Entomophagy! Now there's a mouthful. It basically means eating things with more legs than four - and I don't mean of the seafood variety. Though some Japanese dishes do use insects as an ingredient, those are few and rather more of a common occurrence in the deep reaches of the country side, and far from the capital. But fear not! I know full well that most of my readership surely want to stuff their faces with delicious crawly things, so I've got you covered.
In truth, most of the places you'll find in Tokyo that can serve bug are actually...Thai! That's right. The true-blooded South-East Asians don't care what you find gross or unappetizing. If they like it, they'll eat it, and better yet, they'll serve it, so that takes Ken and I to a small Thai restaurant in Takadanobaba, where they're rumored to do the deed. And they didn't disappoint. Sure as hell, the restaurant "Nong Inlay" serves takemushi, literally "bamboo bug" as an appetizer. The larvae are easily found in bamboo, giving the bug its name. They're around three centimeters long and basically look like long, skinny maggots. But how do they taste?
Absolutely normal, actually. A little salty? They're deep fried, so they're pretty greasy. Not as crunchy as I expected, but it's not like they were mushy either. If you stuck your hand into a bag full of them and ate them thinking they were soggy chips, you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. Until a little maggot head stuck out from between your teeth.
So there you have it! You can eat bugs in Tokyo, and now you know.
Being riddled with active volcanoes as it is, it isn't difficult to find hot springs all across Japan. Even in Tokyo, which occupies a relatively flat surface, hot spring water can be pulled from the depths of the underground. But some towns have an economy built almost exclusively around their onsen springs, and Kusatsu, four hours north of Tokyo, is one such town.
With my ticket in hand allowing for one overnight stay in Kusatsu, transportation included, I hopped onto a bus and made my way. Tucked away into the mountains of Gunma, altitude accounts for a little bit of a drop in temperature, compared to the recent warm weather in Tokyo. The town of Kusatsu is run by an aging population and fueled by tourism, and most of its attractions have something or another to do with the natural hot water drawn from the ground.
The most famous landmark of Kusatsu is the Yubatake - or hot water field. Located right
smack in the center of the town, it's impossible to miss. Here, water flows from rock into rows of wooden boxes, and the residue they leave is cultivated into a dust from which any regular water can gain the properties of Kusatsu's onsen. The waters are said to be medicinal and able to relieve stiff shoulders, bruises and sprains and the like.
In earnest, I do hope the powder doesn't make water smell like the onsen too. The pungency of sulfur is hard to bear if you get too close to the pools of the yubatake. And it's best not to try drinking of the water either. Even dipping your lips into Kusatsu's hot springs is enough to tell you that the water is incredibly acidic. I know that from experience, now.
There are a number of traditions rooted in the extraction of the hot water from the earth, and for a small price, it's possible to see (and even participate) in the yumomi, the traditional act of singing and dancing while using wooden paddles to cool the water. Traditional song and dance aside, this method of cooling the water is still used in Kusatsu, rather than diluting the hot water by adding cold. Such an act would also dilute the medicinal properties of the thermal water. I wouldn't say Kusatsu's theme song is catchy, but it does help to have a tempo when paddling the water.
Have a look at me giving it my honest best!
If you participate in the yumomi, you get a stamp card, and stamping it five times gets you a certificate, demonstrating your awesome ability to cool hot water with a two meter paddle. No, I'm not joking. I'm sure it would fit very well into a job resume.
Similarly to the town of Kinugawa, there are a number of hotels dotted around Kusatsu (though not nearly so many, since we now know what becomes of that) as well as other attractions that also help pass time in the town. Though no one would doubt that these come second to the town's onsen, activities like zipline parks, golf, archery, and even a maze are available and some even came packaged with my own hotel. Though the rain on my second day held me short of trying the tree-to-tree zipline park, I still did manage to get a few activities in. I would've had more than enough to do had I even spent an extra day in the town, seeing as there are over 100 different hot springs in the town, and it's even possible to hike up the neighboring volcanoes in the area, but, short on time, I headed back after my brief yet deeply satisfying taste of the mountain town.
My company is making promotional videos and there's this kind of unspoken contest going between employees on who can be the most over the top without being inappropriate. These pop up sporadically on YouTube, if you look up "My Gym Japan."
Have you ever wanted to eat while surrounded by pencils, paper, and other pieces of stationery?
