Do you know which city has the best food in Japan?

18 June is Sustainable Gastronomy Day. Today, I would like to introduce you to Tsuruoka City in Yamagata Prefecture, the only city in Japan to be recognized as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy. It means that Tsuruoka City is the best food city in Japan. The food is delicious, and the city offers many attractive tourist attractions. Please consider a trip to Tsuruoka City on your next trip to Japan.

Tsuruoka City in Yamagata Prefecture has many food, including rice, vegetables, edible wild plants, mushrooms from the Shonai Plain and many mountains, and seafood from the Sea of Japan. The city has a unique food culture, including developing vegetarian cuisine by monks practicing asceticism on the three mountains of Dewa and more than 60 varieties of conventional crops. Some of the ‘conventional crops’ are famous throughout Japan, such as ‘Moso-dake,’ a brand of bamboo shoots, and ‘Dadacha mame,’ a brand of edamame (green soybeans).

I love the city of Tsuruoka and have visited several times. As a tourist attraction, I recommend the five-story pagoda at Mount Hagurosan, which is a national treasure. The five-story pagoda was built about 600 years ago, and it would not be easy even today to build such a large structure in the mountains. It is well worth a visit.

You can also admire the fantastic sight of jellyfish at the world’s largest jellyfish aquarium, the Tsuruoka Kamo Aquarium.

The SHONAI HOTEL SUIDEN TERRASSE, built in the middle of rice paddies, is recommended as a place to stay. It is the first hotel created by world-renowned architect Shigeru Ban. The furniture is made from sustainable material, cardboard furniture.