I’m a food machinery salesman, currently on my fifth year of a solo work assignment in Tokyo. Before this, Fukuoka. Before that, Nagoya. Twelve years of eating alone in backstreet izakayas across Japan.
I started writing because I kept noticing things that guidebooks don’t explain — why the cloth oshibori matters, why nobody orders what they actually want, why a four-seat counter in a city of fourteen million can feel like the quietest place in the world. These aren’t tourist tips. They’re observations about how Japanese people actually use these places, and what that says about the culture.
Izaikayaism is my attempt to write it down before I forget — and to share it with people who are curious about Japan beyond the surface.
