To deal with Asian food, you need to be okay with two elements - one, is that flavours can be subtle, eg. steamed fish with ginger and soy, steamed brown sugar cakes, and two, salty-sweet flavours. I can wax lyrical about these buns, but if you can't do salty-sweet, you won't like them, full stop. (More for me!) The crust is almost pure sugar, and inside, the already glorious char siu is cooked with a soy-maltose-onion gravy. You think chocolate-coated bacon is a...

Saturday morning started 3am, for Mt Fuji's summit. We collected Saito and Shiroki san en route to tick off this challenge with friends ✔️ And that we did! The journey to Shizuoka took 4 hours, and we set off from the car park to the 5th station starting point, by bus which is a further 30mins. The starting point is at 2400m, and to adjust to the altitude we spent two hours at the station before starting our ascent. The weather changed dramatically withi...

The vehicles in Hall A each played a key role in the automobile's development. They include the world's first motor vehicle (built by Carl Benz), a Ford Model T, a Bugatti, prewar Japanese models from Datsun and Ohta, a Jeep used by US forces during occupied days 1945 from Volkswagen and MG, and a Mercedes-Benz 300SL. Hall B is a nostalgic look at a Daihatsu tricycle or Mazda from the 1950s. The exhibits include models from Austin-Healey and a Triumph TR3, Alfa...

The Kawaguchiko Music Forest (河口湖オルゴールの森, Kawaguchiko Orgel no Mori) is a small theme park and museum devoted to automatic musical instruments. Its main hall displays antique music boxes, mechanical organs and other automatic musical instruments mostly from European countries. The largest of them is a French fairground organ from 1905 which takes up an entire hall and plays every 30 minutes. The main building also houses a concert hall where c...

People all around the World love sake! Sake is Japanese rice wine. It can be brewed different ways like other types of alcohols, which gives it different appearances and tastes. Japanese people once called sake Omiki, or “sacred wine,” and have a tradition since ancient times of offering it to the Gods on special occasions. . Now, people enjoy sake on a regular basis, just like beer or wine are drunk in the West. Clear water from Mt. Fuji is the key to gr...