Umami Mart

Everyone is hopping on the eco-friendly bandwagon these days. Japanese advertisers and marketers are drooling at the opportunities and capitalizing heavily. Take this new line of bottled water, brought to you by the good folks at Coca-cola (who totally care about the earth). It’s called I LOHAS (pronouced i-rohasu). LOHAS stands for Lifestyles of Health […]

The concept of being a vegetarian in Japan is illogical unless you are a Buddhist monk. I have done a lot of thinking about why Japanese people aren’t vegetarians, and I think it is because they originally do not have many meat products in their diet, with the exception of fish. Dairy is also very […]

– I was dropped when I was a baby. – At the age of two, I rolled out of a speeding vehicle on to the freeway. – When I was three, I pulled a cord hanging off the kitchen counter and had a 5lb old school electric can opener drop on top of my head. […]

I am hopping on the plane to San Francisco from Tokyo in a few hours, so I won’t be able to see the results for the Umami vote live – but it looks like boobies will beat out all categories. In honor of boobies, I am posting this photo of Oppai (Boobie) Choco I took […]

Seeing as votes are largely being casted for “boobies” for the Umami Vote question “What would you like to see more of on UM?”, I tried searching for something boobie-related to blog about. But blogging about chicken boobies just seemed kind of boring. So forgive me for not being able to fulfill the demand for […]

Last night, I was at a local izakaya, Washio, with some friends. My friend Takachiho, fresh off of work, downed two bottles of beer, three sake servings and quickly moved onto his next drink all in the time span of about 80 minutes. “Master, please give me an awamori!” (Master is the word used in […]

In an ultra-postmodern city such as Tokyo, where sign and meaning are often so far gone from each other, it seems fitting that a cuisine such as American Sushi finds its way “back.” Many visitors from America who come to Japan are often surprised to find out that the sushi rolls we see in the […]

This is my third White Day. One of my first blog posts on UM was about my first White Day. Then there was last year’s White Day. Three times a charm and I finally realized that White Day is the one time to really milk it in the Japanese workplace. So this year, I made […]

Eating while walking, talking, driving, computing and making love. Most Americans have done many or all of these things. Hopefully not simultaneously. Eating while standing in one place, however, is something that Americans don’t do on a regular basis… yet. Enter Tokyo, and the prevalence of stand-up dining, or tachigui. Step off most any train […]

Turkey would be really popular in Tokyo. If everyone had ovens. I love turkey and I knew my friends in Tokyo could appreciate an American icon that doesn’t just come to a theater near you, but comes straight to your dining table. Dinner parties are very rare in Tokyo because space is limited in homes. […]