy clam at the bottom of the cup providing a chewy, salty finish. An exceptional consommé. Truly, singularly exceptional.

clam consomme at hohei gyoza

Cup a soup.

Hohei Gyoza is an unassuming yet truly wonderful restaurant that could easily getaway with charging twice as much in London and still have a queue stretching out the door and down the street.

Kyoto tofu vegetarian – Sagatoufuine

I have to suppress the urge to roll my eyes every time someone complains about how much they hate tofu. It really is a testament to my self control that I haven’t given in to homicidal acts of animalistic rage and righteous indignation. The tofu that most Britishers will have encountered is all about the texture and not the taste. To be fair, the squidgy, silky texture of such tofu is an acquired delight, but there’s a whole world of tofu beyond that.

Sagatoufuine is a tofu-vegetarian restaurant with two large branches on the main drag just outside the Tenryu-ji temple in Kyoto’s Arashiyama suburb. This, along with a well-oiled kitchen and front of house, meant that the large set menu arrived with almost indecent haste.

Soft small-grained rice arrived soaked in a sticky, lightly moreish goo and topped with surprisingly peppery leaves. The star of this dish was, of course, the soft and wrinkly fresh yuba which was also surprisingly sturdy with a mild amount of elasticity despite its thinness.

yuba ankake with rice at sagatoufuine

Attempting to decipher Hiragana and Kanji characters when you have a negligible grasp of the language is bloody hard.

A tub of ‘thick soy milk skin’ came filled with a creamy and lightly sweet soup that had been lightly thickened. The fresh yuba (or tofu ‘skin’, if you prefer) made a welcome return and was made even better by the umami and sweetness of the soy and mirin dipping sauce on the side. Pour the excess dipping sauce into the soup for a powerfully satisfying umami hit.

kumiage yuba at sagatoufuine

Yes, I’d like a bath tub’s worth of tofu please.

A deep-fried tofu fritter was hearty with a slightly gritty, grainy texture and wasn’t at all greasy. The taste came from gently simmered vegetables which provided a light earthiness that didn’t overwhelm the palate.

fried tofu fritter at sagatoufuine

A Western tourist is wanted by Kyoto police for questioning in relation to a recent rampage of violent selfie stick smashing incidents. Which has nothing to do with me, I swear. Honest.

The tofu chawanmushi doesn’t look like much, but this savoury tofu and egg custard (for the lack of a better term) was an incredibly satisfying, multilayered concoction of rich creamy egginess and milky crispness with a deep umami. And yet, it also had a surprisingly clean aftertaste. This was a dish of immense character.

chawanmushi tofu at sagatoufuine

Deciding on how to Romanise Japanese names and terms is also a minefield.

Namafu is a combination of a mochi-grade rice flour and wheat gluten, resulting in oddly smooth glops-on-a-stick that were also weirdly sticky and a tad gooey. One had a reasonably strong taste of sesame, while the other was too subtle for its own good with a restrained mung bean-ish quality to it. While not bad, the surreal experience of eating the namafu was neither here nor there.

namafu at sagatoufuine

Although the white miso soup had less umami than I was expecting, it did have a beguiling and gentle earthy sweetness. The pickles didn’t fail to impress either – crisp and sweet with a light vinegarishness.

white miso soup at sagatoufuine

Opaque. Yet, in places, almost crystalline in its clarity.

japanese pickles at sagatoufuine

Japan has made me fickle about pickles.

Although the dessert of warabimochi had a similar texture to the namafu, this smooth, slightly gooey and somewhat tacky dessert was more pleasing. Its texture along with its light sweetness and starchiness won’t be to everyone’s taste, nor will the dusting of nutty toasted soybean flour. Still, if you keep an open mind, it’s a light and undemanding way to finish a meal.

warabimochi at sagatoufuine

Pass the spatula.

Some of the most common complaints levelled at vegetarian food is that it’s derivative, bland and unsatisfying. Sagatoufuine refutes such nonsense in the strongest possible terms.

Nara kaiseki ryori – Hirasō

The ancient and surprisingly compact city of Nara is an easy and thus popular day-trip from Kyoto. The hordes of tourists that throng the historic centre of the city during the day seem to vanish by nightfall though, leaving it a far more tranquil place. It’s worth sticking around if only to sample some of Nara’s unique dishes for dinner. Hirasō, roughly 10-15 minutes walk south of the city’s picturesque five-storied pagoda, specialises in this traditional cuisine. That aside, it was almost worth eating here just to see Templeton Peck and Vicious Alabaster struggle with sitting cross-legged on cushioned tatami mats at the decidedly traditional low-slug tables in the semi-private dining room.

One dish particular to Nara’s traditional cuisine is sushi wrapped in persimmon leaves. The latter are alleged to have anti-bacterial properties which aid in the preservation and consumption of the lightly cured fish. Regardless of the veracity of these claims, the leaf-wrapped nigiri rolls were larger than usual and noticeably lacking in wasabi. Delicately fruity and meaty salmon-like fish, resplendent with a brilliant tangerine hue, was nonetheless pleasurable as was the salty and tangy mackerel-like silver-skinned fish.

nara maki roll at hiraso

Maki rolls with sharp and sweet bell peppers at the centre provided a touchstone of familiarity.

nigiri wrapped in persimmon leaves at hiraso nara

Apparently the fish in persimmon leaf-wrapped sushi is also lightly cured.

persimmon wrapped salmon sushi nigiri roll at hiraso nara

What’s with the numerous varying names for persimmons?

persimmon wrapped mackerel sushi nigiri roll at hiraso nara

Imperial purple.

Creamy, eggy tofu with the appearance of scrambled eggs was tinged with sesame. It was sumptuous enough already, but the extra layers of flavour provided by the earthy vegetables and the distinctively sweet goji berries were still welcome and didn’t unbalance the dish.

goji berry tofu at hiraso

Bowled over.

Another dish of tofu didn’t taste of much, instead relying on its two-part texture to please. Initially firm, then squidgy, it was akin to a clean-tasting savoury crème brulee.

tofu at hiraso

Jade dining.

A big gluten-packed vegetarian meatball was light despite its size. Sweet and small-grained, its somewhat oat-like flavour was enhanced by the lightly nutty, umami, sticky and gooey sauce as well as by the gently sweet and earthy mushroom.

vegetarian meatball at hiraso

Goo ball.

