Eating in Japan: A Traveller's Guide to Japanese Food, Drink and Table Manners

Sukiyabashi Jiro in Tokyo. (Photo: City Foodsters, CC BY 2.0)

Japanese food is one of the world's great cuisines, and one of the best reasons to visit Japan. This guide covers what you will find, where to find it, and how to eat it without offending anyone.

The basics

Meals keep Western hours: breakfast from about 6 to 9, lunch from 12 to 2, dinner from 6 to 8. Most restaurants close by 10 p.m., earlier in the countryside, though bars, izakaya, convenience stores and fast-food chains in the cities stay open late or all night.

Rice is at the centre of everything; the word for cooked rice, gohan, also means "meal". Fish and seafood feed an island nation, varying by region, and soybeans appear everywhere: miso soup, tofu, and soy sauce. Cooking follows the seasons: bamboo shoots in spring, eel on hot summer days, salmon, mackerel and chestnuts in autumn, and bubbling hot pots in winter.

A little history explains a lot. Buddhism long discouraged eating meat, so fish and seafood became the protein of choice; sushi began as a way of preserving fish in fermenting rice. The Portuguese brought frying in batter, the origin of tempura. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan took in Western ingredients and dishes and remade them to its own taste, and in 1872 the emperor lifted the ancient ban on eating red meat.

Everyday meals

A typical meal is a main dish with rice, miso soup and side dishes: in a restaurant a teishoku (set meal), to take away an o-bentō (boxed meal). Set lunches are often great value, even at expensive restaurants. The simplest meal is a donburi, a bowl of rice with a topping: oyakodon ("parent and child": chicken and egg), katsudon (fried pork cutlet and egg), gyūdon (beef and onion).

A teishoku: fried scallops with rice, miso soup and sides. (Photo: くろふね, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Japan's most popular dish may be curry rice, a thick, mild brown curry that bears little resemblance to Indian cooking, often the cheapest thing on the menu. Add a fried pork cutlet and it becomes katsu karē.

Noodles

Almost every town has its own "famous" noodle dish. The two native kinds are thin buckwheat soba and thick wheat udon, served in hot broth (plain; with a raw egg, "moon-viewing"; with sweet fried tofu, "fox") or chilled with a dipping sauce (zaru soba, a summer favourite). Ramen, Chinese-style egg noodles, comes in four main styles: shio (salt), shōyu (soy, typical of Tokyo), miso (from Sapporo) and rich pork-bone tonkotsu (from Fukuoka). Slurping is fine, even expected, and you can drink the broth from the bowl.

Chāshū ramen in Onomichi. (Photo: chicatan from Onomichi, Hiroshima, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Sushi and sashimi

Sushi is usually raw fish on vinegared rice; sashimi is the fish alone. Both look simple and are hard to do well: the fish must be very fresh, and apprentices spend years learning the rice. The main forms are nigiri (fish pressed on rice), maki (rolled in seaweed and sliced), temaki (a hand-rolled cone), gunkan ("battleship", with seaweed around the edge) and chirashi (toppings scattered over a bowl of rice, a good budget choice). For those who don't eat raw fish there is egg (tamago), inari (rice in sweet fried tofu) and cucumber rolls (kappa maki).

At the top restaurants, where you order piece by piece from the chef, bills can run to tens of thousands of yen; a chef's set (omakase or moriawase) keeps it in check. At a kaiten (conveyor-belt) sushi shop you take plates as they pass, colour-coded by price, and the staff count them at the end. Eating sushi with your fingers is fine; eat each piece at once, as soon as it is served. And where the chef has already seasoned the fish, asking for extra soy sauce or wasabi implies they have not done their job.

Fugu, the poisonous pufferfish, is a delicacy prepared only by licensed chefs; poisonings from restaurants are very unlikely. Kaiseki, many small courses of the finest seasonal ingredients, is Japan's great fine-dining form, and very expensive.

