Big in Japan 🍣 [Like You Know Whatever]
Plus: why Capricorns are the G.O.A.T.
Hello my darlings!
How are you?? Oh, how I’ve missed you all! My husband Ross and I just got back on Sunday from 11 days of vacation in Japan! Prior to that, we were traveling in the New York City area for a week around Thanksgiving, visiting family and friends (but mostly family). Can you believe that I haven’t sent a newsletter in over a month? I bet you never thought you’d get me to shut the fuck up for that long!
I am so excited to be back in my home in Los Angeles, where I can get cozy and homebody it up with my sweet cat for a while. Visiting Japan was truly incredible, the trip of a lifetime (it’s been the #1 location on my travel bucket list for years), but it was the kind of vacation you come back from completely exhausted. Don’t get me wrong, I love a city-based vacation, but we averaged about 18,000 steps per day. There was just so much to see and do! It definitely took a toll on my body, especially my legs and feet, by the end.
I know I promised you some year-end best-of lists, and don’t worry, you are about to get so many of them! To be more specific, three! On 12/26, Boxing Day, I’m going to send out a newsletter all about my favorite beauty and makeup products for 2023, including a recap of my beauty resolutions and how I did. On 12/29, you’ll get a newsletter recapping all the new recipes I cooked this year and which ones were my favorites. And then finally, on 12/31, I’ll send out a newsletter with my official Best of 2023 awards for pop culture and events in my personal life, along with a resolution recap. You can read last year’s “best of the year” posts here (paywall has been removed, happy holidays!).
I wanted to get those out to you before New Year’s Day because the beauty one in particular has a lot of products you might be interested in picking up, and year-end sales are a great time to do that and save some money. Besides, the period between now and January 2nd is a weird zone when nothing is real and time doesn’t exist, and sometimes it’s nice to have something new and frivolous to read, especially if you are traveling, or hiding in the bathroom from your family. Consider this series of newsletters a showering of gifts from yours truly! Or a plague of posts that you can delete immediately, your call.
If you normally get a holiday card from me and Ross, please be aware that we are unfortunately not going to be able to mail out physical cards this year. I just didn’t have the time this year with all the travel we were doing. We did do a digital card, though, which was fun.
Ross and I will be spending Christmas at home in Los Angeles, celebrating together with some local friends. We’re going to grab dim sum in the San Gabriel Valley on Christmas Eve, and then I’ll be making an epic lasagna bolognese for Christmas Day, when we plan on watching lots of holiday movies and eating lots of holiday food and drinking lots of holiday wine together. I love celebrating with our families, but a low-key holiday with friends is just what the doctor ordered this year.
Let’s get into just one thing before I gush all about Japan:
- Today marks the beginning of Capricorn season! Capricorns are savvy, hard-working, determined, ambitious, grounded, realist, leaders. They are punctual and practical, and masters of their to-do lists. They do not put up with flaky, ditzy, or unserious people, although they do have a rebellious side to them, and are often visionaries or groundbreakers. Cappies are the epitome of “work hard, play hard,” but they would never use that phrase to describe themselves, because that’s too peacocky, and they are goats. They’ll keep their heads down and climb the mountain without any shortcuts or expectations of praise. And most importantly, Capricorns think everything I just said is nonsense, because they think astrology is touchy-feely woo-woo bullshit.
I think that when people hear words like “ambitious” and “hard working” and “materialistic” to describe Capricorns, they think of someone like a douchey, workaholic finance guy who wants to rise to the top of the ranks and make the most money as quickly as possible in a ruthless, Machiavellian way. I don’t see them that way. I think Capricorns just crave security and tangible things, and they work to live, they don’t live to work. They are patient and willing to work for the things they want, but they’re not driven by greed or fantasies of luxury. They just want to be comfortable and secure.
My husband and one of my best friends are both Capricorns, and what I love about them is their loyalty and honesty. If I need someone to show up for me or I want an honest opinion, they always deliver. They may complain about some things in life, but they will never complain about having to work hard. There is also no subject too dark or painful for them to joke about, and I love that wickedly dry sense of humor. I think that sometimes people can see Capricorns as unemotional or cold, but they just have a really zoomed out perspective on life. Like old souls, they have seen it all and life doesn’t scare them. I find that personality type incredibly attractive as a counterweight to my own anxious, dreamy, thinky air sign self. If Libra is a cloud, Capricorn is a mountain. I just love Cappies so much, man, it’s one of my favorite signs.
