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hurpdurpburps · 2 months

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The Otherside Picnic Michelin Guide

Instead of prepping all the shit I have to do for an upcoming 80-hour work week, my procrastination has led me to writing this list, which is mostly a food-focused curation of my OP Pilgrimage Destination List, with new additions that I've discovered since publishing that.

I like to eat and my 4 years of working as a food journalist have sorta ingrained a subconscious razor-sharp attention to mentions of food in the media that I consume (pun intended). Armed with 5 years of experience living full-time in Tokyo, I've decided to redirect my powers for the Greater Gastronomic Good.

All photos featured are taken from Tablelog/official sources. I haven't been to any of these places myself, but you bet your ass I will be visiting most of them and writing up reviews on here when I'm done.

1. Kitchen Nankai Jinbocho (キッチン南海神保町店)

The "Western food" (洋食) place Sorawo and Toriko visited for a quick builder's lunch in Vol 6 (File 20 - T is for Templeborn).

In case you're interested in what our protagonists ate:

Sorawo ordered the tonkatsu curry (カツカレー) topped with cheese, while Toriko went for the fried flounder and ginger pork with rice (ひらめフライ生姜焼きライス).

From the photos on their Tablelog page, raw egg seems to be the most popular topping for curry, which is surprising to me since cheese seems like the most intuitive candidate. Best to bring a healthy appetite since their portions look absolutely huge.

2. Sichuan Cuisine Aki Jinbocho (四川料理秋神保町本店)

The Chinese restaurant near Jinbocho station where Toriko and Sorawo held their first ever afterparty together after hunting the kunekune.

Unlike what the name implies, it seems to be a run-of-the-mill Chinese place that kinda does a jack-of-all-trades menu rather than any focused niche in Sichuan cuisine. They even have peking duck on the menu according to their Tablelog page, but I can't guarantee if it'd be any good.

If you want to follow what SoraTori ordered, then go for the cashew chicken (鶏肉のカシューナッツ炒め), cumin lamb (ラム肉のクミン炒め) and water spinach (空芯菜), and wash it all down with Tsingtao beer.

3. Cafe Pause Ikebukuro

The cafe where Toriko and Sorawo had their first fight. Its location right behind Junkudo presumably translates into a lot of foot traffic from bookworms. Reviews that I've read say that more than half of its customers come here just to read in peace, and it's got free wifi to boot, so the ambience's probably top notch as well.

The cafe regularly updates its menu (but not online, sadly) and offers a wide range of cafe staples such as fresh pasta lunch sets and homemade baked goods. If you want to recreate Sorawo's one-woman feast, you can check to see if the menu has some or all of the following items:

Taco rice

Chocolate and sour cherry cake

Matcha terrine

“Tart of the day” topped with raspberries

Caffè latte

Grape-flavoured black tea (ぶ��うの紅茶)

Check out their website and Instagram here.

4. Maison c

Also nearby Junkudo is this cosy little wine bar in Ikebukuro where Sorawo and Toriko had a rather gloomy dinner after the Ninja Cat saga in Vol 2 (File 8 - Little Bird in a Box).

They don't have a website or a menu, but from what I could glean from their Instagram, they serve mostly seasonal French-Italian fare. Order some sparkling red wine and a prosciutto-salami platter for that SoraTori experience.

Place looks tiny so I wouldn't try to visit with more than one companion, or at least not without a reservation (strictly by phone).

6. Keio Plaza Hotel Shinjuku

The buffet that The Girls stuffed their faces at for their first anniversary dinner in Vol 7 (File 22 - Toilet Paper Moon) is the Glass Court Super Buffet, located on the 2nd floor.

The line in the book about roast beef being their signature is probably true. I mean LOOK AT THIS:

Other shout-outs from the book (MASSIVE HUNGER WARNING):

Picking away at the appetizer of sakura shrimp and lily bulbs as we talked, our first glasses were soon empty.

