Tokyo | Howdy Japan

Halal food in Nippori and Halal Navi

Nippori is an area more diversified than other areas in Tokyo. And there is a certain amount of Muslim population. For Muslim it’s very important to know if a restaurant or a shop serves halal food or not. Halal means that the food is allowed to eat in accordance with the Islamic law.

There are several restaurants to serve halal food. For example Cous Cous is a Tunisian restaurant which serves halal food. A photo below is cous cous in Tunisian style, which is one of popular menus.

Among south Mediterranean cuisines there is much diversity. In Tunisia it’s allowed to drink alcoholic beverage. For example this is Cedratine, sweet and strong distilled beverage made from citrus fruits and produced in Tunisia.

Halal food is served not only in restaurants but also in shops. Around Nippori station there are many shops to sell halal food. For example, the shop owned by Nepali sells Asian halal food.

In accordance with such an increasing potential demand of halal food, ROI, a startup in Japan started an smartphone application called Halal Navi to search halal restaurants in Japan.

Halal Navi

On the other hand it’s true that Islamic culture is not understood well in Japan and some Muslim people feel difficulty to live in Japan. I hope the service such as Halal Navi will help them to get accustomed to the life in Japan.

How Pokemon Go works in Nippori Japan

Finally in Japan, where Pokemon was originally developed, Pokemon Go has been released on past Friday, July 22nd. And of course I have already installed it.

Our home area, Nippori Tokyo is located relatively in suburb of Tokyo. Nevertheless, I can find a lot of Poke Stops around my home. Compared to my birthplace Shizuoka, the density of Poke Stops in Nippori, where we can get items to proceed Pokemon Go, is much better.

I understand that in the world of Pokemon Go the places for Poke Stops are randomly selected. And in Nippori, typical popular shops in Yanaka Ginza street, which is a main sightseeing spot here, are selected for Poke stops. For example, this tempura shop with a cat on the roof is selected as a Poke Stop. The cat is a symbol of Yanaka Ginza street.

I think it’s useful to attract more attention from visitors on Nippori as long as such a funny place is selected as Poke Stop. However, I have a little concern on another kind of Poke Stop.

Now this is also a Poke Stop.

This is Hongyou-ji temple near our home. In Nippori there are a lot of temples and shrines. And not only temples but also sometimes specific statues of Buddha are selected as Poke Stops.

I’m not so religious, but even for me as a Japanese I have a complicated feeling when I find a Pokemon inside the temple and get monster balls from the Buddha statue. And I’m wondering how such religious places are selected as Poke Stops in the US.

Anyway Pokemon Go has just started in Japan. And I’m still motivated enough to try to find another Pokemon in the town!

American style BBQ in Toyosu Tokyo

Compared to the US, there are much less places to enjoy outdoor BBQ in Tokyo. But Toyosu in the bay area is one of such rare spots.

In 5 minutes walk from Shin-Toyosu station of Yurikamome line you can see the entrance which looks like a BBQ trailer in the US.

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This place The Third Park has a concept to operate an urban outdoor park where we can enjoy American style BBQ with all american equipment. They have even cactus like a desert in Arizona.

And more than that we can hang out next to high rise buildings in the bay area in Tokyo. It’s a fun to get relaxed in nature, but it’s also a fun if we can get relaxed just next to concrete jungle.

Due to high cost for parking and narrow roads it’s difficult to have a car in Tokyo. Thus we need to use a train to bring food to a park where we do BBQ, although it’s not realistic to ride a train with raw meat and liquors.

But no problem! At The Third Park they prepare all the foods for you. For example Early Lunch Plan costs 4,500 JPY with a variety of menus; popcorn, assorted seasonable vegetable, American smoke steak, churrasco pork and beer can chicken.

But you don’t know how to make fire? No problem again! They also prepare charcoal and a manual to show how to make fire and to cook BBQ.

Thanks to the practical manual we easily made BBQ like this!

I want to tell you one point, if you are interested on the place. They prepare almost everything but they have only a single kind of BBQ source. So we recommend you bring other sources you like to eat up all the meat.

Below is the website of The Third Park (sorry only in Japanese).

https://the-third-park.com/

Mitsukoshi, first department store in Japan

During the process to modernize Japanese society, Japan accepted a lot of things from the West. The department store, where they have a variety of specialized stores in one huge building, is one of them. And Mitsukoshi is the first Japanese department store whose flagship store is located in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. In 2016, this building is designated as an important cultural property to show the history of the department store in Japan.

The current building itself was built in 1935 as the Renaissance style architecture. And its gorgeous appearance makes visitors feel that the store has whichever luxurious brand they want. But the building is not an only attraction for Mitsubishi Nihonbashi.

At the main entrance there is a pair of bronze statues of lion. They were reproduced from the lion statues at the Trafalgar Square in London and installed in 1914 at the present location.

Such a statue indicates that they tried to make Mitsukoshi as a gorgeous department store like Harrods in London. However, when you walk up to the central hall on the first floor, you will find how Mitsukoshi, as the first Japanese department store, tried to show their originality. Then let’s see the central hall.

At the first glance you might not be able to recognize what you are seeing at the center of the department store. Then let’s come closer.

Now I hope you realized that this is a gigantic and colorful statue of the Japanese goddess. This statue was made by Mr. Gengen Sato, Japanese craftsman in 1960 after spending 10 years to produce it. And it shows the moment when the goddess wrapped with a swirl of clouds has just descended to the flower stem.

According to Mitsukoshi, this statue symbolizes their basic philosophy, which is Magokoro (sincerity). And they have been keeping its philosophy in a long time. While Mitsukoshi branded itself as a department store in 1928, its history back to the 17th century.