Famous Capricorns include Martin Luther King, Jr., Greta Thunberg, David Bowie, LeBron James, Dolly Parton, Nicolas Cage, Susan Lucci, Betty White, Dave Grohl, Florence Pugh, and Michelle Obama. They are/were all very different people, but not one of them was put on this earth to suffer our bullshit. MLK was obviously an incredible visionary and leader, but in his writings, he was also very realistic and logical about the path to equality. Talk about a zoomed out view of humanity! I also think about Susan Lucci famously being nominated for a Daytime Emmy 19 times before she won; that is SO very Capricorn, to keep your head down and continue doing great work without trophies or celebration. And Nicolas Cage is famously bad with his money, but I have never once heard him complain about having to take a shitty role to fund his lifestyle. The man just keeps on truckin’, and that is quite Capricorn of him.
So, how do we best celebrate Capricorn season? Well, for one thing, it’s the season of New Year’s resolutions, so get started on that list of goals for 2024! Show up on time for the holiday party but don’t make small talk, because that’s tedious! Lead a drinking game instead! Invest your holiday bonus in something with slow and reliable growth! Gift your family practical things! Buy a new calendar! Zoom out on Google Maps! Time is just a construct, life is meaningless, so keep it real!
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The First Time Anyone Has Ever Gone to Japan
I don’t even know where to begin when recapping this trip. I guess I will start with this: Ross and I realized very quickly how easy it would be to make broad assumptions about Japanese culture or customs based on a singular experience we had as tourists, to the extent that it became a running joke for us. For example, one of our first nights in Tokyo, we were having beers at an izakaya (tavern with bar food) in Shinbashi, and noticed that we kept getting pints with a lot of head on them. We were then left wondering, was it just this one server? This one bar? Or do Japanese people really just love head? (It turned out to be the last one, go figure!) So, just take everything I say with a grain of salt, please, because this is just one dumb American’s brief experience.
On our first full day, we watched the sun rise over Tokyo, awake at an ungodly hour due to jet lag. I’ll never forget that, and how grateful I felt in that moment to actually be there. We criss-crossed Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and then Tokyo again. We went to a dozen different temples, each beautiful in its own way, and bowed and clapped and rang bells and tossed yen and lit candles and prayed. We hiked up mountains and fed baby monkeys and sacred deer by hand. We went to a very serious progressive jazz performance and a very UN-serious bilingual drag show. (The drag show was amazing, so many modestly dressed middle aged Japanese women in the front row waving ally flags and laughing at sex jokes.)
We went to a tiny basement bar in Osaka helmed by the sweetest old Japanese hippie guy with long gray hair who played the Stones and the Doors and Dylan and bummed me an American Spirit (everyone was smoking there, not sure if that was entirely legal, definitely not up to any kind of fire code). We went to a tiny, beautiful cocktail bar in Kyoto where a very kind, impeccable bartender made me the best whiskey sour of my life, with local Japanese whiskey (natch) and brown sugar from Yonaguni Island, which has the mythology of being “the island of women.” We drank a million draft Asahis with two inches of head and discovered Strong Zero, a low-calorie carbonated citrus drink with nine percent alcohol (god help us if Suntory ever starts exporting them to the U.S.!!).
And the food. Oh my god, the food! I used a mixture of Tabelog, a Japanese review site, and Google Maps reviews to find places to eat, but mostly, we just walked into places because they looked popular and good. The Google Maps reviews cracked me up after a while because it seemed whenever I would look up a place, someone would be saying, “This was the best sushi I’ve ever had in my life” “this was the best ramen of my life” “this was the best yakitori of my life.” Like, okay dudes, they can’t ALL be the best of your life. But I get it, because the food was incredible. I had ramen four times and sushi four times and too much street food to count, and the sweets, oh my god, so many sweets! I am firmly a savory over sweet person, but I fell in love with the desserts in Japan because they are all of the delicately flavored, not too sweet variety. I would frequently start my day with some kind of cream-filled pastry from a konbini (convenience store), have a pastry or sweet from a shop in the afternoon, and end it with two vanilla mochi ice cream balls from the same konbini. The sugar kept me going, and I was walking 10 miles a day, so I needed it.
