Oh, Okinawa

We have arrived in lovely Okinawa, where it is wonderfully warm (mid 70s) and pretty. Want to know the best thing about Okinawa? AMERICA.

Look at how American sized that root beer is. Okinawa is the only place you can find A&W restaurants in Japan. In general, root beer is incredibly unpopular here. As a cruel joke on my students I once had them try it and write a review of how it tasted. One girl ran from class gagging.
All America is awesome joking aside, it is a little strange to see American military types wandering around a Japanese city, but thankfully they don't dominate the place quite as much as I had been led to believe.
We've so far struck out in the vegetarian restaurant department. We were really looking forward to going to a vegetarian Taiwanese place that allegedly had a menu of more than 80 faux-meat dishes, but it seems to have closed permanently. Then we tried another place and found it closed for the holiday (it's the Emperor's birthday). We did manage to find an Okinawan place with enough stuff to keep us filled. I'm not a huge fan of goya (Okinawan bitter gourd), but if you mix it with enough tofu and sauce it'll do the trick. We've also been enjoying some sweets. This thing is sort of a Twinkie with sweet potato where the cream would be, and behind it is delicious black sugar coated peanuts.
Tomorrow we're off to the aquarium and a pineapple theme park!

Veggie Osaka adventures

I have a confession. When I go to restaurants, I don't eat Japanese food. Well, most of the time anyway. I've had some wonderful uniquely Japanese food experiences (conveyer belt sushi, okonomiyaki, etc) but a lot of the time I go for the international places, and our trip to Osaka was no exception. This entry acts as a mini-guide to vegetarian dining in Osaka.

We arrived at Namba station, conveniently close to one of our first destinations: Den Den town (Osaka's electronics, video games, and all around nerd district). Greg remarkably remembered the location of a nearby Indian restaurant. Lala had a large selection of decent tasting veggie curries, but it wasn't especially vegan friendly. Greg ended up with a yoghurt dessert he couldn't eat and the mango juice he ordered was suddenly a mango lassi when it appeared.

For dinner, we went to Axum, probably Japan's only Ethiopian place. Remarkably, the owner remembered us from our previous visit over a year ago. He didn't, however, remember that we are vegetarians so we ordered an item that had no meat listed in its ingredients but it actually had beef in it. He was kind enough to replace the dish with something we could eat. Totemo oishikatta desu yo!

The next day we intended to eat at Cafe Millet, an organic vegetarian lunch place, but, alas, it was closed for the holiday. We headed back to the station and decided to give a random Japanese style curry place a try. Unfortunately they used the same curry sauce for all the curries, so even though we ordered the vegetable curry we ended up with some stringy meat bits in our meals. Moral of the story: never trust the Japanese curries.

That night we ate at Kathmandu, a Nepalese place. It gets my vote for the best meal we had in Osaka. We split an oh so wonderfully spicy soy bean salad (the crunchy nut kind!) and then I had an eggplant and potato curry.

We liked Katmandu so much we tried to go back for lunch the next day, but it was closed. Instead we ate at Maharaja, an Indian place in the basement of Umeda station. We've never had problems getting vegetarian food at Indian places, and the owner spoke English, so I'm not sure what went wrong but we soon found that one of the two curries they gave us had chicken in it. Sigh.

I didn't discover until our return that Osaka has a really good (well, by Japanese standards) mexican place called El Pancho. I think we've exhausted most of the activities we actually want to do in Osaka, but I think we might return just for BURRITOS.

Japanese temple lodging, please

Japan decided to lump a bunch of holidays I don't know anything about together so I had a five day weekend. Instead of "respecting the aged" and whatever else I was supposed to be doing for these holidays I decided to visit Koya-san, the headquarters of the Shingon sect of Buddhism located in Wakayama prefecture. It has 120 temples that offer lodging, so in making my selection I used the scientific method known as "hey, this one's ten bucks cheaper!" The primary draw of staying in a temple for Greg and me is they are pretty much the only places in the country that understand vegetarianism. When I mention that I'm a vegetarian here in Japan, the conversation usually continues as follows:

Japanese person: But you eat fish?
Me: No, no animals.
Japanese person: So octopus is ok?