In 1673, Mr. Takatoshi Mitsui, started Echigoy-ya as a kimono shop. In those days, other kimono shops, whose targets were rich people, showed higher prices than their real prices to the customers at first preparing for their request of discount and sold only with the unit of a roll (approx. 10.6 meters).

However, Mr. Mitsui showed his sincerity and in order to make his shop approachable for normal people, they showed their real prices from the beginning and sold kimono with the much smaller unit than a roll.

When you visit Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi, you can understand not only a history of Japanese department store but also history of commerce in Japan.

Below is the website of Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi.

Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi Main Store

Noodle restaurant at a cake shop’s backdoor in Nippori Tokyo

In Nippori, area of Tokyo Japan we live, there is a street called Nippori Fabric Street where there are many small fabric shops along the street.

And around the end of the street there is a small cake shop called Sablon. It looks quite normal as long as we see from the frond side. The word “Feinbackerei” in the signboard indicates that the chef might have had training of cake making in Germany.

However, when you move to the backside of the shop, your impression has totally changed. It’s not so obvious if we can enter into the shop from this side as well. But several people are waiting and there is a simple signboard saying “dip noodle”! Wait, isn’t it the backdoor of a cake shop?

It’s a noodle restaurant indeed. After waiting about 30 minutes we can enter into a tiny restaurant with only 4 seats. And they have a single noodle menu, Tsuke-men (dip noodle). Only one chef is working hard for both the cake shop and this noodle restaurant. He called the noodle restaurant “Ura-Sablron”. Ura in Japanese means backside or secret.

According to an explanation on the wall, when he was young, the chef was a big fan of Taisho-ken in Ikebukuro Tokyo, which is the legendary dip noodle restaurant well known to have created the current style of dip noodle in Japan for the first time. And even after he got training of cake making and started his own cake shop, he couldn’t forget his passion to the dip noodle of Taisho-ken. Finally he decided to start a dip noodle restaurant while keeping his cake shop at the same time.

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By the way, I myself was a fan of dip noodle of Taisho-ken. And the dip noodle here has an authentic great taste. I believe it’s the best dip noodle in this area.

Meanwhile it seems that the chef cannot help serving his original specialty, cake. So with additional price he also serves his original dessert after dip noodle.

The dessert is also delicious but quite ordinary compared to the special dip noodle. Seeing no guest in the front side as cake shop, we are afraid how long the chef can continue this double work…

Sablon (and Ura-Sablon)

5-12 Higashi-Nippori, Arakawa-ku, Tokyo, Japan 116-0014

Packed train in rush hour

One of globally-famous but not comfortable things in Tokyo is packed trains in rush hour. When I lived in the US, I drove to the office every day. And before I moved to the US, I had lived in Tokyo but at the apartment very close to our office so I could walk to the office.

However finally we need to ride a train to go to the office every day now !

Below is a photo of Nippori station in rush hour in the morning but on the day with “relatively” less passengers. On the other days, there were much more passengers and I had no chance to take a photo.

A good point of train network in Tokyo is that trains come to the station every a few minutes without delay. A bad point, especially in rush hour is that there is almost no room for us in any train.

Japanese people are known to be kind and modest. However, when the train arrives at the station in rush hour, people behave as if there is no human right in this country. We need to push other people in the train to make some space and squeeze ourselves into the train. While we are in train, sometimes we still keep pushing each other and need to be silent like a statue.

And when the train arrives at the destination, people start walking to each office as if there were nothing special inside the train.

Nevertheless, Japanese people like train. Nippori station is one of stations where many train lines including Japanese bullet train pass by one another.

And there is a bridge next to the station where we can see each train comes into the station. On weekend many people including families with small kids spend a long time watching trains coming in and going out. I got surprised some (not single) kids memorized many names of trains, while I cannot even distinguish some train…

Maybe it would be a good strategy to learn more about train in order to somehow enjoy the time in the train in rush hour.

Akihabara, changing area of electrical products in Tokyo

Recently Akihabara is one of the most famous areas in Tokyo for foreign visitors. But for me it’s one of the most changing areas in Tokyo as well.

When I firstly moved to Tokyo from my hometown in 2002 in order to enter the university, since Akihabara was close to the university, I sometime visited there. At that time, there were many small shops which sold electrical parts for those who can made their own machines such as transceiver.

However after 15 years such scenery has totally changed. the most of such small shops has disappeared and when it comes to electrical products there are some gigantic stores with multi floors.

Yodobashi-Akiba is one of such gigantic stores with 9 floors. And even though some Japanese manufacturers of home electrical appliance recently sold their business to other Asian companies (Sharp is the latest example), here we can still see Japanese technology which is famous for improving the original concept created by others.

For example, next to Roomba developed by iRobot, American company, Panasonic, Japanese company sell their model of the automatic cleaning machine with lower price and (most possibly) better performance.

Japanese people is famous for hard working and also being always tired. So there is unique development of electrical appliance for relaxation. For example Japanese massage chairs are so good that customers start sleeping on the chairs even inside the store.

On the other hand, in the past decades Akihabara has been expanding as a center of Japanese pop cultures such as animation, manga and video game, which Japan has been trying to export as “Cool Japan”. As for this side of Akihabara culture I’m a little afraid that the industry of such cultures is targeting too much the specific people who like cute but unreal girls and started losing diversity. IMG_0070 (1)

Anyway, the change of Akihabara is successful in the sense that I see the more foreign visitors than any other areas in Tokyo. And there are several new fancy hotels which target such visitors.

So over all I think Akihabara is still one of must-visit areas in Tokyo for foreign visitors.