sake

Three weeks back at home

how, where can we hope to find

Japan in London?

Part of my fortunate workload at present is to edit, catalogue and store all the photographs and videos we shot during our month-long tour. It’s wonderful to relive the moments and taste the food but oh the withdrawal symptoms! So this Saturday since we had to go into town, we decided to recapture some of those elements of Japan that are available in the city.

Several years ago we dined very well with friends at an extremely unpretentious restaurant in Brewer Street so I walked along there and while perusing the menu was approached by a young Japanese man who said “I really like this place.” That’s good news and he was soon followed by another (Japanese) customer who engaged me in conversation – just like in Japan – wanting to know my interest in Ten Ten Tei. I mentioned that I’d eaten there once a while ago, had just come back from Japan and was looking to replicate the delights of dining there in London. “You can’t do better than this,” he said, “it’s genuine, simple Japanese food, well prepared and served.” I thanked him and said I’d be back with my wife later – which we will. He then wanted to know where we’d been in Japan and was amazed at the itinerary, saying we’d been to parts of Japan he hadn’t. But then I guess that’s true of many visitors to the UK who have been to places I haven’t here. So a good start with reminders of Japanese friendliness and the confirmation of another good place to eat. It seems not to have its own website but has a Facebook page.

Dee rejoined me for a trip to Arrigato which again has no website but you can get a good picture from reviews on Yelp! We browsed the shelves, looked at taro root, burdock and other ingredients we had tasted, ogled the excellent bento boxes for lunch, saw sushi, noodles and soup being consumed by others and vowed to go back there to eat. In the meantime we stocked up on enoki mushrooms, konbu (seaweed), the super-addictive torpedo rice cracker and peanut snack and checked out the tea stocks for future reference. This included packs of Fuji matcha (green powdered tea) in fabulous retro style. Arrigato is smaller and has less variety than the Japan Centre on Regent Street but was less busy and probably an easier place to shop. And of course you can buy online from the Japan Centre website but you miss the fun of browsing.

On the roof of the Brunei Gallery at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies of London University) is a Japanese inspired garden which we had intended to visit before our trip so today seemed like a good day to remedy that. It got better too as in the gallery was an exhibition called Treasures from the Tenri Central Library which covered 1000 years of art in Japanese books. A brilliant display of drawings, watercolours, woodblock prints and illustrations from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. There are some great representative images here. Exquisite work that recalled some of our museum and gallery visits in Japan and well worth a visit by anyone with an interest in the production and illustration of books.

Then it was up to the roof garden a small but beautiful area with significant elements of Japanese garden planning in this case strongly reminiscent of Tofukuji in Kyoto with raked gravel with boulders, squares of limestone alternating with beds of thyme and a scented wisteria as an arcade over a restful bench. The calm was slightly disturbed by shouts form the roof of nearby Senate House where someone was abseiling down the building.

Back in the gallery we could have taken part in calligraphy and origami demonstrations which are going on until the end of June and also include Gagaku music, the tea ceremony, sake tasting and lectures using the exhibition as a resource. However, welcome though this discovery had been we were also intent on visiting the Wellcome Collection only half a mile away where there is an exhibition Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan which closes at the end of June.

It’s an attitude-altering, mind-expanding exhibition that presents the work of untrained and self-taught artists all of whom live in the care of the state – as the exhibition brochure says “in social welfare facilities”. The clay and papier-mâché models and sculptures, tapestries made from leftover scraps of thread, paintings and drawings on cardboard and paper factory offcuts, demonstrate the creativity of those who might be considered disadvantaged in modern society. They may be raw but the variety, impact and lasting impression left by this exhibition makes them very definitely works of art in that they communicate ideas and emotions to the viewer. The pieces exhibited ranged from bold life-sized depictions of the artist and friends to obsessively meticulous drawings of imaginary cities of the future. It served to give us a new interest in “outsider” or “raw art” which is increasingly recognized as a genre worthy of study. There’s a good discussion in RawVision magazine. If you can get to the exhibition before the end of June, do. It’s well worth it. And the Wellcome Collection itself is another superb relatively unsung museum of science and the mind. As its slogan says it’s “The free destination for the incurably curious”.

Sunday had a Murakami dimension too. We took the grandchildren to Chislehurst Caves which involved walking in semi-darkness through (part of) 20 mile labyrinth of chalk caverns under south east London. Dampness, darkness and lots of dead ends brought several passages from Haruki back to mind. Labyrinths in the mind or physical ones to be crawled through recur in 1Q84, Kafka on the shore and several other of his books and stories.

