The hunger map

Twenty-three days north to south, one dish per province

This isn't about where to eat well in Japan. It's about why Japanese food is regional at all. For two and a half centuries the domains were kept apart, there was no refrigeration, and every province made do with what it had. Kagawa eats udon because it couldn't grow enough rice but could grow wheat; Sapporo ramen carries fat and miso because it's twenty below outside; Kobe beef is called that because it left through the port of Kobe, not because the cattle came from there. Each stop explains a different mechanism: cold in Sapporo, the fish market in Tokyo, trade in Osaka, the imperial court in Kyoto, wheat in Kagawa, the strait in Shimonoseki. November is set by a fishing season, not the weather: Sea of Japan crab opens on the 6th, and Hiroshima oysters are already in.

The itinerary, stop by stop

1. Sapporo2 days

   A grid city laid out on the Ishikari plain, with a scrap of its original forest still standing downtown, and you can take the whole thing in from the Moiwa ropeway. You eat lamb grilled on a domed iron plate and a miso ramen sealed under a layer of lard that keeps the bowl scalding to the last mouthful; soup curry was invented here too. The city's own hot-spring town sits in a gorge of the Toyohira river.

   The route starts where the food explains itself with a thermometer. Sapporo miso ramen does not use miso because it tastes better: it uses miso and a floating layer of lard because it is twenty below outside and an ordinary broth goes cold before you reach the middle of the bowl. Sumire, the house that set the modern style, seals the bowl with that fat and the broth is still scalding at the end. Jingisukan follows the same reasoning: lamb grilled on a domed plate, cheap meat, plenty of calories and a heat source in the middle of the table.

   Two days is enough, and they split by clock rather than by district. Nijo market is a morning thing — sea urchin opened in front of you for breakfast — while the ramen and the jingisukan are evening food, with Susukino open into the small hours. Soup curry fits in between, and it is the useful counterexample to everything above: it is nobody's tradition, it was invented here between the seventies and the nineties, and it is already a city dish. That a regional cuisine keeps inventing is part of the point.

   The practical warning in Sapporo is the calendar: in November the city is not yet in snow mode, which makes moving around easier, but several ramen houses close on irregular days and do not announce it in advance. Crossing town on the metro to find the shutter down is the classic mistake. And the hop to Sendai is the only flight on the route: 535 kilometres that would eat a whole day by train.

   What puts it in this route: Ramen Crawl at Ramen Yokocho · Miso ramen at Sumire · Jingisukan · Nijo Market · Soup curry

2. Sendai2 days

   Tohoku's capital, founded by the one-eyed warlord Date Masamune and laid out around avenues of zelkova trees: his lacquered mausoleum, the castle terrace above the Hirose river, the charcoal-grilled beef tongue invented here, and August's Tanabata festival. It is also the obvious base for Matsushima, Yamadera and half the north.

   Sendai is the stop that shows the least romantic mechanism in regional cooking: making use of what is left. Gyutan was invented here in 1948 by the cook Keishiro Sano, using the beef tongues the American bases threw out, and it is always served with the same sides, barley rice and oxtail soup, because that is how the set was built from what there was. Seventy-odd years later it is the reason you stop in Sendai, and it is still well-made postwar offal.

   The morning market is five minutes on foot from the station's west exit, two narrow lanes with some seventy stalls, and it is the quick way to see what comes in through the port of Shiogama. Zunda, green soybean crushed with sugar, completes the picture: a sweet made from a field crop, not from an expensive ingredient. Two days, one of which can go out to Matsushima.

   This is also the base for the one side trip that was not in the original plan for this route and that the catalogue ended up adding: Morioka, thirty-eight minutes away on the Hayabusa, with its three noodles. It is optional and it eats half a day, but it is the best example on the whole trip of a city that builds itself a cuisine after the war and turns it into identity within two generations.

   What puts it in this route: Gyutan, charcoal-grilled beef tongue · Sendai Morning Market · Zunda, the green edamame sweet

3. Tokyo3 days

   It is not just Shibuya and Asakusa. Tokyo is the stone base of Edo Castle, once the largest in the world, sitting in a free public garden; it is Toyosu, the biggest fish market on earth, with glazed walkways above the tuna auction and sushi counters serving from first light; it is kabuki at the Kabukiza with single-act tickets sold same-day at the side window, no booking; and it is the whole forest wrapped around Meiji Jingu, minutes from Harajuku.

   Tokyo does not have a cuisine: it has everyone else's, and that is exactly why you stop here for three days. Toyosu market opens at five and is where you see the mechanism raw: fish from the whole country passes through an auction and is distributed from here. Then comes the consequence, the ramen-by-style route: the only place where you can compare light Tokyo shoyu, the tsukemen born in Ikebukuro, Sapporo miso and Hakata tonkotsu in one day without boarding a train.