Aju is apparently a prized seasonal fish in Nara and it’s not hard to see why. Judiciously grilled, the fish here was meaty despite its small size and had an oddly grainy, almost roe-like texture. It was nonetheless pleasing, especially with its citrusy taste emphasised by shiso leaf. Accompaniments of creamy tamago, sweet and starchy ginkgo nut, crisp lotus root and sharp pickles were no less accomplished.

grilled aju at hiraso

Aju-rn for dinner.

As a long-standing opponent of congee, I didn’t expect to like Hirasō’s rice porridge and was thus surprised to find myself quite taken with it. Far from the neutral tasting goop that I’ve avoided over the years, its taste was highly reminiscent of barley tea. This quality was only enhanced by the popcorn-like taste of toasted, puffed rice served on the side and applied yourself. My dining companions seemed somewhat ambivalent over our sticky gruel, but this chagayu is definitely a congee I can vouch for.

nara congee at hiraso

Unsure if cha-ga-yu is technically a congee or not, but I’m sticking with that description.

Dessert was an odd, but light and refreshing dish of narrow glass noodles served in a thin, lightly sweet syrup that tasted a lot like orange honey. A taste reminiscent of the Near East rather than the Far East (to use geographically relativist terms) was unexpected, but certainly welcome.

dessert noodles at hiraso

Dessert noodles.

There’s so much to savour and enjoy in Kyoto that it would be easy to overlook Nara’s culinary delights, but Hirasō’s take on this city’s quirky traditional cuisine is easily worth your time. Plus it’s hardly unaffordable at ¥3785 (approx. £26 at the time of writing) for our set menu.

Convenience store and vending machine food

The unexpected budgetary crunch for this trip meant that convenience store food played a bigger part in my diet than originally planned. Although comparable on paper to a Tesco Metro, the archetypal 24-hour Japanese convenience store’s bigger focus on food means that the various snacks and take away meals are more interesting and surprisingly better tasting than your average corner shop Cup-a-Soup.

Lawson has nothing to do with Nigella, but is one of the biggest convenience store (or konbini) chains in Japan. I regret allowing Templeton Peck and Vicious Alabaster to talk me out of dipping into the steaming bain maries of oden (stewed Japanese fish cakes). It’s worth downing Lawson’s range of savoury snacks – dried squid was chewy and umami with the tentacles possessing a suitably ribbed texture. A roughly equivalent bag of dried squid strips from Family Mart was less pleasing – far too chewy and hard for too little umami gain.

dried squid from lawson

It’s no weirder than beef jerky when you think about it.

lawson dried squid snack japan

Just what I needed.

family mart squid

This article’s procrastination was brought to you, in part, by The Foo Fighters.

Family Mart’s sandwiches were a better bet than their dried squid snacks. A chicken tonkatsu sandwich sounds bizarre, but it’s not that different from the ‘southern fried chicken’ sandwiches you’d find in a Tesco or Sainsbury’s. The limp batter won’t set your world alight, but at least the moist chicken underneath was a meaty fillet with discernible muscle fibres and a light smearing of tingly mustard, all sandwiched in soft white bread.

family mart chicken tonkatsu sandwich

All Japanese convenience store sandwiches appear to be crustless. What do they do with all the crusts?

A surprisingly more moreish alternative was a temaki-style ‘sandwich’, but with nori and then a layer of fluffy rice taking the place of the bread. The same moist chunks of battered chicken made a repeat appearance.

family mart chicken tonkatsu temaki sandwich

Not the pengest chicken ever.

Family Mart’s mini bento-style meals pack a lot of variation into a small plastic container. Sweet tamago, a crunchy croquette, a slice of salty frankfurter and moist, lightly sweet onigiri rice balls were far more palatable than a supermarket tuna nicoise or falafel salad back home. Bulking up with an additional nori-wrapped onigiri, such as the vaguely umami miso pork variety, is pleasing enough and costs mere pocket change like all the konbini foods here.

family mart mini bento

Mini mart.

family mart onigiri

While London ignores onigiri, naff stuff like poke catches on instead.

Daily Yamazaki is a far smaller chain of convenience stores, but that doesn’t mean its cheap and cheerful food is any less edible. Umeboshi onigiri wasn’t quite as tart and sour as I would’ve liked, but that may make it more palatable to some and the rice was fluffy enough. Stir-fried chicken noodles were surprisingly good – moist chunks of chicken and hearty noodles all doused in a modestly umami garnish of aomori (chopped seaweed).

daily yamazaki chicken yakisoba

Eat and Pret *dream* about takeaway convenience food this good.

Given the hot weather prevalent during my visit, convenience store ice cream was alluring even if the reality was somewhat underwhelming. A Family Mart dorayaki was a disappointment once you got past the soft pancake with limply flavoured adzuki beans and matcha ice cream presenting themselves for your disapproval.

lawson dorayaki ice cream

Not your grandfather’s ice cream sandwich.

green tea ice cream dorayaki from lawson

Dorayaki explorer.

A lot of mass-produced Japanese ice creams seem designed to preclude any possibility of unsightly drippage. Ice cream sandwiches, such as a Haagen-Dazs branded matcha-flavoured option, didn’t just use a pair of wafers but encased the entire serving of ice cream in a wafer coffin. Unsurprisingly, the Haagen-Dazs effort tasted of mediocrity and compromise. An oddly ingot shaped Ohayo chocolate affair was even less convincing.

haagen dazs matcha ice cream sandwich japan

This is simultaneously the most exotic and most mundane food item I’ve ever written about.

ohayo chocolate ice cream sandwich

At least I think it’s supposed to be chocolate.

ohayo chocolate ice cream sandwich from lawson

It looks more enticing in the photo on the packet.

A better option, surprisingly, was Lawson’s sweet potato ice cream sandwich. Although the wafer casing looked more convincingly realistic on the box than in the flesh, it was still a reasonably charming recreation – especially with the smooth ice cream and syrup inside managing to stay true to the taste of the original tuber.

lawson select sweet potato ice cream sandwich

Lloyd George’s sweet potato.

sweet potato ice cream sandwich from lawson

Ice cream sandwich? More like an ice cream bullet.

sweet potato ice cream sandwich from lawson japan

I was tempted to try some gelato in Tokyo’s cavernous department store food halls, but decided not to. I kinda regret that decision.

Imuraya is a company dedicated to making sweets and other dishes made from adzuki beans, a very savoury and distinctively nutty dessert staple in this part of the world. It’s a favourite foodstuff for most Japanese, but gets a decidedly more mixed reaction amongst most Westerners. Imuraya’s adzuki bean ice lolly would be a suitably gentle introduction for such adzuki bean sceptics. A crunchy, tame and pale icy shell with a pared back core of inoffensively moreish and lightly sweet adzuki beans at the centre.

imuraya adzuki bean ice cream

Food doesn’t just fall into your lap, you know.

imuraya adzuki bean vending machine ice cream

Days bean and gone.

