Japanese-Australian software engineer in Tokyo. Writing about hiking in Japan, coffee, birding, books and anything else that piques my interest.
We recently visited GESHARY COFFEE, a specialty coffee shop and roaster near Tokyo station that specialises in selling coffee made with Geisha (also known as Gesha) beans. They offer pour-over, cold brew and espresso-based lattes. The prices range from 1100 to 4070 yen for a cup. As a bit of an explanation, most specialty coffee stores in Japan tend to stock a range of beans from different…
MIA MIA is a small coffee shop in Kuramae. Its specialty seems to be in being a place where you are guaranteed to have a friendly chat, whether with one of the baristas or one of the other customers around you. So it's a great place to hang out if you are in need of some social interaction.
Porta Coffee Stand is a tiny coffee shop near Koenji station, down one of its busy shopping streets. After a recent visit to Koenji to see a friend, I cottoned onto the fact that it seems to be a coffee hotspot, and so I was back in short order for more. I think I just about fell in love with this place! Porta offers mainly espresso / milk-based coffees, with alternative milk options available.
NEYO is a cafe a little ways away from Koenji station, and next to a local park. I will say the coffee is not amazing (a little on the bitter side) but the vibe is nice and it turned out to be a very convenient place to get some co-working done with some friends. I'm realising finding the perfect co-working cafe is quite the art.
Mt Warusawa (悪沢岳, warusawa-dake) and Mt Akaishi (赤石岳, akaishi-dake) are two mountains located on the southern end of Japan's Southern Alps. Although the Southern Alps honestly don't look that far from Tokyo on the map, some of the peaks in this mountain range have quite the reputation of being hard to get to. 5 hours on two buses to finally get to the trailhead. A bit of a long trip, but worth it!
INCredible COFFEE in Koenji is possibly the only coffee store in Japan that comes with its own silver YouTube play button. It seems like the cafe will sometimes transform into DJ space at night, and their YouTube channel uploads recordings of these events. The menu is a fairly standard list of espresso-based drinks. They also have soy milk and oat milk options for an extra 50 or 100 yen…
Ikebukuro is a pretty big commercial and transportation hub in north-western Tokyo - it has the third-busiest train station in the world (only behind Shinjuku and Shibuya). I've managed to get the hang of Shinjuku station's sprawling underground passageways, but I'll admit the maze of Ikebukuro station still eludes me.
⚠️ This review contains spoilers! Book review for The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar. I rated it 4 stars. Written by Amal El-Mohtar, who together with Max Gladstone wrote the popular sci-fi/romance novel This Is How You Lose the Time War. For both authors that book has been by far their biggest success, although it seems like El-Mohtar has managed to re-grasp some of that magic for herself in…
⚠️ This review contains spoilers! Book review for Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. I rated it 4 stars. Yesteryear follows a woman named Natalie who is raising her six children on a farm, while broadcasting her family's more traditional way of life to millions of Instagram followers. The book kicks off with her in the middle of a wildly successful social media career, with flashbacks to her college…
MÖWE COFFEE ROASTERS is a small coffee store and cafe in Koenji. Once inside the store, you can grab a seat and take a look at the menu - the barista will come over and take your order when you are ready. Rather intimidatingly, the front cover of the menu had a rather long series of instructions. To translate and summarise - it mentions that MÖWE is mainly a roaster, and not a cafe.
Rozi Coffee is in Shin-Okubo - a cafe hotspot I am yet to mention on this blog. It's the station next to Shinjuku on the Yamanote line, and is most famous for being Tokyo's Koreatown.
After visiting the National Crafts Museum, we also stopped off at Kanazawa's Kenroku-en garden. I'm kind of a bird person, so I was more on the lookout for some new birds. Although luck wasn't really on my side, I did spot a couple flitting about!
To break up our long drive back to Tokyo from Mt Haku, we decided to stop off at Kanazawa's National Crafts Museum. Actually I'd never visited Kanazawa - my only impression of it had been that huge structure that lives outside Kanazawa's train station. This was a really lovely museum! It was a good mix of traditional and more modern art pieces.
July kicked off with some relatively cool weather here in Tokyo, which feels absurd considering how hot Japan's summers usually get, but it was a welcome start to the month. By mid-July we had some pretty darn hot days, but the plus side is that the snow on mountains has all melted and we've truly entered the summer season for hiking.
⚠️ This review contains spoilers! Book review for Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi. I rated it 5 stars. Taiwan Travelogue is about a Japanese woman named Aoyama Chizuko who spends a year travelling around Taiwan in 1939, and writes a book about her experiences - especially on all the delicious food she gets to eat. By the end of this one I was for sure craving noodles.
I recently popped by KIELO COFFEE in Akihabara, a small cafe and roaster specialising in light roast pour-over coffee. They do also have milk-based coffee and matcha lattes available as well. They had a range of reasonably-priced beans to choose from for your pour-over, ranging from an 800 yen Rwanda washed bean to a 1600 yen cup of Colombia's El Paraiso M3.
Mt Haku (白山, haku-san) or quite literally "White Mountain" is a 2702m elevation mountain located on the borders of Ishikawa and Gifu prefectures. We hiked Mt Haku as a day hike in mid-July, which turned out to be the perfect time to enjoy the alpine flower fields that line the trails.
Japan has some really great bookstores, but unfortunately they have mostly been off of my radar due to my poor Japanese reading skills. I'm hoping to work on that over the next few years - actually I'm finding just by living here my reading skills have been improving.
⚠️ This review contains spoilers! Book review for Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor. I rated it 4 stars. Death of the Author is about a Nigerian American author named Zelu who gains immediate worldwide popularity when she publishes the sci-fi book Rusted Robots. The book jumps between the main plot as Zelu becomes famous, with flash forwards to interviews with Zelu's friends and family, plus…
On a recent weekend we found ourselves back in Kuramae to check out another of its many coffee stores - Coffee Counter Nishiya. ) Coffee Counter Nishiya has a bit of a unique setup in that you take your order at one long and narrow counter. There are no seats, so this is probably not the place to linger for too long.