Well golly gee, I've two pieces of news for you! One, you're a bit of a dork! Two, I might've found you're second home in Tokyo. As far as eateries with a theme go, some have a pretty wild, general appeal that draws in the curious, and others are pretty obscure and really just appeal to a certain niche. Bunbogu, the stationery cafe, is blatantly part of the latter.
Faber Castell's limited colors.
The idea is simple, but neat and effective in application. Customers order, and get to look around the cafe, which doubles as a stationery shop, for what ever pencils, pens, coloring pencils and the like they want to try, and bring them back to their table and try them out. You won't hear anyone screaming joy and excitement, but it's a good distraction while waiting for food to arrive. I'll admit it's kind of fun. That's as much pleasure as you'll get from Bunbogu. Unless you're a stationery fanatic.
If you are, the rabbit hole goes a little deeper.
It doesn't take anyone savvy about stationery to figure out that the staff here really know their shit. Given a chance, they'll gladly let you know that the shop is in possession of Faber Castell coloring pencil shades that are no longer in production, for instance. If you're the least bit interested in this kind of thing, you'll have yourself a field day. Bunbogu also offers a membership service where members are given a key to the drawer of the cafe's tables (which are effectively desks.) Inside these drawers are exclusive pieces of stationery that only members have the privilege of using. Members are also invited to member parties, and are given a typical 10% discount on the menu. Welcome to hipster paradise.
As for the food itself, well, it's quite alright? I can't say I was impressed by the pasta, but it wasn't bad by any means either. There's unfortunately little to choose from in the menu - a small selection of appetizers, salads, mini-pizzas and pastas pretty much sums it up. They do have a couple of original cocktails, though! The highlight of which is their "Sketchbook" cocktail, which comes with a coloring pencil in it (not a real one) so that you can stir the drink.
If this all sounds fun to you, check out Bunbogu near Omotesando. Yeah, I know it's pretty niche, but hey, given that some of my readership graduated from art school with me, this might just be the thing that pushes some over the fence for a Tokyo trip.
I remember setting foot in Tokyo for the very first time, and the adrenaline rush of walking into the outside air and not knowing anything. I didn't even know the directions to my hotel, New Koyo, and just threw the address to a cab driver, and it all worked out. I collapsed upon the hotel futon, and turned on the room's small television.
And, lo and behold, what came on was wrestling amongst the disabled. The blind versus the man with one arm! And so on. I was amazed at the censor-less entertainment.
Some clips from Japanese television shows went viral in North America. Quirky game shows that look like something out of a video game, or terrible pranks that would get people sued on spot. Here are some examples, just for good measure. The former, then the latter.
Wow, you would think. Going by these, Japanese television would kind of be the pinnacle of entertainment.
Actually, and, rather unfortunately, for the most part Japanese television is...pretty normal. And normal television, regardless of where you are, is pretty boring.
Even just flipping through the channels, you can't help but notice almost trope-like similarities in the programming. Television here has its own set of rules. Here, let me turn my television on right now and give you a good example.
REACTION SHOTS: Look at the picture to the right. Notice the faces in the corner; those are people who are famous to at least some extent. During a segment, a live feed of their reaction as they watch the same thing you're watching is visible in a corner.
My take of it is that, in Japanese culture, the norm is to do what other people do and think what other people think, at least to some extent. And having someone else's reaction within sight kind of gives you an idea of what your own should be? It's a guess, and yours is as good as mine. Otherwise, reaction shots are pretty useless. BIG, COLORFUL SETS: Even the blaaaaandest of talk shows is decked out in useless colorful trinkets and flamboyant furniture. It gives this really candy-like look to all the sets. "Hey!" it screams at your eyes. "Stop flipping the channels!" OVERUSE OF CAPTIONS: For emphatic purposes as well. Notice both pictures have this big bold font right where you can see it. That font isn't providing you any real information, actually. It literally repeats what the person speaking just said. God, how aggressive! OVER-ACTED EVERYTHING:
Whether it be a talk show or a drama, everything on Japanese television is frighteningly overacted - at least to my western tastes. Talk show hosts blow up their reactions to the slightest surprise - "WHOOAAAA!" and "EEEEHH!!?" are the kind of thing you're likely to hear six times a minute.
Most of the drama shows also lack in subtlety, with audible, campy music tracks and overplayed crying and anger scenes and cartoon-like expressions. Whereas I feel like all dramas in western television have entered an age of gritty realism where everything has to be cold and serious, Japan's stuck in the early 90's, but with HD.