I gluttonously loaded up my plate with fresh fried tempura, mussels, foie gras with strawberry sauce, Berkshire pork and mountain vegetables fried in miso, and tom yum noodles. Toriko got a chicken stir fry with chili peppers, chicken liver and bamboo shoots in garlic, a bunch of Iberian ham, and more. It was a lot of meat, but she also had a Caesar salad and yuba maki rolls, so she still succeeded in having a somewhat stylish plate overall.

Just a bit of an intermission here to note a couple of slight mistranslations. The Japanese text is as follows:

揚げたての天ぷらとか、ムール貝とか、フォアグラの苺ソースがけとか黒豚と山菜の味噌焼きとかトムヤム麵とか、欲望のまま皿に取ってきた。鳥子は鶏肉の唐辛子炒め、砂肝と筍のガーリック風味、たっぷりの生ハムなどなど、やたら肉が多めだったけど、ちゃんとシーザーサラダや野菜の湯葉巻きなんかも取っていて、全体として小洒落た感じにまとめることに成功していた。

砂肝 (sunagimo - lit. "sand liver") refers to the gizzard. The name is derived from how the organ works, which stores bits of grit to help grind up food before it's digested, since birds can't chew.

生ハム (nama hamu - lit. "raw ham") is a term for generic proscuitto, and is not interchangeable with the much more culturally/geographically-specific parma ham or jamon iberico.

We both went to the buffet and came back, having gotten gratin, paella, beef curry, and other heavy foods that would pair well with red wine.

Toriko asked between bites of roast beef. It was the type the chef cuts as you watch, and I’d gotten some too. This was supposed to be one of their best dishes here and the taste reflected that.

I got a tiny cake and a confection called nerikiri, then poured myself a cup of black tea.

It was Crêpes Suzette, warm crepes in an orange sauce with coconut ice cream on top.

The second half of the night takes place at the Aurora Sky Lounge on the 45th floor.

Definitely a great (and very convenient) choice to bring a date to get in the mood.

7. Chichibu Waraji Katsu Tei (秩父わらじかつ亭)

After escaping Hasshaku-sama in Vol 1 (File 2 - Hasshaku-sama Survival), Toriko and Sorawo had dinner at a waraji katsu shop located within the food court of a recreational complex that was connected to Seibu-Chichibu station.

This complex is called Matsuri No Yu (祭の湯) and the only waraji katsu shop here is Chichibu Waraji Katsu Tei (秩父わらじかつ亭).

Here's their Tablelog page. According to reviews, the standard serving size is two pieces of katsu. Miyazawa really wasn't lying about meat overflowing from the bowl.

8. Masan's Home (琉球酒場ま～さんの家)

The Okinawan izakaya that Sorawo and Toriko pigged out at after finding themselves on Kokusai-dori in Naha.

Their Tablelog page features a very extensive menu. Jimami tofu and sea grapes are a must if you're visiting Okinawa for the first time, and I also recommend going for the local sashimi platter as well as other Okinawan specialties such as rafute, Okinawa soba, goat sashimi and bitter gourd stir-fry (ゴーヤチャンプルー).

Honourable Mentions

1. Mendokoro Maruwa (麺処まるわ)

In case you missed it, there was an OP x ramen collab back in 2018. You can read all about it in my first ever tumblr post (literally I made a whole ass tumblr acc bc I felt like I NEEDED to share it with the world lmao).

I'm not sure if the Ultra Blue is still up on the menu (probably not after all these years), but if you're enthusiastic about the restaurant's link with the series then perhaps it's worth checking out. Their signature is the basil salt tsukemen (バジルソルトつけ麺) so it wouldn't be too different from the Ultra Blue in terms of base flavour profile.

Here's their Tablelog page and Twitter.

PS. This place is in Chiba prefecture, outside of Tokyo. So like idk maybe plan it before a Disneyland trip or smth to be more time-efficient.

