“Visit” Japan without leaving home

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If you’ve ever wanted to visit Japan, that dream may seem far away, in these days of travel restrictions. But don’t despair! It’s still possible to immerse yourself in Japanese culture at home. Enjoy some Japanese food, fire up a Japanese movie or try your hand at some Japanese paper crafts.

Curious? Keen? Then let’s pack our metaphorical bags and head for Japan on a virtual vacation.

P.S.: If you’d like to see a few “real world” sites in the Ottawa area with a Japanese connection, I have some ideas for those, too, at the end of the post.

Note: None of the links below are affiliate links (in other words, I don’t get a commission if you click on them).

Set the table

For many travellers, food plays a big role in any trip. Fortunately, you have lots of ways to enjoy Japanese specialties without hopping on a plane—by ordering takeout or whipping up your own take on Japanese fare.

I went for the takeout option last week and tried two restaurants in Old Ottawa South.

If noodle soups are your winter comfort food, I highly recommend the beef udon soup at Shibayan (437 Sunnyside Avenue at Seneca). Just as in Japan, it’s served in two separate bowls: one filled with thin strips of beef, slurp-worthy noodles, soft-boiled egg, onions and mushrooms, and the other with piping-hot dashi stock (you combine them when you get home).

Is sushi more your style? I ordered from Ten Fish (1149-B Bank Street at Belmont), where various raw and cooked options are hand-rolled to order. As a bit of a sushi newbie/raw fish skeptic, I lean toward cooked rolls; my latest order included one set filled with tempura sweet potato, and another with salmon, avocado and cream cheese.

Many folks I know also rave about the ramen at Sansotei, a Canadian chain with locations in Centretown and on Merivale Road.

Ask around your neighbourhood for your local best picks—and let me know in the comments if you discover something you love!

When you get your bounty home, do as they do in Japan and plate it artistically. Dark plates work well for sushi, while brightly coloured bowls are nice for soups. If you can find an Asian-style tablecloth (I had a kimono-patterned one from a trip to Japan decades ago) and some chopsticks, even better.

Here’s an example of a beautifully presented noodle dish that I tried at an izakaya (small bar) in the Japanese city of Sendai on a trip to Japan last year.

And don’t forget that Japanese plating is more about a sense of balance and colour than fancy ceramics. Here’s a seafood plate from a restaurant in Matsushima, Japan.

Here’s my amateur attempt at Japanese-style plating. Not bad, but I’ve decided I have to keep practising by ordering more Japanese takeout throughout the winter. It’s all in the name of research.

Perhaps you’d rather cook your own meal? Some of the best-selling Japanese cookbooks at Ottawa’s Perfect Books include Let’s Make Ramen: A Comic Book Cookbook, Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavours and Bento: Over 50 Make-Ahead, Delicious Box Lunches.

Put on some Japanese music

If you don’t have any Japanese music in your CD collection, don’t worry. AccuRadio.com features free streaming music channels for just about every musical interest imaginable, including Enka (Japanese pop) and Rising Sun (traditional Japanese music).

Enjoy some Japanese culture

Japan has a long and fascinating history of papermaking. Both The Papery in the Glebe (850 Bank Street) and East Wind in Westboro (361 Richmond Road) sell a range of delicate Japanese papers, which would be a great basis for a family evening of scrapbooking or making paper cards. If you’d like to learn about the Japanese art of paper folding, here’s a clear, detailed beginner’s guide to origami.

Also in the hobby vein: If you’re interested in learning how to cultivate tiny trees, check out the Ottawa Bonsai Society. (That’s more of a long-term project, but hey—we all have nothing but time these days, right?)

Perhaps a Japanese movie night is more your style? Shoplifters, currently available on Netflix, is a compelling story about a hardscrabble family of Tokyo grifters whose lives take a sudden turn when they try to save a little girl from an even rougher home.

A bit harder to find is the funny, wistful Departures, a 2008 movie about a laid-off cellist who moves back to his hometown and begins working in a funeral home. It sounds depressing but it’s strangely uplifting, and it will stay with you for a long time. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, too. You can buy or rent it on iTunes.

I’ll candidly admit that I know very little about anime, the Japanese animated film style that is hugely popular around the world. Here’s a guide from Nerdist.com about the best anime movies for newbies to the genre.

If you’d prefer to curl up with a book, The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide is a short and deceptively simple story. On the surface, it’s about a young workaholic couple visited by a stray cat. Underneath, it’s about philosophy and history and relationships, beautifully told (the author is also a poet). Here’s a review from NPR.

To learn about the experience of Japanese-Canadians, you could start at Meditating Bunny Studio, the online shop of Japanese-Canadian filmmaker, writer and artist Jeff Chiba Stearns. His newest book for young adults, a graphic novel co-created with Lillian Michiko Blakey, is called On Being Yukiko and follows one Japanese-Canadian family through several generations—including the dark period of internment during the Second World War.

Finally, earlier this year, the National Gallery of Canada presented a show called Hanran: 20th-Century Japanese Photography. The exhibition is finished, but many of the materials—including photos and interviews—are still available on the museum’s website.

Japanese-inspired sites in Ottawa-Gatineau

Did you know that there’s a Zen garden at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau? It’s one of my favourite local secrets, and it’s not well signed, so it may well remain that way. It’s on one of the lower roofs of the curatorial wing of the museum (that’s the building on the eastern side of the site that’s not open to the public). Keep following staircases up and up and up, and you’ll find it eventually. Designed by Buddhist monk Shunmyo Toshiaki Masuno, it is a peaceful space of boulders, trees, paths and raked pebbles. From a nearby terrace, you can get a great view of Parliament Hill.

And in Barrhaven, two huge sculptures over a staircase at the Minto Recreation Centre pay homage to a famous Japanese architect. The piece by artists Daniel Young and Christian Giroux is called Mr. Kurokawa and was installed in 2014.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this virtual vacation—it’s something a bit different for this website! If you did, please let me know. I’m hoping to write a few more posts like this to get us all through the winter.

Also, if you enjoy learning about things both real and virtual to do in Eastern Ontario and West Quebec, please subscribe to my free weekly newsletter. Thanks!