Most of you have probably heard of fugu, or blowfish, a Japanese delicacy famed for its deadly potential. Parts of the blowfish are poisonous, and if prepared incorrectly, it’s possible to die after consuming it. (As Homer feared he would in a particularly classic episode of The Simpsons.) Consequently, restaurants have to be certified in order to be able to serve fugu, and chefs are required to undergo special training to learn how to deal with the fish.

Anyway, I’d been curious about fugu for a long time, but I’d never had the chance to actually try it until my trip to Kyushu last month. It tends to be rather expensive and is often served as a full course of different fugu-related dishes, so I just never had the motivation/opportunity to make an event of it.

But when we were passing through Beppu last month, our guidebook informed us that fugu is a specialty of the area and that the best months to eat it are generally in the winter—particularly January. How could we ignore such a sign from the Fates?

So, we made our way to Fugu Matsu, a lovely traditional restaurant just a short walk from Beppu Station. It was already late in the evening, so we didn’t get the full course meal. Instead, we decided to try the fugu sashimi (raw fugu served in thin slices, as pictured above) and the toasted fugu-fin sake (pictured below). People say that fugu is rather tasteless, but I actually disagree—I thought that the sashimi had a very delicate but distinct flavor. Instead of being overtly fishy, it was quite subtle. I thought it was quite nice, actually. They also say that you can sometimes feel your mouth tingling as a result of slight traces of poison, but we didn’t experience any of that. Instead, it was just a nice sashimi experience.

I thought the toasted fin sake (hire-zake) was very tasty as well. I think they toast the fin first, then heat the sake with the fin inside. The toasted fin imparts a very savory, smoky flavor to the sake—you taste the toastiness much more than the fishiness, if that makes sense. It made a nice addition to our little sashimi snack.

So, if you’re at all curious about fugu, I’d recommend taking the plunge and giving it a try.  One day, I hope to do one of the full course meals with fugu prepared several different ways. But if you don’t want to spend that much money, I think the sashimi is a nice way to go. It’s a very common style of fugu preparation, and I think it’s probably the most “pure” one, since the flavor of the fugu is unadulterated by other ingredients—or even by cooking.

There are many fugu restaurants around Japan—you may see tanks like the one above as you walk down the street. (My old neighborhood in Chiba had a surprising number of fugu restaurants, for some reason.) I hear that you can find good/cheap prices if you look around, but I would recommend going with a well-known/well-reviewed restaurant if you’re at all nervous about the risk. And hey, it’s probably a one-time experience, so why not make the most of it, right?

Related Posts

• Shin Yokohama Ramen Museum
• Traditional Kaiseki Cuisine at a Japanese Ryokan
• Wordless Wednesday #18: Dumplings!

Spotted at Glover Garden:

“As the story goes, touching a heart-shaped paved stone will make your dreams of love come true, while good things will come if you find both stones.”

Happy Wednesday!

Since I entered graduate school, I’ve often bemoaned the fact that my pleasure reading has fallen by the wayside. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when reading becomes a huge part of your day job, it becomes the last thing you want to do on your time off. But this year, I decided to reclaim reading as a hobby by setting myself a “50 book challenge.” I made it my goal to read 50 non-school-related books from cover to cover, and I just barely made it across the finish line in time.

I found this challenge really rewarding. 50 books isn’t really that many—it boils down to about one per week. All in all, I ended up reading roughly 17,742 pages of text—the longest book was George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords at 1,128 pages, but there were some really short selections like The Time Machine and The Metamorphosis thrown in as well. Anyway, setting this goal helped to keep me reading consistently. I loved that it gave me the excuse to read classics and catch up on new fantasy and young adult sensations. And even though it took time, I really think it helped my general state of mind to do some reading outside of my Japanese language study and dissertation research. I thought I would share with you the final 50, in case some of you might be looking for reading suggestions. Books are listed in the order read. The items in bold are recommended. Ratings are rough evaluations: = didn’t really like it; = it was ok; = liked it; = really liked it; = it was amazing

Title	Author	Rating
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements	Sam Kean
A Matter of Magic	Patricia C. Wrede
Far From the Madding Crowd	Thomas Hardy
The Picture of Dorian Gray	Oscar Wilde
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything	Joshua Foer
Slaughterhouse-Five	Kurt Vonnegut
To the Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie	Muriel Spark
The Lost Hero	Rick Riordan
The Hunger Games	Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire	Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay	Suzanne Collins
The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown	Charles R. Morris
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?	Philip K. Dick
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake	Aimee Bender
The Postman Always Rings Twice	James M. Cain
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People	Stephen R. Covey
Artemis Fowl	Eoin Colfer