2. Kayu San Chin Keio Mall (粥餐庁京王モール店)

The Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) food therapy restaurant that Sorawo and gang visited in Vol 3 after the events of the Kotoribako was KOGA Seibu Ikebukuro (皇雅西武池袋店), which closed down a few years ago.

While not a perfect replacement, there's a store specialising in Chinese-style congee located at the Keio Mall in Shinjuku, called Kayu San Chin (粥餐庁 - lit. "congee restaurant" in Chinese).

Their menu is similar enough (sans the TCM tea selection that was apparently a signature offering by Koga).

3. A Whole Buncha Meat Places

Kozakura treated Toriko and Sorawo to a luxurious steak lunch near Shakujii-kōen station after the kidnapping incident in Vol 4 (File 12 - The Matter of that Farm). While Meat Bar Modavaca (ニクバルモダ・バッカ) has since closed down, there's more than a handful of places where you can try out the quintessential "sizzling hot plate" Japanese steakhouse experience for yourself.

Ikinari Steak (いきなり！ステーキ) is the most easily accesible place where you can order a cut of beef by weight. It's a chain, so don't get your hopes up with regards to the meat quality, but it's also a convenient and budget-friendly option. Website here.

Steak Kuni (ステーキくに) is a similar concept business but on a much smaller scale - with only three locations so far split between Tokyo, Natori in Miyagi prefecture and Koshigaya in Saitama prefecture. Website and Instagram here.

Beef Up Tokyo is a chic joint nestled somewhere near the Yaesu side of Tokyo station near Kyobashi. Which bumps it up really high on my to-try list based on the location alone (I'm pretty sure my usual hotel is max 2 streets away from it). They have basic options that start at 1,800 yen for a 200g cut of run-of-the-mill sirloin, to A5 marbled wagyu going at 3,600 yen for the same size. Which is a steal imo. Click here for their Tablelog page, Instagram and official website.

Pound-Ya Roppongi (听屋六本木) is another option if you want to splurge a little bit more on quality. Their wagyu steaks are priced at 2,200 yen/100g for the rump/round and 4,000 yen/100g for the sirloin, with the filet taking the cake at 5,600 yen/100g. Tablelog page and Instagram here.

PS. I KNOW that you laughed at that name.

#裏世界ピクニック #urasekai picnic #otherside picnic #裏世界ピクニック聖地巡 #otherside picnic pilgrimage

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chuck-snowbug · 9 months

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Wakamusume(Japanese Sake/わかむすめ月草超限定うすにごり特別純米無濾過生原酒), Cakes(ヨーグルトとリンゴのヴェリーヌ、グアヴァとアナナスのヴェリーヌ、ストロベリーショートケーキ、モンブラン、クラウンメロンロール) of "Keio Plaza Hotel", Baked Renkon & Yam & Ham Salad - September 2023

#cake #sweets #japanese sweets #japanese food #japanese sake

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aricastmblr · 2 months

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Jimin JungKook en Are You Sure?! SBS TV Disney Advertisement

jungkook se cayo y jimin ríe traían misma ropa de haneda sapporo aeropuerto y publicación de j.m instagram (mepareceamiXD)(sontodosdiferenteslugares)

JiminxJungKook se está divirtiendo en la nieve es frente al Sapporo Keio Plaza Hotel.

JK cojeaba ese día en el aeropuerto - seria por esa caída!?

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thefortressofscience · 28 days

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I sent this to you other blog but me and my BF are going to Japan this November! any advice you can offer to a fellow queer Latine for their first visit? (and also me I guess)

There's not much I can say that I didn't already in my first response, but I'll repost it here if anyone else wants travel tips in Japan!

Depends on where you’re headed! Usually for first timers, the typical route is Tokyo -> Osaka -> Kyoto -> Nara. You can go from Tokyo to those cities by train pretty easily! The latter three are really close together so you can basically make a lot of day trips that way.

For your first time in Tokyo I recommend mostly sticking to big ticket sights like the Tokyo Sky Tree, Akihabara, Asakusa, etc. But if you want to explore other spots, off the top of my head I can recommend:

Mikado Game Center in Takadanobaba. This is an extremely OG arcade and it is said if you’re serious about fighting games, you have to compete here at least once.

