Japan's Food Festivals

About this book

Ask when to visit Japan and the famous answers are blossom and autumn leaves. Ask a Japanese cook and the answer is a different calendar entirely: the week the new rice comes in, the day the crab season opens, the morning the first bonito is landed, the weekend the breweries open their storehouse doors. Two hundred food festivals, harvest fairs and taste events — and nothing else — in one uniform, practical format, covering all 47 prefectures: 25 from Hokkaido, 25 from Tohoku, 50 from Kanto, Koshinetsu and Chubu, 50 from Kansai, Chugoku and Shikoku, 25 from Kyushu and 25 from Okinawa, the islands and nationwide taste events. Every entry gives the typical window, the place, the event inside the life of its land, and how to eat your way around it.

The giants are here — Sapporo's great autumn food gathering, sake festivals that pour a prefecture's breweries into one hall, national gourmet contests where forty towns cook against each other in one park. But this book goes where the "best food in Japan" lists stop: riverbank taro-stew parties in Yamagata where every group cooks its own pot to its own secret recipe, a port grilling its first Pacific saury of the season on the quay where it was landed, orchard villages weighing their champion persimmons, brewery streets where the cedar ball of new sake has just turned brown, island fairs on Sado, Oki and Hachijojima where the producer handing you the bowl is the person who caught, picked or brewed it. Every window is given honestly as the typical year — first-of-season foods move with the weather and the catch — and every entry carries its check date.

The only volume in this series organised by event and date. Its companions treat food by subject and place (regional cuisines, ramen, wagashi, tea, sake breweries, markets) and festivals by rite (the Matsuri volumes); where a food appears in more than one book, it is written here from the festival ground, never copied across.