Fooooooooooood

Those of you that know me will know that I was very apprehensive about coming to Japan. I don’t like fish, I thought, how will I cope?

Very well, as it turns out. Japanese food is unbelievably good. Here are a few examples of what I’ve eaten so far:

Okonomiyaki

This is a Japanese specialty dish which actually has variations depending on which city you’re in. Every Japanese person I spoke to before I came said “you must have okonomiyaki!” because apparently, Hiroshima okonomiyaki is especially good. Incidentally, the name “okonomi yaki” literally means “fried stuff you like”: お好む (okonomu) is “to like” and 焼き(yaki) means fried. What they do, basically, is make an omelette, shove a load of fried veg and meat and whatever else on top, then turn it over so the omelette makes a kind of lid. Then they smother it with the most amazing sauce you’ll ever taste. It’s incredible.

Ramen

This is incredibly cheap to eat out (300 yen, about £2), and is nice enough that I’d eat it if it cost three times that much. It’s basically noodle soup. But it’s the most amazing, salty, flavoursome soup I’ve ever had, and the noodles are perfectly cooked. It gets a bit messy, with the whole slurping thing (in Japan, it’s actually polite to slurp your noodles up noisily), but if you wear something you don’t mind getting oil splashes on, you’re fine. Plus, if you don’t want to eat out, you can get the instant variety from some vending machines and all convenience stores, which is surprisingly nice.

Katsukare- (katsu curry)

Japanese curry, usually served with a huge amount of sticky rice. You get a chicken breast, in breadcrumbs, sliced into maybe five pieces, which is placed on top, in the middle of the rice and the curry. Even in the university cafeterias this curry is worth eating, it’s that nice. Worth eating with a spoon instead of chopsticks, though, as the rice gets less sticky when covered in curry. The Wagamama version is surprisingly authentic, actually, but still can’t compare to the real thing.

Japanese Italian food

It’s not all good. There’s an Italian restaurant quite near where we live, and I went with a couple of the girls yesterday, having been told it was quite good. It was strange. It was pasta and pizza, but it was absolutely nothing like any Italian food you get in England. The pasta was in an Italian-style sauce, but they had over-flavoured it (as I’ve been told, the Japanese like their strong flavours) so it actually tasted strangely Japanese, and the pizzas had very strange ingredients on them. Everything on the menu was based on something Italian, but had gone slightly wrong somewhere, and ended up as a kind of Italian-Japanese hybrid. It was expensive, too.

I have only been here for a week, but I do wonder whether I’ll ever tire of Japanese food.