Homer Simpson may have introduced you to fugu. Or perhaps Anthony Bourdain. They’re among those who have eaten the potentially deadly blowfish and helped make it “the thrill-seeking gastronome’s equivalent to scaling Mount Everest,” writes Adam Platt in New York Magazine. It’s banned through much of Europe and available only in a few restaurants in the U.S., though the FDA-sanctioned importing process, according to Platt, renders the fugu “less toxic than a piece of mercury-saturated tuna sushi at your local Korean deli.”

Continue reading >>

Yoshoku means “Western food” in Japanese, and it’s been a staple of the country’s cuisine for decades. Chefs have taken hamburgers, spaghetti and other dishes, and “reshaped” them for Japanese palates. Most foreigners, though, have never heard of yoshoku, writes Norimitsu Onishi in The International Herald Tribune.

Continue reading >>

You want bad travel news? We got your bad travel news. The dollar’s tumbling value in Japan is today’s big headline. (Japan-bound budget travelers might want to cancel that hostel reservation and book a night here.) But the dollar has been sinking around the globe, from euro-land to India, for some time now. Get this, from the AP: “At the Taj Mahal, dollars were always legal tender, alongside rupees, for entry into the palace. But because of the falling value of the dollar, the government implemented a rupees-only policy a month ago.”

Related on World Hum:
* Three Travel Tips: Ways to Save Money in Europe

Photo by Delvis via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

All those stars Michelin awarded Tokyo restaurants are impressing many, but not a core group of prominent Tokyo chefs and critics. “Japanese food was created here, and only Japanese know it,” chef Toshiya Kadowaki told the New York Times. “How can a bunch of foreigners show up and tell us what is good or bad?”

Continue reading >>

Michelin’s first-ever guide to Tokyo gave the city’s restaurants a combined 191 stars, more than Paris (98 stars) and New York City (54 stars) have together. Sure, Tokyo also has far more restaurants (160,000) than Paris (20,000) and New York (23,000), but the news of the quality of the Japanese cuisine—Michelin released the Tokyo ratings last November—has resonated with travelers. According to the Japanese government, seven out of 10 international travelers to the country cite food as the primary reason for visiting. 

Continue reading >>

The prolific travel writer reflects on life in Japan and his writing career in a recent Washington Post essay: “Perhaps the greatest beauty of the writing life is that it offers you concrete evidence of all your changes; the pages you write are like those charts nurses place at the end of your bed to map your progress. Whatever you need to know about yourself is there, if only you know how to read it.”

Related on World Hum:
* Q&A With Pico Iyer: On Travel and Travel Writing

Photo by kurisuuu via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

I’ve always considered fortune cookies to be a prime example of Chinese-American entrepreneurship, developed by early 20th century immigrants to draw Americans into chop suey houses in the San Francisco area. Or so went popular history. Now a fascinating New York Times article has blown the fortune cookie’s cover: A Japanese graduate student has traced the tradition to several family bakeries outside Kyoto, Japan, where they have been tucking paper fortunes into crimped brown wafers since the 1870s. 

Continue reading >>

In Japan, pod hotels are old news. The first one, Capsule Inn Osaka, opened in 1977. Writes Karen Burshstein in a National Post story: “With more than a passing resemblance to the drawers in a morgue, it was a weird but nifty addition to Japan’s space-starved cityscapes.” Now, though, the concept has spread, and mini-hotel rooms are popping up in London, New York, Amsterdam, Vancouver and elsewhere. They range from the garish yet economical (the low-cost and bright orange easyHotels,) for instance, to trendy and high-tech (like Dutch company Qbic‘s LCD TV screens and changeable color schemes that match your mood, pictured) and many are available for only a few hours at a time, neatly filling the gap between a red-eye landing and the start of a long day of museum or gallery hopping. 

Continue reading >>

Wild scene today on the tarmac of an airport in Okinawa, Japan: A China Airlines Boeing 737-800 skidded to stop and caught fire, prompting passengers to evacuate down emergency slides and the pilot to jump from the cockpit window. The plane then “burst into a fireball,” according to the AP. Amazingly, all 165 people aboard reportedly escaped serious injury. The AP notes that the incident “is a setback to China Airlines, which in recent years appeared to have improved on a troubled safety record among international carrier.”

Love him or hate him, our commander-in-chief, George W. Bush, can teach Americans at least one lesson: how to vacation. With only a few weeks of summer remaining, President Bush, like many other world leaders, is trading the stress of executive office for some rest and relaxation. And he’s leaving the majority of U.S. citizens in his Texas dust. Actually, if a survey conducted by a global human resources firm is accurate, even the average Finn, Israeli or Lithuanian would have a hard time keeping up with his seven-year vacation-time total. Because whatever President Bush may lack in creativity—he’s taken 65 trips to Crawford, Texas since entering office—he more than makes up for in number. According to the Houston Chronicle, G.W.B. is well on his way to claiming the White House record for time off, rapidly closing in on the 436 days Reagan racked up during two terms. 

Continue reading >>

Sounds like hell to me. Or an Onion story. However, German entrepreneur Alexander W. Schoppmann (pictured) says he’s bringing glamour back to air travel with Smoker’s International Airways, aka Smintair, a start-up airline that plans to cater to smokers.

Continue reading >>

My sister, Janet, visited Japan last year and returned with a breathless account of her experience with Japanese toilets, particularly the “washlets”—high-tech bidet models with myriad features such as adjustable hot and cold water sprayers, heated seats, blow dryers and, in some cases, massage settings. “It’s not for someone who just wants to go in, do their business and get out the door,” she concluded. Japan-bound visitors have traditionally had to wait until they arrive to make use of what are perhaps the world’s most luxurious loos. But according to a recent Reuters story, soon passengers on some All Nippon Airways (ANA) flights won’t even have to wait that long. (Yes, the airline that brought the world the Pokemon jet is again breaking new ground.)

Continue reading >>