The Japanese have a real passion for food. More and more, this passion is spreading to all parts of the world. Most major cities around the world have sushi bars and restaurants. In some places, such as New York, they are practically on every corner. The popularity of Japanese cuisine could be partly due to the fact that, more than most any other national cuisine, it is considered an art form, where presentation, esthetic and ritual are as much a…
Next we take a look around the ancient capital city of Kyoto. Kyoto, in fact, means capital city. It was Japan’s capital for over a thousand years and was originally the country’s largest city. Located in a valley of the Tamba Highlands in central Honshu, Kyoto, with a population of around 1.5 million, is part of the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe metropolitan area. The city, which was originally built using principles of Feng Shui, was destroyed in large part during the Onin War,…
The history of the island of Honshu is basically the history of the country of Japan. It is the largest and most central of the Japanese islands and is where its current and historic capital cities are located. Before 300 BC, the early Japanese were for the most part, hunters, gatherers and fishers. Things changed quite a bit when around that time, rice cultivation was introduced. This caused a rapid evolution in the formation of social structures. One result of…
For much of its history, Tokyo was known as Edo. Like so many island cities, it started out as a small fishing village. Today, however, it has grown to mind blowing proportions. It is the largest metropolitan area in the world and is actually much more a conglomeration of cities than just a city in the usual sense. Japan is divided into 47 ‘prefectures’ or districts. The ‘metropolitan prefecture’ of Tokyo makes up only a part of the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan…
Our next destination is Japan. And, more specifically, since Japan is made up of four main islands as well as several chains of smaller islands, we will focus only on the main island of Honshu this time around. Honshu is the seventh largest island in the world and second only to the Indonesian island of Java in population. It makes up sixty percent of Japan’s land area and is home to 104 million people. It is where most of the…