Buddhist temples, however, specialize in a cuisine called Shojin Ryori, which is always vegan. By staying at a temple we were assured two carefully prepared vegan meals a day. We ended up at the Haryo-in temple. I must say, I kind of wish we had sprung the extra ten bucks to stay elsewhere. Firstly, they had two kinds of slippers out front: nice looking ones and cheap, crummy looking ones. We were quickly informed that the nice slippers are for "Japanese only." This rule was pretty firm. We saw a mixed couple and the Japanese man was allowed to wear the nice slippers while his Western girlfriend had to wear the vinyl ones. At this point I'm pretty well accustomed to the various rules about shoes (put the slippers on before going inside, take them off to go on the tatami, put them back on to walk to the bathroom, take them off and put on the toilet slippers to go in the bathroom, etc) but the monk in charge was watching me constantly, just waiting for me to slip up. And the room had bugs in it. Lots of bugs. Food was decent, though. But then I got scolded for putting my tea cup on the food tray instead of the tatami. Ugh.

Freshness Burger: adventures in the "quality, noun" school of Japanese dining

Freshness Burger is a chain of slightly fancier than average fast food restaurants in Japan. They allegedly have a veggie burger. Allegedly, this is what it looks like. It consists of tofu, lettuce, tomato and AVOCADO. This is the closest I’ve gotten to an avocado in Japan: looking at the picture on the menu at Freshness Burger. I have come to the unfortunate belief that the vegetable burger does not actually exist. Every time I get up to the counter and ask for “bejitabaru bagaa wo hitotsu onegaishimasu” the girl does this adorable thing where she nervously smiles and makes an x with her pointer fingers and covers the vegetable burger on the menu before saying “sorry, sold out.” Every time this happens I sigh and order the fried potatoes. I have come to the following conclusion: the vegetable burger only exists on the menu to sell the fried potatoes. Freshness burger lures in the weary vegetarians with the promise of the cheap burger-like meal they’ve been missing so long and then forces them to buy either the fries or onion rings when they actually get to the counter. The avocado is probably the giveaway. Of course they don’t have avocado.

A trip to Freshness Burger is not a complete disappointment, however, because once you have procured your fries you can hit up the condiment bar.

As you can see, the condiment bar allows you to “taste original with the spice in the world!” They have some sort of intense garlic sauce that makes my mouth water and produce bad scents just thinking about it. I will use freely indeed.

Haku-san adventures

On Sunday we attempted to play tourist with mixed results. First, we had lunch at Noppokun, a vegan cafe in the southern section of Kanazawa. They have a fun system where they have sample dishes next to little knitted balls. You fill your rice bowl with the knitted balls of the dishes you want. I had a salad that was quite good, tempura that was super good, and curry that was nice but Greg has made equally tasty Japanese style curry at home for cheaper. After eating we went to the organic grocery they have on the first floor and found VEGAN DOUGHNUTS. If there's one thing Greg never expected to find in Japan, it has to be vegan doughnuts. Surprisingly, they also had a few frozen veggie meat substitutes.

Our next stop was supposed to be Tedori Gorge. It looks very pretty, but it is hard to find precise instructions about how to get there. I thought I had read it was near Tsurugi station so we got out there and walked along the river for a while.

By the time we had reached the final station on the train line we could tell the gorge was a lot further than anticipated. We switched plans and visited Shirayama-hime shrine. Then we took a gondola up to Shishiku, a peak that has skiing in winter, but mostly acts as a launch point for paragliders during the summer. Even though they were inexplicably shaped like tater tots, Greg enjoyed his vegan doughnuts.

The top of Shishiku has many depressing activities for children. For example, they have depressing polar bear playgrounds.

They also have depressing astro turf sledding.