Eating Plant-Based in Tokyo

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the birthday trip I took to Tokyo earlier this year. More specifically, I wrote about my favorite vegan restaurants in Tokyo during that trip. If you missed it, definitely check it out!

In this post, I’ll be talking more broadly about my trip and how I stuck to eating a healthy plant-based diet. Even with all the amazing plant-based restaurants in Japan, I didn’t want to eat out for every meal. For me, part of the fun of traveling is staying somewhere with a kitchen and finding interesting local ingredients to cook with. Let’s see how I did!

Traveling and arrival

Flying from Maui to Honolulu to Tokyo, it took about 9½ hours of flying time to get there. You can see how densely populated Tokyo is when you descend. With over 37 million people, it’s the largest city in the world by population.

We landed at 5pm and arrived at our Airbnb at 8:30pm. It might have been faster to take a taxi from the airport, but we decided to have an adventure and use the metro instead. It took some navigating and asking a few very nice train station attendants, but we finally made it to our stop and walked 5 minutes to the Airbnb.

This was a side street close to our apartment. After we dropped off our bags, we walked to a little health food store to buy some soy milk and fresh fruit for breakfast the next morning. I was happy to be in another country and on another continent! This is one of my favorite feelings in the world. To experience a place where nothing looks familiar and you’re completely out of your routine and what you know.

What I packed

I never, and I mean never, leave for a trip without packing my body tools.

Here we have:

• Cloth yoga mat
• Strap for stretching my legs and neck
• Golf ball for rolling under my feet
• Bigger ball for rolling my neck
• Ball sock (6 tennis balls tied in a knee-high sock) for rolling out my back

I use these things every single day, whether I’m traveling or at home. I’ve been doing my morning ball / stretching routine since 2017, and I can’t imagine going without. It’s especially awesome after spending hours on a plane.

I also packed some rolled oats, nuts, seeds, raisins, and a mixture of toasted buckwheat and cacao nibs in my suitcase. All we needed was some soy milk and fruit, and BOOM, breakfast would be taken care of. We found some small containers of soy milk at the little health food store near our Airbnb and put some overnight oats in the fridge before we crashed for the night.

The next morning, all we had to do was add some of the organic blueberries we’d bought the previous night, and a bit of the yummy buckwheat / cacao topping, and breakfast was served! It’s so nice having breakfast taken care of because I like to take my time getting up and moving around in the mornings, especially when traveling. I usually wake up early, but I like to take it slow, drink some warm water, do my ball / stretching exercises, make some tea, check my messages, and then eat breakfast.

Shopping, sightseeing, and cooking

After taking our time in the morning, we decided to hop on the train and explore. Traveling is the BEST!! Below is the metro map—yeah, not very helpful—LOL. I have no idea how we managed, but by the end of our trip, we had the metro nailed! If you go to Tokyo, I highly recommend using the train system because it’s super affordable and it’s the fastest way to get around.

We found a vegan, gluten-free cafe called Where is a Dog? The theme of the restaurant is, get this, CATS. Lol—I was cracking up! Anyway, the food was good, and the bread was even better. That baguette you see in the upper left corner? It was vegan AND gluten-free. And it was freaking delicious! We got that and the little biscotti-looking things to the right of it.

We also went to a health food market and picked up some green onions, bok choy, blueberries, jam, hummus, tofu, and loads of organic sunscreen.

We then picked up some miso from the Miso Farm that I talked about in my last Japan post, and that evening, I made the best miso soup I’ve ever had in my life.

The miso was SO good and so was the tofu. I added some bok choy and green onions as well. My mouth is watering as I’m remembering how damn good it was! The quality of the miso makes such a difference.

I also had a toasted baguette slice with hummus, and another with almond butter (from a travel-sized pack I brought with me), and some yummy jam. I was blissed out by this simple, yummy food.

We usually had breakfast at the Airbnb, lunch out, and then back to the Airbnb for dinner. There were a few days we had lunch and dinner out, but those were marathon days because once we left our Airbnb in the mid-morning, we didn’t get back until the evening. There are so many vegan restaurants in Tokyo that we could have eaten at a different one for every meal, but Tokyo is also really spread out, so it can take a while to get from one part of the city to another.

