Day 14 - 5/26/18 Meeting the Olive Sommelier of Japan and Tokyo's Fifth Ave

Day 14 - Saturday An Offer We Cannot Refuse and A Street We Cannot Afford

Logo for Olive Japan

Today we met with Tadeo Tada, the Olive Sommelier of Japan. A man who works as an international tasting judge, educator, and olive entrepreneur, he is passionate about educating consumers about olive oil (just like us!.) In the past eight years, he has graduated over 2,000 students from his "Olive School" located in the Tokyo neighborhood of Chuo, which is where we met on Saturday.    We had tons of questions for him and he had all the answers and more.  In addition to the school, he organizes the International Olive Japan  Oil Competition that just finished up for 2018 a few weeks ago.  

The competition had over 700 entries from 22 countries. With 25 judges tasting these oils over 3 days, the results were in - oils from 9 countries came away with top awards. Tada-san had promised to provide the written feed back from the judges to each of the entries in the competition and said he had just finished providing this feedback to the entrants yesterday. Simultaneously,  he was preparing for a June 8-10 an Olive Marche - a trade showcase providing information and food to consumers. Meanwhile, today, his "slow" day, he was running a tasting course for a group of five individuals, tomorrow's course would have 25.  A very very busy man.  It was clear that we had found a fellow olive afficionado. We felt very lucky to have ANY time with him.  We had some frank talks about the difficulties of growing olives in Japan and the regrettable failure of many companies, chefs, the government to regulate or even notice when rancid oil masqueraded as Extra Virgin.  We spent a few hours with him today that flew by and he apologized for needing to get back to class, but we made arrangements to meet again.  I wished we had more time, and we agreed that with the same goal - we would share resources and collaborate in the future. 

Ginza 6: Tokyo's newest department store, our young clerk had excitedly told us about this at check in and we felt this would be a good change to experience the wonders of Japanese department store.  After browsing fashions from all the name lines, we felt pretty famished.  Our lunch consisted of scallop rice croquettes and teriyaki beef rice croquettes from the basement food court and cocktails on the rooftop open air park.