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading	Nina Sankovitch
Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies	Seth Grahame-Smith
Anthem	Ayn Rand
Shiver	Maggie Stiefvater
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader	Anne Fadiman
Everything Matters!	Ron Currie Jr.
Linger	Maggie Stiefvater
Death with Interruptions	Jose Saramago
The Magicians	Lev Grossman
The Magician King	Lev Grossman
Forever	Maggie Stiefvater
South Of The Border, West Of The Sun	Haruki Murakami
A Game of Thrones	George R.R. Martin
A Clash of Kings	George R.R. Martin
A Storm of Swords	George R.R. Martin
A Feast for Crows	George R.R. Martin
A Dance with Dragons	George R.R. Martin

The Fallen	Celia Thomson
The Chosen	Celia Thomson
The Stolen	Celia Thomson
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian	Sherman Alexie
The Imperfectionists	Tom Rachman
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	Maya Angelou
The Time Machine	H.G. Wells
The Death of Ivan Ilych	Leo Tolstoy
Eats, Shoots & Leaves	Lynne Truss
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell	Susanna Clarke
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd	Agatha Christie
The Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka
The Turn of the Screw	Henry James
The Screwtape Letters	C.S. Lewis

For those of you looking to invigorate your fun reading, I highly recommend joining Goodreads, where you can track/review your books, explore new selections, and meet readers with similar tastes or reading goals. I’m currently part of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die group, which is currently working through the list via a monthly reading selection (I just finished the December selection, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and I loved it!). I’m also totally inspired by the people participating in the Around the World in 52 Books challenge, though I probably won’t be able to take part. Anyway, if you’re looking for a reading support group, Goodreads may be a good place to start!

I’m currently in the midst of an amazing trip through Kyushu and Kyoto—I’ll have lots of great stuff to share with you when I get back! For now, here’s a shot of me in front of Umi Jigoku, one of the more beautiful of Beppu’s nine “hells” (scenic hot springs).

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 44,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 16 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

n 2011, there were 67 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 255 posts. There were 566 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 50mb. That’s about 2 pictures per day.

The busiest day of the year was November 21st with 6,346 views. The most popular post that day was Traditional Kaiseki Cuisine at a Japanese Ryokan.

My Five Most-Viewed Posts of the Year

1. Traditional Kaiseki Cuisine at a Japanese Ryokan

2. Places in Japan: One Fantastic Day in Historic Takayama

3. Goodbye, Lennon: Remembering the John Lennon Museum

4. Things I Like About Japan #5: Koi

5. An Afternoon at the Hakone Open-Air Museum

Thanks again to all of you who helped make 2011 such a great year for A Modern Girl!

Click here to see the complete report.

Related Posts

• 2010 in Blogging
• Looking Back at Post A Week 2011

It’s the end of the year, which means it’s time for reflecting on days gone by and for scheming about days yet to come. I imagine (hope) that there will be a few such posts here, but I thought I’d kick things off with some thoughts about my participation in Post A Week 2011.

Just to remind you, Post A Week 2011 and Post A Day 2011 were initiatives taken up by WordPress to encourage its blogging community. The Daily Postrecently posted a list of suggested questions to help bloggers determine their “blogging strategy” for the new year:

1. Why did you start the Post a Day/Week Challenge?

As might be expected, I signed up for the Post A Week challenge because I wanted to incentivize myself to blog more consistently. I’m a busy girl, and I have a tendency to drop off the map for weeks or even months at a time when I get too absorbed in my work or in travel. But when I look back at my diaries and blogs later on, I always wish that I had taken the time to record more of my thoughts and experiences during these hectic periods, as the memories tend to slip away over time. I saw the Post A Week challenge as a way of minimizing these gaps.

2. Describe the state of your blog at the time you started the challenge.

This blog was just about 6 months old when I started the challenge, though I’d taken the time to import older entries dating back to 2005 from some of my now-defunct former blogs. I’d had some early success when one of my posts was picked up on a Japanese language news site, and I logged 13,624 views for the whole of 2010. I think I had around 17 followers on WordPress and a handful of subscribers in Google Reader.

3. How did your blog evolve over the course of the challenge?

Now, as we approach the end of 2011, I have logged over 46,198 views from January thru December—a marked increase. I currently have around 110 followers on WordPress and an additional 71 subscribers on Google Reader. Notably, two posts of mine (Goodbye Lennon: Remembering the John Lennon Museum and Places in Japan: One Fantastic Day in Historic Takayama) were featured on Freshly Pressed, which gave me a lot of exposure and started to establish A Modern Girl as a travel blog particularly focused on Japan (where I currently live and conduct research). I also participated in a number of blogging festivals and roundups, such as the Japan Blog Matsuri (which I hosted in September on the theme “Reasons to Visit Japan”), J-Festa, Wordless Wednesday, Travel Photo Thursday, and Show Me Japan. And I benefited every day from the listing of my blog on The Japan Blog List.