This evening, we had a very simple dinner of carrots and hummus, bananas and almond butter, some pre-cooked white rice, and pickled veggies we picked up at a grocery store. Dinner doesn’t have to be fancy; sometimes, it’s just about getting whatever plants in your mouth that you can before you go to sleep and recharge for the next day.

Here is the kitchen in our Airbnb. By Japanese standards, this is actually quite large. It had everything we needed: a fridge/freezer, an electric kettle, a microwave, two burners, a toaster oven, a sink, and basic kitchen tools.

Fun fact: In the summer, it starts to get light at around 4:30am! By 5am, the sun is up. I’d never wanted black-out curtains so much as that first morning in Tokyo!

We were originallygoing to stay at a hotel, but we found this Airbnb for about the same price. Because the hotel had no kitchen, it was a no-brainer. Our place was less than a 5-minute walk to the Asagaya train station.

We stopped by Muji, one of my favorite Japanese stores. They sell understated clothes, household, and office goods. They also had amazing peaches and this yummy sparkling water. Only in Japan can you buy a ripe peach, an awesome notebook, and a cute pair of pants at the same store.

Soy milk, granola, and bananas. Add in some blueberries, and breakfast is ready. I can’t emphasise enough the ease of not overcomplicating breakfast. When breakfast is routinely easy you don’t have to think about it, which frees up space to think about other things. This is helpful whether you’re at home doing your usual stuff or exploring a new part of the globe.

We mainly took the trains to get around, but we did take a bus a couple times as well. Public transportation is so efficient in Tokyo that you really don’t need to take taxis or rent a car. It’s much easier to explore by train and the occasional bus.

If you’re planning a trip to Tokyo, I recommend emailing these people and booking a session during your trip. We booked some much-needed bodywork, a mix of chiropractic work and massage. They cater to tourists and speak English.

This vegan gluten-free bread was as good as that magical baguette I mentioned earlier! We found it at one of the health food stores, and it was made out of millet and rice. I’m sure there was oil in it, but I didn’t care and ate it with delight. I also found some peanut butter, which isn’t super common in Japan, so I jumped on the chance to buy it.

If you had to guess what the control panels below are for, what would your guess be?

An alarm system?
Heating and cooling thermostats?
Remote controls for electronics?
Nope, they’re for your usual run-of-the-mill Japanese toilet!

Each toilet control is slightly different. Some have one control panel, others have a few. Some are on the wall, others are on the side of the toilet. Some have sounds of birds and waterfalls you can play at various levels, others have warm water options. They all have a bidet option that you can move front and back depending on where you, um, need the water to clean. I love Japanese toilets because they are so damn thorough (even if some of them are confusing AF).

I wish I could tell you more about all the options on this example, but I had no idea. I just pressed buttons and hoped for the best.

Our Airbnb host gave us some fresh corn (a big thing in Japan), and I cut the kernels off the cob and added them to the miso soup I made, along with some rice noodles we got at the health food store. I 10/10 recommend adding corn and rice noodles to your next batch of miso soup! It was an instant favorite.

This was the last meal at our Airbnb. We tried to eat all the rest of the ingredients we had. A tall order for breakfast!

Check-out time was at noon, and our plane didn’t leave until 7pm. Most of the train stations in Tokyo have lockers you can rent. This came in really handy since we had some time to kill and couldn’t leave our bags at the Airbnb. So we had breakfast, enjoyed a lazy morning, and then packed up and went to the train station to drop off our bags.

We stored our luggage in a big locker for about 4 hours while we did some more exploring. During that time, we hit up an arcade, bought some last-minute presents for friends and family, had an amazing matcha, and checked out the giant 3D cat in Shinjuku. We even found a post office that was open on Sunday, so I was able to mail some books to my niece, who’s learning Japanese.

When it was time to head to the airport, we paid a few dollars to collect our luggage and then met our bus.

And just like that, we were back on the plane leaving Japan.

I’ve traveled to many parts of the world (such as the Netherlands, Namibia, Australia, Malaysia, France, and more) and have always managed to eat plant-based food while doing so. With a little creativity, some planning, low expectations, and a bit of wiggle room, you, too, can eat plant-based when you travel. It’s not about being perfect; it’s about doing the best you can while fully enjoying the experience.

Thank you Tokyo, I will be back!

Xo
Molly