Autumn arrived two weeks ago, but it wasn't until this week that it has begun to truly feel like autumn. The temperature suddenly plummeted with a bout of rain on Wednesday. It finally got cool enough to bring out the cold weather comforter, not to be confused with the frigid winter down comforter that we rarely use here (I brought, not one, but two from Chicago - what was I thinking?).
In Chicago, Halloween decorations and pumpkin spice everything are the first signs of the season. It is not all that different in Tokyo, where the consumer market also marches ahead of nature. Everywhere you look there are advertisements for seasonal foods: chestnuts, sweet potato, mushroom, plump fish, pears, persimmons, and root vegetables galore. They are the bounties of October. My Japanese friend who lives in America says that winter is the best time to return to Japan because the food gets better as the weather gets colder.
Takashimaya, an otherwise posh department store, carries produce of high quality at surprisingly reasonable prices. Given the generally posh (and older) customer base, each piece of produce is impeccably and frustratingly wrapped in plastic to be perfectly displayed. It is obvious when something is in season. It will be humongous. With the size of these things, there is no way you can display it "elegantly." Last year, I found a romanesco cauliflower so large that I wouldn't have been able to fit it into my bicycle basket. This week, you can get maitake mushroom the size of a small suitcase for the equivalent of $3 USD. Same for shimeji and oyster mushrooms. Also on offer are baseball-bat daikons and two-pound bouquets of greens.
I then moved on to the cake section, where a pop-up stand was taking orders for Christmas cakes! Christmas in Japan is actually a very secular/commercial holiday for couples and friends while New Year is the holiday to spend with family. Christmas is all about cakes, and without Halloween and Thanksgiving standing in the way, preparations begin now. The cake order lady handed me a catalog of their cakes. I brought it home, where my kids pored over it for an hour analyzing which cakes they would buy and why.
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| Notice that each cake is diagramed in the lower right corner of each box. |
I wanted to feel like I really took advantage of this perfectly cloudy autumn day, so I went for a run. And with a run, I worked up an appetite. It was also cold and had started raining. The very best circumstances for a bowl of hot ramen.
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| A soul warming way to end the day. |
