Tony Alexander profile

blog: The Soul of Japan

This blog is about one man's travels through-out Japan and his love for onsen & sake. What makes this blog so unique ? Of all the blogs ever written on Japan, this blog is a compendium of onsens and sake in full color, sort of a how-to guide to enjoy

This blog is about one man's travels through-out Japan and his love for onsen & sake. What makes this blog so unique ? Of all the blogs ever written on Japan, this blog is a compendium of onsens and sake in full color, sort of a how-to guide to enjoying Japan through pictures.　Everything you'll see in this blog will be in full color. Every place illustrated are places I have been to, and every sake you'll see in this blog, I've tasted. All information and places are real and authentic !

A little bit about me: I'm an Japophiliac man with simple taste. I'm not rich, but modest. I'm a lover of all things Japan, both great and small. I believe that Japanese onsens, sake and food and Japanese women are central in how everything is defined in this country. Sake is a refined drink, the perfect harmony between rice, water, and good koji(mold). And then there's the brewer and his Art and how he manipulates three of those elements, fusing them into this nectar we call God water—nihonshu.

Since arriving here in Japan some years ago, I was overcome with the same convictions as the late great Mishima Yukio, one of Japan's greatest playwriters and authors who took his own life back in November of 1970, that beauty and art co-exist, but that beauty is short lived. To die at the very height of ones beauty is better than if one dies old, for if one dies beautiful, that person will always be remembered as beautiful in death. Art goes on.　The sake is similar in the fact that it is sort of a dying beauty. And although, it is enjoying some popularity abroad, the essence of how sake used to be made in relation to what it has become over the years has changed and is loosing some of its beauty and character, albeit from an aesthetic point view.