Japan's Soft Serve & Ice Cream

About this book

English travel guides mention Japanese soft serve in a paragraph. This book makes it the whole journey: a field guide to the flavours themselves — what a swirl is, where it was born, and how it is eaten on the spot.

200 entries in eight parts, each in one fixed format — What It Is, Roots & Place, Taste & Texture, and How to Enjoy & Where to Find It. Hokkaido farm milk, Yubari melon and Furano lavender; Sendai zunda and Sato Nishiki cherries; Tokyo station milk stands, Asakusa parlours and island milk from Izu Oshima and Hachijojima; Kanazawa gold leaf, Uji matcha and Osaka mixed juice; Setoda lemon, sudachi, yuzu and shikuwasa; Amaou strawberries, Miyazaki mango and Okinawa beni-imo; the famous dare list of wasabi, soy sauce, miso, garlic and curry cones; and the new craft gelato, mochi ice and taiyaki cones of modern counters.

No flavour is ranked and no shop's prices or hours are asserted — shops change them; flavours, towns and customs endure. A glossary and indexes by flavour family close the book, so you can plan a journey by taste instead of by map. Every entry runs to more than 200 words of its own, with no sentence repeated anywhere in the book.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.