March 27, 2010: Tokyo V

After a few hectic days of sight-seeing, we started Saturday off slowly, mooching around the house and considering our options for the afternoon. This gave us time to try out a risky breakfast: natto! Natto is a weird fermented soy bean dish, that's commonly eaten with rice as a breakfast food in Japan.

It smells as bad as it looks. It doesn't taste quite as bad as you'd expect - it's strongly flavoured but pretty agreeable, it's just texturally and olofactorally disturbing.

With natto under our belts, Cindy and I were ready to face the day. The sun was peeking out again, so we focussed on outdoor activities, starting off with a wander through the Imperial Palace East Garden.

The moat provided me with my first identifiable new bird for the trip: the northern shoveller.

The cherry blossoms hadn't quite reached full flower yet, but they were still pretty stunning.







The next stop was Ginza, for a quick stroll through Tokyo's poshest neighbourhood to lunch at Nataraj vegetarian Indian restaurant.

Being Ginza, things weren't cheap, but there were a range of veg-tastic thalis to choose from and as neither of us had eaten since the natto, we were both ready to hoe into them. I ordered the Maharani Thali (3500 Yen, $40), which was made up of three curries (palak paneer, navratan korma and the mysterious 'nataraj curry'), a garlic naan, a couple of tandoori gluten nuggets, a mayonnaisey salad, some pickles and some rice plus a mango shrikhand for dessert.



Aside from the salad, this was all pretty great - particularly because I was starving and there was heaps of it. The curries lacked a bit of spice, but were rich and full-flavoured and there's nothing better than a fresh naan bread. Cindy went for a slightly smaller option, the Padma thali (2500 Yen, $29), which came with just two curries (chana curry and vegetable curry) and was lacking the dessert.

She particularly raved about the tomato-based vegie curry, which was creamy and delicious. All in all this was a very satisfying lunch: the food was tasty and plentiful, the staff were extremely friendly and quite excited that we were both vegetarian and the setting was quiet and peaceful. The prices are just a bit too steep to really recommend a visit - possibly one of their non-Ginza branches would be a cheaper option.

By the time we finished 'lunch' it was getting on to 4:30, which meant I had to scurry off to meet Matt in Koenji for a gig. The great thing about live music in Tokyo is that it's designed for lazy old people like me - the shows start at 7 and the last band is usually done by 10:30. Brilliant. The venue for the night was The Penguin House, a tiny room with no real stage that would fit maybe 40 people inside.

The first band of the night were the insane PukaPuka, starring a guy whose only job is to dance around madly, yell out random things and impersonate a motor bike. By the end of the show the singer was riding him like a horse. It was all very weird. Weird but compelling. Especially their ramshackle cover of ACDC's 'Thunderstruck'.

Next up were My Pal Foot Foot who, despite the odd name, are a much more conventional band. They were great - especially once Julian from Kes Band had joined them on the drums.

The show was basically a launch for a split album that My Pal Foot Foot and Melbourne's Kes Band have just released, so KES were the final act, with members of Foot Foot joining them at various points in the set.

It was a great night - three excellent bands, a tiny intimate venue and a crowd that was there to listen and dance, not chat their way through the music. Despite the crowd forcing Kes Band into two encores, we were still out of there by 10:30 and home before midnight. That's the way rock and roll should work.

March 26, 2010: Tokyo IV

The forecast for Friday finally promised a break in the rain, so we decided to make it our day-trip day, heading off to Kamakura for a retreat from the neon and noise of the city. Kamakura is about an hour out of Tokyo and was once, many centuries ago, the capital of Japan. Now it's a tourist destination, famous for the second-largest Buddha statue in Japan and for its many temples. We started off with a wander down the main street, stopping only for some fresh mochi balls to give us the energy to explore more widely.

We drifted along with the crowds, finding our way to the main Shinto shrine in the town of Kamakura, Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gu. It's a large, sprawling place, with some impressive buildings and a beautiful pond and garden area.

photo by Matt

Rather than exploring the temple's museum, with its 13th century statues, we decided to head back to town to find something to eat. The main street has a beautiful walkway up the middle, rather like the St Georges Road bikeway, but with more cherry blossoms.

