Here, finally, is my last report from our trip to Japan last summer. It’s also my last report from Kyoto and features our last meal eaten on the trip. Fittingly (?), it features not just sushi but kaitenzushi or conveyor belt sushi. This was a genre of eating the boys wanted to be sure we did before we left and we left it for the last night. I will admit that I was secretly looking forward to it as well. While conveyor belt sushi in the US is usually an iffy proposition, the baseline of quality in Japan for any kind of sushi is much higher and so the thought of going out with an excessive sushi meal was very appealing. And that is exactly what this turned out to be.

The place I’d picked for our conveyor belt meal was Sushi no Musashi, which is located in Kyoto Station. It was both convenient (we had to come to the station area to buy our bus tickets for departure to Kansai airport the next morning) and had a surprisingly decent rating on Tabelog. Reviews on Tabelog indicated it was very popular and that lines could be long. We beat this by eating relatively early. We got in pretty quickly but had to wait around a bit longer inside for four seats together to become available. As conveyor belt sushi places go, Sushi no Musashi is on the smaller side and their only seating is around the central sushi prep area around which the conveyor belts rotates. As at most (all?) such places, the plates are colour-coded by price. There’s a big display outside that lists most of the different kinds of things you can expect in each tier and non-Japanese customers are handed English menus as well. In practice, however, it’s just easier to just pick up whatever catches your eye (though some plates do have English signage on them).

All the sushi is made without wasabi but wasabi (and soy sauce and gari/pickled ginger) is available at the counter. And you can make your own green tea via a hot water dispenser. This is not obviously the kind of place where you expect service. You sit down, get your accoutrements ready and, as noted above, start grabbing whatever catches your eye. That is what we did, grabbing things pretty indiscriminately—though we did leave some of the more baroque things for the end of the meal. In this latter category fell smoked duck, gunkan maki with assorted fish bits and one thing whose identity I can no longer remember or piece together from the menu pictures: it featured corn and mayo and something else.

Anyway, as hoped for, the quality of the fish was far superior to that at most neighbourhood sushi places in big American cities, leave alone at conveyor belt sushi restaurants. And some things were really quite good indeed (the tuna, the Hokkaido scallop). The plates piled up alongside us over the short while we were there. We separated them by colour at the end but didn’t really need to: the server scanned them and the bill was automatically calculated. The total was not very high. Scroll down to see what it was. To see what we ate, launch the slideshow below.

The total for what was in excess of 20 pieces of sushi each for the four of us was 15,354 yen or well below $100. A good deal, I would say and I would 100% do it again.

Okay, that’s Japan ’25 in the books. Of course, since then we’ve spent another week in Japan this summer—that was a week in Hokkaido at the end of our five-week stay in Seoul. I’ll get a bunch of those Seoul reports out in the next few weeks before I get to those recent Hokkaido reports. Before that I’ll have another report from the Twin Cities in February. That should go up tomorrow, at some point in the afternoon probably.