The cool dollops at the centre of the Lotte-branded ice cream mochi didn’t taste of much, but were refreshing enough with suitably elastic, chewy mochi-style skins.

lotte mochi ice cream

Konbini ice cream can be a Lotte-ry.

lotte mochi ice cream japan konbini

Yes I took this photo in the fridge. Buy me a coffee and maybe I’ll explain why.

I could easily devote a whole website to the endless kombini vittles as well as the foodstuff wares available from Japan’s ubiquitous vending machines – both of which I only managed to scratch the surface of. ‘Ubiquitous’ doesn’t quite do justice to the seeming omnipresence of the Japanese vending machine though, which seem to materialise in herds on every street corner, urban and rural, with multiple brands having dedicated machines of their own.

The apparently universal availability of iced coffee from vending machines meant that I had no trouble keeping my caffeine addiction in check, even if some of the brews available left much to be desired. Pokka Sapporo’s Biz Time Black had plenty of kick, keeping me motoring along from an early start until after lunch time, but the sour taste was grim.

pokka sapporo biz time black vending machine iced coffee

Back in black.

Kirin is only known for beer in the West, but the company appears to have several soft drinks available from its home territory vending machines. A salt and lychee libation was surprisingly refreshing, capturing the taste of the fruit with the hint of salt alluding to the crispness of the fruit’s flesh – a visceral point which obviously couldn’t be recreated directly in a bottle.

kirin salt and lychee vending machine drink

Try it. Don’t bottle it.

Royal Milk Tea is a smooth and refreshing but very odd cold drink. The taste of tea is tangential at best, with the brew dominated by the intense sweetness of what tastes like condensed milk but with none of the viscosity.

royal milk tea vending machine japan

Well, it’s more like tea than that wretched bottled Lipton’s stuff.

Hot items are also available from some vending machines, an oddity that I found quirkily charming. Hot sweetcorn soup in a can from Bistrone Select (a Coca-Cola brand) wasn’t just coasting by on its toasty warmth – it was actually filling with a creamy consistency and a natural-seeming sweetness that wasn’t overpowering.

bistrone select vending machine hot cream corn soup

It was more of a corn chowder really and I’d have it again in a heartbeat.

Up next: Eating my way around Japan, part 2 – Wakayama’s Kii Peninsula and the Kumano Kodo

7 thoughts on “Eating my way around Japan, part 1 – Tokyo and Kyoto

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Dickens World

One week ago today Charles Dickens turned 200. For some, it was the most important thing to happen in England in 2012, a year in which London will host the Summer Olympics for the first time in over 60 years. I’m almost positive it was the most important thing to happen in the English town of Chatham, home to something called  — I am not making this up — Dickens World.

Dickens World
A street in Dickens World - Creative Commons (Shaun Dunmall)

Yes, there is an amusement park that seeks to recreate the world of Charles Dickens’ stories, to provide what its website promises is

an amazing, multi-sensory, interactive experience where you can leave behind the modern world and immerse yourself in the sights, sounds and smells of nineteenth century England.

“Smells?”, at least one of you just asked.

Yes, smells. Here’s how literary critic Sam Anderson described the original mission of Dickens World:

It promised to be an “authentic” re-creation of the London of Charles Dickens’s novels, complete with soot, pickpockets, cobblestones, gas lamps, animatronic Dickens characters and strategically placed chemical “smell pots” that would, when heated, emit odors of offal and rotting cabbage. Its centerpiece was the Great Expectations boat ride, which started in a rat-infested creek, flew over the Thames, snaked through a graveyard and splashed into a sewer. Its staff had all been trained in Victorian accents and body language. Visitors could sit at a wooden desk and get berated by an angry Victorian schoolteacher, watch Dickensian holograms antagonize one another in a haunted house or set their kids loose in a rainbow-colored play area called, ominously, Fagin’s Den, after the filthy kidnapper from “Oliver Twist.”

The thousand souls who applied for the first fifty jobs had to go through “American Idol-style auditions” in which they roleplayed customer service scenarios, but had to respond “in a Victorian manner.”

Anderson confessed that he wasn’t sure how to respond when he first heard of Dickens World:

Was it a homage to, or a desecration of, the legacy of Charles Dickens? Was it the reinvention of, or the cheapening of, our culture’s relationship to literature? And even if it were possible to create a lavish simulacrum of 1850s London — with its typhus and cholera and clouds of toxic corpse gas, its sewage pouring into the Thames, its average life span of 27 years — why would anyone want to visit?

“Why wouldn’t anyone want to visit?!?”, I near-screamed.

Granted: I’m a modern European historian. I enjoy Dickens. And I love the idea of “living history,” even its most commercialized forms. I went to college across the street from “the world’s largest living history museum”: Colonial Williamsburg. And when my wife and I were on our honeymoon in Nova Scotia, I insisted that we interrupt the most romantic week of our lives to visit the Fortress of Louisbourg, a rebuilt 18th century French fortress that bills itself as “North America’s largest historical reconstruction.” (Props to the historical interpreter playing the role of a Swiss mercenary: I couldn’t stump him.)

I would so much rather visit a “lavish simulacrum of 1850s London” than go to Six Flags!

But I’m pretty sure I’d be disappointed in Dickens World, which has had a troubled history. Anderson first visited in 2007, when the place was scheduled to open. But things were behind schedule, so “Instead of a functional attraction, I found a vaguely Dickensian construction site.” Anderson was underwhelmed, but still found it all

fascinating to watch. The laborers had been hired to do basically the opposite of a typical construction job. They were building squalor — making new things look old, clean things look filthy, dry things look wet, solid things look rotten. A worker named Phil explained to me some of the park’s technical aspects. The ivy was silk. The trees were polyurethane cores surrounded by sculptured plaster. The cobblestones were made from a latex mold of actual cobblestones. The moss was a mixture of sawdust, glue and green paint — you stirred it in a bucket and flung it on the walls. The bricks were casting plaster that had been dyed pencil-eraser pink; they arrived in big rolled sheets that were bolted to the wooden buildings, in thin layers toward the top (where no one would touch it) and thick layers below — because, Phil said, kids tend to kick things. Later, professional scene painters came along to make the pink bricks look grimy, adding highlights to signify texture and smoke. The result looked so good that, when I got back to London, some of the actual Victorian-era brick and moss and ivy struck me as unrealistic.