So we did discover several aspects of Japan in London last weekend and look forward to meeting a dear friend for dinner and reminiscence in the excellent Watatsumi restaurant on Friday.

With wood block prints to

start our day we wonder what

else will come our way?

After the exhaustion of the last two days we decided on a quietly cultured vacation day. But before we start in on that let’s just share some of the Joys of Japan.

Jazz is alive and well and is the music of choice in most shops, restaurants, coffee shops and bars. It’s usually easy grooving West Coast style jazz and it’s so much less intrusive than relentless pop.
Manners in the main are what we miss in the UK. They are not all perfect – nobody offered us oldies a seat on the metro but in general people are friendly, helpful and polite.
Heated loo seats – Dee was so delighted with her first experience of the high tech loo off the hotel lobby, she insisted I go check it out. This one was brilliant and we’ve now found many others are accompanied by control panels fit for the SS Enterprise that will pre-sterilize the seat, add pleasant odours and wash various parts of your lower body on request – but the best is sitting down on a warm seat.

We have some framed reproductions of Hokusai’s 36 views of Mount Fuji in our hall at home and are both fans of these delicate, funny and sometimes outrageous wood block prints known as ukiyo-e which were produced as popular art from the mid seventeenth to the early twentieth century. There’s a museum devoted to them in Harajuku which we visited where there was a fascinating exhibition of prints depicting women’s fashions, hair and make-up styles. Who knew the green lower lip was so desirable! There was also a great display which showed the process of making Hokusai’s The Wave an image I guess most people are familiar with. As we left there was a spattering of rain and our eyes were drawn to a line of brightly-hued umbrellas.These were office workers queuing at Harajuku’s trendiest popcorn store to buy popcorn for their lunch! We passed on the opportunity – few things are worth waiting that long for. So we then walked over to the Meiji Park through a little drizzle to the Meiji Shrine in which the immortal souls of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken are preserved in Shinto honour. They were largely responsible for making Japan a modern nation in touch with the rest of the world. It’s such a place of pilgrimage that it was rebuilt from funds raised by public subscription after the war which destroyed it. The Japan Sake Manufacturers also donate these huge barrels of sake each year as a mark of respect. It’s a place of quiet, serious contemplation in the busy city and is clearly valued by many as a place to spend time in, not just somewhere to tick off on the “Let’s do Tokyo Tour”

We had been pretty pleased with ourselves for mastering the Metro to get to the museum but our next trip after a quick lunch involved working out the best route right across the city. We had to find the right entrance to the line we needed and then change midway. The subway is easy to use and a great way of getting quickly around the huge metropolis that is Tokyo. We ended up in Asakusa where I thought I might have bought my etchings but as it transpired no likely shops were spied and the search goes on. However Asakusa has an amazing shopping thoroughfare leading to the Kannon Temple, as it was called in 1981 when I visited but now known as the Senso-ji. Buddhist rather than Shinto the visitors are more expressive with cleansing and incense wafting rituals to be performed before approaching the temple. We captured a few of them…

… and Dee captured Mike still seeking Murakami.

We again attracted the attention and advice of an elderly gent entirely self-taught and fluent in English – from self-help books and listening to the BBC World Service – note to the new regime at Broadcasting House! He was sorry the cherry blossom had been so early this year but thought we might catch some near Mount Fuji tomorrow and told us about the different varieties with their varying shades from almost white to deepest pink. We then strolled around some artisan jewellers, ceramicists – no stand yet Mike but we’re looking – and fabulous fan and fabric stores before getting the subway to the heart of Tokyo shopping – Ginza. Mitsukoshi department store had a marvellous roof garden on the ninth floor overlooking the street where we enjoyed a green plum and, separately, black sesame icecream. We’ve all seen the pictures of Ginza crossing but it is really incredible to see the sheer number of people late into the evening who descend onto and beneath this world-famous street. Again in the interests of finding Murakami’s Japan we had to visit the subterranean bars that lead from Ginza to Shinbashi where so many people and some of his characters seem to finish off their working day. Ours ended with a visit to – oh come off it! – a tapas bar just off the Ginza with Basque pintxos and Rioja. Then the subway back to the hotel to write. Oh and we ordered and printed out our baseball ticket for next moth in the local convenience store on the way- what a service!

An early night is needed as we have a six a m alarm set to be the first to buy the new Murakami tomorrow.

Tag: sake

Japan in London

A day of culture in Tokyo