Well, I had promised to meet The Woodsman at 5 PM, after my bath. Due to excessive bathing and the sluggishness of mind that immediately follows it, it took me some time to get back up to the station and then start north along Nakano’s enormous, insane, pack-em-in covered shotengai. I didn’t even have a […]
izakaya
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Wajin, Meguro (和神)
Now, when I was heading out to Meguro this evening, one of my colleagues thought that was a very exciting place to go. She said there are lots of old-fashioned places to eat. Before I started looking around, I had been excited too, but I found it pretty difficult to find anything that looked especially […]
Tori Ton, Monzen Nakacho
As a second choice to take The Peacocks, this was a bit more gritty than Koto (most things would be, in truth). I’ve seen Tori Ton for years without going in – maybe it was the 3-foot high doorway that put me off? Turns out they can open a full-size door to let you out […]
Koto, Monzennakacho ( 古都 魚河岸料理)
Back when I was young and first started coming to Japan, it was always for winter vacations. Because of that, Japan felt like the country of freedom, the place where I didn’t have responsibilities (an odd twist, wouldn’t you say?), and that made me love it here. To this day, certain things give me the […]
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Sake no Ana, Ginza (酒の穴)
[December 2010: I see a lot of people getting to this page as a result of searches on the Google. I wanted to say: there are better places out there, even in the neighborhood. You should check out the Izakayas page. My new favorite is Moromiya, which is practically right up the road. Now back […]
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Yukari, Kamiyamada (ゆかり)
What’s that you say? More pictures of wacky Showa stuff? Here’s one of a shooting gallery at night. Folks, this is fer ril. They really do want you to pay money to shoot corks from toy rifles and try to win tiny prizes. Nifty. The specialty at Yukari is evidently yakitori, but everyone there was […]
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Santensan, Kamiyamada (三天参,上山田)
I hit the city ’bout 9 PM, loaded, loaded… OK, not exactly – 9 PM, but not at all loaded, and with no sort of Rob Halford vibe going on, I promise. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. On a loose whim, I made another one of these short trips to random, depressed country […]
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Kawashima, Musashi Koyama (川島)
In one of the standard books on drinking sake in Tokyo, there’s an establishment called ‘Sake no Ana’. I like to translate that as ‘The Liquor Hole’, although I’m sure there’s a more delicate way of putting it. If I had to assign a name to Kawashima, it would be ‘The Liquor Cave’. It’s a […]
Hana Modern, Kagurazaka (華もだん)
Japanese people, damn your language. I was moping around the counter at this place, thinking how crappy it was that I couldn’t understand what ‘modan’ meant. Written in hiragana, I assumed it was a regional word or something. Then I noticed it was written ‘modern’ on their business card, and I said “damn your language”. […]
Tamanegiya, Kagurazaka (たまねぎや)
Friday night…errr, Wednesday night before the Thursday holiday…saw me walking around Kagurazaka, freezing my nuggets off, in search of sake. It’s been 2 weeks since I last brought you any sake exploration (the last was Ikebukuro’s Umibatake, which I still remember fondly) – a short low-consumption period to recharge. Feeling better now, thank you. Having […]