Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo

by Matthew Amster-Burton

Utsunomiya is an ordinary city of half a million, an hour north of Tokyo on the Tōhoku Shinkansen line. It has no particular tourist attractions, and any foreign tourists heading that direction are probably more interested in the beautiful mountain town of Nikko. A few years ago, Utsunomiya’s city booster types, as boosters do, went looking around for something about the city to promote. Poring over official statistics, they found that Utsunomiyans eat more gyōza per capita than people of any other city in Japan. “Aha!” said the boosters. “Let it be known far and wide that we are the City of Dumplings.”