   The counterweight is the food that really is from here and that nobody exports. Tsukishima's monjayaki is the runny, plebeian cousin of okonomiyaki, with nearly a hundred places on an island reclaimed from the sea. Ryogoku's chanko nabe is served by retired wrestlers in the sumo district. And the Showa-era kissaten — velvet, smoke and slow drip coffee, with Ginza's De L'Ambre going since 1948 — are the dead hour of the afternoon, which on an eating route has to be planned like the meals.

   Isetan Shinjuku's depachika is worth a visit even if you buy nothing: it is the display case where century-old wagashi houses and French patisserie compete in the same basement. Three days covers Toyosu one dawn, two afternoons of neighbourhoods and one night of ramen, and the realisation that Tokyo is the market, not the kitchen.

   What puts it in this route: Toyosu Market at dawn and a sushi breakfast · Ramen by regional style · Isetan Shinjuku food hall · Monjayaki on Tsukishima's Monja Street · Showa-era kissaten trail · Chanko nabe in Ryogoku

4. Nagoya2 days

   The city where you watch Japan being manufactured: the Toyota museum traces the jump from the loom to the car with the machines running, and an hour away you can look down from a walkway onto a real assembly line, kanban cards moving along it. The castle has rebuilt its residential palace in cypress with traditional joinery — you go in barefoot — and you eat hitsumabushi, grilled eel served three different ways in the one bowl.

   Nagoya is a whole city organised around one ingredient. Red bean miso, thick and salty, does not accompany: it rules. Miso-katsu is a breaded cutlet drowned in that sauce, and it is not a variant of Tokyo tonkatsu but a different dish. Hitsumabushi divides the eel into three forms within the same bowl, in an order you are meant to follow. Tebasaki are twice-fried wings, glazed and heavily peppered, and they exist so that people keep ordering beer in the bars of Sakae.

   The piece that best explains the city is the smallest. Order a coffee in the morning and breakfast comes with it — egg, toast, sometimes salad — at no charge, and the local version is toast with sweet red bean paste. This is not generosity, it is competition: local cafés kept outbidding each other on the freebie until it hardened into a rule. That is the kind of mechanism this route is looking for.

   Two days, and the split is simple: one morning of morning service and the centre, one night of tebasaki, one lunch of hitsumabushi and another of miso-katsu. It does not stretch further and it does not need to, because the next hop, Nagoya to Kanazawa, is 155 kilometres and the stop at the other end is the one that dictates the month of the entire trip.

   What puts it in this route: Hitsumabushi (Grilled Eel) · Miso-katsu · Tebasaki, Nagoya chicken wings · The morning service and red bean toast

5. Kanazawa2 days

   Kenroku-en, one of Japan's three great gardens, opens free at dawn through two side gates, before the ticket office starts charging: it is the only way to see it empty. The city also keeps three working teahouse districts — Higashi Chaya is the one with the cobbled streets — and its geiko give public performances of dance and shamisen. Add a Sea of Japan fish market, gold leaf and lacquer.

   Kanazawa is why this route runs in November and not in another month. The Sea of Japan crab season opens on 6 November, and from then the male — kano-gani here — comes with a blue tag if it is from Ishikawa, while the female, kobako-gani, has a much shorter season. This is not a seasonal suggestion: it is an opening date, and no other route in the catalogue has its month fixed by a fishing season.

   Omicho market is where you watch it arrive, and the sushi counter is where you understand why the city holds its own against the capitals: Sea of Japan fish in winter beats Pacific fish on the same date. The fourth piece is of another kind. Kaga cooking is not only jibuni: it is a whole set menu on five-colour Kutani porcelain and lacquer bowls, and that does not come from fishing, it comes from the money of a rich domain that could keep craftsmen.

   Two days, and the practical advice is to book the ryotei before you leave home and keep the crab for the second day, in case the first arrives with a rough sea. Then it is 190 kilometres to Kyoto, the sharpest change of register on the route: from shellfish and gold to tofu and vegetables.

   What puts it in this route: Winter crab: kano-gani and kobako-gani · Omicho Market · Kanazawa sushi · Kaga cuisine in a garden ryotei

6. Kyoto3 days

   The old capital holds a density no other Japanese city matches: the garden at Tenryu-ji is the only one in Kyoto that keeps the layout Muso Soseki gave it in the fourteenth century, To-ji's Kodo holds twenty-one sculptures arranged as a mandala in three dimensions, and the Imperial Palace is now simply walked into, no application and no ticket, while Katsura Rikyu has to be applied for months ahead. Then there is the torii forest of Fushimi Inari, the gold leaf of Kinkaku-ji and the sand sea of Ginkaku-ji.

