Search results for “Don”

Order Kubota at an izakaya, a casual Japanese pub, and you will usually get a restrained, smooth sake with a clean, quick finish. Kubota sake is a Niigata brand made by Asahi-Shuzo and first released in 1985. It became one of the best-kn...

Pour a glass of sake and take a sip. Then try to say what you noticed. Most people stall right there, because nobody taught them what to look for. This guide on how to taste sake fixes that gap with six simple steps. To taste sake, first...

Open a bowl of miso soup in Tokushima and the seaweed inside may not behave the way you expect. It holds its shape and bites back a little. Locally, that seaweed is often Naruto wakame (鳴門わかめ), a Japanese seaweed specialty from the ...

Most Japanese green teas are judged by their leaves. Kukicha (茎茶) turns that idea around. It's a Japanese green tea made mainly from the stems and leaf stalks of the tea plant, the parts that finishers sort away when they want a neat, ...

You sit down at a small izakaya counter, and the staff slide over a menu with a long column of kanji. Some words look familiar from bottle labels, while others do not. Meanwhile, someone nearby is sipping something warm from a tiny cup, ...

In 2025, Japan exported about 45.9 billion yen of sake to a record 81 countries and regions. Meanwhile, the country's own sake drinkers kept buying less, as they have almost every year since 1973. Contemporary sake is the story of how th...

You pick up a bottle in a Japanese liquor shop and turn it around. On the back, you find a column of kanji and numbers: Junmai Ginjo, 55%, 15%, Yamada Nishiki, +3. So learning how to read a sake label means spotting which clues matter, a...

Kōyō-zuke (紅葉漬), also written koyo-zuke or koyozuke, is a ready-to-eat fermented salmon specialty from northern Fukushima Prefecture. Producers make it by curing and maturing salmon with rice koji and salt. The result is salty and sav...

Say “Wagyu” to many travelers, and they picture beef so marbled it looks almost white. Iwaizumi Tankaku Beef (岩泉短角牛) tells a different story. The beef comes from Japanese Shorthorn cattle raised in Iwaizumi, Iwate Prefecture. It sta...

Beneath the grass of the Heijo Palace site in Nara, archaeologists uncovered a well surrounded by hexagonal stone paving. Nearby lay wooden pipes, the sockets of large ceramic jars, and wooden tablets carrying notes about brewing. These ...