After Midnight in Japan (Patreon)

Jet lag, late-night noodles, convenience store eggs, karaoke bars, and the quiet pleasures of wandering alone in Japan

For the past ten days in Japan, my normal insomnia was injected with a heavy dose of jet lag, so I spent virtually every night wandering.

Being alone in a place where nobody needs anything from you—no lunches packed, no rides to give, no important decisions to make, not even conversation unless you want it—is liberating. Just my feet, my appetite, and wherever the night pulls me.

I often find that feeling the energy of a city at night—or the calming peace of a small town after dark—gives me an even better sense of what it’s all about than its daytime bustle ever could. The habit has also led to more than one extraordinary meal, and there are few places more interesting, or more delicious, to wander at night than Japan. That it happens to be one of the safest countries in the world to do this doesn't hurt.

In Kyoto one night, I took a walk down Kiyamachi-dori, listening to the babble of the canal before ducking into a ramen-ya for a bowl of springy noodles. Menya Wadachi claims to be the oldest ramen shop in the Gion district (though some locals told me that’s not really true) and specializes in pork backfat ramen. But as the fifth meal of the day, I wanted something lighter and instead ordered a bowl of noodles in a clear broth scented with lemon. It was a workmanlike bowl, served with no glitz or glamour, the noodles and vibe more reminiscent of ramen's Chinese origins than modern Japanese takes, but even the most basic bowl of ramen in Japan is delicious. (Lemon should be a more common option for noodles.)

Afterward, I ate a waffle and drank a Calpis—a yogurt-flavored soft drink that has been a favorite of mine since childhood—under the branches of a cherry tree while local kids took selfies beneath its pink flowers.

On another night, after a lengthy omakase sushi meal at Mizuki (peaceful, minus the interruptions by the real estate mogul and his girlfriend who sat down next to me half way through the meal), I turned down a back-alley as I walked home. Doorways with small hand-written signs beckoned me to walk up their narrow stairwells, so I picked one at random, and did. I found myself in a tiny cigarette smoke-filled bar and soon had a couple of non-alcoholic Sapporos in front of me. I picked up a conversation with a woman from Scotland and her wife from London here on vacation—an escape from their jobs in enterprise software sales. (I remain aware that my work sometimes looks suspiciously like vacation.)

The gregarious bartenders convinced a former stage performer from London to sing Jean Valjean's Soliloquy from Les Misérables. This prompted the full clientele of the bar to start singing through the entire soundtrack of Les Mis in unison—which in turn prompted me to move along. If there’s an eighth circle in my personal hell, its soundtrack is drunk people doing musical theater together. I said goodbye to my new friends and headed back down along the river. The smell of cigarette smoke on my clothes reminded me of my college days, when bars were still full of smoke and a night out meant an extra-long shower and dry cleaning the next day.

Single Serving Onigiri and Single Serving Friends

I passed by the inviting fluorescent glow of a 7-Eleven, so I stopped in for a soft-boiled egg and an onigiri with umeboshi. Convenience store food in Japan is reliably, predictably fresh and delicious, with meals, sandwiches, rice balls, and snacks delivered multiple times a day. Perfectly engineered food delivered in perfectly engineered packaging. (Japan is full of perfectly engineered packaging—and all the plastic waste that comes with it.)

The nori was crisp, thanks to the clever plastic sleeve it comes in. The rice was plump, separate, and just sticky enough. The umeboshi was a full-on pitted pickled plum—none of the gelled paste that often gets used in packaged onigiri these days. And the soft-boiled egg! I don’t know how they do it, but every convenience store seems to sell perfectly peelable eggs boiled until their deep golden yolks are in that ideal state between raw and jammy. (And, of course, they come in cute packaging.)

At least the 7-Elevens in the States beat Japan in the all-important categories of “Highest Number of Cylindrical Foods Heated on a Hot Dog Roller” and “Most Pushable Infinite Mystery Chili and Cheese Sauce Button.”

