About
Misako Fukuda (福田 美佐子)
Food Media Director & Editorial Producer based in Kamakura
I have been writing about where to eat in Japan since 2010 — close to 1,500 restaurants, in Japanese, at Lua Branca. The Mitate Files is the English edition: the same eye, for people on their second or third trip.
I am not really in the business of listing restaurants. What interests me is why a town eats the way it does — what it used to make, what it lost, who stayed. The restaurants are where you can taste the answer.
So the site is built in two layers. Mitate is the reading: essays on how a place holds together, and how I came to read it that way. Under each essay sit the places themselves — the restaurants, with the hours and the walk from the station, gathered town by town in Where to Eat. A town does not have to wait for its essay, so you can enter at either layer; they point back at each other.
I live in Kamakura, so that is where this starts. But I travel for the same reason I eat: to find the places people who live somewhere actually go. Shonan, the Izu coast, Shonai, Ishinomaki, Joetsu — towns you will not find written up in English, described by someone who sat down and ate there.
Everything here comes from a visit I made myself, with my own photographs. Nothing is written from a press release, and no restaurant pays to appear.
How this site is verified
There is a great deal of English writing about Japanese restaurants at the moment, and much of it was never anywhere near the restaurant. This is how you can tell what you are reading here.
Two dates on every restaurant page
Visited is when I actually ate there. Store details checked is when I last confirmed the opening hours, the closing days and the price band. They are often years apart, and the page shows both rather than blurring them. A meal in 2020 is still worth telling you about. Opening hours from 2020 are not.
The restaurant’s own information comes first
Hours, closing days and walking times are taken from the restaurant’s own site or account where one exists. Aggregator listings for small Japanese restaurants go stale and stay stale, so they are a last resort, and never the only source.
Blank rather than guessed
If I could not confirm something, the field is left empty. You will see gaps in the information boxes. That is deliberate — an empty line is more useful to you than a plausible one. Prices are given as bands rather than figures, because bands stay true for longer.
My reading is marked as mine
In the Mitate essays I make an argument about a place. Where that argument is documented history it is presented as history; where it is my own reading it is presented as my own reading. You cannot check my Japanese sources from where you are sitting, so the line has to be visible.
Small restaurants change their hours, and some of them close for good. Please confirm before you travel — and if you find something out of date, tell me and I will check it.
Get in Touch
For enquiries, collaborations or corrections, use the contact form. The form itself is in Japanese — please write to me in English.
Contact Form