As expected, I have been cramming my schedule with fun-filled activities in celebration of my final fortnight in Japan. I’d also quite like to wrap up this blog with thirty chapters, which means I’ve got to get a fair bit of blogging in before I board the plane.

So here we are, chapter 27. Last weekend I decided to treat myself to a luxury onsen day in Odaiba. I was planning to soak for a few hours with my friend Akina, then we were going to lounge around the relaxation room, each wearing a yukata (kind of like a casual kimono), have back scrubs and massages. It was supposed to be perfect. Unfortunately after trekking an hour and a half to get there, we were greeted with a closed sign taped to the entrance. Bloody covid.

We decided to take the train back towards Tokyo and ended up in Kagurazaka. It’s a tiny neighbourhood with tea shops and cobbled back streets, known in the past as a geisha hang-out. Oozing with Edo period, it’s what Akina describes as, ‘Paris meets Kyoto.’ We moseyed around pottery shops and we walked up Waseda Avenue, a sloping street with trendy cafes, restaurants and women walking by in kimonos.

We went to a games arcade where we put 500 yen in what we thought was a purikura (photo booth) machine and out came the tackiest stick-on nails I’ve ever seen in my life. We weren’t allowed a refund for getting the machines mixed up so I kept the nails and then we did the photo booth afterwards.

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For lunch, we ate sashimi on rice, served on a tray with miso soup, salad and a chunk of tofu with bonito flakes dancing on top of it. After lunch we went to the local sento, an old wooden building with a curved and beautiful roof. Inside the floor tiles were a peach colour and the walls were covered in paintings of koi fish and a mural of Mount Fuji across the back. There were about six old ladies, some of them soaking, some of them hunched under shower heads, sitting on plastic stools and lathering themselves with soap. I’m not an artist but for some reason I felt an urge to paint it. To keep this scene before me in my memory exactly as it was. To recreate this moment with these strangers that I wouldn’t ever have again.

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We went our separate ways after the soak and I walked to Shin-Okubo, where I ate Korean food with my friends Paul and Karl. We ordered buchimgae, kimchi and a bottle of makgeolli, which is unpasteurised rice wine – a favourite of mine. We fried pork on a grill at the table and it was really, really delicious.

As mentioned in chapter 26, I have been eating like a queen these past few weeks. Last night was no exception. One of my favourite students, Koichi, took me to a luxury restaurant in Shinjuku for kaiseki. Kaiseki is a traditional Japanese tasting course, also known as the pinnacle of Japanese haute cuisine. Kaiseki cuisine features a set course meal chosen by the chef to highlight a specific seasonal theme. At the heart of kaiseki dining is the Japanese principle of shun, taking ingredients at the peak of their freshness. The dishes are simple and the flavours are pure. Paul Hollywood also sampled kaiseki when Channel 4 sent him barricading around Japan and he was a lot nicer about it than he was the taco rice. For good reason too. The kaiseki was delicious.

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Thanks as always for reading. Chapters 28, 29 and 30 will be following shortly.