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| Washita Shop: Ginza | |||
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Just up the block from Ginza's Printemps Department Store, a one-meter-tall, bright-yellow Okinawan shisa (guard-lion) sits on the sidewalk watching over the entrance of the Washita Shop. This popular store carries just about every Okinawan item you can imagine, from pottery and traditional musical instruments to a surprising assortment of tropical fruits and vegetables.
The ground floor is almost entirely devoted to food, and the customers here seem to be a mix of transplanted Okinawans stocking up on home-town ingredients and past vacation travelers with a nostalgic craving for the foods they had while visiting the islands. Here you can find Okinawan soba noodles, papayas, bananas and bitter winter melon (goya), black-sugar candies, and the pungent, liquor-marinated compressed tofu product called tofu-yo. One aisle is devoted to a bewildering display of different types of Spam and other canned meat products that are an essential ingredient in Okinawan stir-fries. An ice-cream stand in the far corner serves several flavors of Blue Seal ice cream, for here to to go. Downstairs in the basement is an impressive liquor department, with hundreds of varieties of awamori, the traditional Okinawan distilled liquor. (Beers - three kinds of Orion plus a few local microbrews - are back upstairs next to the ice cream.) You'll also find a big selection of books, CDs of Okinawan music, traditional shamisen instruments, pottery and other crafts. You can guard your own genkan with souvenir shisa lions in various sizes (though none are as big as the impressive specimen outside the shop). If all this Okinawan atmosphere leaves you with a hankering to see the islands for yourself, you're in luck - the travel desk in the far corner of the basement is ready to help you with air and hotel bookings for your next trip. (There's also a smaller branch of Washita in Ueno that opened in October 2003.) by Scott Cooper |
Washita Shop
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