Butter Tarts & Rebels October 2026

4 October 2026

After Work, We Found Japan

Yellow hats, expensive gyoza, sticky dango, an orange box — and us being there

We had absolutely no plan to go to Japan Matsuri.

Sunday morning had already begun as one of those transport days when getting to work feels like a small expedition of its own. Somewhere during the journey, while trains, platforms and Sunday arrangements were doing their usual best to keep us alert, we came across the information. Japan Matsuri was happening that day in Trafalgar Square.

The reaction was immediate. Should we go?

We looked it up properly. It was on until the evening. We would already be in central London. We would finish work with enough time to get there. So the decision was made almost as quickly as the question appeared. Yes. After work, we were going to Japan. Well. A little version of Japan in Trafalgar Square. And that was enough.

From a workday into something else

There is something we love about plans that appear from nowhere. Not the carefully booked theatre ticket three months in advance, not the restaurant reservation sitting politely in the calendar, but the little opening that appears in an ordinary day and says: What if?

We still had the entire shift to work first. By the time we finally came out, we were tired, still in work uniform, and very aware that most sensible people might simply have gone home. We went in the opposite direction. Towards Trafalgar Square.

There was a moment during the festival when someone looked at Elena for rather a long time. We became conscious of the uniform then. Around us were people dressed for a Sunday out, people wearing Japanese-inspired clothes, families, tourists, festival visitors. The other people dressed for work were mostly the people behind the food stalls.

Perhaps the person was looking at the uniform. Perhaps not. We cannot know what somebody else was thinking. People are allowed to look.

We carried on.

We underestimated the crowd

 

Japan Matsuri was packed. Not pleasantly busy. Not “there are quite a few people here.” Packed.

The steps were full. The square was full. The spaces around the stalls were full. Even as evening approached, people were still sitting and standing around the performances while singers, dancers and later traditional drums kept the festival alive.

It was far bigger and busier than the Canadian festival we visited in London last year. In that sense alone, it was an extraordinary success. But sometimes an event can become almost too successful for the space holding it.

At several stalls, we could not even properly see what was being sold before joining the queue. We watched a couple wait in front of us, finally reach the counter, look at the food and say, essentially, “Oh. No, we don’t want this,” before walking away. They had queued before they could make the decision. And we understood why.

Moving through the festival alone would already have required patience. Doing it while looking after a child, staying close to an elderly parent, pushing a buggy, using a wheelchair, or simply trying not to lose the rest of your group would have been another experience entirely. Still, we stayed. We watched. We noticed. We were there.

Then came the food

Elena had been to Japan. She remember food from Japan, even if memory loses details with time. And only a few days before this festival, we had made sushi ourselves at home, measuring the rice, seasoning it, tasting it, adjusting it.

So we were curious. Not because we expected Trafalgar Square to recreate Tokyo or Kyoto. But because food has a strange ability to wake up places you have already been. Food became the centre of a large part of our festival because choosing anything required a negotiation between curiosity and those prices.

The chicken gyoza came first. Five little gyoza for £6. 

They were tasty and savoury, with a creamy mayo-like sauce, but the wrappers felt thicker and slightly stiffer than we would have preferred. Flavour: good. Portion for £6: much harder to defend.

Then the sushi tacos. £14 for two.

The vegetable one was okay, with softly seasoned rice and nori that had already lost some of its crispness. We could not really find the promised sense of taco-meets-sushi fusion in it beyond the shape. The karaage one was better in some ways: hotter, moist chicken, fresher and somewhat crispier nori. But there was so much sauce that it began to overwhelm everything else, and for something involving karaage, it did not give us enough crunch.

Then the £3 tuna onigiri. Warm rice, very little tuna. This was the real disappointment. So much internet enthusiasm surrounds onigiri that we expected at least to understand the obsession after eating one. We did not. Not this one, anyway. And this was the disappointment. Because the one we ate at Japan Matsuri did not explain the hype. The rice, the filling, the overall experience — mediocre.

That does not mean the people preparing it did not work hard.

We saw behind some of the stalls. We saw people taking tiny breaks, drinking water, sitting down for a few minutes before going back into the heat and pressure of serving thousands of people. Cooking continuously under those conditions cannot be easy. That explains a lot. But explanation and taste are two different things.

Food can be difficult to produce and still be mediocre. And when portions are small and prices high, it becomes harder not to notice.

The yellow hats

Then something extremely serious happened. We received yellow Pikmin hats. Two of them. One each. Of course we put them on. There are photographs. Evidence exists.