All of these things had the effect of solidifying my blog as a travel blog meant for general public consumption. I think I had originally intended it to be more personal and eclectic in nature, but given the heavy element of travel in my life at the moment and the obvious interest in this material, the shift seemed to make sense. I suspect that if I were to make it even more explicitly into a travel blog, it would have even more success, but I’m reluctant to do so as of yet.

4. Did you post as often as you had hoped? Why or why not?

Predictably, I did not post as much as I would have hoped. Including this post, I have written 71 entries this year. And while this averages out to more than one post per week, there were a number of gaps—I didn’t post for the entire month of October, for example. So, I would have liked to be able to post a bit more consistently. But you know, real life intervenes! Things are busy. Research and travel get hectic. And that’s just the way of things. I wouldn’t want to sacrifice too much of my real life activity for the sake of blogging, so I don’t know how much this can be helped. ;)

5. What type of blogging strategy works best for you?

Given the tumultuousness of my schedule, I find it works best for me to write a bunch of posts at once when I have the time and energy, and either to schedule them for delayed posting via WordPress or save them in draft form in my local editor. I’ve come to really like Windows Live Writer as a tool for composing and saving posts—I find it much easier to work with that the WordPress interface, and it’s very easy to integrate with WordPress (and it’s free!). So, whenever I find myself with some spare time and motivation, I sit down at my desk and bang out sketches of a few posts that I want to write sometime—even if it’s just a post title or a single sentence reminding me of an experience or a place—and then I save these as individual draft entries in Live Writer. This serves as a mind-jogger for those times when I want to write but can’t think of anything to write about—my own private list of blogging prompts, if you will. Depending on the time I have available, I can then choose a prompt (or multiple prompts), upload them to WordPress, and schedule them to be posted sometime in the future, often in conjunction with weekly blogging roundups like the ones listed above in #3 (which I also find to be helpful blogging motivators).

6. If you could go back to the beginning, what would you do differently?

I would try to be more strategic about scheduling most posts in a weekly fashion. Despite my good intentions, I still ended up with a couple of month-long gaps in blogging, accompanied by weeks where I would post almost every day. While this variation is ok, I would like to have been a bit more consistent—I think it makes for a better experience for my readers and for myself.

7. What are you most proud of accomplishing this year?

I’m proud of being featured twice on Freshly Pressed for these two posts:

• Goodbye Lennon: Remembering the John Lennon Museum
• Places in Japan: One Fantastic Day in Historic Takayama

And of being featured on the Searchina news website in Japanese:

• My post: Traditional Kaiseki Cuisine at a Japanese Ryokan
• Link to the Japanese article: 日本の懐石料理「きめ細かいサービスと味に感動」

It’s very flattering to have had my posts featured in this way. I’m glad that others enjoy my writing and photography! Plus, I love that WordPress breaks down its featured posts into tags, to make it easier for people to find your material—for example, the screenshot above shows how my post about the John Lennon Museum was showcased under tags such as “art.”

8. Name some great blogs you discovered through the challenge.

I actually didn’t find myself following too many of my fellow Post A Week bloggers in the end—I started out doing so, but it quickly (regrettably) fell by the wayside. But here are a couple of blogs that I found through the challenge and still enjoy keeping up with:

Teacup and Cake
Out & About

9. What surprised you about the challenge?

How difficult it was! It sounds so simple to blog once a week, every week. Just 52 posts in a whole year—it should be a snap, right? But no, it took a lot of time and energy to come up with interesting content of which I could feel proud.

10. What advice would you give to others who want to blog regularly?

Enjoy it! Make it part of your life. Let it serve as a complement, not a detraction. At its best, blogging is not only a way for me to record my experiences, it also gives me an added incentive to do more with my life—go more places, take more pictures, learn more stuff. I think that the key to blogging regularly lies in maximizing the benefits that blogging can yield to your daily life.’

And less philosophically: Put pictures in your posts! Pictures make everything better. Even if you can’t manage to take a picture yourself, find one on the Internet and credit the photographer/source accordingly. Visuals really add to the reading experience.

11. What are your blogging goals for 2012?

I’m tempted to take up the Post A Week challenge again! Although I definitely increased the frequency of my blogging during 2011, the consistency wasn’t quite where I would have liked. Once a week seems like a good goal for me, so here’s hoping that I find success in the new year!

I finished the second quarter of my intensive language program last week, so I’ve been taking the opportunity to explore some of the sights and tastes that the Tokyo area has to offer. I recently made a trip to the Shin Yokohama Ramen Museum, one of Yokohama’s most well-known attractions. In 1994, founder Yoji Iwaoka decided to combine his love for his hometown with his passion for ramen by opening the Ramen Museum, which, according to the official brochure, was “the first food amusement park to be created anywhere in the world.”