Yanaka Ginza is a neighborhood that maintains old skool Tokyo charm and worth taking a stroll around to get a feel for that early Showa-era atmosphere.

Les Grands Arbres Cafe is a very aesthetic cafe that has a big tree growing through it. It’s very cool and worth going just to take a selfie.

Nakano Broadway predates Akihabara as the nerd paradise. It’s a lot smaller and entirely indoors but it is extremely dense with anime, manga, and retro gaming goodness.

BEEP Akihabara is a basement level store full of retro computing stuff if you’re into that stuff. I really liked that store.

The top floor of the PARCO department store in Shibuya has a Nintendo Center in it but there’s also a ton of other stuff like Capcom and Shonen Jump booths.

The JAXA space center museum in Tsukaba is pretty accessible by train. It’s about an hour out from Tokyo but worth the trip.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building near the Keio Plaza hotel in Shinjuku has a free observation deck on the top floor if you don’t feel like shelling out for the Tokyo Sky Tree

Other spots I heard good things about but haven’t gone to are the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum and Yokohama China Town. You can get to Yokohama pretty easily by train.

For Osaka, you have to go to Dotonbori. It’s kind of like the centerpiece of that city. I also enjoyed Den Den Town which is like Osaka’s answer to Akihabara. In Kyoto, you should hit up all the various shrines and temples. For more information I think most online travel guides will have you covered.

I hope you have fun on your trip!

#wreative-criting

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junkyardzeny · 29 days

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yo, my BF and I are going to Japan in November and we were wondering if you had any tips/recommendations as a fellow Queer Latine Furry

Depends on where you're headed! Usually for first timers, the typical route is Tokyo -> Osaka -> Kyoto -> Nara. You can go from Tokyo to those cities by train pretty easily! The latter three are really close together so you can basically make a lot of day trips that way.

Mikado Game Center in Takadanobaba. This is an extremely OG arcade and it is said if you're serious about fighting games, you have to compete here at least once.

Yanaka Ginza is a neighborhood that maintains old skool Tokyo charm and worth taking a stroll around to get a feel for that early Showa-era atmosphere.

Les Grands Arbres Cafe is a very aesthetic cafe that has a big tree growing through it. It's very cool and worth going just to take a selfie.

Nakano Broadway predates Akihabara as the nerd paradise. It's a lot smaller and entirely indoors but it is extremely dense with anime, manga, and retro gaming goodness.

BEEP Akihabara is a basement level store full of retro computing stuff if you're into that stuff. I really liked that store.

The top floor of the PARCO department store in Shibuya has a Nintendo Center in it but there's also a ton of other stuff like Capcom and Shonen Jump booths.

The JAXA space center museum in Tsukaba is pretty accessible by train. It's about an hour out from Tokyo but worth the trip.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building near the Keio Plaza hotel in Shinjuku has a free observation deck on the top floor if you don't feel like shelling out for the Tokyo Sky Tree

Other spots I heard good things about but haven't gone to are the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum and Yokohama China Town. You can get to Yokohama pretty easily by train.

For Osaka, you have to go to Dotonbori. It's kind of like the centerpiece of that city. I also enjoyed Den Den Town which is like Osaka's answer to Akihabara. In Kyoto, you should hit up all the various shrines and temples. For more information I think most online travel guides will have you covered.

I hope you have fun on your trip!

