Tag: events | RocketNews24

Located just across the northern border from Tokyo, Saitama Prefecture is home to over seven million people. With far more affordable housing than the capital, but yet with relatively easy access to it via numerous train lines, several of Saitama’s residents spend most of their day studying or working in Tokyo. Despite its proximity though, Saitama is still outside Tokyo, earning it something of a stigma among Tokyoites, some of whom have saddled it with the unflattering nickname “Dasaitama,” coming from the word dasai, or “uncool.”

For the beginning of May though, Saitama will be filled with something we can all agree is very cool: ice cream. With the opening of the All Japan Ice Cream Collection festival, Saitama’s Koshigaya City is set to make even the snootiest urban socialites eat a little crow, even if that particular flavor is definitely not on the menu. Read More

As icky as it sounds to many of us brought up in Western cultures, the human consumption of insects is common in many parts of the world.

Most Japanese people are on the same page as the rest of the developed world in thinking of bugs as unappetizing—not to mention creepy, gross, and/or scary— little creatures that have no place in the home, and especially not on the dinner plate.

However, there are some rural regions of Japan where insects are are a local delicacy, and have been so for centuries. In Nagano, the prefecture this writer calls home, you can walk into any supermarket and expect to find plastic packs of grasshopper (inago) or stonefly larva (suzumushi) boiled in soy sauce, and sometimes even read-to-eat packs of boiled wasp larva mixed in with rice (hachinoko-gohan).

In the cities, eating bugs is still taboo, and even in rural areas insect cuisine is now considered fringe cuisine, especially among the younger generations. But in Tokyo, there is a group of people who believe that bugs just need to be given a chance, which is why they are hosting what is now the 4th annual Tokyo Insect Eating Festival (Tokyo Mushikui Festival) on November 23.

Masthead