I titled this newsletter “Big in Japan” because something I discussed a few times with my therapist before flying out were my anxieties about existing in a plus size body in a country not known for catering to larger bodies. Would people gawk at me? (Um, no. Also, get over yourself.) Would my ass even fit into the tiny bars and restaurants? (Yes.) And was there any chance in hell of me buying clothing there? (Actually, yes! I bought a t-shirt in Harajuku of the Japanese poster for Pulp Fiction! And the oversized sweater look is really in over there right now, so I probably could have bought one of those, too, but I had to watch my shopping because a) luggage space and b) unemployed.)
I was able to make those things work, but people in larger bodies than me might struggle, which is a whole hell of a lot of people who deserve to experience Japan just as much as I did. I thought about accessibility often on this trip, as there were so many things that required the ability to do lots of stairs or walking or just wouldn’t be accessible to people with mobility issues, chronic pain, or low energy levels. And my intention here is not to single out Japan on this issue when the U.S. can be just as bad (shittt, at least Japan has healthcare!), more just to acknowledge how many layers of privilege I had working for me on this trip.
Another thing I had anxieties about at the beginning of the trip was inadvertently offending someone because I was unaware that what I was doing was actually very rude. I did a lot of research on Japanese culture and manners before I went, but there is only so much you can learn through internet research. In general, Japanese people are so polite and reserved, they are not going to call you out on your rude behavior, which, of course, just gave me even more anxiety! However, as the days went on, I became more comfortable in the role of tourist and realized that even if I did make a faux pas, since I was visibly a foreigner, they would just assume I was being a dumb tourist and probably let it go.
The one thing I learned through experience, unfortunately, is that Japan is VERY anti-PDA. There were two occasions where I gave Ross a kiss on the cheek in public, and man, you would’ve thought I stuck my hand down his pants the way that people reacted! The first time, I thought that maybe I was just being paranoid, but the second time, I realized that I was being rude. Again, no one confronted me, there was just a visible wave of flinching/stinkeye, shall we say. As a heterosexual, I have never experienced that reaction to showing affection to a partner in public. It was eye-opening, to say the least!
Though Japan is very anti-PDA, while there, I also saw signs of the thriving sex industry, which I find fascinating. A lot of the sex industry there does not even involve sex. We were often walking past young women trying to get people to come to host clubs, which are bars where cute young ladies flirt with patrons and sell them overpriced drinks but do NOT do anything physical. My favorite was inexplicably called High School Banana. There is even a male version for women called Top Dandy which I read a really interesting article about. There’s also a cuddle cafe where guys can go and cuddle with young women who will pretend to be their girlfriends for an hour but, again, not do anything sexual.
And then, of course, there is the traditional sex industry. For our second time in Tokyo, we stayed at a hotel in the Kabukicho neighborhood of Shinjuku, which I realized after booking it and already using a Hotels.com credit on it is known for being in the “red light district.” On our first night at the hotel, we ended up riding the elevator with a young lady and an older John. (You could just tell by the way she was giggling at all his jokes. No man is that funny.) While we were staying in that neighborhood, Ross wanted to get a massage, but felt like it would be too difficult to find a legitimate massage parlor from… you know, the other kind people get. I agreed, not out of fear of him being offered any “services,” but because I wanted him to have a real massage, not a bullshit one (he got one at his usual place once we got back to L.A., but paid probably twice as much for it).
(I fear this is now veering into stereotype territory, and that is not my intention at all!! We were just in the literal red light district, okay?? Sex work is work that exists all over the world and I have respect for the people who do it, duhhh.)
Japan has a reputation for being a very expensive destination, but can I be honest? We were pleasantly surprised by how cheap everything was once we were actually there. Like, really cheap. We were “lucky,” I guess, in that the yen was down compared to the US dollar, but even so, we would frequently spend less than $20 on dinner for both of us, including drinks and usually at least one app or side. Where in the U.S. can you do that?! We got so used to it that whenever a meal cost more than that we would go, “Oh, that was expensive,” then realize that the whole bill was $35 and we would easily pay three times that for the same meal in Los Angeles.
We splurged twice. Once, on fresh uni and fatty tuna sashimi at a place in the Tsukiji fish market that was without a doubt, the best sashimi I’ve ever had in my life, melted in my fucking mouth like butter, made me want to cry. And we splurged again on some wagyu beef from Kobe at a yakiniku in Osaka (yakiniku is like Korean barbecue, where you cook the meat yourself over an open flame). Both occasions were totally, 100% worth it.