The next night, I made friends with a table of locals while eating gyoza and practicing my Japanese at a karaoke bar. Convincing others to sing in public is a Japanese pastime as popular there as baseball or saying “thank you” too many times. It wasn’t long before the table coerced me into singing some Green Day—a karaoke first for me. Apparently Green Day and The Eagles are the only American bands known in Kyoto, and I hate the f&#king Eagles. (Just kidding. I love The Eagles.)

I finished my gyoza, said arigatō gozaimasu and bowed my head to the server thirty-four more times, then headed into the street while my table of new friends waved pleasantly at me until they couldn’t see me anymore, as is Japanese custom.

Back in Tokyo, I wandered alone down alleys illuminated by neon signs and lined with noodle shops, bars, love hotels, and the occasional tout trying to get you to follow him to a hostess bar or massage parlor. There were boys with gray-dyed hair carrying their overindulgent friends down the street while simultaneously hitting on girls in miniskirts cosplaying as porcelain dolls.

I walked past Kamo to Negi ("duck and onion") by Ueno Station and saw a row of men in oversized business suits leaning over a counter, slurping bowls of ramen—no doubt just leaving their offices (or one of those hostess bars) and loading up on carbs and salt before a short night of sleep. I promised myself I’d come back early the next morning before we hopped on a bullet train to Tsukube-Sanjo.

The early morning noodles were glorious. Sliced duck breast that melted like confit. Thin, straight noodles with bounce and chew. A clean, clear broth made with duck bones and charred spring onions, seasoned with salt and flavored with a slick of aromatic duck fat. I couldn’t resist ordering the egg and duck don as well: a sweet and savory stew of softly scrambled eggs and tender chunks of roast duck served over freshly steamed rice.

(An hour later, I met up with Lena and ate more noodles and rice at the soba shop down the street.)

Steel, Springs, and Smoke

In Sanjo City, we spent a few days with our knife-making partner Gordon Hanson and his family, as well as the heads of Aiba Steel, a five-generation steel manufacturing company that creates the incredible metals used for everything from the machines that manufacture Formula 1 race car tires, to hairdressers' scissors, to some of the best knives in the world. (I’ve recently discovered that hairdressers are the only people as nerdy about the stats of particular steel alloys as chefs.)

Our days were a whirlwind of factory tours, business meetings, hotel changes, and lavishly formal kaiseki meals. Japanese culture is driven by politeness and an unwavering focus on ensuring that your actions do not make others uncomfortable. There is a sense of formality about even the most casual exchange—something impressed upon Japanese people in ways I’m aware of from my own upbringing, but which no longer comes naturally to me. It was wonderfully informative and productive, but mentally draining.

Thankfully, the nighttime hours were fully dedicated to solo unwinding.

In Sanjo City, I made a run to Family Mart, where I found an egg salad sando on soft shokupan that was as tender, creamy, and perfect as every sando from every konbini in Japan. I stood outside to eat it—nobody eats while walking in Japan—and chatted briefly with a couple of men fresh from a bar, smelling strongly of cigarettes. I washed it down with a Wilkinson’s Extra sparkling water.

I like a bottle of sparkling water that feels like it’s cutting up your mouth like a dry bowl of Cap’n Crunch, and Wilkinson's Extra hit the mark.

That night it was a solo soak in a deep, salty hot spring followed by a walk along a rural river. I did drink a cup of hot tea made with that salty spring water, but no late-night snacks were found that night—which was probably for the best. Earlier in the day we’d eaten a giant bowl of curry ramen for lunch, a local specialty with thick curry broth, sliced pork and onions, lots of white pepper, and a tangle of chewy noodles.

Dinner was a relentlessly lavish multi-course kaiseki meal. Everything served was harvested locally: greens, shoots, and sprouts foraged from the mountains and fermented in-house. Matatabi (silvervine) pickled lightly with salt. Zuiki (taro stems) dressed in walnut paste. Bracken root and flowering ferns harvested from just up the mountain. Tiny mukago (the aerial tubers of Japanese yams) set into tofu and served in clear broth flavored with mitsuba. Salt-grilled freshwater fish from the nearby river, eaten head and all (I should have brought my fly rod!). Deeply marbled beef aged for three months under the snow and cooked on local river rocks. A perfectly custardy Japanese sweet potato brûlée.

