NEWS OF TRAVEL JAPAN

Kenroku-en Garden is so beautiful, and has various countenance of changeable landscape sights and seasonal nature. Especially, on a fine morning after snowing during the previous night in winter, the maiden beauty of Kenroku-en is superficial. You can have a super experience in the white silent world, of listening to the sound of foot steps on the virgin snow while looking at beautiful scenes. Kenroku-en has a lot of old pine trees with heavy branches. In winter each tree is guarded by a lot of ropes from the top of a long straight wooden pole called “Yuki-zuri” for the sake of preventing those branches from breaking by the weight of the snow. The aspect of the pine trees with Yuki-zuri, which has the harmony of nature with the artistic triangle, is wonderful. Kenroku-en means the garden which has six characteristics, wide-scape, profound and quiet, artistic, old and elegant, water & spring and wide viewing from it. It is the garden of the “daimyo”, the lord of the samu...

Mikan, the mandarin orange, is the most popular fruit in winter in Japan. It has good sweet and adequate flavor which doesn’t obscure the taste of any other foods. For example, if you eat a mikan and drink a cup of Japanese green tea alternately, both of them can be your favorite. In addition, its weak acidity doesn’t stimulate your tongue so that you can eat any number of mikan. Moreover, the mikan has a lot of nutrition to prevent colds. Furthermore, the skin of the mikan is so thin that people can peel off by hand, and the size of a section of a mikan is similar to a larger piece of chocolate, it is easy to eat it. To sum up, the mikan is the best fruit for spending a luxurious time in winter. Kotatsu Kotatsu is a facility for keeping warm in a room in winter. The kotatsu is composed of a four-foot table with a electric heat source, a wide warm blanket and a table-board. You can warm yourself sticking your legs into the kotatsu. You can do anything in the kotatsu, eati...

February 3 is the event of the start of spring, “setsubun”, as the folklore culture of Japan next to new-year, “syogatsu” on January 1. On the setsubun day Japanese people scatter roasted soybeans and loudly say “fu-ku-wa-u-chi (luck, be inside), o-ni-wa-so-to (demons, go away)”, or recently we eat sushi rolled in nori, “eho-maki”. You can look at its ritual at any large famous shrines on February 3. I will explain the meaning of roasted soybeans scattering on the setsubun day. Scattering roasted soybeans is to purify bad vibes. January 3 is the last day of the year in the old Japanese calendar. Then demons are the comparison of the bad vibes accumulated through out a year, and luck is a lucky deity of the new year. My best recollection of setsubun is the one in Kyoto. I worked at a bank branch nearby Shimo-gamo Shrine. Banks in Japan close at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, so we welcomed ritual people from Shimo-gamo Shrine into the bank which had no bank-customers after closing t...

What is your image of blow fish? A food or a prohibited fish to eat? Blow fish alone is dangerous and can cause death. Many countries prohibit serving blow fish to eat. However in Japan, blow fish is popular to eat as an expensive gastronomic food in winter. The story of the beginnings of eating blow fish Blow fish eating had been officially prohibited for a long time from the 16th century, but common people had eaten it behind officials backs. In 1887 then prime minister, Hirofumi Ito, stayed at a high class Japanese hotel in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi prefecture. However bad weather prevented all fishing, so that the hotel had no fresh fish to serve to the prime minister. In the end the woman master, who was confronted with the problem of having no fresh fish, served their blow fish, probably it might have been kept in their pool, and prepared to receive a heavy punishment. On eating the blow fish dish, Hirofumi admired it, finally he abolished the prohibition of eating blow fish...