Japan - Food for Budget Travellers

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Charles:

Japan is fascinated by food. It's supposed to have the highest "restaurant-per-capita" ratio in the world. And it's not just "Japanese" food -- Japan has adopted Chinese food (both "real Chinese" and "Chinese fusion"), Korean food, American food (generically "fasto furudo", represented by McDonalds), Italian food, etc. There is also lots of regional cooking, including "Kyoto food" (largely vegetarian), "temple food" (vegetarian), and so on.

We had two problems:

. . . Our hotel rooms didn't have cooking facilities -- not even microwave ovens;

. . . "Real restaurants" tended to be expensive.

The "set menu" breakfast in our hotel restaurant (the Touganeya) was reasonably-priced, and delicious. A whole grilled fish, rice, miso soup, and an assortment of Japanese pickled veggies really set us up for a day of touring, for about $10.

But dinner in our hotel restaurant cost about $50 for the two of us, and wasn't very large. I wanted to try out "Kyoto food" in Kyoto, but the restaurants offering it were mostly charging $50 for a "tasting menu".

And if anyone says;

. . . All the restaurants have English menus !

they're travelling in a different Japan than we were.

We eventually adjusted to the Japanese way of food preparation:

. . . Let somebody else do it!

It's easy to get "white bread" -- Wonderbread-style loaves, thick-sliced. For crusty Italian/French bread, you need a bakery, and there are lots of them. Good whole-wheat bread is harder to find.

There are scads of convenience stores (7-11 is a Japanese company), and they _all_ have very good quality, ready-to-eat meals. Everything from spaghetti with tomato sauce, to sushi, is available. The supermarkets have a wider selection, and the department store basements have an _unbelievable_ selection.

Everything is packed into meal-sized portions, and the "bento" (a tray containing a mix of dishes -- see any sushi restaurant for examples) costs between $6 (simple meal) and $12 (a feast).

So we had most of our breakfasts and dinners in our rooms. We would buy some rice and/or pre-cooked buckwheat noodles, tofu, a bento or two, some pickled vegetables, and eat a good dinner.

Soy milk, yoghurt, hard-boiled eggs, and bread was our normal breakfast.

We ate most lunches out. There is a whole stratum of "fast eats" Japanese restaurants, which will serve a good bowl of buckwheat-noodle soup (soba) or a plate of sushi for under $10.

In Tokyo, we finally tried the little restaurant across the street from our hotel. There was one server who spoke some English, and supplied us with English menus and explanation. It was a place for people to drink and snack -- enough snacks, and you had a meal! Most of the food was on skewers, priced around $1.

When the English menu said "Pounded fish cake", what could this be? The correct translation (for us) would have been "Gefilte fish" -- and it even came with horseradish! It was good -- as were the meatballs, green pepper, fried tofu, etc, etc, etc.

One thing "Japanese food" is missing -- large servings of vegetables. Instead, it relies on small amounts of concentrated tastes -- pickled plums (umeboshi), horseradish (wasabi), pickled radish (daikon), and so on -- to make its meals interesting.

Japan cannot grow enough vegetables to meet its needs. And imported veggies are expensive -- not outrageously expensive, though. We have photos of $1-per-tomato displays, but those were in high-class supermarkets. You could pay as much at Whole Foods.

For a decent plate of vegetables, a Korean or Chinese restaurant is a good choice.

For further reading:

http://www.jnto.go.jp/eng/indepth/featuredarticles/JN/expat/afford.html

I was expecting to be tired of Japanese food after the trip. But for last night's dinner, I cooked up a bowl of soba with fried tofu and bok choy. Just like home.<g>

Technical Notes:

We used a one-year-old (and therefore "obsolete") Panasonic FZ-35 digital camera. It worked fine. Anti-shake is the best thing since the 18:1 zoom lens.

Every hotel room we rented had a high-speed Internet connection.

We carried a brand-new Acer D255E "netbook" computer -- 10" screen, 1 GByte of memory, an Intel N550 chip, and a 6-cell battery. It cost $300 at Costco (Richmond BC). It weighs about 3 pounds, runs Windows 7, and does everything I ask of it.

That computer enabled us to produce these blogs as we were travelling. And track the reactor situation, without listening to Japanese TV (which we couldn't understand). And get our tickets back home, and cancel our hotel reservations via Expedia.

And so on . . . I'm not going anywhere without it.

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