Twentythree

Even when Mt. Fuji is hidden in shadows, there’s still something breathtaking to see here.

When picking a hotel for traveling in Japan, “has views of Mt. Fuji” is definitely a big plus. Japan’s tallest mountain is a symbol of the country itself, and its beauty is so timeless that admiring it at length will always feel like time well spent.

But what about after the sun goes down? While we’re thankful that the plan to put electric lights on Mt. Fuji didn’t go through, that does mean that hotels that boast that they offer views of Mt. Fuji really only offer views of Mt. Fuji during the day, and so they start to feel less special at night.

However, a notable exception next month will be Kaneyamaen, an onsen (hot spring) hotel located near the foot of Mt. Fuji in the town of Fujiyoshida, Yamanashi Prefecture. Kaneyamaen has an expansive garden, and part of the grounds stretch across the Katsura River, which becomes a gathering place for fireflies in early summer.

Next month, the hotel will be holding its Hotaru Matsuri, or Firefly Festival, coinciding with peak firefly activity in the garden. Special firefly viewing sessions will be held nightly from 8 to 8:45 p.m.

Accommodation packages include pre-viewing refreshments of matcha green tea, classical Japanese confectionaries, and amazake (a sweet, non-alcoholic sake) served in the late afternoon and early evening…

…and at night, violin performances will be held in one of the garden’s pavilions.

And with firefly viewing being something that’s been enjoyed in Japan for generations, the hotel also offers yukata (summer kimono) rentals and fittings, so that even first-timers can get into the traditional spirit.

Kaneyamaen’s Firefly Festival runs from June 5 to 27.

Related: Kaneyamaen official website
Source, images: PR Times
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Lunch Pack falls flat in the noodles-and-bread department, but there is a silver lining.

Yamazaki Baking’s popular Lunch Pack series of sandwich pockets has become famous around the world for its unusual fillings, but now there’s a new limited-edition variety that takes things one step further.

▼ Iekei Tonkotsu Shoyu Ramen Style.

Iekei (literally “house/family style”) is a type of ramen that features tonkotsu shoyu (pork bone and soy sauce broth) with thick, straight noodles, and it was first invented in Yokohama in 1974, by a ramen shop called Yoshimuraya.

This new sandwich has been created under the supervision of Yoshimuraya, and it’s the fourth of its kind, following previous releases in 2016, 2019, and 2021. Scheduled to be sold in the Kanto region (in and around Tokyo), Nagano Prefecture, and parts of Shizuoka Prefecture from 1 May through to the end of June, we were keen to find out how this new release would taste, so we picked one up at our local supermarket for a taste test.

Upon opening the pack, we pulled out what looked to be a plain, white bread sandwich.

After slicing it in half, though, the truth was revealed, as its saucy centre gave us a peek at the contents. To our surprise, there really were noodles here, and they were thick, in the style of Iekei.

▼ Seeing noodles inside white bread like this makes for a very unusual sight.

The thick sauce raised our expectations for a mouthful of rich pork bone and soy sauce broth in the style of Iekei ramen, but when we took a bite…

▼…we were sorely disappointed.

To put it bluntly, it just didn’t taste like Iekei ramen. While it was indeed soy sauce-based, it had more of a sweet, teriyaki-like flavour, and it was such a departure from what we were expecting that we didn’t even get the feeling that this was ramen at all. After taking another bite, we felt it lacked the flavour of chicken oil (chiyu), which is one of the characteristics of Iekei ramen.

▼ Checking the ingredients, though, we could see that chicken oil (“鶏油”) was listed as an ingredient, but it was indiscernible on the palate.

For those who aren’t familiar with the taste of Iekei ramen, this sandwich will be a novel experience, thanks to the unusual filling, but for diehard Iekei lovers, it’s a sad disappointment.

▼ The flavour of the Iekei you’d hoped for will feel blurred and distant when you eat this sandwich.

▼ Taking a look inside the sandwich reveals the short-cut noodles are paired with chopped pieces of char siu pork.

But they just don’t have the hearty richness of the large pieces you get in a bowl of Iekei, pushing the flavour further into the distant recesses of the mind.

To be clear, this is not a bad sandwich – it’s just more like a mysterious savory bread that longs to be like Iekei ramen. After thinking about it, though, we came to the realisation that the way it hints at Iekei without actually getting there is a clever selling point, because after eating the lunch pack we found ourselves yearning for a bowl of Iekei ramen.