Grilled, fried and stewed

• Tempura: seafood and vegetables in a light batter, deep-fried very quickly.
• Tonkatsu: breaded, deep-fried pork cutlet.
• Yakitori: skewers of every part of the chicken, a classic with drinks.
• Okonomiyaki: a savoury pancake of batter and cabbage with your choice of fillings, topped with sauce, mayonnaise and bonito flakes.
• Yakiniku: Korean-style barbecue grilled at your table.
• Unagi: grilled eel, eaten for strength in the summer heat.

In winter, nabe hot pots bubble in the middle of the table: sukiyaki (beef, tofu and leeks, the beef dipped in raw egg), shabu-shabu (thin slices of meat swished through hot broth), oden (fishcakes, radish and tofu simmered for days, sold even in convenience stores) and chankonabe, the sumo wrestlers' stew.

Sukiyaki made with Yonezawa beef. (Photo: Jpatokal, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Western and Chinese, Japanese-style

Yōshoku, Western food made Japanese, is everywhere: hambāgu (a hamburger steak with gravy), omuraisu (fried rice wrapped in an omelette, with ketchup), korokke (croquettes), Japanese-style pasta with cod roe, and light, fluffy soufflé cheesecake. Chinese food has been adapted too, with milder flavours: gyōza dumplings (the classic partner to ramen), kara-age fried chicken, mābō dōfu and fried rice.

Omuraisu. (Photo: Nesnad, CC BY 3.0)

Where to eat

• Shokudō: neighbourhood diners with simple dishes and set meals at low prices.
• Izakaya: Japanese pubs, recognisable by their red lanterns, serving many small dishes to share with drinks.
• Chains: beef-bowl, tempura, curry and set-meal chains offer good food cheaply, often with tablet ordering in English.
• Ticket machines: at many cheap places you buy a ticket from a machine at the door and hand it over.
• Convenience stores (konbini): open around the clock, with rice balls, bentō and hot food.
• Station bentō (ekiben): boxed meals sold at stations, many unique to a region or even a single station.

Menus are often in Japanese only, but many places display lifelike plastic models of their dishes; if you cannot read the menu, pointing at the model works. Tokyo has more Michelin-starred restaurants than any other city in the world.

A typical izakaya in Tokyo. (Photo: Japanexperterna.se, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Special diets

Japanese food is not as light as its image: everyday dishes can be salty and fatty. Vegetarians have a hard time, because fish stock (dashi) is in almost everything; conveyor-belt sushi shops (cucumber, fermented-soybean and pickled-gourd rolls) help, as do the growing number of vegetarian restaurants in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, and soy foods like tofu. Halal food is scarce, though Japan's tourist board lists certified restaurants. Travelling with severe allergies is very difficult: awareness is low, soy is in everything, and gluten-free eating out is close to impossible, since most soy sauce contains wheat. Dairy and peanuts, on the other hand, are rarely used.

Drinks

Tea, usually green, comes free with almost every meal. Sake is brewed from rice with a mould and yeast, is around 15% alcohol, and is served anywhere from hot to chilled; contrary to popular belief, most is not served hot. Shōchū is a stronger distilled spirit, typically around 25%, and Japanese whisky has won many international awards. The drinking age is 20, and drinking in public is legal.

Manners

• Never stand chopsticks upright in rice, or pass food from chopsticks to chopsticks: both are part of funeral rites.
• Don't point, lick or spear with your chopsticks, or use them to move dishes. Rest them on the holder or across your plate.
• Drink soup straight from the bowl, and lift your rice bowl to eat.
• Never pour soy sauce on plain rice: it suggests the rice was badly cooked.
• Use the hot towel for your hands, not your face.
• Staff leave you alone until you call them: say "sumimasen" (excuse me).
• Pay at the counter on the way out. Tipping is not done, though some restaurants add a service charge.

How to hold chopsticks. (Photo: Hiaeoupyc, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources

• "Japanese cuisine" from Wikivoyage, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changed: rewritten in hubnx's own words and condensed from a much longer guide; regional specialties, sweets, condiments and chain lists left out, and prices omitted; each photo under its own licence, credited in its caption. This page is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.