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The story
What started as a thread starter’s report of being blown away by the food on a trip to Akita spiraled into bragging about the local sake and fish, then escalated into a full-on regional showdown over whether Tokyo’s water and food are actually bad. Tokyo, Okinawa, Saitama, and Shiga all got dragged into the back-and-forth, while Akita’s sake fans kept the brand names coming — Aramasa, Yuki no Bosha, Yamamoto, Hiraizumi — making the case for Akita’s chops as a top rice-growing region. No consensus was reached; the thread ran on two tracks at once, a food-and-water superiority debate and a sake tasting session.
What people said
Sukima Switch is the worst
I dunno, even the water tastes bad.
Tokyo food is plenty good.
You're just not finding the good places.
Both the air and the water are bottom-tier.
Wonder what it is. Might be the water.
The good places are good, but on average Tokyo food is mediocre.
Gosaku Ramen
Okinawa's the real bottom-tier though
Okinawa's water is hit or miss, but the air's fine.
Nagoya or Osaka might come close, but Tokyo's still the worst.
Tokyo's the only place that smells like crap in summer.
So true.
Gurukun (reef fish), shima tofu, pork belly udon — all terrible.
The only good stuff is the steak, burgers, and beer the US military brought over.
Though I'll let yagijiru (goat soup) slide after a few drinks.
You're not getting what I mean.
"The water tastes bad" — you'll get that feeling eventually.
I've lived in both Tokyo and the Kansai area.
https://www.central-group.co.jp/sevenseas/s4/img/20250205_001.pdf
Oh… Osaka.
Good restaurants don't even use tap water to begin with
True, the high-end places are good.
But at your average diner or izakaya, it's often kind of meh.
Meanwhile in Hokkaido, literally everywhere is good
It's good if you pay for it.
But at a ¥1000 lunch spot you're like, "this kind of sucks?"
Where the water's good, every dish is a notch better across the board
Re: #57
I stayed in Akita as a stopover.
Niigata and Hokkaido were the real destinations.
They actually ran that test before.
Some guy who'd been going on and on about how Tokyo water tastes bad didn't even realize he was drinking Tokyo water when he said he liked it.
Something about Tokyo's purification being really good, apparently.
There are plenty of rural areas worse off than Tokyo.
Those don't somehow rank above Tokyo.
Saitama and Shiga are landlocked, so their fish game is dead on arrival anyway.
Now you get it.
If a rural area has bad water, there's always some reason for it.
Otherwise it's basically always good.
That's exactly the problem — people talk like ALL rural areas have great food.
Good food varies place by place.
Tokyo has great food across the board.
Sure, it's also got plenty of bad food too.
My bad.
I'm broke, so I can't afford to eat well in Tokyo every single night.
The competition's fierce.
More like a competition for the least crappy option
In Tokyo, getting the same quality costs more than in the regions.
Especially true the fancier the restaurant.
Akita's strength as a rice-growing region really shows in its sake too. I wish more people nationwide knew about it.
I'm a Yamamoto guy myself.
It's delicious and they make all sorts of interesting sake.
Also Yuki no Bijin's kijoshu (a rich sweet sake brewed using sake instead of water) is amazing too.
I'm a Hiraizumi fan
I've had Yuki no Bosha and Ippaku Suijo.
Paired with ankou no tomoae (monkfish liver mixed with its own guts).
The pairing was so perfect it made me want to move there.
Might pick some up for New Year's.
Aramasa is ridiculously good
One bottle is ¥20,000?!
Which ones are actually reasonably priced?
That's a scalper price
That's a resold bottle of No.6.
Even that one's retail price was only around ¥2,000-3,000 for a 720ml bottle, if I remember right.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The “Tokyo’s water tastes bad” debate is a recurring one, often brought up alongside blind-taste-test anecdotes, but differences in taste owe a lot to the water source (river water vs. groundwater), the purification method, and plain old personal bias — making it a hard call to settle scientifically. Akita, meanwhile, is nationally known as a top rice-growing region, and that same strength carries over into sake: it’s home to highly regarded breweries like Aramasa Shuzo, Saiya Shuzoten (makers of Yuki no Bosha), Yamamoto Gomei Kaisha, and Hiraizumi Honpo. Hard-to-find bottles like Aramasa’s popular “No.6” sometimes get resold for several times their retail price, so the “¥20,000 a bottle” figure that came up in the thread was likely one of those scalped prices. The thread ran on two tracks at once — a regional showdown over water and food, and a sake-brand discussion — without ever landing on a single conclusion.
*This article is composed of excerpts and a summary from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Good News] I Went on a Trip to Akita and Was Shocked at How Good the Food Was lolololololol”.
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