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berrychanx · 1 year

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The buildings in the OP of TMM (2002) seems to be modeled after the Keio Plaza Hotel in Nishi-Shinjuku. It's a little expensive hotel, if you're going to Tokyo, it's definitely worth it. By the way, there are models of the surrounding buildings, but that's another time

#tokyo mew mew #mew mew power #tmm #trivia

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konradnews · 10 days

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JICA/JST Session at the 9th Global Energy and Water Cycle Project (GEWEX) International Conference ｜ News & Media

summary Session Title: SATREPS International Joint Research on Global Issues with Developing Countries: Achievements and Future Perspectives on Climate Change and Water Date and Time: July 11, 2024, 13:00-17:00 Location: Sapporo, Hokkaido (Keio Plaza Hotel Sapporo) background At the 9th Global Energy and Water Cycle Project (GEWEX) International Conference, a session titled “International Joint…

#JICA

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 3 months

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"...an orthogonal perspective on more mainstream and well-recognized forms of "political" thought and action might also serve as the very ground for new thinking and activism. Such politics could also involve spaces of unprogrammed gathering and eventfulness, such as the bustling Shinjuku Ward in Tokyo - 1968 saw the commencement of construction on the first of the Shinjuku skyscrapers (the forty-seven-story Keio Plaza Hotel first tett completed in 1971) that would come to dominate the space of West Shinjuku, the first planned skyscraper space for Tokyo. The area made available by the closed Yodobashi water purification facility was marketed internationally for its anticipated huge development potential. The newly laid streets, meanwhile, attracted bosozoku bikers to their smooth surfaces and strange landscapes. Shinjuku as a whole, by 1968, was seen as an ambiguous site and place of connection for globalized politics that seemed all around, immanent and yet hard to identify, centered ambiguously in popular and press representations on disreputable figures of youth, activists, hippies, gawkers, idlers and criminals. But its enormous train station also served as a major commuting hub and rail junction through which millions of gallons of jet fuel passed daily en route to the American air base at Tachikawa some twenty miles west of the station.

The American military's presence, and the close links between daily commuting and military support, were dramatically exposed in the summer of 1967, when several fuel cars had derailed, crashed, and exploded. On June 26, 1968, the Sohyō labor federation's railway workers engaged in a labor slowdown and demonstration to draw attention to the prior incident and the continuing shipments. They were joined by representatives from most of the major student movement groups, which together with members of Beheiren, reached the station platforms and train tracks and disrupted travel for some hours. Newspapers reported that idlers called futen joined the demonstration as well, and after midnight they had allegedly showered the riot police with rocks.

Futen was the colloquial term for the ambiguous and colorfully dressed young idlers qua hippies who congregated in several locations around and about Shinjuku station. From the summer of 1967 onward these were figures for alternating castigation and fantasy in the media for their indolence, dirtiness, and drug use (glue, sleeping pills, paint thinner, occasional LSD, and perhaps the recently outlawed marijuana). But, ultimately, the boundaries for this category are ambiguous, since although several hundred thousand people regularly congregated in Shinjuku after midnight, in fact almost no one properly resided there. All were potentially as rootless as the futen.

The daily practices of a wide variety of people living outside of social norms, drifting through cafe cultures, dropping out, participating in the growing commune movement, engaged at all levels of the informal economy - all casually lumped by media and the state alike into abject and disreputable groupings (futen, criminals, idlers, gawkers, thugs, and so on) - nonetheless demonstrated varieties of dissensual living and brought a sense of eventfulness that contributed to the politicizing potential of the moment. As figures of alternating castigation, fixation, and fantasy in the media, such groups lent their ambiguity to the spaces in which they congregated, drawing in turn attention from all quarters, from the curious and politically interested to plainclothes detectives and riot police.

The proximity of the catch-bars, sex workers, cafe hangouts, and fraught history of a former black-market area imparted an additional sense of norm-breaking, violation, and potential eventfulness to Shinjuku. So too did the sellers of underground newspapers like Buzoku [the Tribes), who hung out by the east exit of the station, or in the ground floor corridor of the Kinokuniya bookstore. Lavishly illustrated, Buzoku's inaugural issue of December 1967 had proclaimed the eponymous commune's declaration of transnational belonging through disidentification (written by poet and Buzoku editor Naga Tetsuo), encouraging all who read it to drop out and join the tribes of the global commune movement, which would ultimately supplant nations. And, as Shimada notes, a number of the artists and performers who would be featured by Gendai Shichosha focused their practices on the quotidian eventfulness of key spaces in the Shinjuku Ward: the east and west station exits, the Hanazono Shrine grounds, the underground passageways, Fugetsudo cafe and other hangouts and Kinokuniya.