   Kyoto is the stop where the mechanism is absence. It is an inland city with no port of its own, a court that stayed a thousand years and a Buddhism that banned meat: hence a cuisine built on vegetables, tofu, dashi and preserves rather than on the day's fish. Shigetsu's shojin ryori is eaten inside the Tenryu-ji grounds looking onto the Sogenchi garden, and it is monastery food served as such, with three set menus by number of dishes. The yudofu around Nanzen-ji is the same reasoning taken to its limit: tofu simmered in kombu broth, and little else, because that is how the monks ate it.

   The most misread item is obanzai. It is not Kyoto haute cuisine and it is not a restaurant style: it is home cooking, made with katsuo, kombu and shiitake dashi and Kyoto vegetables, and it is worth knowing what you are buying before paying tasting-menu prices for it. The fourth leg is tea: Ippodo has been on Teramachi-Nijo far longer than almost anyone, and its Kaboku tea room, reopened in December 2023, is where the tea hour stops being an accessory and becomes a fixture of the day.

   Three days, and the split that works is by temple district: Arashiyama with Shigetsu one morning, Nanzen-ji and the yudofu another, and the centre — Teramachi, Nishiki, obanzai in the evening — on the third. This is where the warning that this route is not a restaurant list bites hardest: the houses change, but Kyoto eating vegetables and tofu has not changed in a thousand years, and that is what you come to see. Then 43 kilometres to Osaka, the shortest hop and the biggest contrast.

   What puts it in this route: Shojin ryori at Shigetsu, inside Tenryu-ji · Yudofu and yuba around Nanzen-ji · An obanzai dinner, the home cooking of Kyoto · Ippodo and its Kaboku tea room

7. Osaka2 days

   This city eats standing up and out loud: the neon of Dotonbori over the canal, takoyaki, okonomiyaki and kushikatsu, the izakaya alleys of Ura-Namba and, around Tenma station, the densest cluster of stand-up bars in Japan. Kitsune udon was invented here, and Osaka was pressing sushi in wooden boxes before Tokyo got round to nigiri. It is also home to Taro Okamoto's Tower of the Sun, seventy metres of sculpture you walk inside.

   Day trip to Kobe

   Osaka is the cooking of commerce, and you can tell because most of it is eaten standing up and with your hands. Takoyaki, okonomiyaki and kushikatsu are street food from a city that lived off moving goods and feeding the people who moved them quickly. Hakozushi proves it historically: before Tokyo invented nigiri, this city pressed fish and rice in wooden boxes and cut it into blocks, and Yoshino Sushi has done it in Awaji-machi since 1841, weekdays and lunchtime only. Kuromon market is the storeroom for all of it.

   The side trip to Kobe is not a shortcut: it is twenty minutes away and nobody sleeps there to eat beef. And what you learn in Kobe is exactly the kind of thing this route is after. Kobe beef is called that because it left through the port of Kobe, not because the cattle are from there: only Tajima cattle born and raised in Hyogo that clear a bar for fat and quality are certified, a few thousand head a year, which explains both the price and the number of places that use the name without having it.

   Nada, the sake district, fits in the same day, with the Hakutsuru museum and the historic breweries. It is the piece that closes the Osaka-Kobe argument: port, water, rice and trade in one place. Two days in Osaka plus one on the side trip, with Dotonbori at night to see the city lit up, and then 165 kilometres to Kotohira, the only country stop on the trip and the one it would be easiest to cut.

   What puts it in this route: Street food tour (takoyaki, okonomiyaki, kushikatsu) · Evening stroll through Dotonbori · Hakozushi, Osaka's pressed sushi · Kuromon Ichiba Market · Grilled Kobe Wagyu Beef Dinner · Eating real Kobe beef without going broke · Nada Sake District and Hakutsuru Museum

8. Kotohira1 day

   Pilgrimage town centred on Kotohira-gu Shrine (Kompira-san): 785 steps to the main shrine and 1,368 to the inner Okusha shrine.

   If Kotohira goes, this route becomes the big cities under another name, which is why it is here. Also because it is the cleanest example of the whole argument: Kagawa eats udon because the soil would not give it rice and would give it wheat. There is no story of emperors or monks behind it; there is a crop. The prefecture calls itself the land of udon and the dish is eaten at any hour, in small shops by the approach to the shrine.

