So What's Japanese Food, Really?

I have been a bit surprised by the food in Japan. Nothing here is what you would expect to get at a Japanese restaurant back at home. Sushi is really only nigiri, most noodle or rice dishes are nowhere to be found, and ramen is a nice dish containing strips of meat and plenty of vegetables, though still at an affordable price. Now, I fundamentally knew this going into our time here—that Japanese food in America is not what food in Japan is like—but I’m still amazed at just the complete lack of presence of what we would feel as staple dishes.

So what have I been eating? Well, for the first few days, really nothing because I was so sick I could hardly eat. But, since I’ve been gaining my ability to eat again, I’ve been figuring out what Japanese food here means.

My first meal I had here was a nice bowl of Ramen. I frankly cannot comment on it because I was in so much pain eating from the sores in my mouth that I couldn’t focus on anything else. But it was Ramen.

That night, I was able to have my first real meal, which was Okonomiyaki. Funny enough, I remember trying to make Okonomiyaki years and years ago on our griddle back home, to no avail. I remember them coming out incredibly weird and underwhelming, but here, I got the fix I wanted. Okonomiyaki is a pancake made from primarily cabbage, other vegetables, and a meat that may be mixed into the batter or served on top. It’s served to you in a big bowl, all raw, and you get to cook it on your table! Now, there’s no chefs’ hats, “egg roll” tricks, onion volcanoes, or that stuff, but it is truly the same kind of teppanyaki table that you’d see at a hibachi restaurant. Just smaller, for a table of two, in our case. After you mix everything, using the egg to keep it together, you shape it into a pancake using the metal spatulas they give you. Once you’ve reached the desired shape and thickness, you cover it, cooking it on each side for four minutes, covered by a pan lid. Then, you can dress it with okonomiyaki sauce and mayo, and make it artistic should you choose. The pancake is, despite being made of cabbage, really sweet and not that crunchy. It falls apart easily, though can be eaten with careful chopstick skills. It’s very light, but the sauce makes it heavier certainly. I think I over-sauced my okonomiyaki, because I felt towards the end that it was too heavy, too sweet, and too greasy.

We got more okonomiyaki in Hiroshima, which is where the dish originates from. Traditionally, they also put fried noodles on top of the okonomiyaki. The second time, I got mine with bacon, and it also came with meat floss sprinkled on top. Meat floss has been one of the few things that has plagued my Asia trip so far… it’s dried shredded meat or fish that you can smell from a mile away. It’s so gross, but I mostly was able to eat around it.

Zack and I had yakitori one night, which is fried meat skewers. In addition, we had a few small plates as appetizers. The restaurant we knew would be nice, as it was in the middle of Shinjuku—the food capital of Tokyo—and it made you take off your shoes before entering the dining area. Zack and I were seated at the bar, as the rest of the restaurant was full, but others were kneeled on the ground looking over central Shinjuku, or We ordered without translating anything, which was certainly a bold move, but neither of us were that scared of what could come from it. We ended up with skewers of all parts of the chicken, including chicken breast, thigh, but also heart, liver, and skin. Neither Zack nor I were fans of the liver, the texture was quite grainy and gross, but otherwise the rest of it was good for sure.

We also made a trip to Zack’s “grandma-in-law” Baba’s house, where she made us tonkatsu, or fried pork cutlet. This was delicious, and certainly helped by being homemade and the first real thing I could eat after my canker sores healing over enough that I could put hot and spicy food in my mouth. Along with the tonkatsu, she also made fried chicken, karaage. This is, funny enough, iconically Japanese despite being literally a chicken nugget. I had tonkatsu and karaage a few more times during our stay in Japan, and I’d certainly call either tonkatsu or katsu curry (tonkatsu served in a curry sauce with rice) to be my favorite Japanese dish.

She also made us “American Style Sushi” which was lettuce, cream cheese, salmon, and cucumber inside a roll. Apparently, Baba’s husband, Jiji, found it disgusting and couldn’t believe there was cheese in it! But the main course was Japanese hotpot, called Shabu Shabu. This has a dashi-broth with a few strips of kombu (seaweed) in it, boiling over a flame on the table. You drop vegetables and meat in, and they cook within seconds. Despite this, the Dashi does flavor it decently. I guess I should mention we also had the Chinese version, hotpot, as our last meal in Taipei, so we were decently experienced with this cooking method.

But by far the classic Japanese food is sushi. And boy is it different here. There are no specialty rolls, no fancy deep fried rolls with mountains of things on the top and drowning in spicy mayo and eel sauce here. All they have here is pure sushi. Just fish on top of rice: nigiri. Or sometimes, just the fish without the rice: sashimi. The few rolls you may find are wrapped horizontally (it’s hard to explain) with the nori making an oval with the rice at the bottom and one filling—be it masago or tuna, for example—at the top. Zack, Tommy, and I ate at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant in the lakeside town of Ōtsu, where we ordered a ton of small plates so we could try lots of different kinds of sushi. We ordered mostly nigiri, with some of those rolls as well. We tried salmon, salmon with mozzarella and pesto, shrimp, shrimp with cheese, tempura shrimp, cuttlefish, masago, octopus, tempura shrimp with avocado, as well as a few others I’m sure I’m forgetting. It was interesting to see their take on sushi, because there were some combinations, and some rolls were definitively sweet or savory, and to see how they achieve that with such few ingredients. I wish I had pictures, but hontesly, I was so excited for the sushi that I forgot to take pictures. I don’t want to sound like a sushi snob, now—when I go back to the US I will certainly be returning to my old ways of extravagant rolls and mountains of toppings smothered in sauces—but it was cool to get a different perspective on sushi.

The most common dish you’ll find all around Japan would be some kind of noodle in soup. This could be an udon, soba, or ramen noodle in a cold soup or a hot soup, and each dish has its own regional variations, meat parings, broth flavorings, and methods of preparation. But they all boil down to the same sort of thing. Ramen and udon are both wheat noodles, where udon are thicker than ramen. Soba are thin and stringy like ramen but are made from buckwheat flour, which gives the noodles a darker color. I couldn’t tell a taste difference, mostly because the broth usually made the most of the flavor, but I’m sure there is a difference.

So, I hope you can see that Japanese food, as we see it at home, is not what food is really like in Japan. In Japan, there’s a focus on the ingredients and on the simplicity. To the Japanese, as in many aspects of life, less is more. There are some dishes that haven’t made it to America, and there are some dishes that have changed as they crossed the Pacific, catering to the American preference for flavor over quality.