You may remember that on one of our rail days out, we bought some shochu. Well, we've been trying it...

Shochu (not to be confused with Korean soju), is a distilled spirit, with an alchohol content of about 25%. It can be produced on a number of different ingredients (for example, "black" sugar, barley, buckwheat, or even sake lees) but the most popular is the sweet potato shochu made in southern Kyushu. Shochu is actually more popular in Japan than sake.

Here are our two bottles, imo (sweet potato) on the left, and kokuto (black sugar) on the right:


You can drink it in a variety of ways (and of course we've very much enjoyed the experimentation...) It's good cold and neat. It gains refreshing gin-and-tonic qualities if you lengthen it with fizzy water. And the sweet potato one can also be drunk with warm water, which gives a completely different taste and aroma. You don't want the water too hot, of course; somewhere around 70C is good. The mixture is four parts water to six parts shochu, and you pour the hot water first, and then add the shochu.

It's all been a nice little local experience.

And then there's coffee... The one at the top comes from The Local Coffee Stand. But we also like Rec Coffee, where we're now so local that we have loyalty cards:


We also tried 33 Cafe Green. No photos, because I didn't realize at the time what the "aojiru" latte I was drinking actually was.

Aojiru literally means "green juice". It is produced by juicing green, leafy vegetables, and it's very nutricious. But the problem with this health miracle is that it tastes terrible... So 33 Cafe Green -- which, I think, must be related to this one in Tokyo -- specializes in making the healthy stuff taste palatable.

My aojiru latte definitely tasted fine. No vegetable overtones at all. In fact, at the time I just thought I was drinking some kind of matcha... I guess you have to ask, along with the author of that article: "Can you really call it aojiru at this point?" But he was ultimately persuaded: "If you’re curious about aojiru but don’t want to jump right into the bitter, grassy taste, you can use this as a starting point."

And finally, a quintessential Japanese food experience: Our lunch at Teishoku Yayoi today.

It took a lot of scouting to find this meal. We had heard that opening hours in Japan might be a bit unpredictable now that we're into the New Year holiday period, and today certainly proved that to be true. Lots of eateries were closed; the open ones were very crowded; some had extraordinarily long queues.

But we were very happy with what we got here. Teishoku means a set meal. You order and pay by means of a touch-screen before you go in (English version available). Tables are provided with protective screens.