This craving was so strong that we recommend checking your surroundings to see if there are any Iekei ramen shops nearby before trying this sandwich. That way, if the lunch pack falls short of your expectations, you’ll be able to fill the gap with a real bowl of noodles, and if you’re near this ramen joint you can try a different bread-and-noodles experience with a baguette and grilled cheese topping.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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Now you can get a taste of a famous limited-edition exclusive burger without travelling to Japan.

On 15 April, McDonald’s released the Chicken Tatsuta in Japan for a limited time, with plans for it to be on the menu only until mid-May. As a recurring exclusive, many people in Japan look forward to the release every year, but what if you’re not in Japan to enjoy it?

While that used to be a problem for lovers of the chicken burger, we’ve come up with a hack that’ll have you recreating the burger with ease no matter where you are in the world. Unlike other hacks, which tend to involve complicated steps and hard-to-get ingredients, ours is the ultimate lazy-person’s recipe – once you have the ingredients ready, you can make it in just five minutes.

So let’s get right to it, starting with the ingredients:

• McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish
• McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets
• Soy sauce
• Ginger paste (Japanese tube-type is ideal)
• Mayonnaise
• Mustard
• Shredded cabbage

Now for the method, which is so easy even lazy folks like us can handle it.

Step 1. Remove the white fish fillet and tartar sauce from the Filet-O-Fish.

Step 2. Take around three Chicken McNuggets and cut them in half.

Step 3. Spread ginger and soy sauce on both sides of the nuggets (use plenty of ginger).

Step 4. Lightly toast in a toaster (adjust to your liking).

Step 5. Spread mayonnaise and mustard on the bottom bun, then add shredded cabbage, the nuggets, and finally, the top bun.

▼ Chicken Tatsuta, complete!

While it may not look identical to the original Chicken Tatsuta, don’t let that concern you, because…

▼ …the taste is unbelievably spot-on.

With nuggets standing in for the chicken patty, the texture is slightly firmer than the original, but the flavour of the ginger soy sauce is almost identical. Oftentimes, it’s the sauce that really gives a McDonald’s burger its distinct flavour, and our recipe reproduces it incredibly well.

▼ If you prefer video tutorials, this clip will show you how easy it is to complete the hack.

Another key ingredient is the buns, and the ones on the Filet-O-Fish have the same fluffy texture as the ones used for the Tatsuta, making it very close to the original.

The brilliant brain behind this hack is our boss Yoshio Ueda, who loved it so much he got his wife to try it, and when she did she said, “If someone told me this was the newly improved Chicken Tatsuta, I would totally believe them. What a clever idea.”

That’s high praise from a discerning spouse, and it emboldened Ueda to take things one step further, with an additional idea. If you buy the Filet-O-Fish as a set rather than individually, you’ll be able to combine the leftover white fish fillet with fries, giving you a second meal of fish and chips.

This unexpected by-product of the hack is a pleasant, and tasty, surprise that Ueda urges you to try at least once. He didn’t think it would be this easy to recreate a Chicken Tatsuta, and get a bonus meal of fish and chips to boot, so he really thinks others will love the hack as much as he does, especially if you’re outside Japan and yearning for a taste of the Tatsuta, albeit without the anime packaging.

Related: McDonald’s Chicken Tatsuta
Images ©SoraNews24
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Tokyo Metropolitan Police officers issue warnings to pub owners in Ueno.

There are two sides to Tokyo’s Ueno neighborhood, both literally and figuratively. Head out one side of the station, and you’ll find yourself in Ueno Park, a sprawling park that’s home to many of the finest museums in Japan. Exit the station on the opposite side, though, and you’ll soon be in Ameya Yokocho, a.k.a. Ameyoko, a lively web of shopping streets with discount stores and pubs, where staff boisterously call out to passersby to stop and see what they have on offer.

Ameyoko rose to prominence in the postwar period as a black market, but here in the modern era it’s largely a legitimate, law-abiding place. However, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police swooped into Ameyoko on May 5 to tell proprietors to clean up their act regarding outdoor seating.

The primary targets of the crackdown were izakaya (Japanese-style pubs) that have set up tables and chairs in the street outside their storefronts. While this style of operation has been fairly common in the neighborhood for quite some time, Hirohisa Mizutani, the head of a local residents group, said that more and more izakaya owners began spreading their seating into the street during the coronavirus pandemic, in order to maintain wider distances between customers. However, even with there no longer being a need for such spacious social distancing buffers, street seating hasn’t receded to its previous levels, and with Ameyoko not having the widest streets to begin with, complaints have been coming in about the congestion, which also poses safety issues by potentially impeding emergency vehicles such as ambulances or fire trucks to access the neighborhood if needed.

