Thinly sliced well-marbled Yonezawa beef, about to be cooked as sukiyaki
Originally peasant food for long winters, Tohoku food tends to be strong flavoured and salty, and the area is famous for its pickles. In mountain regions you will certainly have a chance to sample sansai-ryōri (山菜料理), prepared from herbs and plants harvested from the forests and hillsides. Rice from Tohoku is also famous, with Miyagi's sasanishiki (ササニシキ) and Akita's Akita-komachi (秋田小町) being the flagship varieties.
Tohoku is an important fruit production area and produces most of Japan's apples (Aomori), pears (Yamagata), cherries (Yamagata) and peaches (Fukushima). Yonezawa in Yamagata is famed for beef, and beef tongue is a specialty of Sendai. Akita is best known for kiritanpo (きりたんぽ), a hot pot with pounded rice and a chicken stock. Horsemeat is commonly eaten in mountain regions of Iwate.
The Most Frequently Asked Travel Questions about Tohoku
Where To Stay & Best Hotels in Tohoku - updated Apr 2024
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Tohoku Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.
