Back from Japan!

We’re back from Japan and I’m fairly jetlagged, and also counting up the things I miss…

• The cheerful, polite rituals that govern so much of daily life, especially at shops and restaurants
• Toilets with lids that open and close automatically, with warm seats (and lots of other buttons, though I didn’t use most of those functions)
• How clean everything is, and how orderly
• No tipping!
• Sleeping on our freshly made futons on the floor of our ryokan
• And of course, the food!

One of the things that you’ll notice in any train station are the shops that sell omiyage – nicely wrapped, locally-specific souvenir gifts (often cookies or other sweets).In Kyoto, you can find Malebranche’s Okoicha matcha cookies, which aren’t sold 280 miles away in Tokyo or even 35 miles away in Osaka.  They’re made of two langue de chat (cat tongue) cookies flavored with strong, bitter Japanese green tea, with a paper-thin layer of white chocolate sandwiched between.  The combination is perfectly elegant.

In Hiroshima, I had only a few minutes at the station before our train left, but even so I found a treat in a convenience store on the platform – lemon madeleines from Setoda, a city on an island just off the Hiroshima coast in the Inland Sea.

I ate them on the Shinkansen bullet train back to Osaka, enjoying the local flavor.

Then there’s Tokyo – where there are as many options as you might imagine, considering that they may be going not only to the rest of Japan but the rest of the world.  You can shop at the train stations, the airport, or even in the department stores to find the perfect thing.

Some of my favorite discoveries?  Tokyo Campanella, similar to Malebranche cookies but made with chocolate instead of matcha, meltingly delicate with the flavor of dark cocoa.  As usual in Japan, these cookies are not overly sweetened.  I bought these at Daimaru department store, which also carried Tokyo Campanella brownies, “exclusive to Daimaru Tokyo.”  A textbook example of scarcity and marketing to increase demand!

For something quirky and fun, there’s Tokyo Banana, a banana custard-filled sponge cake (think fancy Twinkie) found almost everywhere around the city in various permutations, including a giraffe printed version with banana caramel.  I carried a few to Kyoto with me as a handy portable snack, and we also saw bags of them being carried on the subway in Osaka.  Tokyo Banana gets around!

And then there are the Kit Kats.  Japan is known for unusual flavors that are decidedly un-chocolately, from wasabi to pear, so I couldn’t resist the Tokyo rum raisin version that I saw at Narita.

They do taste amazingly like rum raisin, though I’m glad that I can’t read the ingredients list.  Some things are better left unknown!