Our vegan pocket guide had nothing on offer in the Kamakura region, so we turned to the Lonely Planet, which suggested 'Bowls', which it said had both an English menu and vegie options. Alas after we sat down, we realised that it had neither. So Cindy and I watched Matt chow down a bowl of fishy rice and than we went exploring for other options. We ended up in an okonomyaki place, tucked a bit off the main street.

Okonomyaki restaurants are basically self-cooking affairs - you order your bowl of ingredients and then fry them up on the grill in the middle of your table. While there were a few veg-friendly sounding options on the menu here, it's important to make sure the staff are aware that you don't want fish-flakes or dried shrimp in your bowl, as these seem to come standard.

I went with a kim-chi mixture, while Cindy's mochi obsession continued, with a mochi and cheese mix (about 1000円 ~ $11.60 each). The cooking is fairly straightforward and, if you're patient enough, the pancakes flip pretty well, giving you a golden-brown cabbagey treat for lunch.

Fully satisfied (okonomyaki are incredibly filling), we headed off to find the Daibatsu at the Kotoku-in temple, via a short train trip to Hase.

photo by Matt

The Buddha was completed in 1252 and, despite massive earthquakes and floods destroying most of the surrounding temple over the centuries, has survived basically unchanged ever since. It's Kamakura's most famous sight and is consequently crowded - a brief stroll around the rest of the temple was all we could manage before heading off to find somewhere quieter.

On the way back to the Hase train station, we followed our noses up to the Hasa-dera temple, which is a beautiful and large Buddhist temple, with gorgeous gardens and ponds.

A few of the small shrines on the way up the stairs are surrounded by dozens of tiny statues of Jizo, the patron of lost children - each put there by a woman who had lost a child through miscarriage or abortion.

photo by Matt

With enough stair-climbing, you end up at the top of the temple, looking back across Hase and out to the ocean.

All templed out, we journeyed back to Tokyo, stopping at a convenience store to grab some groceries for Matt. Cindy took the opportunity to explore the chocolate aisle, coming away with some Meiji assorted cho-pan, little biscuity chocolate treats.

Matt had a party to be at on Friday night, so Cindy and I headed out for dinner on our own, determined to take our revenge on Pure Cafe that had lead us on a wild goose-chase a few days earlier. Like most places, Pure Cafe offered a set dinner menu (1200円 ~ $13.90), which Cindy and I both chose.

This was a wonderful plate of food - lots of beautiful vegetables, a delicious marinated tempeh slice, and some tasty pickles and sauces. The little radish flower petals were a beautiful touch, but the tastiness title was won by the pesto on the brussel sprouts. Having been wowed by the savoury course, it seemed essential that we check out the dessert options, with Cindy deciding on a vegan tiramisu and a chai (600円~ $7.00 each) to finish things off.

The cake was outstanding, capped off by the glorious berry smears that accompanied it.

Our final adventure for the night was an Ipod walking tour of Tokyo's notorious red-light district, Kabukicho. Matt had done the walking tour previously and promised us a couple of fun hours exploring the seamy side of the bright lights. The tour takes you through the history of Kabukicho, originally set up as a neighbourhood for enlightening entertainment that was quickly overrun by vice and alcohol so that despite the name, not a single Kabuki performance has ever been put on in the area. Nowadays it's chock full of hostess and host clubs, offering some bafflingly hair-styled folks for hire.

The tour takes you through the lobby of a love hotel and around some of the more family-friendly entertainments as well as through the seediest parts of town before winding up in the Golden Gai, a few blocks chock full of tiny bars, each seating no more than ten people.

Most of the bars are really just places for a group of regulars to hang out together, although there are apparently a few that welcome strangers and even Westerners. We were too shy to check them out and besides, midnight and the end of the train service was fast approaching, so we pushed our way on board a packed Yanamote line train and jostled our way homewards for a well-deserved sleep.

March 25, 2010: Tokyo III

For breakfast on our third day, we dined on reduced-to-clear onigiri.

