Day 2 in Tokyo

Ok, so it's day 2 of my Japan travelogue.

So the day begins with 2 reps from the juice company meeting us in the hotel lobby to pick us up along with the other couple who won this trip and take us to the company's headquarters. Speaking of which, I had forgotten to mention the other couple who also won this trip in my previous post. While getting onto the plane in Seattle bound for Tokyo, we were looking at all the people on the same flight, trying to guess which couple was the other winner of this trip, as there were two grand prizes for this sweepstakes. It turned out to be an older couple who live north of Seattle. They were such nice people and despite the difference in age, they were fun to be around. They've invited us over to their house for a Scandinavian style dinner someday - I'm SO there!

Anyway, the reps from the juice company were very friendly and spoke very fluent English, as I later found out that one gal grew up in Torrance, CA. We got to their headquarters and watched a promo of the company and learned the history, which was quite interesting.

The company started off as a tomato juice company and have expanded to include many different food items in Japan. The juices are their main products here in the U.S. but they do supply the tomato sauces for pizza companies such as *izza H*t and *ominos. They gave each winning couple a huuuuge bag of all of the juice products they currently have available in the Japan market. Needless to say, we had enough beverages to last us the rest of our stay in Japan and you didn't feel guilty drinking them, because they were good for you :)

After stopping by the HQ and meeting with the President of their U.S. operations and taking promo pics, they took us to a very nice Japanese lunch.

The male servers were dressed up sharply in their crisp dark suits, while the female servers were dressed up in beautiful, traditional kimonos.





Bear had the chirashi sushi ("scattered sushi") lunch set (sorry for the blurry photo!). He was amazed by how fresh the seafood tasted and wasn't even sure that the squid he was eating really was squid. He said the seafood was so fresh that it just melted in his mouth (like buttah, heh).




I had the grilled fish lunch selection (shown below).


The presentation was absolutely beautiful and it was almost too pretty to eat. Most of us had the same accompanying side dishes, which included some pickled vegetables, some chilled spinach topped with bonito flakes, and some miso soup with baby clams. One of my favorite side dishes of the meal was the chawanmushi, which is a steamed egg custard that incorporates some mushrooms and/or vegetables and some shrimp, which is traditional, but this one added a modern twist as it was topped with a smooth, velvety edamame (soybean) sauce. It had such a delicate taste and was so wonderful (I'm sorry I don't have photos to share except for the outer container, which is the white ceramic dish in the upper left hand corner with the lid) that I would have licked the bowl clean if it wasn't improper to do so.

After lunch, they took us back to the hotel and gave us some recommendations on where to check out around the Ginza area. Bear and I decided to take advantage of this time to get to know our temporary neighborhood. Along our afternoon stroll, we found a mini statue of Godzilla. He probably only stood 3 feet tall on a granite pedestal, but through the wonders of perspective, you can make even a 3 foot tall Godzilla to movie scale:


We also passed by Kabuki-za theatre where if you're pressed for time, you can catch just a single act. The few times we passed by there during the week, it was almost always sold out.

My favorite stop of the afternoon was the famous and historical Mitsukoshi department store. My objective was to go down to the basement level (aka "depachika" in Japanese which is short for depaato=department store, chika=basement) of this store to buy some high quality green tea for Mom and some sweets to take home.


The employees all had cute little uniforms and were hawking their goods, from tea to baked goods to freshly prepared side dishes to take home for dinner that evening.


One thing I sorely miss from Japan are the bakeries. Although rice is still a staple here, they sure do know how to bake bread!


I made a beeline for one of the many counters of baked goods and bought some melon pan , which was a childhood favorite of mine. I can get them in Seattle at the local Asian market, but the taste isn't quite the same, so I welcomed the opportunity to sample the authentic stuff.

After finding some tea to bring back home for mom, we were still a little full from lunch earlier that day, but thought we might stop for a little break to rest our weary feet and found a place to have some beer. We ordered a large, frosty mug of beer each with some shumai (which is traditionally Chinese, but very much a part of the Japanese food culture) to nibble on to tide us over until the next morning.

All in all, a great way to end our 2nd day in Tokyo. Coming up, our full day tour of Tokyo that the juice company arranged for us.