As many of you know, I’m mostly vegetarian. This is fairly hard to do in Japan. One of the delegates I met at the Ethicomp conference recently, who was just finishing a five month stint in Japan, had been a strict (moral) vegetarian when he arrived and had recently been told by his doctor that he had to start eating meat because his health had suffered so badly. Of course, he was eating out in traditional Japanese restaurants much of the time. The fare in these places is very very meat-heavy. Typically variants of yakitori (chicken kebabs mostly) and lots of other dishes with meat. The best you can do for non-meat dishes are green salads (very over-dressed for my taste) and a barbecue-it-yourself selection of vegetables. The barbecue-it-yourself selection gets very boring after a few tries, particularly if (like me) you don’t like the vinegar-based dressing that comes with the veggies. Luckily for me, I’m OK with chicken meat. I do specify chicken meat there, because it would appear that the Japanese eat every part of a chicken except the feathers: chicken skin (both on the meat and separately); chicken entrails; deep-fried chicken tendon; chicken feet (not many witches in Japan because the peasants eat up the feet); processed chicken bone (it’s processed in some way to soften it up). I’ve not seen it, but I’ve been told that some places even serve “chicken nose”.


Fruit and fresh vegetables are quite expensive in Japan, as you might expect since almost all of it must be imported. The quality is OK, but they’re sold in small quantities, generally. Preserved and “processed” fruit is interesting. There’s lots of strawberry things (yoghurt, jam etc) and blueberries all over the place. Apple is fairly popular and that’s about it for Japanese-made jams, yoghurts etc. Oh, except for aloe yoghurts. This is one of the four standard flavours (strawberry, blueberry, apple and aloe). I finally tried a pot today, but as aloe is listed online as a purgative/laxative I don’t think I’ll be eating too much of it.

On the whole, I tend to eat in, where I can cook my own noodles, spaghetti, gnocchi etc. Not highly Japanese, I will admit, but I figure I’m eating more healthily than that chap who had to start eating meat for his health. I do get Japanese style fried chicken from one of my local supermarkets along with taro (mountain yam) tempura. Oddly, the tempura selection in the supermarket comes as a bundle (ebi, sakana, aubergine, carrot…) and you can get sakana and ebi tempura separately, but only the taro tempura in the veggie line (no carrot, aubergine [not loss to me], mushroom [great loss to me] or pepper) in the separates.