A Fat Purple Fig

When Airbnb cancelled our accommodation (for the second time) in Shinjuku, a week before we were due to arrive in Tokyo, we took a place in Nakano at the eleventh hour. And I’m not sure if we ended up loving the suburb because it became familiar, or because it was great anyway and we got lucky, but I like to think it was the latter.

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It’s not often you get to have lunch with someone famous, but Mary and I were lucky enough to do just that, when we visited the Tsugawa Family for lunch in Nagayama. We connected with Yuko and her husband, Kazunori, through Nagomi Visit, a not-for-profit organisation that seeks to match visitors to Japan with local families over a shared lunch.

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