D'aww, I didn't mean to disillusion you about how entertaining Japanese TV is. Once in a while you do get something genuinely entertaining. Like that one time they created a living room half-made of sweets and made people try to eat what they thought was fake!
-What do you like to do in kindergarten?
- Poop...
I can't claim to be an expert on Japanese television at all, and without the outside perspective, it's hard to tell whether, to the eyes of a foreigner, western television falls into such redundant tropes as well. But for the most part, it took me a very short time to lose all interest in Japanese TV.
I have the basic set of channels offered by cable now, and that's free, thank God, but I can count the total hours I've spent watching television on the fingers on one hand. It just ain't for me!
I've stumbled upon more mascots in the last two and a half years in Japan than I have in the rest of my life combined. Here are a handful. Recognize a few?
It's the month of June, and therefore Japan as a whole (minus Hokkaido and Okinawa, probably,) is drowning in rain water during this time of the year. So you might have noticed the recent trend of me blogging about things I'm putting in my mouth. This is another one of those.
In a similar vein to Sweets Paradise, Aunt Stella's, an all-you-can-eat cookie place, opened in Ikebukuro a while back. It's basically an invitation to dentures and diabetes (my second favorite kind of D&D) but what the hell, you only live once.
...Uurghhh...aaarghhh...
The good: Aunt Stella's will run you down 880¥ only, for a whole hour of cookies to your heart's delight. That's less than 10$, folks. And I'm no expert on the subject matter at hand, but I'd say the cookies were actually pretty awesome, too. I had the delightful chance to experience the joy of scarfing down at least twenty cookies during my visit, which, actually, doesn't seem like much written out like that, but is a whole god damn bunch in reality. On top of it all, Stella's boasts 100 different varieties of cookies, though only 15 are put out on any given day. So there's lots of...re-visiting value, if you want to put it that way. During my visit I got to sample mango and raspberry and caramel flavored cookies amongst a whole bunch of others. Just thinking of the ones I haven't tried makes me hungry again.
The bad: Well, in Tokyo, where there's a cheap price and quality, there's also a crowd. It's a one hour queue just to get into the place, though you may find a luckier time in the day than I did (around 75 minutes wait on a rainy Saturday afternoon.) It's a shame, but more people like cookies than just you and me. And for a price so low, you can bet there's a whole shit tonne of middle school and high school students that get added to the crowd. If you're anything like me, you may find that 30 minutes with a cookie buffet is more than enough time to get disgustingly full, so you may want to take some time to appraise the reward for the ordeal of queuing for that long.
Aunt Stella's! Making you watch people eat for an hour to build appetite!
"Someone would like to sit at your table, would that be okay?"
Uh, Hi.
Man, Moomin Cafe would've been so much more magical if you walked into it not knowing what it was about. Over the course of the last month, the cafe where they place stuffed animals at tables with empty seats has been catching fire on social media - from outside of Japan! And yes, it's true, they do do that. They even put 'em at tables where there are two people. Or three. It's all a matter of whether or not there are any empty seats at your table. It's been shared and re-shared, so I thought I'd give you guys a look at what it's actually like.
You can't really miss it.
Moomin Cafe's by no means new, folks! It's existed where it is for a few years now, and is expanding still, in no small part thanks to the good media attention it's been having.
I was expecting droves of tourists to be hanging about, but for the time being, it's no more busy than the next place. It's easy to sit down and get a light meal, the ambiance is nice and quiet, service is great, and, plus, the Laqua store, located in Korakuen's Tokyo Dome City, doubles as a bakery. Customers can enjoy all-you-can-eat-bread, and that's lovely. The cafe, based on the Swedish children's books, caters very much to families with young children, and it's especially nice to see the warm staff-folk helping the kids interact with the plush toys.
All in all, it's a nice place to check out! You won't be spending hours and hours in Moomin Cafe, but it's a nice little stop if you happen to be in one of the areas that have one -Tokyo Dome, Kichijoji, or the Sky Tree.
In truth, most of the places you'll find in Tokyo that can serve bug are actually...Thai! That's right. The true-blooded South-East Asians don't care what you find gross or unappetizing. If they like it, they'll eat it, and better yet, they'll serve it, so that takes Ken and I to a small Thai restaurant in Takadanobaba, where they're rumored to do the deed.
And they didn't disappoint. 
