Anime, Sweets, and Tokyo Streets: An Interview with Emily Bushman

Meet Emily Bushman, a self-taught baker who turned her passion for anime and food into a creative career! Living in Tokyo, Japan, Emily started her blog Penguin Snacks to channel her love for cooking and fascination with anime treats. Her hobby soon created a cookbook, Bake Anime, with 75 delicious sweets seen in our favorite anime movies and shows. Beyond her talented baking, she shares her love for Japan’s culture through self-guided walking tours at WaTo Tokyo. These hand-held walking tours and live-action games are an interactive adventure that show visitors Tokyo’s hidden gems. Join us as we hear more about Emily’s creativity from WaTo Tokyo and her desire to bring anime-inspired treats to life in her cozy Tokyo kitchen!

Can you please introduce yourself?

Hello! My name is Emily. I’m from California, and I moved to Tokyo in 2019. I currently wear a lot of hats, but one of my favorites is being an anime food and travel creative. I’m working on Walking Tours Tokyo right now, where we have been developing live-action walking tours and games for visitors to Tokyo who want to experience the city in a whole new way.

WaTo Tokyo offers accessible, self-guided tours and live-action games that let visitors explore Tokyo in a fun and immersive way! Can you share the story behind how these tours were created?

Absolutely! I was travelling with my creative partner, Joe, and a few friends, and we were in a restaurant in Kyoto. We had been having such a great day, due largely in part to Joe’s talent for curating the perfect vibes and navigating us around the city, and I mused aloud how great it would be to be able to give tourists the kind of day we were having: completely local, organic, and intuitive. We could stop when we wanted to stop, spend as much time as we wanted at sites, and always had a new, off-the-beaten-path sight to see. It was effortless, easy, and, most importantly, fun. Thus, our walking tours were born: an independent but immersive way to experience a neighborhood of Tokyo, where you can engage in games, photo spots, and local history all from our handy guide.

Your tours feature photo spots, fun challenges, and a detailed city map. How did the WaTo Tokyo team go about discovering the best locations to highlight Tokyo’s anime/manga culture?

A mix of research, experience, and taking to the streets. Joe and I leverage my experience with anime and otaku culture to give ourselves a focus for our tours and research. From there, Joe put his superior investigative and navigational skills to the test as he developed a walking loop for the tours. And then it was just a matter of running the route, poking around and finding the best stops along the way. We had a lot of fun going on the tours ourselves, and letting our silliness out as we developed mini-games and came up with photo challenges.

There are many tours, each with a different theme, exploring cities in Tokyo! Which tour was your favorite to design, and what made the experience so special for you?

That’s a really tough question. The Akihabara Otaku tour is our flagship product, and is an excellent starting point for people who want to be introduced to nerd culture in Japan in general. I’ve been on this tour the most times, so I really know it like the back of my hand, and it was surreal to go from a casual tourist back in 2016 in the area to writing a walking tour about the place in 2023! That was sort of a crazy moment of reflection I had when working on the tour. However, our other two tours are also so cool. The Ikebukuro Anime tour is near and dear to my heart. I love the area, for one thing, but I am also a huge fan of the history behind Otome Road, which is so special and speaks to the power of female fans and the role they play in anime, which is sometimes discounted, especially in the Western world. But then there’s the Ikebukuro Manga tour, which was special for me because I learned the most from this research, and it delves a lot more into the literary origins of manga. As a reader, learning that history gave me a whole new insight into both the neighborhood and the genre.

You wrote a cookbook, Bake Anime, that focuses on anime sweets from all of our favorite anime movies and shows! What were some of the most fun – or downright tricky – challenges you faced in turning animated treats into real-life recipes?

Ah, this was such a great project. I was working on this before the tours, and honestly, one of the biggest challenges was just working on this alone. I did all the recipe development, testing, food styling, and photography totally on my own, which can be tough when you’re trying to be creative. My poor roommate at the time got roped into eating a lot of desserts and gave me a lot of reassurance that everything was actually pretty, and also tasted good. Another challenge that might be a little surprising: the recipe count! There are 75 recipes, all based on animated food. As it turns out, there really aren’t THAT many desserts featured in anime. This inspired me to do the third section of the book as recipes themed around anime as opposed to being taken from anime. It ended up being my favorite section to work on, but I was sweating for a while trying to figure out how I was going to hit my recipe count!

If you were to write another anime-inspired cookbook, what kind of dishes or themes would you want to explore?

Incredible question. I have so many wish lists for cookbooks! For anime–inspired content, I’d love to create a cocktail recipe book or a bento-themed cookbook. I loved doing the designs in part three of my cookbook, and I think that would translate well to bentos. Cocktails are just fun to drink, and there are so many great cocktail bars in Tokyo to take inspiration from. Now, if I could move away from anime, it would be to focus on a convenience store cookbook, WITHOUT A DOUBT. I LOVE Japanese convenience stores, and I would love to do a recipe book of copycat recipes.

We’re big foodies at Arigato Travel and just have to ask – what is the most delicious dish you’ve seen in an anime?

Also a great question, with so many good answers. Without a doubt, though, I have to go with Transforming Furikake Gohan from Food Wars! The dish is both a magic act and a feast for the eyes, and it’s the dish that got me hooked on both the show and really got me into recreating food in anime.

Anything else you would like to share with our readers?

Yeah! Come to Japan, and go on one of our walking tours, play one of our live-action games, or support my cookbook by grabbing a copy for yourself. I worked on these things to share the beauty of the world we live in with everyone. Don’t be afraid to explore whether it’s through travel, cooking, or both.

Thank you so much for taking the time to be interviewed! We truly appreciate you giving us the chance to share your passions and creations with our readers!

Blog: https://www.penguinsnacks.com/

Bake Anime Cookbook: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bake-Anime/Emily-J-Bushman/9781982186647

Anime Food Tarot Cards: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/emily-bushman/anime-food-tarot/9780762486885/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/PenguinSnacks/videos

Featured Photo Credit: Emily Bushman

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