Anderson went back last month. While you’d expect Dickens World to be at its best so close to the Dickens bicentenary, the critic found that “It was the worst of times.” Few visit aside from some school groups and retirees; jobs and hours had been slashed, so that “posts were abandoned; displays were broken; animatronics failed to animate”; and main signs of life came from a megaplex movie theater and fast food restaurants like Pizza Hut. Anderson and a friend went on the — again, not making this up — “Great Expectations” boat ride, and it all got to be too much for him:

After a minute or two, someone came and put us on a boat. Halfway up a dark tunnel, the chemical smell-pots engulfed us in a powerful cloud of sour mildew. It was genuinely unpleasant, and in the midst of that cloud of stench I felt something suddenly slip inside of me: two centuries of literary touristic tradition, the pressure of Dickens reverence, the absurdity of this commodified experience — all of it broke, like a fever, and what poured out of me was hysterical laughter. I laughed, in a high-pitched cackle that sounded like someone else’s voice, for most of the ride.

(Be sure to click through to see the photo of Anderson and his friend, who smiles a “smile of sadness, confusion, defeat, resignation.”)

Now, horrific as this sounds, I’m sure it could be worse. With France’s track record for amusement parks, Madame Bovary Land is a bad idea whose time must never, ever come.

Charles Dickens (1842)
1842 drawing of Charles Dickens - Wikimedia

And, failures of Dickens World to the side, it does seem to speak to a common longing that most of us share: to somehow return to the past, imagined and/or historic.

Anderson frames Dickens World as one rather dismal manifestation of “literary tourism,” an activity that Charles Dickens himself engaged in and has long been pursued by his fans. (Anderson notes that Dickens — who “was, in many ways, the world’s biggest Dickens fan” — often returned to sites associated with his stories.) Another of these Dickens tourists was G.K. Chesterton, who enthused: “It is well to be able to realize that contact with the Dickens world is almost like a physical contact; it is like stepping suddenly into the hot smells of a greenhouse, or into the bleak smell of the sea. We know that we are there.”

In my wildest dreams, Chesterton’s description would be my goal for any meeting of any history class at Bethel. Student and teacher would together forget that they were in a dark, noisy, cinderblocked classroom and be transported to another time and place. Of course, we’d be missing those “sights, sounds and smells,” and the neo-Victorian customer service reps trying to help us find the Pizza Hut. But just as a Dickens novel is able to create a world so vivid that even a painstakingly reverent (Anderson: “too reverent, and reverent about the wrong things”) recreation can’t measure up, so too I hope that a well-taught history class can engage the imagination and — if only for a fleeting second — cause us “to know that we are there.”

2 thoughts on “Dickens World

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Three more days!

It’s 4am on December 22nd and the day begins for us at Sabando Design. We are a true mom and pop operation. My wife Kristeena and I design, fabricate and sell the jewelry we’ve been offering at the market for the past six years.

We generally follow a Monday through Friday schedule at the Market, but sell every day from Black Friday to Christmas Eve. I will give you a little insight on what it takes for us to keep a full selection of products at our booth on a continuous basis.

Our early rise enables us both to fabricate rings, pendants, bracelets and earrings in silver and gemstones daily before heading into the Market. Many of the products you find in the Market require a multiple-day process before they are able to be sold.

We are set up to make things from conception to finish in a continuous sequence. Many jewelers use various tumblers to get a finish on their shiny creations. We are set up to tumble chains in crushed walnut shell tumblers for a bright finish, but we usually use a sequence of motor buffers and compounds to get that alluring shine.

Throughout the year we purchase finished faceted stones and gemstone roughs for our designs. In the final weeks before Christmas we have no time to actually cut and polish the various cabochon gemstones used in our designs, so this generally happens when the weather is warmer, because grinding stones involves lots of water on diamond impregnated wheels and belts, and our hands get cold from the constant spraying while polishing. We try to ensure that we have enough raw materials to get us through the holiday season.

Throughout the year we offer custom design work for our customers and friends. This is great for people who plan a more personalized gift for their loved ones. We often set stones with sentimental meanings or etch specific designs into metal for our customers. Every year we stop taking custom orders by the 15th of December so we can just focus on balancing our product mix for the remaining days.

These final days before Christmas simply revolve around the two of us fabricating and selling. Our morning ritual is to caffeinate first, and crank the heater and tunes in our downstairs studio. We each make our own individual pieces, but agree on what we need to give a balanced color and size display at the Market. By 6:30am we usually try to have our polishing complete so we have enough time to shower and walk our dogs before we head downtown.

Around 8:20am we arrive in the Market and pull our cart from its locker location. At 9am the bell rings for roll call. We choose our selling locations by seniority.  Every vendor is assigned a number when they are accepted in the Market. We are number 153 out of a total of around 260. Once we have have picked our spot we need about an hour until we are properly displayed and ready to sell.

By 10 :15am you should find Kristeena and I ready to assist you. “Three more days!” is our mantra today. We hope to welcome you down to the Market among our friends and fellow crafters and artists.

by Ron Sabando, Sabando Design

Where are my elves?

At this time of year, the Pike Place Producers are thinking “lucky Santa” and wishing we had our own elves. Just like the famous North Pole workshop, our studios are a hive of activity as we busy ourselves making lovely gifts for under the tree.

But rather than magic and reindeer, it’s plain old elbow grease and people power that’s bringing our gifts to you. So I thought it would be fun to draw back the curtain and give you a peek behind the scenes at Red Delicious Handbags HQ.

A lot has happened before you see my products carefully arranged at my Pike Place Market booth, like this.

Red Delicious booth display

Here’s the Wall o’ Fabric! Not just mine, but also that of my studio partner Lynn Rosskamp of Pingihats. This is maybe half of the fabric stashed around our work space.

The Wall o' Fabric

I make all my own pattern pieces and then have to cut all the fabric before even starting to make a bag. Here are some Long & Lean bags in progress:

Bags in progress

It’s impossible to do everything myself (if I want to sleep and read a book occasionally, that is!). And in the Market rules we are allowed one production assistant. This is Lovely Assistant Nikki doing some cutting. She also assists PingiHats production.

Lovely Assistant Nikki

And finally, I sew up the pieces to make the bags you know and love! The studio has big windows which let in lots of light, and I can see all the great neighborhood dogs being walked by.

