Kamakura

Miko priestesses dance at a Kamakura shrine to gagaku music

dango roasting over a grill

Visiting Kamakura, an ancient temple site that has long been a standard omairi locale for the Japanese, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I have already been to Todaiji and the Daibutsu, so the famous (although very slightly smaller) giant Buddha in Kamakura is a local next step.

Still, while the temples are in fact quite beautiful, there are so many of them and they are of a similarity such that looking at them one after the other is, well, tiring to say the least. There's only so much walking through gates and admiring of chrysanthemum flowers that anyone can take before their stomach starts grumbling.

sweet sake manju steam buns

Fortunately I happened across a section of town that offered hot food and treats from street-side stalls. Dango, dumplings made from sweet rice flour and skewered before roasting, are a specialty of the region.

I also enjoyed the soft fluffy texture of sake manju – steamed buns made with sake and sweet adzuki bean filling – on a bamboo bench while watching the crowds mill about shopping for trinkets and snacks. The three flavors pictured, from the left, were yomogi, kokutou brown sugar, and mochi rice. Yomogi is a Japanese variety of mugwort, but it's not nearly so bad as that sounds. Think of it as a leafy and faintly flavored kind of an herb. In Japan, it's mostly used as a kind of natural food coloring, although it does impart a nuance of vegetative flavor to the steam bun.
 
I munched on sweets and snacks for a bit longer before deciding that my stomach was telling me it was time for something more substantial.

Lunch led me to sausages. Thick, bratwurst-like sausages with local craft lager from Enoshima. A German experience is not exactly what I was expecting out in a rural and old-school-traditional Japanese town, but it was good nonetheless.

And it had the biggest line in front of its stall. I guess times do change.