Japanese Food

While most people think of a food pyramid filled with various food groups in Japan it's more of a line. You have fish and you have rice.

At one point or another most people have been exposed to Japanese food, or at least what they think Japanese food is. A general rule of thumb: If it doesn't have enough of a face left in which to judge you it's probably not real Japanese.

Where as the Japanese salary men work long into the evening Japanese cooks don't really do any work. "The more alive it looks the more delicious it is" seems to be the Japanese kitchen policy. It's common to just have a whole fish that is no more than salted and grilled and it is up to you the eater to pull it apart. Using the same methods found in a high school biology lab it is possible to separate the vital organs from the edible flesh but unfortunately the same is not so true of the bones which will ultimately explode into a bunch of splintery shards in the back of your throat in the creature's final desperate show of defiance.

The other group is rice which is the deliciously bland cornerstone of any Japanese meal. Contrary to popular belief you should not add soy sauce to the rice, just enjoy it in its naked glory. You might think this is rather lacking in taste but the Japanese will assure you that they can taste the difference in types. I'm no rice expert but to me the types of rice seem to be: white, off-white, snowstorm-white, polar bear-white, arctic-white, colorless, extra white, mostly-white, possibly-white, could-be-white and probably-white. This is also added to almost any dish to distract you from the fact that your $15 pork plate had about as much protein as an amoeba. But hey at least you're full.

When not eating slimey sea creatures, they will ocassionally chow down on more normal things. Fruit is fairly common but ungodly expensive. Local in-season fruits can be had at a normal price but anything else goes through the roof. In Japan, there is a aim for perfection. If you go down to the market on B1 of the local department store you'll find what Bill Gates keeps in his fruit bowl. Here, the largest most perfect of all the fruits can be purchased individually wrapped. Rated (and priced) much like diamonds the roundest Melons with virtually no blemishes can be purchased for a cool $100 (Keep in mind that's 1 melon). There are also grapes the size of hand-fruits and pears that cold kill a man if dropped from a decent height sold in small sets costing $50-70. Supposedly these no-doubt delicious treats are to be given out as gifts and not eaten by the purchaser but eitherway the only thing the buyer of one these has more of than money is chromosomes.

This also indicates the fatal flaw with Japanese food, it's all presentation and often lacking substance. A $3 bowl of Ramen will look pretty nice even if it doesn't taste it often making it hard to make a good decision (Thankfully Ramen is one of the few good and cheap foods). So, for as neat as a 12 course ryoukan dinner looks (no less than half of them have the texture of boogers) it doesn't really seem to capture the raw deliciousness of a slightly smooshed, oversalted hamburger made by a 17 year old who made a poor life decision.