Emma at the sewing machine

I hope you receive lots of lovely hand-crafted gifts this year, and wish you all very Happy Holidays, with grateful thanks for your interest in, and support of, my business and all the Pike Place Producers.

by Emma Roscoe, Red Delicious Bags

Handmade for the Holidays

Today, more than ever, where you spend your hard-earned dollars really counts. And many people are thoughtfully choosing to support small, independent and local businesses when they do their holiday shopping.

Of course, small, independent and local is exactly what we – the Pike Place Market crafts vendors – are.

This year Pike Place Market is all about ‘Handmade for the Holidays’. Buying from the crafts people ensures your loved ones will receive original and beautiful gifts, unlike anything you’ll find at the malls.

It also supports the ‘shop local’ principle, which benefits the community as a whole in many ways:

  • Creating jobs
  • Putting money into the local economy
  • Keeping the Market interesting and diverse
  • It’s eco-friendly

Buying local and handmade is a nationwide movement, including The Nature Conservancy’s Green Gift Monday campaign encouraging everyone to buy responsible, meaningful gifts on ‘cyber Monday’ this year.

Many Market crafts people have websites where you can buy on cyber Monday, November 28. Take a look at our Member Businesses page for links.

And in the weeks up to Christmas, why not turn off your computer and come to the Market to shop? Meeting the producers – the faces and hands behind your gifts – makes the holiday shopping experience so much more personal and special.

Free holiday parking at Pike Place Market

We promised you details of the parking offers at Pike Place Market this holiday season… and here it is!

Every day from December 1st to 15th you’ll can park for FREE for two hours in the Public Market Parking Garage (located at 1531 Western Avenue).

You’ll just have to spend at least $30 with Market vendors. Not a problem, we’re sure, when you’re buying Handmade for the Holidays from your Pike Place Producers friends!

If you want to make a day of it, early bird parking is just $8 if you’re in the garage by 9.30am.

All the details will soon be available at the Market website where you’ll also find information about the Magic in the Market event and merchant holiday specials.


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Lon Gisland EP

  • Ba Da Bing!

This five-track, 16-minute EP-- which features four new tracks, plus a full-band remake of "Scenic World"-- demonstrates that, yes, there are songs behind Zach Condon's much-discussed international flavors.

After the wild success of Gulag Orkestar, an album described (and derided) time and again as indie rock meets Balkan brass, authenticity becomes an issue in just about every Beirut review. Whether labeled "Gypsy Rock," Neutral Milk Hotel Jr., or flat-out village pillaging, Zach Condon's approach to songwriting's been questioned: Yup, the 20-year-old is from New Mexico and currently lives in New York. Yeah, he's a kid. So, based on that information, just what should his band sound like? In recent interviews Condon's discussed his interest in French pop and chanson. While that sound's yet to work its way into Beirut, this new EP includes some important upgrades.

Moving from his solo, Jeremy Barnes-accented bedroom recordings, Condon's now part of an eight-piece band. Smart move. Gulag showed promise and also limitations: In retrospect, the most intriguing sounds often amounted to ambient pastiche. Pretty but vacant. Now, a solid, pulsing group of players fleshing-out his songs, Condon opens to something less paint-by-numbers static-- it's more alive.

He shows, albeit briefly, that he can write songs without, as a friend called it, "that Beirut thing"-- i.e., not everything needs a quasi-Neutral Milk Hotel horn swell. But, note the subtle echo of On Avery Island in Lon Gisland, on which he even pokes fun at charges of cultural appropriation, transforming hairspray and pizza joints into foreign territory. Touché! Tellingly, the cover painting uses a collage technique to transport the band to a scene of black-and-white historical figures afloat in a green, green river.

It's a tiny offering, a 16-minute stopgap before the sophomore full-length scheduled for this fall. (The EP's been released in Europe as a part of Gulag Orkestar and as a one-side 12" by Chouette.) There are three new songs, a new incidental instrumental that echoes its neighbors, and a full-band remake of "Scenic World".

Opener "Elephant Gun" begins with that familiar ukulele sound and Condon giving his critics enough rope to hang themselves: "If I was young, I'd flee this town/ I'd bury my dreams underground." He's young... get over it. The song has joyousness to it-- it feels less downcast, nostalgic or mournful than the previous material; it's somehow more authentic for that. It's stately and deep, bottomed out with marching band drums, Condon's soaring vocals quaver. At the end, the track shifts gears, drifting into another flavor of accordion and horn.

A waltzing "Carousels" takes the listener to Coney Island with Morrissey to "watch the faces go 'round." Here, there's a whole lot of group singing. Musically, the repeated motifs are nice, showing Condon unafraid to really open up and play. A sound of water floats in the background-- but when you listen closer, it could also be the distant bustle of the city. It's hard to tell. Here, sounds are never clear-cut.

The incidental pieces are small but effective. "My Family's Role in the World Revolution", a polka piano rave-up, is an instrumental given signs of life with laughs and a sighing producer. Again, it's upbeat, opening up a riotous saw duster with Charlie Brown piano, glockenspiel, and martial beats. Tossed off, sure, but fun.

The other instrumental, "The Long Island Sound" plays on sound (something you hear, the physical space where you get wet, salt and fresh water mixing it up). You can make out water, or whatever, in the background as well as an echo of "Elephant Gun", an accordion and bass-trumpet reprise. It very much feels like it's coming over a wire recorder á la the Microphones. Like the other piece, it's a swatch of sound, another bit in the collage.

Most interesting is the band's new take on "Scenic World". For Gulag, it was the song that justifiably snagged Magnetic Fields comparisons. That cute lilt's been replaced with a slower, statelier unfurl: Condon comports himself in less bubbly way and any cartoonish residuals disappear in the slower pace. Also, tapping drum sticks are placed upfront and become a sort of undulating Indian percussion background; the original's horn parts are doubled on violin and accordion. Basically, you're hearing an older Beirut tuned played by a group, offering the listener a sense of community, rather than some kid alone in his room cuddling his 4-track. It's how this music should be experienced.

Lon Gisland marks a positive progression-- in these 16 minutes Condon has shown that, yes, there are songs behind the international flavors, that his work would be interesting even if kept the trumpet at home. It's clear, too, just how much age and gravity he holds in his voice and not just the sound around him. Most important of all? It seems Condon's getting all this-- by embracing the developments, he's started to go beyond chewing the scenery to, well, actually living in it.