Our hotels weren’t even that expensive! We splurged once, on a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) in Kyoto that had a gorgeous living room with tatami mat floors and a private patio with an open-air onsen (hot tub). Excluding that, we averaged about $175 per night including taxes and fees for three and four-star hotels, all in major cities. That’s not nothin’, but I actually think it’s quite reasonable considering what comparable hotels in big cities usually cost in the U.S. And of course, the biggest expense that we saved on were the flights, which we paid for entirely in miles through our Delta Amex.
It was so affordable that I’m honestly kind of baffled as to how Japan has such a reputation for being expensive? Is it just that I’m from an already expensive city, and these things are relative? Are people balling out on omakase sushi (chef’s tasting menu) and steak dinners at upscale restaurants all the time? While I found most of the food very affordable, there certainly were luxury options with seemingly limitless boundaries. Or maybe people are taking cabs everywhere? We took public transit 99% of the time, and while it was a little intimidating at first, Google Maps made it super easy once we got the hang of the ticket machines, and all the train announcements were made in English in addition to Japanese.
Something that I marveled at the entire trip and am devastated to go without here in the states are Japanese toilets. Y’all, we are so far behind on toilet technology, it is not even funny. The toilets in Japan come with seat warmers, bidets, buttons to lift and lower the seats, and the ones in public restrooms even have white noise machines so no one has to hear you poop, and deodorizing and sanitizing spray options so that no one has to smell it, either. Some of the public bathroom stalls also had chairs that you could strap your toddler into so you don’t have to wrangle them while you’re trying to pee. I’m telling you, they thought of EVERYTHING and came up with a solution for it. And these are everywhere, in public restrooms! I’ve never had so much fun going to the bathroom in my life!
(Okay so there were two occasions when I came across squat toilets which are just drains in the floor and I had to seek relief elsewhere because I did not have the confidence in my thigh strength or my ability to not pee on myself. But 99% of the toilets were these magical technological achievements.)
I could go on and on about how special this trip was for me, how enriching and inspiring and downright life-affirming, but I don’t want to bore you to death. Suffice it to say, Japan was everything I wanted it to be and more. If you have any interest in traveling there, and you have the means to make it happen, GO!!! I was worried about the flight and the language barrier and the money and my fat ass, and none of that shit mattered in comparison to the incredible experiences I had. Just go. Trust me.
If you’d like to see some photos, please check out my Instagram page. I’ll be sharing more in the coming days, I’m just trying to spread them out so as not to overwhelm the feed. And if you REALLY want to deep dive, I made a big Google Photos album for our families that I’d be happy to share with anyone who asks, just hit reply.
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Before I go, I want to wish all of you very happy holidays. I know that sentiment may feel somewhat trite or hollow this year in light of the atrocities happening right now. How can such suffering not weigh heavily on all of us? But I wanted to share something that brought me a small bit of peace.
I started listening to Christmas music absurdly early this year, like, before Halloween was over, even, and while I was listening to a “Christmas Hits” playlist, Stevie Wonder’s “Someday at Christmas” came on. For whatever reason, that day was the day that I really listened to the lyrics to that song, and I’ll admit that I burst into tears. I’d like to share some of them with you now:
Someday at Christmas men won't be boys
Playing with bombs like kids play with toys
One warm December our hearts will see
A world where men are free
Someday at Christmas there'll be no wars
When we have learned what Christmas is for
When we have found what life's really worth
There'll be peace on earth
Someday all our dreams will come to be
Someday in a world where men are free
Maybe not in time for you and me
But someday at Christmastime
Someday at Christmas we'll see a land
With no hungry children, no empty hand
One happy morning people will share
Our world where people care
Whoa, someday at Christmas there'll be no tears
When all men are equal and no man has fears
One shining moment one prayer away
From our world today…
Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, I hope the sentiment behind that song may still resonate with you. The older I get, the less important I think it is to be a certifiable member of X or Y religions in order to participate in their traditions. Hell, I was raised Roman Catholic, and I just spent 11 days in Japan praying to Buddha for peace at ancient temples and shrines. I figured it couldn’t hurt.
Let’s leave it there. If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you have an absolutely wonderful day filled with joy and peace. I hope you have that kind of day on the 25th even if you DON’T celebrate Christmas! I’ll be back in your inboxes on the 26th.
Don’t forget to like, comment, and share this newsletter if you’d like–you can use the buttons at the bottom or the top.
Until next time—tidings of comfort & joy.
Love,
Liz
XOXO