[Day 5] Pan no Mimi
Some background:
Yakitate!! Japan is a Japanese manga and anime which is basically all about baking bread. The title means “Freshly Baked!! Japan” which is also a pun, because “pan” is the Japanese word for bread. Sounds like an odd subject for a series but it is honestly one of my favourites.
It’s about a boy named Kazuma Azuma who wants to create a bread that is uniquely Japanese, much like there is German bread (doitsu-pan), French Bread (furansu-pan) and Italian bread (itaria-pan) - hence the name Ja-pan.
The series is above all funny but it may be better appreciated by those who have watched plenty of anime before, and know the conventions and clichés. A lot of the jokes are parodies of other anime/manga or their genres.
Still, it could be interesting for non-otaku too. The manga actually had recipes of the breads featured in the series, as well as general baking tips. The manga-ka Takashi Hashiguchi hired a bread artisan consultant while writing the series. That consultant’s name is Kouichi Uchimura. He created a lot of the bread that appeared in the series and is apparently really trying to create a uniquely Japanese bread (I personally thought that they had plenty, but anyway). Uchimura has a bakery here in Kyoto called Pan no Mimi (which translates into ‘bread ends’, or ‘bread crusts’) and that’s where I went today!
To get to Pan no Mimi, you need to get on the JR San-In or Sagano Line (Platforms 32 and 33 at JR Kyoto Station at time of writing) and get off two stations later at Nijo Station. Yes, that’s Nijo, like Nijo-jo, or Nijo Castle. The castle is a block away from the station. When you get out of the station (take the east exit, there should be signs pointing to Nijo Castle) and you get to the main road, take a left and walk for a while. You’ll pass two major intersections and about four traffic lights in total. Pan no Mimi will be on this street you’re walking down, on your left. There are only signs in Japanese.
The first thing I thought when I found the place was “Yay! I found it!” because it really was a hike from Nijo Station and I thought I may have missed it. The second thing I thought was “….it’s so tiny”. And it really is. There is barely room for two customers to move around. There is a small display with some Yakitate!! Japan manga and posters explaining how Uchimura was involved, plus a few manga scans and what seems to be a thank you card from the Yakitate!! team to Uchimura.
But that was all that showed that this was anything more than a tiny, local bakery servicing the residents in the less-touristy part of Kyoto. In keeping with its name, Pan no Mimi was in fact selling bags of bread ends and bread crusts on one table….for what I’m not sure. It just looked like duck and koi food to me.
In every Japanese bakery you walk into, you’ll find a pile of trays and tongs at the door so you can serve yourself. Go around the display and place what you want to buy on your tray, then take everything to the counter where it will be bagged by the assistant and totalled.
I decided to go for two very Yakitate!! breads: melon bread (meron-pan) and a French baguette (furansu-pan). Coupled with a bottle of lemon ice tea, the whole thing was less than $6.
If I remember correctly, in the anime, the melon bread that Kazuma made was rather ugly and sickly looking, but then it tasted fantastic. It was the same with Pan no Mimi’s melon bread. It didn’t look anything like the carefully sculptured and identical looking breads that you get from the local combini - but, oh man, when you tasted it……yumyumyum. There was only a hint of melon flavour - it was mainly just a sugar hit, complete with slightly caramelised bits on the edges.
The baguette was slightly sticky and chewy on the inside while being very crusty on the outside - again, just like they said it was in Yakitate!! - and it was also damn tasty. In fact, it was so good that I had eaten most of it before I remembered to take a photo, heh.
I didn’t have extreme and comic reactions to the breads’ taste like the characters in the series, but I did like it enough to decide to go back tomorrow - despite the hike to get there.
Pan no Mimi is quite unique among Japanese bakeries. There’s great bakeries here, no doubt. The Andersen under Kyoto Station makes an excellent Polish-style rye, even if they call it “brot” (ie: German bread). But they still seem very…Japanese and like Yakitate!! says, the Japanese aren’t known for bread. Uchimura must’ve trained in Europe or somewhere, because his bread is the most continental of the breads I’ve tasted in Japan, while still being unique and still Japanese. He sells those 3cm-thick-6-slice-loafs too. Those loaves are generally the worst kind of bread you can find anywhere. I think Uchimura’s may be good though. They’re slightly burnt around the edges, I noticed, heh. I wonder if they’re made with wasabi like in the anime?
And on a side note: I love the Internet. Doing a search for unchi turned up this completely useless factoid: there’s a children’s book called Minna Unchi, or, 
Good grief. I’m not sure that I believe that the author’s name was really Taro Gomi. It’s kinda like saying his name was “John Poopies”. Only in Japan.