I also cracked open a packet of these rice snacks.  I've no idea what they're called but they're brilliant - light, very crunchy, and coated in a savoury soy-ish flavouring.  The puffed rice shape is well designed with high surface area for maximum flavour/oil coating.  I might even like these as much as I like chips.

Like any self-respecting Melburnian, Michael would prefer to be starting his day with coffee.  According to the aficionados around me, coffee in Japan is as horrendous as it is prevalent.  Cafes (chains such as Starbucks, as well as small businesses) are reasonably common around Tokyo but serve very weak drinks.  Much more common are vending machines stocking canned coffee (hot and cold) - this one is less than 10 metres from the door of Matt's flat.  They're certainly no better than a local flat white but they're so constantly available that Michael's finding them difficult to resist.

Our first excursion of the day was to Shimo-Kitazawa to meet one of Matt's friends for lunch.  Matt had located a vegetarian restaurant, called Alicia, that didn't appear in our vegan eating guide.  It's a charming little second-floor nook, with most of the dozen seats arranged along a bench overlooking the tiny kitchen space.

The menu is only in Japanese but between Matt's reading skills and the shy English of one of the staff, our choices were laid out clearly enough.  (There's also a decent summary of the menu over on this blog.)  For lunch there are six different lunch plates, such as Alicia's special, the fried lunch and the sandwich lunch (ranging from 1100-1500円 ~ $12.90-17.60).

Michael ordered the fried lunch (1250円 ~ $14.60), but this was always going to be more than a few deep-fried veges.  There was brown rice and miso soup and pickles and salads and well as the crunchiest, just-seconds-out-of-the-fryer croquettes.

Still feeling a little jealous of Michael's tempeh sandwich from J's Kitchen the night before, I went for the sandwich set (1250円 ~ $14.60).  Though it looks a little less complicated, there are still choices to be made - there are several beverages and sandwich fillings on offer.  My cheese sandwich came with pickles and bread studded with dried fruit, which was a surprisingly agreeable combination.  It had nothing, however, on the tempeh sandwich - the crispy seasoned tempeh was sliced thinly, squirted with a little mayo and squeezed into the soft bread with lots of lettuce.  This bettered a KFC chicken fillet burger (a food I have enormous nostalgia for) in every way.

While I was swooning over my sandwich, my companions had their eye on the apple pie.  It was perched tantalisingly right next to us throughout the meal.  Marked egg- and sugar-free (450円 ~ $5.30), it was very much of the wholesome, home-made variety and bursting at the seams with fruit.

With the cold rain continuing, we tried to stay inside for much of the day.  We browsed the shops in Shimo-Kitazawa, then hopped back on the subway to Shinjuku.

Matt showed us the basements of a couple of department stores - this is typically where all the food stalls are and, allegedly, a lot of free samples.  We concentrated on the sweet areas (since the vego status of most of the savoury food would be questionable) but didn't snag too many freebies, unfortunately.  It was still fun to ogle the stylish desserts - they were all so meticulously presented, and I was surprised that most were French and Italian-style cakes.

We bought a couple of macarons, and liked them well enough, but it was the mochi that were more memorable.  We had these packed up to enjoy later in the evening.  The hefty feller on the left was a mochi revelation, stuffed with a whole strawberry and a thin mauve layer of sweet bean paste - a bit of fresh juiciness really lightens the starchy dough.

For dinner, before my major mochi moment, we headed to an izakaya for dinner.  Here we ordered drinks and snacks from a touch-screen at our table, with Matt interpreting the text and highlighting the veg-friendly options.  There was plenty to choose from - edamame, pickled eggplant, tofu, omelettes and any number of deep-fried items.

Our highlights were the battered tofu and the lotus root.  The lotus root was utterly different to the slow-cooked stuff of two nights earlier.  Here the slices were deep-fried to a delicate crispness and they had a mild seasoning that Michael and I just couldn't get enough of.  (I can only guess that garlic and salt were involved.)

With a couple of drinks under their belts, Michael and Matt got keen on visiting one of the local entertainment complexes and bashed out their sibling rivalry in the batting cages...

... and on the freak-guitars...

... until I decided to smash the drums.

But it turns out one of the most amusing activities in these places isn't competitive at all...