There are two separate sections to the museum. The entrance on the street level leads to a small exhibit illustrating the history and types of ramen, a souvenir shop that’s nearly as big, and a giant slot car racing circuit (a past-time that was evidently very popular in the 1960s). But if this were all there were to the museum, it’d be pretty disappointing (especially if you can’t read Japanese, since nothing is written in English). The real attraction—and the part that makes it utterly worthwhile—is downstairs, where the ramen shops are nestled within a 1:1 replica of a section of Tokyo in the year Showa 33 (1958).

Pretty cool, huh? The museum features 9 different shops, selected as the best representations of various regional types of ramen (Tokyo, Kurume, Wakayama, Kumamoto, Saitama, Sapporo, Yamagata, and Yokohama). Regional styles differ in noodle thickness, noodle length, soup ingredients, etc. You have to pay to eat at the shops. For 500 yen, you can get a “mini” bowl (which may not be so mini, depending on your appetite), or you can pay 800 yen for a full serving. I recommend getting the mini bowls and trying a few different varieties. Definitely check out the Ramen Museum website for more information on the ramen shops—here’s a screenshot from their site to whet your appetite:

Screenshot taken from the Shin Yokohama Ramen Museum website

Anyway, we had fun walking around in the late 1950s setting and soaking up the wonderful smells. In the end, we settled on trying Eki, the Sapporo ramen restaurant. The first photo in this post (above) gives you a close-up of my mini-ramen bowl. The restaurant offered miso, shoyu, or shio-based soups. We tried the miso and the shio (pictured above), which proved to be a nice contrast—the miso was amazingly rich, while the shio was quite light. The restaurant itself was simple, featuring long counters to seat customers—it was tucked away in a cool little hallway above the other shops:

Anyway, I highly recommend a trip to the Shin Yokohama Ramen Museum if you’re in the area. It’s fun, and it’s incredibly tasty. The restaurants in the museum are supposed to be exemplars of their kind, and they’re typically long-established family institutions. So, if you’re looking to introduce visitors to the wonders of ramen or perhaps sample a few varieties yourself, you can trust that these shops won’t lead you astray. Plus, the décor is so cool!

Tip: You can get a 50 yen discount on admission by printing out the coupon available here.

Cautionary Note: This museum is located near Shin-Yokohama, not Yokohama!

Related Posts:

• Traditional Kaiseki Cuisine at a Japanese Ryokan
• Koganecho Bazaar 2011, Yokohama
• Wordless Wednesday #18: Dumplings!
• Pigging Out on Peking Duck

Thanks to a tip from the always useful Time Out Tokyo, I stopped by on December 17 to catch the beginnings of “Santarchy 2011 near the statue of Hachiko in Shibuya (just down the street from my apartment). From the Time Out website:

Giving Christmas a bad name for 18 years, the annual tradition of Santarchy sees hordes of Santa Clauses gather, get drunk and make merry in cities throughout the world. Tokyo’s will be starting from Hachiko in Shibuya at noon on December 17, and anybody hoping to make sense of it all should take heed of a statement on the official website: ‘No violence, no insistence, no purpose, no commercialism, no hypocrisy, no money, no spectator, you are Santa.’ Amen to that.

A bit odd perhaps, but fun. The Santas were still gathering when I popped by. I wonder what mischief they got up to later on.

  I’m not sure what these two items were—but they were tasty! Fried crab also arrived toward the end of the meal, accompanied by some kabocha chips BREAKFAST So many little treats, accompanied by rice, miso soup and green tea! Tsukemono and salad

An assortment of seaweed, yogurt, meat, egg, and more! And the fish, the star of the show! Anyway, it was a truly satisfying culinary experience. If you can arrange it, I strongly recommend staying at a ryokan and enjoying some kaiseki cuisine at some point. Our room, dinner, breakfast and unlimited onsen access cost us about 16,900 yen each—not cheap, but a good value considering all that was included. You may be able to find better deals elsewhere, but Hakone is a particularly popular tourist destination, so this was the best deal I could find. By the way, I also had an amazing experience at a tofu kaiseki restaurant earlier this year, which I really should post about at some point. Imagine the things above—except everything is tofu! :)

Note: This post is also being submitted to the 2011 Special Edition of J-Festa.

Related Posts:

• An Afternoon at the Hakone Open-Air Museum
• Pigging Out on Peking Duck
• Wordless Wednesday #18: Dumplings!

A few of the other students and I were invited to a meeting of the local Rotary Club of Yokohama on Friday. They graciously provided us lunch in exchange for asking us some questions about international exchange. Just thought I’d share a quick picture!