There are a number of theories about the invention of soy sauce but at least one legend has it that tamari soy sauce was invented in Wakayama, the prefecture at the tip of the Kii peninsula, south of Kyoto. Tamari, which is a specifically Japanese soy sauce, is made almost entirely from soy bean. The story goes that Kakushin, a Zen Buddhist priest who had traveled to the Kinzanji, or the Temple of the Golden Mountain, in China, returned not… Read more »
The problem was, the egg mixture just wasn’t cooperating. I was standing in Elizabeth Ando’s highly organized and functional kitchen, a square frying pan in one hand and long cooking chopsticks in the other, trying to make tamagoyaki, or Japanese rolled egg omelet. It is, at first sight, a fairly simple-looking omelet, sometimes with flecks of aonori (dried green seaweed) mixed in with the egg and sometimes with nori (dried seaweed) sandwiched in between the layers of egg, which is… Read more »
If you don’t ski or snowboard but still want to enjoy the beauty and peace of a snow-enveloped landscape, head over to Satoyama Jujo (里山十帖) in the hot spring resort area of Osawa, Niigata. This is an area that sees some of the heaviest snowfall in Japan. The Nobel-prize winning novelist, Yasunari Kawabata, came here and wrote “Snow Country,” the novel which imprinted the wintry landscape of Niigata on every Japanese student’s mind. And just as Kawabata described it in… Read more »
