Japan Navigator

Akita is lies in the northwestern corner of the main island of Honshu and is a beautiful prefecture of rugged mountains, beech forests and deep lakes. As cold winds blow in from Siberia over the Japan Sea, the severe winters bring heavy snowfall. Tazawako is Japan’s deepest lake and Mt Chokai, in the south [...]

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Tsukemono, Japanese pickles, are a constant part of every Japanese meal that contains rice – they are usually combined into a set with the rice and miso soup (ichiju issai, “one soup and one vegetable”). Pickling was an important way of preserving vegetables and get the necessary vitamins also in winter. In the past, Japanese [...]

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Suntory’s Yamazaki Distillery is the oldest whisky plant in Japan. It was set up in 1923 by Torii Shinjiro, the founder of Suntory which until then had been only manufacturing the extremely sweet Akadama port wine. While Akadama for obvious reasons never has won any hearts outside of Japan, Suntory’s malt whisky has been another [...]

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The egg masses of fish or their ripe internal ovaries are called roe (gyoran). Both raw and cooked, roe is a popular food in Japan. We find the following types:

Ikura or salmon roe. The term is a loan word from the Russian ikra, caviar. Although not as precious as its Russian namesake, the bead-like ikura-spheres have [...]

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When searching the web, there seems to be a lot of confusion what the sweet liquid flavoring called mirin in fact is.
It is, for example. often called “sweet cooking sake”, but that is wrong. Mirin does not contain any sake and has not been fermented either.
Mirin is produced by mixing steamed glutinous rice [...]

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