Such a perspective was perfectly captured by Akasegawa Genpei's succinct description of Shinjuku in Watanabe Hitomi's photo book, 1968 Shinjuku, as "one station from Yoyogi." This banal geographical fact about train lines had a double meaning: the Japan Communist Party's headquarters was in Yoyogi, and was often colloquially referred to by this location ("Yoyogi's position is..."). Akasegawa's comment references both the proximity and distance from Yoyogi. He points simultaneously to Shinjuku's arm's-length difference from the left party politics epitomized by Yoyogi, but, at the same time, its proximity to longed-for and perpetually forestalled revolution the name metonymically represented. Revolution, just one step-or station-away. Indeed, Akasegawa's formulation suggests that such revolutionary proximity is enabled by this difference.

Rebellion and unstable identities was the theme of Yui Shōsetsu, a play by director Kara Jurô and the Situation Theater that enjoyed an extended run into the summer of 1968. This tent theater troupe performed every Saturday within the Hanazono Shrine grounds in their signature red tent to sold-out audiences crammed within its confines. Kara and company's impromptu happenings by the east exit of the station, as advertising for their play, regularly attracted crowds of onlookers. The play is named for a figure of failed rebellion from the early Edo period. In its fantastically abstracted narrative, the question of true and false revolution is doubled in a convoluted story of stolen and unfixed identities, sales of decapitated heads (of the rebels), and violent action. Kara's staging played fantastically with the very notion of anonymous persons stealing and assuming identities of rebellion, creating a meta-play on theater, acting, and political action. The story so attracted Oshima Nagisa, while filming his Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1969), in June of 1968, that he wove interactions with both company and play throughout his film, even having his protagonist come and "steal" the lead role from Kara himself in a scene in which play and film merge. In the wake of the events of June 29, Kara would find his troupe expelled from Hanazono as part of the backlash demanding Shinjuku's "cleanup" (joka, literally "purification"], castigated for attracting futen to the shrine area and encouraging improper behavior,

Shinjuku would remain a key focal point for opposition and authorities alike throughout 1968 and beyond. Events such as that of June 26 both heralded potential coalition building and further expansion among a disparate opposition, providing political possibilities, on the one hand, while enabling a roadmap for the state's recapturing of legitimacy for its force through the ambiguous identities associated with Shinjuku. The presence at the protest of disreputable elements enabled the association of protest acts with the alleged dirty fecklessness of the futen, helping to code them as therefore illegitimate and violent, and tying the futen to student violence in turn. During the subsequent protests in and around the station in October, the state indeed managed to regain some of the legitimacy it had lost in January precisely by reassociating protest action with criminality instead of reason." But it is also equally the case that the space for such protest, in the broadest sense, was made invitingly combustible by the overlaid daily practices of provocation, refusal, and imagination, giving the space a paradoxical sense of quotidian eventfulness. And, indeed, the availability of ambiguous identities such as futen, made further ambiguous by such counter- cultural celebrations of dissemblance, performance, and action, enabled the kinds of disidentification that made much of this politics possible in the first place. And, as a final thought, following Kara's play: perhaps revolutionary subjectivity has to come by way of violation - it must be seized, improperly."

- William Marotti, “The Perception of Violence, the Violence of Perception, and the Origins of Japan’s 1968,” in Gavin Walker, ed., The Red Years: Theory, Politics and Aesthetics in the Japanese ‘68. London and New York: Verso, 2020. p. 71-76

#shinjuku #tokyo #vietnam war #beheiren #train derailment #anti-war #protest action #political protest #political violence #new left #1968 #japanese 68 #japanese history #left history #reading 2023 #the red years #avant guarde art #agitprop

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