About Mochi

I’m Mochi, and Japan caught me. Not subtly, not gradually. Exactly at the moment the cabin doors opened and that strange mix of cedar, fresh matcha, and something completely undefinable hit my nose. I haven’t fully recovered since.

The first trip was with my partner. At some point I just had to go back: just me, the country, and no fixed plan. That’s how one trip turned into a habit. My partner loves Japan just as much.

From Tokyo to Fukuoka, and everywhere in between

Tokyo and Kyoto? Yes, like everyone. But also Kanazawa, Nagano, Matsumoto, and the Nakasendo, an old post road where you can walk for hours without a single tour bus selfie in sight. In Ise, we visited the Naiku shrine, one of Japan’s most sacred places, radiating a silence that’s genuinely hard to find anywhere else. We walked the Kumano Kodo with sore feet and wide grins.

In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we stopped. Those cities demand it. They’re the hardest thing Japan shows you, and the most important.

And then: the Aso Valley. The crater. The silence. Cows on green hills that look like Miyazaki placed them there personally.

Flea markets, ceramics, and the Saga obsession

Our secret superpower: flea markets. And when I say flea markets, I mean: we actually plan our Japan trips around them. We’ve developed an uncanny ability to spot beautiful old ceramics, and an equally alarming inability to leave them behind. The Saga region and Arita in particular we explored with wide eyes. Arita-yaki, 400 years of porcelain history, and a market that draws half the world once a year. We were there, obviously.

Why plant-based in Japan?

Japan is, on paper, the country where you’d least expect to eat well as a plant-based traveler. Dashi in everything, hidden fish, puzzled looks. And yet, or maybe because of that, it’s the most exciting culinary adventure I know. Shojin ryori, Japan’s Buddhist temple cuisine, is so spare and so layered you could think about it for hours. A good konbini onigiri at 2am is its own small miracle.

What MochiMiles is

MochiMiles is my attempt to share my experiences and enthusiasm for this country, and to make others feel it too. I want to write down the small things before I forget them. Because that’s really what it’s about: the feeling Japan gives you.

An example: we were strolling through narrow lanes in Kyoto, about to cross a small street, when an elderly man in a car stopped to let us through, and bowed to us as he did. We thanked him, bowed back. A tiny moment. Nothing remarkable, you might say. And yet that moment still warms me whenever I think of it. That’s Japan. Not in the obvious places. In these small gestures that make you wish you’d written them all down.