Back to home


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Donat Margaret

Donat Margaret

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A Horizontal Manifesto

The world is oriented around verticals. It’s accepted wisdom that verticals help us organise service delivery. Hierarchy, control, order – these things flow top to bottom right? Government departments, corporate divisions, contact channels – this is the way of things. They appear to provide us, as service providers with benefits. But it’s my opinion that they actually cause more problems than they solve.

I propose that verticals are holding back business performance in the digital age. They’re a hangover from an industrial era of management and we need to challenge them. I also propose that we already have the tools at our disposal to do so. In fact I want to propose a Horizontal Manifesto.

So what’s the problem? Clearly the most obvious one is that verticals give you unhappy customers. Because traversing verticals takes effort, and customers hate expending unnecessary effort. But the biggy is actually cost – verticals cost business huge amounts in wasted cost. If one department sends me a letter that I don’t understand, then I’m going to make you pay by calling you and getting you to explain it again. And verticals undermine revenue generation – because unhappy customers are unlikely to buy more stuff. If I think you’re hard to do business with, I probably won’t buy more stuff (British consumer apathy and inertia being taken into account of course…)

For me verticals are the long sharp things that puncture holes in your bucket, out of which leak a constant stream of hard-won customers.

Hand pouring water from a glass into a leaking pail

Indulge me as I draw this out a bit.

How verticals hurt

The sales team sell me a phone and tariff. They do this quickly and efficiently, because they’re incentivised to win the sale. 3 months later I go over my data limit and get a surcharge. My reaction – I am surprised and call in for an explanation. I spend 3 minutes on the phone. “I didn’t know I was near my limit.” “How am I supposed to know how much I’ve consumed?!” “No-one ever told me what to do..!!!” The agent fobs me off – they see it as my fault. I take another route through the phone menu, and speak to a different department for 5 minutes. They say someone from ‘back office’ will get back to me. I don’t hear back, so go on a web chat. They can see that I have contacted in the past 3 days, but can’t see the full details on their system, so ask me to explain my issue… and so it goes.

We all know this picture. Of course the customer hates it as it makes them feel like a mug. And of course business leaders hate it because it is deeply inefficient (this scenario will have cost £100s in servicing unnecessary costs, undermined £1,000s of brand and marketing investment, and lost them the opportunity for future revenue gains).

But the really sad and maddening thing is, the manager of the vertical will likely have been in tolerance of most of their targets, eg short calls with good AHT (Average Handling Time), even if they do get a monthly bang on the head about poor RFT (Right First Time). Budgets will remain balanced. Customer satisfaction as we record it (how people think the call / web chat went) will be okay – the agent was nice even if the outcome wasn’t.

The manager will have successfully minimised the cost of supply within their vertical – ie the amount spent on handling the demand. Never mind that further supply costs are incurred in the next vertical along. The problem being that tracking costs across verticals isn’t really anyone’s job. More on that later…

Customers are ruthlessly horizontal

The thing vertical businesses need to wake up to is that customers are ruthlessly horizontal, and ruthlessly impatient. This is not a good combination for vertical service providers – meaning almost all service providers. Customers want to get things done, and those things invariably involve interactions with different verticals.

As we’ve seen, the worst bits are clambering over the seams of the verticals – being passed from call centre to call centre, and having to re-state your details to each agent – having to learn new interfaces between the sales website and the service website, and often encountering different sets of facts on the page – going into the store and getting quoted a different price to the one you got on web chat. At the best of times these are speed bumps, at the worst crevasses.

Customers are lazy. I’m not being rude here – we are all customers. I am a customer, and as a customer I am lazy. I resent making an effort. This is particularly the case in the digital self-serve world. If you want me to buy something AND do all the work relating to that transaction (ie self-serve ie you’ve outsourced it all to me) then you better work bloody hard to make that simple, easy and convenient to do – if not desirable even. Your part of the deal is to remove all the effort. “If Amazon can give me a One Click impulse purchase on any device then WHY CAN’T YOU?” That’s what people are thinking.

There’s a reason why Customer Effort Scores are emerging as the best indicator of loyalty – it’s because we are fundamentally lazy. And the internet has made us all MUCH lazier, and as a result made the job of EVERY channel MUCH harder. (Incidentally Gerry McGovern makes a great point of this here.) You cannot afford to let your verticals get in the way of this dilemma. Or you could, but you’d need to become an expert in gamification – make it fun for them to traverse the verticals 😉 !!

Okay gripe over – let’s put a more positive lens on this…

In the case I’ve presented, surely what we want is an educated customer who is capable of self-helping. We want a customer that knows their data limit, can set notifications if they go near the limit, and have the option of buying more when they need it. Because this would have provided us with an empowered and more responsible customer, and avoided the need for the call in the first place. Small upstream education cost in the sales and set up stage – large saving downstream in the manage and use stages.

Upstream, downstream. This is horizontal language. It’s no mistake that ‘customer journey’ was lampooned in the paper this last week – it’s become a faddishly over-used expression. But as with all fads, there’s a germ of value in there. Everyone is abuzz about journeys because they are anti-vertical – and everyone knows that verticals are bad. They’re bad if you’re a customer (effort), and they’re bad if you’re a business leader (cost and lost revenue).

But why is it that the organisation can’t get Sales to deliver the upstream education in the above example? Well it comes down to the old adage of ‘culture eating strategy for breakfast‘. If your culture is vertical because for eons your money and power has flowed that way, writing a strategy about customer journeys and service design is not going to work. You will get cosmetic improvements at the interface, which will improve your service hygiene levels and bump CSI, but you won’t change the system.

You’ll come into contact with plenty of managers who have their entire careers wedded to being brilliant vertical deliverers. To get them to work horizontally will make sense to them as customers, but as professionals it runs counter to everything that’s come before and everything they want to go on to do. You are proposing risk and disempowerment. When you suggest that money should be spent according to the needs of the customer, as defined by a service design or customer experience team, rather than by vertical managers – well this becomes an exercise in kingdom destruction. The logical conclusion for them is that they lose budget to some new fancy sounding department, to do stuff on brown paper over big walls… (Ps it’s great to watch Barclays – a 350 year old bank – going through this. I’m hoping it can help us turn a corner.)

Well we service designers are all diplomats right? We’re all playing for the long game. We have integrity and decency. We aren’t here to destroy vertical kingdoms. But the kingdoms need to be turned to a new purpose or they too will perish when the customers naff off.

So we need a Horizontal Manifesto…

1. We need to see horizontally

We need to see our organisations as our customers do. It’s a long-term bad joke now that the only person who sees a whole company is the customer. Well that needs to be put to bed.