Citing clauses within the Road Traffic Act that prohibit the placement of objects on roads or sidewalks that obstruct the flow of traffic, approximately two dozen officers from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police’s Ueno Precinct patrolled Ameyoko on Tuesday, handing out awareness fliers and informing violators that they would have to remove tables and chairs deemed to be impeding traffic. No arrests were made, but when one izakaya owner refused to comply with the directions, the police confiscated roughly 30 pieces of offending furniture.

Curious to see how much of an effect all this has had, we stopped by Ameyoko to take a look for ourselves. First off, despite the police warnings to pull outdoor seating back, it doesn’t necessarily seem to be the case that it’s been banned outright.

That said, it did seem like the restaurants on the main streets of the neighborhood were at least keeping their seating underneath their buildings’ awnings/eaves. Depending on how exactly the property lines are drawn, it could be that these seats aren’t “in the street” on account of technically being within the boundaries of the business, and so not in actual violation of the Road Traffic Act.

However, when we wandered down some of the smaller, secondary streets of Ameyoko, we came across setups like this, which look like they’d pretty clearly obstruct the flow of people and vehicles.

The timings of the police sweep and our visit add a few more wrinkles to the evaluation of how much things may or may not be changing in Ameyoko. The police sweep took place on May 5, a national holiday in the middle of Japan’s Golden Week vacation period. As such, the crowds were larger than usual in Ameyoko, which probably made for a stricter eye test as to whether or not tables and chairs protruding into the street were hindering traffic. In contrast, we visited the neighborhood (and took the photos seen in this article) on May 7. This was the first day after Golden Week finished, and a weekday to boot, meaning a much smaller than normal number of shoppers and tourists were out and about, and fewer bottlenecks in the streets most likely made violations easier to overlook.

It’s also generally the case in Japan that when new rules come into effect, the authorities don’t start off with iron fist-style enforcement. With Japan being a largely considerate, rule-abiding society, efforts to gradually build understanding and awareness of rules often results in widespread compliance. Whether such a patient approach will result in Ameyoko’s restaurant owners voluntarily pulling seating back towards their buildings, or if the Tokyo Metropolitan Police will feel the need to make follow-up sweeps of the neighborhood, is something we’ll have to wait a little longer to know for sure.

Reference: Yomiuri Shimbun
Photos ©SoraNews24
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Inside Chiba Station, Manyoken is a piece of edible history.

The name of bento boxed lunch shop Manyoken translates loosely as “House of 10,000 Leaves.” That count isn’t necessarily meant to be taken literally, though. Yes, in Japanese man does mean 10,000, but in non-scientific contexts it can also be used just to mean “many.”

Really, the impressive number for Manyoken is 98, as in the 98 years the company has been in business since its original founding in 1928. You don’t stay in the bento game that long without winning over a lot of fans, and so when field work recently had our ace reporter Mr. Sato out in the vicinity of Manyoken’s one and only branch at Chiba Station, he decided to stop by and try one of their boxed lunches for himself.

Finding the place turned out to be a little tricky. Manyoken’s address indicates that it’s on the third floor of the Perie Chiba shopping center, which is attached to Chiba Station (itself about 40 minutes by train east of Tokyo Station). However, even after wandering all around the third floor, Mr. Sato couldn’t spot the place. After some more digging, he found out that Manyoken is actually located inside the Chiba Station ticket gates. The easiest way to get to the shop is to go through the Chuo/Central Gate, and after walking straight for a bit, you should be able to see Manyoken’s sign, with its name written with the kanji characters 万葉軒.

Manyoken has a few different bento varieties, but Mr. Sato wasted no time in grabbing one of their Tonkatsu (pork cutlet) Bento, for 782 yen (US$5). The Tonkatsu Bento is Manyoken’s flagship boxed lunch, the one that’s earned the place generations of loyal fans, and remains the purest Manyoken experience.

▼ The Tonkatsu Bento

Yes, the packaging does do that surreal thing where the cooking is being done by an anthropomorphized character that is itself the source of the marque ingredient. The illustration might not match the modern cuteness of contemporary kawaii design cues, but its older-school vibes are completely in keeping with a bento shop that’s been around for almost 100 years.

