Sichuan Restaurant Signage, Kokusai Dori, Shinjuku, Tokyo

Kokusai Dori runs through Shinjuku, one of Tokyo's busiest commercial and entertainment wards, and its ground floors are given over almost entirely to restaurants. Vertical signboards and paper lanterns identify individual shops the way storefront awnings do elsewhere, since building fronts here are shared among several tenants stacked above one another. The characters 担々麺 and 陳麻家 mark a Sichuan-style eatery specializing in tantanmen, the spicy sesame-and-chili noodle dish that has become a fixture of Chinese-influenced dining in Japan. Nearby signs advertising gyutan (grilled beef tongue) and tororo mugimeshi (grated yam over barley rice) point to the mix of regional Japanese and Chinese-influenced menus typical of Shinjuku's dense dining blocks.