Luckily we have big chunks of this in place or coming into place. Certainly the quantitative bit has developed a lot. My read is that the Customer Experience Industry has done a huge amount to connect quant operational and customer data together, and marry it with better metrics to measure performance. But I have to admit to beng worried about the CX industry and it’s intent to boil down oceans of data to find problems. It’s all very analytical and arguably in keeping with the industrial mindset that gave us verticals.

My hope is that the qualitative insight service designers bring can be married to this work. I guarantee you that standing in the shoes of the customer for a day, will get you closer to an understanding of the customer pain points faster (and more cheaply) than the data can be crunched. Give it to a good service designer, with the tools to trigger the same empathetic viewpoint in your vertical teams, and you get a quantum result. Regardless of what vertical I represent, and the baggage I carry as a result, I can always be made to empathise with 78 year old Ethel struggling to log in. We are all human. We can all see this way. We just need to do it corporately.

2. We need to think horizontally

Once we’ve got a good panoramic, horizontal view of the problem, we need to think in new ways to solve them. We can’t think in the vertical way anymore. Vertical thinking is done in meetings, disaggregated through lengthy reports, communicated by emails and internal newsletters – and ignored by almost everyone. Horizontal thinking isn’t part of the day job.

We need to bring together the vertical decision makers into rooms where we can look at the customer’s journey, and think collectively and creatively of ways of fixing their problems. What we need to do to achieve this is get permission for people to do this (saving the business from angry customers, falling revenues and rising costs) as opposed to ‘doing the day job’.

3. We need to act horizontally

We then need to act horizontally. Because the product of thinking is generally thought to be strategies and graphical visualisations of future services. The simulacra of action, ie not action at all. We need to not just think in these brown paper rooms, we need to take decisions in this way too. These collaborative multidisciplinary rooms generate great thinking – great ideas – but they often don’t scale commercially and horizontally because the organisation can’t back up horizontal thinking with horizontal action. Decision making outside of the C-suite is often highly verticalised.

This is by far the hardest pledge to make as it means getting into the guts of how your organisation runs – where the power sits, who has the money, how decisions are made, the environments people work in.

And doing so threatens much conventional wisdom about how action takes place. Those who try to act horizontally so often lose all their energy in the thick long grass of established bureaucracy. Change management, project and programme controls and IT releases – these have all become necessary and useful parts of business, but the eternal rounds of effort persuading each and every vertical to work horizontally saps the strength of those flying the flag. (Incidentally, I like the argument that turns the tables – “you write a business case to say why it SHOULDN’T be done.”)

Many business leaders pledge that they want to be ‘customer-centred’, without realising that the vertical structures on which their business hangs, also undermines their ability to meet that pledge. For that reason I propose developing this out into a fully fledged Horizontal Manifesto that business leaders can understand and, with a bit of cajoling from you good folk, readily sign up to.

I’m warming to this idea so much that I’m going to do more work on it. If you’ve got input / thoughts, I’d love to hear them via @joelbaileyuk

Thanks for reading. Joel

You’re 74. One day you wake up with a chronic medical condition – maybe even co-morbidity with lots of conflicting issues. A meeting with a GP spawns umpteen consulting appointments. You spend the next 12 months receiving alarmingly written letters for appointments you can’t make, listing phone numbers that go unanswered. You spend hours wandering lost in hospitals trying to find the right department. (But on the plus side you develop guns of steel carrying a lever arch file under your arm that describes your horizontal life for the benefit of each vertical you encounter. You see they hate talking to each other)). You struggle to make sense of the adult social care worker when she quite honestly admits that it’s not in her remit to help you with the things you need – its the health team you need to speak to. Your battle with horizontals becomes a matter of life and death. If you’re lucky you are middle class and can navigate all this. If not, it’ll probably be a series of collisions.

I’ve spent 2,000 words describing how verticalism undermines private sector businesses. I could write 5,000 on how it undermines public sector organisations. The killer fact is that most of us will end up in the above scenario – CEOs, COOs as well. Just another reason to make the pledge…

5 responses to “A Horizontal Manifesto

  1. Hi Joel,
    this is brilliant and so true. Really well communicated – you should get this out more. – Una

  2. Pingback: Aphorism 98 « Public Strategist Public Strategist

  3. Pingback: This thing called agile might kill us all | plate and serve

  4. Pingback: What is a Strategic Designer? | StrategicDesignResourcing

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PNY Wireless Media Reader Review

Manufacturer: PNY
Model: Wireless Media Reader
Price (at time of review):  £49.99

PNY Technologies is normally most well-known for RAM and maybe graphics cards depending on where in the world you live. However, this does not stop them from manufacturing other products such as memory cards, mobile power solutions, USB flash drives, solid state drives, headphones and even HDMI cables.  While they may not be the most recognized company they have been around for some time and have rightfully earned their place in the PC components market.

PNY Electronics was founded in Brooklyn New York in 1985 and were a company that bought and sold memory chips. In 1996 the company was headquartered in Moonachie, New Jersey and had manufacturing plants in Moonachie, NJ; Santa Clara, CA and even in Bordeaux France to help serve the European market.  In 1997 the company changed its name to PNY Technologies to put an emphasis on the fact they were expanding into manufacturing new types of memory and complementary products.

Today I will be taking a look at a product that is geared towards mobile users; namely the PNY Wireless Media Reader. The Wireless Media Reader is designed for consumers to easily be able to stream, share or save their photos, movies and other files they may want to access from a mobile device.  It allows for 5 users to connect simultaneously and is currently compatible with Android and IOS devices. It also features a 2,000mAh powerbank to help charge your devices.

Before we get started with the review lets take a quick look at what PNY have to say about their Wireless Media Reader:

The PNY Wireless Media Reader is a wireless USB and flash card reader compatible with Apple and Android mobile devices. The Wireless Media Reader allows users to stream, save and share all their photos, videos, music and other files from just one device.
Practical, light and compact, it’s the perfect travel companion for business or pleasure trips.

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Do you feel at home in Hökarängen?

‘Please Don´t Make Hökarängen Cooler’ is an art project that took place in Hökarängen in April 2013. The project grew out of artist Aiko Kubo´s monthlong studio residency at Atelier 123.