Japan’s been doing local and fermented since long before it was cool. (And it didn't cost $1,500.)

The next night, by the Iwamuro Onsen Fujiya, I walked through the local park to the sound of frogs and crickets and found myself the only customer in the only business still open: a darts bar whose owner had difficulty wrapping his head around a customer not wanting to try his favorite sake made from the celebrated local koshihikari rice.

This was the first bar in Japan I visited that didn’t offer non-alcoholic beer, but cold oolong tea made a fine accompaniment to the pickled daikon radish with homemade butterbur miso he served me as an otsumami—the free snack that comes when you order a drink.

We chatted about his childhood in the mountains, where he grew up eating wild rabbit, boar, and bear (which apparently have a plastic-like aroma to their fat). He’s not much of a fisherman, but he loves the local ayu (sweetfish) and masu (landlocked salmon, also known as cherry trout).

He told me about his brother, who lives over the mountains by the ocean and sends packages of hand-harvested mozuku—an algae cut into thin strips and served cold in a vinegary dressing to be slurped up like slippery noodles. Ten years ago, he said, you could buy a kilo for around 100¥. Now a kilo costs more like 5,000¥. The algae is a casualty of warming oceans, and he was genuinely worried for his brother’s livelihood in a small coastal town that depends on the sea.

He’d never left his region of Japan and was fascinated to learn that Seattle is also a seafood town with mountains and rivers nearby. He was surprised that Americans like to eat raw oysters, and that we farm oyster stocks originally brought over from Japan. But he was most surprised to learn that a bowl of ramen in Seattle costs at least three times what it does in Japan.

A Bowl to Myself

Back in Tokyo, on our final night in Shinjuku, I passed a narrow walkway marked by a photo of an inviting bowl of noodles. It turned out to be a branch of Ichiran, the ramen chain that began as a single stall in Fukuoka and helped popularize tonkotsu broth: pork bones boiled for hours until the soup becomes rich, creamy, and intense.

Ichiran’s design is a throwback to its origins as a shop built for hungry salarymen getting off work and not in the mood to socialize. After buying tickets from a vending machine (a common ordering scheme near train stations in Japan), you sit at a single-person stall separated from your neighbors by wooden partitions. In front of you is a bamboo screen. After you sit, you fill out a form to specify the richness and spiciness of the broth, the firmness of the noodles, and any extra toppings or sides you'd like to add.

Moments later, the bamboo screen lifts just high enough to reveal the hands of the cook—no face-to-face interaction of any kind—who hands you a bowl of pale, creamy tonkotsu ramen with slices of pork belly chashu, shaved spring onions, and a dollop (or several dollops) of proprietary hot sauce.

It all has the feel of a confessional, designed to keep the focus between you, your thoughts, and the bowl of noodles in front of you.

Bless me with more noodles, father, for I have slimmed.

It wasn't the best ramen I’ve ever had, but as someone who loves walking and eating alone perhaps even more than I enjoy meals with a group, there’s something deeply appealing about that singular focus. There, solitude isn’t framed as loneliness, but as attention. It’s designed as a moment where nothing is asked of you except that you be present for what’s in front of you.

At home with the kids, life is different. There are lunches to pack, breakfasts to make, fish to feed, teeth to brush, litter boxes to clean, and the inevitable game of hide-and-seek I get forced into when my four-year-old disappears exactly when we’re already five minutes late.

I love that life fiercely.

But when I’m traveling kid-free, wandering alone at night with nowhere to be and nothing asked of me beyond hunger and curiosity, I’m reminded of a different version of myself—the one who can spend an hour talking to a stranger over tea, or stand outside a convenience store under cherry blossoms eating a soft boiled egg and a rice ball with pickled plums like it’s a feast.

I think that's what night wandering really offers for me: not escape from home, but a time to find myself and gain a clearer sense of what it means to return to it.