Speaking of classic aesthetics, the Tonkatsu Bento goes with a very simple presentation, with a single compartment on which the cutlet is laid out directly over the white rice, like a ruler relaxing luxuriously on a chaise lounge.

For a second, Mr. Sato thought that the boxed lunch was completely devoid of vegetables, but it turns out they’re simply tucked underneath one end of the cutlet. Lifting up the corner of the katsu, he found pickled eggplant, bamboo shoots, and simmered kombu (kelp).

Seeing the cutlet in cross section might have some foodies bracing for disappointment, as the pork is thinly sliced. This higher ratio of breading to meat actually ends up having its own unique charm, though.

The tonkatsu sauce that Manyoken includes in its bento is fantastic, and with more breading for it to soak into, every bite is extra delicious, so make sure to pour on every last drop from the bottle.

All in all, this is a classic and extremely satisfying style of tonkatsu bento, Mr. Sato says, delivering not just tasty flavors but also a dose of comforting nostalgia, and he highly recommends making one a meal when you’re in Chiba. Especially in a tough economic time, he’s glad to see Manyoken still doing what it does best, and we’re looking forward to when the shop can change its chopstick wrappers, which currently say “Founded over 90 years ago” (創業九十余年)…

…to “Founded over 100 years ago.”

Shop information
Manyoken / 万葉軒
Address: Chiba-ken, Chiba-shi, Chuo-ku, Shin Chiba 1-1-1, Perie Chiba Ekinaka 3rd floor
Open 7 a.m.-9 p.m. (weekdays), 7 a.m.-8 p.m. (weekends, holidays)
Website

Photos ©SoraNews24
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Blending modern beats with the sounds of nature for a one-night-only ambient session.

For many, Kyoto is just a list of famous spots to check off an itinerary: the shining golden pavilion, the crowded bamboo forest, and the seemingly-endless vermilion gates. It goes without question that they’re beautiful, but they can sometimes feel like a museum, as art you’re supposed to look at. However, for the design innovation studio Moon, these historical places, and their surrounding environments should be something you can also hear.

Having curated a diverse range of projects that blend “nature” with “sound” — including Ambient in Nature, held at Kifune Shrine in northern Kyoto — Moon’s latest event, The Wave, marks the eighth installment of their Time & Space initiative, which seeks to let nature lead the music while the performers improvise around it.

▼ Moon’s most recent event, held in October, 2025.

The venue for the event has been chosen to be a small sub-temple of the much larger Tofuku-ji complex, Komyo-in, which is famous for its “rainbow moss” garden, a peaceful space filled with vibrant green moss and carefully raked sand.

Designed back in 1939 by Mirei Shigemori, a well-known name in the world of Japanese landscaping, the circular windows were included in the temple’s walls to make the room seem as if it was specifically designed for moon-watching.

While the typical soundscape of temples often features chanting, The Wave will instead offer modern ambient music performed by guitarist Gensuke Kanki and beatboxer SHOW-GO, along with the sound of chirping insects, the rustle of the wind, and the silence of the stones.

▼ Gensuke Kanki

▼ SHOW-GO

It’s a music performance, but instead of expecting a loud, high-energy concert, this is more of an opportunity to sit back, listen to some experimental music, and enjoy how it mixes with the sounds of a zen garden, creating a unique and intimate experience.

▼ The most recent performance in the Time & Space initiative held in May, 2025, at Komyo-in.

The event will be held on June 6, with doors opening at 6:00 p.m. and the show starting at 7:00 p.m. It’s not a performance where you can just turn up at the door, though, as tickets are available only through advance booking (link below), and start from 8,000 yen (US$51.31) per person.

If you’re ready to experience the beauty of a candle-lit Japanese garden to the blend of natural sound and human music, get your ticket before it’s too late.

Venue information
Tofukuji-Tacchuu Komyo-in / 東福寺塔頭・光明院
Address: Kyoto-fu, Kyoto-shi, Higashiyama-ku, Honmachi 15-809
京都府京都市東山区本町15-809
Event date: June 6, 2026
Event time: 6:00 p.m. (doors open), 7:00 p.m. (start time), 8:00 p.m. (finish time), 9:00 p.m. (doors close)
Venue Website

Related: Ticket Booking, Moon, Gensuke Kanki’s Instagram, SHOW-GO’s Instagram
Source and images: PR Times
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