How do we become attached to the places in which we live? How does this attachment form over time? Attachment might be something we take for granted. We might overlook it, ‘overfeel’ or ‘oversmell’ it. Through the project, Aiko Kubo researched people’s sense of attachment to Hökarängen. She collaborated with photographer Stephanie Wiegner to create a project that aimed to grasp an everyday sense of the suburb. Street surveys, longer interviews, and visits to peoples’ homes, local shops and pubs resulted in a body of research that examined people´s feeling of attachment to Hökarängen. Walking the streets for one month, Aiko and Stephanie collected stories as they presented themselves, each one leading to the next like links in a chain. These stories and images comprise an archive of a specific moment in time and become part of the history of Hökarängen.

The residency resulted in an installation of temporary sculptures and a series of commemorative group photographs. The sculptures are made of objects borrowed from the participants that represent each person’s own idea of home. The group photographs document the sculptures together with the owners of the objects. Both the individual photo shoots with the temporary sculptures and the final exhibition at Atelier 123 gave rise to meetings and conversations between people in Hökarängen who had never met before.

In 2014 Jun, Atelier 123, Aiko Kubo and Stephanie Wiegner made a book ‘Please Don’t Make Hökarängen Cooler’ that presents interviews, stories and images, which did not appear as a part of the installation at Atelier 123 designed by Weng Cho Jui (Ray). This book talks about ideas of home, and documents unique experiences and memories of Hökarängen, collected from local residents and from people who work in and around the area. The photographs document the area’s mix of people, interiors, landscape and architecture.

The project started openly and associatively and was shaped over time by all of the participants. It developed together with them, according to what they felt like contributing. That process has contributed to the diversity of material in this book. Some people have a lot to say while others are represented only by a short text or a single photograph, thereby illustrating the actual character of the journey. This archive has inevitable holes and omissions, and so some things remain as mysteries and secrets. This is but a glimpse of Hökarängen, and there will always be new things to discover and new stories to be told.

Project concept: Aiko Kubo

Photography and photography concept: Stephanie Wiegner

Atelier 123: Maria Andersson & Finbar Krook Rosato

Text and Interview: Aiko Kubo

Interview partner: Stephanie Wiegner & Finbar Krook Rosato

Editor: Finbar Krook Rosato

Translation and proofreading: Finbar Krook Rosato, Maria Andersson and Marie Janevall

Book design: Weng Cho Jui (Ray)

Thanks to / tack till:

Arne, Fredrik, Maria-Magdalen, Siri, Harriet, Victor, Thea, Kim, Johan, Victor, Robin, Olof, Madeleine, Ibou, Adama, Aliou, Marthina, Rune, Peter, Paula, Marit, Ylva, Anna, Tayfun, Metin, Mimmi, Charlie, Elmer, Lovely, Siri, Oliver, Emilia, Max, Emma, Anja, Roger, Gabriela, Sara, Rosabella, Sabina, Lina, Bernt, Gunnar, Stefan, Gunilla, Lillian, Martha, Sam

and to everyone else who participated in the project /

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Then I remembered

walk in the snow pxlrd Happy New Year one and all. What will 2015 bring besides more evidence of global warming? Joy and pleasure, I hope.  And the rights of citizenship for the disenfranchised. It’s a specialized wish, I know, but it’s one of my fondest. Under the cut, my story of a 2014 turning point in my erotic life. Of course. (No nudity, alas.)
blinded by the light For months now I have been unable to understand why I suddenly launched myself into the fetish scene in August. This past week I was looking for rope tops in my home town, with no success, and realized that my July trip to Tokyo probably provided the inspiration. It was there that it occurred to me that I might find a kinbaku show with relative ease. After all, the Japanese are the masters and mistresses of rope. Tokyo is not a city one can slide into without snafus, especially if one is a woman since the culture is resolutely sexist. I needed a guide. (I believe my friend Sian, of Parthenoid fame, encouraged me via SL to go for it. If she didn’t, I apologize for the possible aspersion and promise to be more accurate in 2015.) I logged in to FetLife for the first time since I created a profile three years ago and asked if anyone would be a platonic escort. Tentative plans were made with a westerner so young I could be his disapproving professor. I dreamt only of being a volunteer, one of those fully clothed women who gets tied to an unsexy wooden chair. But I didn’t want my picture to turn up online. In the end, a looming typhoon left me radically uncertain about my plans for the week. So the kinkiest I got was going to a maid cafe—a very commercialized version in the middle of Shibuya, which hosted tourist couples and a few remainders from the otaku milieu. I admit I felt slimy. But Maid Dreaming got the best of me. I have a tiny commemorative pic that makes me look like a fittingly silly tourist. No human who does not love me unquestioningly will ever see me trying to be a kawaii cat next to an expert in the art. It’s hard to believe that those first tentative and failed steps into the public, if underground, rope world have blossomed into private sessions with a modest clutch of partners. It may very well be that the typhoon, which did not ravage Tokyo after all, saved me from a furtive and discouraging experience. Still…I can’t wait to go back to Japan and try again. (Bonus for those of you who might enjoy reading a western article about—of course—the global economic impact of Japanese apathy about sex, love and marriage.)

*:..Silvery K..:*KimonoMesh(SAYA)Black (NEW; available in many other colours, this kimono has a menu of colour and fabric choices for sash, underskirt and obi) Limo to event Lots of LBs for the kimono unconvinced
*:..Silvery K..:*Japanese Lady’s shoes for winter(Purple) (gacha)
[LeLutka]-DUCHESS hat and hair (Xmas gift; group is free)
Essences {LadyDyvine} Medium01 *browless* cleavage (open Xmas gift)
[KOOQLA] Nico – beauty marks tattoo
Rotten Toe, Goth brows 1
(AMD) Ultimate Lashes – Double Wing (not available)
!dM Amidala – SatinFan w/ diamonds **SAKURA DRAGON** (right and left hands, colour-change) (old gacha, try yard sales)
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Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice

Cover Photo of Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice
Cambridge University Press

What did democracy mean before liberalism? What are the consequences for our lives today? Combining history with political theory, this book restores the core meaning of democracy as collective and limited self-government by citizens. That, rather than majority tyranny, is what democracy meant in ancient Athens, before liberalism. Participatory self-government is the basis of political practice in 'Demopolis', a hypothetical modern state powerfully imagined by award-winning historian and political scientist Josiah Ober. Demopolis' residents aim to establish a secure, prosperous, and non-tyrannical community, where citizens govern as a collective, both directly and through representatives, and willingly assume the costs of self-government because doing so benefits them, both as a group and individually. Basic democracy, as exemplified in real Athens and imagined Demopolis, can provide a stable foundation for a liberal state. It also offers a possible way forward for religious societies seeking a realistic alternative to autocracy.