A taste of incarceration that’ll leave you with a new appreciation for the everyday. There are many places where you can eat in Japan, but if you’re looking for a meal that’ll take you back in time and leave an indelible mark on your soul, then you might want to take a trip to Abashiri Prison Museum. Abashiri Prison is Japan’s northernmost penal facility, and while it’s still in operation, some of its oldest sections, dating back some 120 years, were relocated to a site roughly 2.
4 kilometres (1.5 miles) away. This site is now the Abashiri Prison Museum , and it’s Japan’s only open-air museum where a real-world penal facility is preserved and open to the public.
▼ There’s a lot to see and do here, but the highlight is a meal at the Kangoku Shokudo (“Prison Cafeteria”). This cafeteria is famous for serving prison food that recreates the lunches of modern-day inmates, and there are two main set meals, containing either sanma (Pacific saury) or hokke (Okhotsk Atka mackerel), that come with barley rice, side dishes, and miso soup. ▼ Not bad for a prison meal.
These meals are surprisingly healthy and delicious, but likely to become boring if you were to eat them every day. With this in mind, the cafeteria decided to get a little creative by adding a new item to the menu recently — the “ Released From Jail Celebration Meal ”. ▼ Our reporter Saya Togashi was keen to try the meal, so she ordered it at the ticket machine, where it was priced at (1,650 y.