   One day covers the three things worth doing, and the order matters because two of them are morning affairs. The udon school is by reservation and in the morning: you knead with your feet, stretch, cut and eat what you made, in under an hour. The udon taxi is driven by drivers with Kagawa's official certification and takes you to the inland stands, the ones you will not find on your own. And the 785 steps of Kotohira-gu up to the main shrine, at 251 metres, are the other half day; the palanquin service was discontinued in 2020 and no longer exists, so you walk up or you do not go up.

   The fourth piece is Kinryo no Sato, a brewery from 1789 and supplier of the shrine's sacred sake, with the historic kura and its original machinery. It is what ties the day together: wheat, water and a pilgrimage shrine that brought people for centuries, which is why a rural district has a cuisine of its own and not just a crop. Then 127 kilometres to Hiroshima.

   What puts it in this route: Udon school · Udon Taxi · Sanuki Udon Tasting · Kinryo no Sato sake museum

9. Hiroshima2 days

   What the city was is in the Peace Park and also in small things: some hundred and seventy trees that survived the bomb and still carry plaques, two streetcars from that morning still running in commercial service, the chalk messages survivors left on a school staircase. What it is now: the largest tram network in the country, okonomiyaki with the noodles layered inside, oysters from its own bay and the sake breweries of Saijo.

   Hiroshima okonomiyaki is not the Osaka one with something added: it is built in layers, with the yakisoba noodles inside, and that difference has a date. It is a dish of the reconstruction, made to fill you with flour and not much else, which grew as ingredients came back. Okonomi-mura shows it concentrated: three floors of the Shintenchi Plaza building, second to fourth, with twenty-three griddle counters packed side by side, heirs to the postwar stalls.

   The other half of Hiroshima is the bay. The prefecture produces more than half of Japan's farmed oysters, and between November and February there are oyster festivals at several points along the coast, so this route's month lines up again without being forced. November is the start of the season, not the peak, and that has a practical advantage: there are oysters and not yet the January crowds.

   The third piece means leaving the city: Saijo is in Higashihiroshima, about forty minutes by train, and its brewery street holds a dozen kura with their brick chimneys in plain view. It is the water variant of the Kanazawa and Nada argument: where there is good water and rice, there is sake, and that does not move even when the owners change. Two days, then 209 kilometres to Fukuoka, the last leg.

   What puts it in this route: Okonomi-mura, the building with twenty-three griddles · Hiroshima-Style Okonomiyaki · Hiroshima oysters in season · Saijo, the sake town

10. Fukuoka2 days

    They were two cities facing each other across the Naka river: Hakata, the merchants' port with a thousand years of dealing with China and Korea, and Fukuoka, the samurai town the Kuroda clan built on the far bank. The name was settled by a hair's breadth in the council chamber, and Hakata kept the station, the dialect and the festivals. Tonkotsu ramen started here, and a hundred-odd yatai survive — over a third of all those left in Japan.

    Day trip to Shimonoseki

    Fukuoka closes the route with the argument of the strait: it is the large Japanese city closest to the continent, and its food shows it. Hakata tonkotsu, a creamy pork-bone broth, is the style nearly all the others came out of. Motsunabe, a tripe hotpot with cabbage, garlic chives and garlic, is postwar thrift again. And Nagahama market, the central fish auction, opens to the public on the second Saturday of each month from 9:00 to 12:00, with tuna butchering; if the trip does not fall on that Saturday there is no substitute.

    The yatai are the piece with no equivalent at any other stop. Fukuoka has around a hundred of them, more than a third of all that remain in Japan, and the Tenjin ones are less touristy than those in Nakasu. The rules matter more than the menu: they open around 18:30, close towards midnight, have no fixed closing day but do not come out in the rain, hold about ten stools, have no toilet, few take cards, and the done thing is to order a drink and a dish per person and then free up the seat.

    November adds two things that are not there the rest of the year. The Kyushu honbasho is held this month at the Fukuoka Kokusai Center, the last of the six grand tournaments of the year and the only one outside Tokyo, and during it the stables lodge for a whole month in temples and neighbourhood halls across the city, with training at dawn. And an hour away is Shimonoseki, where you eat fugu in the place most of Japan's supply passes through, with Karato market opening at five in the morning. Three stops in one, and the end of the trip.

    What puts it in this route: Yatai Food Stalls Along the Naka River · Tenjin yatai: the real rules, prices and how to order · Original Hakata Tonkotsu Ramen · Motsunabe · Nagahama fish market and its ramen · Kyushu Sumo Tournament (Kyushu Basho) at Fukuoka Kokusai Center · Watching morning sumo practice in November · Eating fugu where it is auctioned · Karato Market and the Iki-iki Bakangai