Furusato Matsuri Tokyo

Yearly festival inside Tokyo Dome, displaying the many local foods (and festival dances) from Hokkaido to Okinawa.
Apparently in the last few years, there is also a contest for the best donburi (rice bowl). You first need to buy tickets (¥500 each) to trade in for the donburi bowl, then line up at the place (s) you want to try. This year there were over a dozen entries and my husband and I ended up trying about half of them — but be warned, the bowls are small so not really ideal for sharing, unless you have a really small stomach. Our favorite ended being a rice bowl from Chiba prefecture that tastes like ramen!
There’s also a «sweets street» full of dessert vendors from the traditional zensai to crepes to different flavors of soft serve ice cream. There’s also a few alcohol vendors with different kinds of liquor such as whisky to shochu to fruit liqueur. I ended up getting a bottle of yuzu (Japanese citrus) liqueur after I bought a glass to try. My husband apparently came across a great whisky from Chichibu, but unfortunately, we’re not selling by the bottle (only by shots).
All in all, a great place to check out all of what Japan has to offer in one convenient place!

Furusato Matsuri is a food festival held in the Tokyo Dome for one week a year. The event is pretty awesome. Imagine food vendors from all over Japan gathering in Tokyo Dome with the various festival performers conducting 1 hour shows on what they do in their home prefecture while you eat in the stands and chow down.
This year, they had a Donburi Grand Prix, Donburi is meat on rice (Katsudon, Oyakudon, to name a few) and a Grand Prix is where you try as many as you can and you vote for the one you like. The Donburi are 500 yen each and are pretty small. As you can see from my pictures there are a lot of them. I ended up having 5 types and my favorite was the CHIBA RAMEN RICE.
We hit up a few other booths and had a great time. I definitely recommend it, the choices are diverse and the food is awesome. I wish I had extra stomachs, because after eating all those donburi, I didn’t have room for anything other than a melon soft cream. I so wanted to eat all the various types of cuisines available…