Japan – Flung

A Journey Through the Foodiest Country on Earth, Family in Tow

Alice Stephens — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 18:01:00 +0000

There’s a joke told among expats in Japan that newcomers deem themselves experts in the enigmatic country after a week and write a book about it after a month. The library is filled with these books. Dave Barry has one. So does Will Ferguson. Add another title to the list, Michael Booth’s Super Sushi Ramen Express: One Family’s Journey Through the Belly of Japan. The author freely admits that before he embarked on his three-month odyssey, he had “no definable […]

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Grocery Shopping with the Dragon Ladies

Steve Finbow — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 17:22:37 +0000

Walking along Hisago Dori, a covered street in Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood festooned with paper lanterns and ribbed with red pillars, a friend and I were looking in the shop windows at the piles of mochi (rice cake), the ranks of plastic sushi, at the kimonos and the yukatas. I had lived in Asakusa for about six months and had just about got the hang of street etiquette, the pedestrians, cyclists and rickshaws that moved around the areas that bordered Sensōji […]

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Gaining a Country, If Not a Language

Jourdan Arenson — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 21:33:07 +0000

When I lived in Kyoto, Japan thirty years ago, I didn’t like it much. I had a job teaching English to engineers who didn’t want to learn it. I quit after a year and left Japan. By then, I did have a Korean-Japanese girlfriend named Kwija. We kept in touch, she eventually came to the United States and now we’ve been married for 25 years. This summer we went back to Japan to visit Amagasaki, her hometown. Like Kyoto, Amagasaki […]

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