For a while, two adults who had just come from a long workday walked around Trafalgar Square in matching yellow Pikmin hats, inspecting food stalls and discussing rice. This is probably a perfectly normal thing to do. We refuse further questions. And strangely, those ridiculous hats became one of the happiest little details of the day.

They made us laugh. They made the whole thing even less serious. They belonged to the adventure.

And then the orange box arrived

We had just put the hats on. We were having fun. Then we said: Let’s find dessert. And that was exactly when the orange box arrived. Our long conversation had reached its maximum length. It has happened before. At airports. On difficult journeys. At emotionally heavy moments. After coming back from Amorgos. And now, in the middle of Japan Matsuri.

There is never a convenient moment for something like that, but some moments feel particularly badly chosen. Luckily, we found a quiet corner at the edge of everything. Thousands of people were still moving around us, music was playing, stalls were serving food, somebody somewhere was probably shouting an order number — and for a little while we stepped outside all of it.

Then we continued. We always do.  That matters. The orange box became part of the day. It did not become the day.

The dessert that nearly wasn’t

By then we were considering abandoning dessert completely. There seemed to be matcha everywhere. And matcha is not our thing. Then we spotted dango. Three-colour dango first. Then another version covered in a glossy brown sauce.

Mitarashi dango. We had never tried it. So we did.

The texture of the rice dumplings was strange at first — soft, dense, springy, chewy, almost elastic. For someone who normally prefers food with crunch, it sat right on the border between fascinating and suspicious.

Then came the sauce. Soy sauce, sugar, starch, that sweet-savoury combination which sounded slightly alarming when described and tasted completely different once eaten. Caramel-like, but not very sweet. Glossy. Sticky. Hart tp describe. Unexpectedly good.

It was probably the most interesting food discovery of the festival. And right at the very end we discovered something else we would have tried if we had found it earlier: fresh-fruit daifuku. Strawberries, peach, melon, kiwi and other fruits wrapped inside mochi. The ones with Japanese white strawberries were already completely sold out.

Only kiwi remained. We do not like kiwi enough to buy something merely because it is the last survivor. The lonely kiwi daifuku was left to find somebody else.

Nearly five pounds for coffee we already knew

There was still one last mission. Japanese coffee. We had spotted it earlier and decided we could not possibly leave without trying it. Then we finally reached it. And recognised it.

We had already bought that Japanese coffee from Sainsbury’s when we lived in our old house, usually when it was on promotion. The festival wanted nearly five pounds for an espresso. No. There are limits to adventure. Paying almost five pounds to rediscover supermarket coffee we already know is one of them. We walked away.

Sunset over the square

By then the light had changed. The sun was going down behind Trafalgar Square.

People were still sitting on the steps watching performances. Traditional drums were appearing. A portable shrine moved through the crowd. The sky turned orange behind the buildings while the festival continued underneath it.

That was perhaps when the day made the most sense. Not because the food had suddenly become better. Not because the crowds had disappeared. Not because everything had gone according to plan. But because we were there.

We had come after work at the last minute. We had tried things. We had laughed. We had been disappointed. We had discovered something new. We had stopped when we needed to stop. Then we had continued.

Was it worth it?

Yes. We are not giving Japan Matsuri a score. This is not that kind of piece.

From where we stood, the crowds were overwhelming, the food we chose was mostly mediocre, and some of the prices were astonishing.

All of that is true. And we enjoyed ourselves. That is also true. Those truths do not cancel each other out.

Whatever we spent — perhaps twenty-five pounds, perhaps thirty, we stopped counting — bought more than food. It bought a spontaneous extension to an ordinary workday. It brought back memories of Japan. It made us talk about food we had eaten there and food we still want to understand. It gave us photographs, sunset, performances, a brochure rescued from a table as the festival started packing away, two ridiculous yellow hats and one very sticky dango.

And it gave us another idea. We recently saw someone online suggesting a small “Japan in London” day: visiting a Japanese café, a Japanese garden and then the Japan Centre, apparently home to some of the best fresh onigiri in London. It was not our idea. But now we want to try it. Especially the onigiri. The one from Japan Matsuri deserves a retrial.

We will probably go again

Next year, if Japan Matsuri returns, we would go again. Not because everything was perfect. Because now we know it.

We would arrive more prepared. We would understand the crowds. We would know that sometimes you have to queue before you can even see what you are queueing for. We would choose the food more carefully. We would have more patience. And probably, knowing us, we would still discover something we had not planned for.

That is part of why we travel. Sometimes across countries. Sometimes across London after work. Sometimes only across a crowded square.

The adventure does not need to be perfect to be worth living. Sometimes it only needs us to be there. And we were. Together.

- by Elena and Atlas