Japan's Markets & Street Food

About this book

English books about Japanese food tell stories or teach recipes. This book does the travellers' job instead: a field guide to the places where Japan actually eats.

200 entries in eight parts, each in one fixed format — Location, Signature Foods & Shop Types, How to Walk & Etiquette, and Season & Timing. Tokyo's outer market and shitamachi shopping streets; Kyoto's Nishiki lane and Osaka's Kuromon and sauce-rule districts; wholesale outer markets and dawn asaichi you may honestly enter; twenty-seven shotengai from Sendai to Naha; Fukuoka's yatai and the night alleys of a dozen cities; station ramen streets and depachika basements; tuna, crab and squid ports and the great roadside stations; and a closing part on fair days, stall types and the rules — dip once, eat where the seller says, return your dishes — that make every market work.

No per-shop prices or hours are asserted — shops change them; the place, the season and the custom do not. Wholesale entries cover only the public edge, and the eat-or-walk rule is stated honestly for every street, because that single misunderstanding ruins more market visits than any language gap.

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.