WOW! That looks FANTASTIC! I am totally jealous!

Don't be. Bentos are nasty. Other Japanese food? AWESOME.

^huh? bento is the stylish box the food comes in, how can it be nasty?

i loves me some of everything you mention persephone. been too long since i went to eat Japanese *sniff*

You have nooo idea how jealous I am. The food looks spectacular. I had a friend from Japan who used to do the same thing here in the US on New Years Day. It is quite the experience and now I realize how much I miss it! Maybe next year I'll have to try it.

MG, I know what I am talking about... everything inside that bento is damn tasty! I mean, I don't know what you do, but its generally recommended that you not eat the box the food comes in.

Osechi is an acquired taste. We were proud that our kids were game to try half of it! (they've had some practice, too) I'm wondering MG, if that means you were adventurous enough to go outside of the base there and eat your bento, or if you had it in the mess hall?

When Dag worked for USFJHQ outside of Tokyo, some of the command there had never stepped outside of the base, even after God-knows how many years of service. A little bit messed-up, if I may say so.....

Oh, the Bentos we had were in some remote town on a southern island near Oita. Maybe we just got some particularly nasty ones. I don't know. What I do know is that I loved me some Japanese food. And yes, I ventured off base.

The first day we were able to leave the base, me and two other guys walked from Camp Hansen (The town of Kin) to Camp Foster (Ginowan). That's normally about a 40 minute bus ride, so NOBODY walks it. We were hungry, so wwe stopped at this tiny restaurant.(The point being, it wasn't meant to cater to our undeveloped American palate) It probably seated about 25 people. No one spoke English but thank God those Japanese put pictures up on the wall for menus. We all just pointed to something and awaited our food. When it arrived, it was the most massive quantity of food I'd ever seen served to one person, and all for about $7. Needless to say I could only guess as to what I was eating, but we all thoroughly enjoyed it.

So it's not that I only ate chow hall food. It's just that the box actually tased better then then food in them.

And I love me some Yakisoba.

Glad to see you have an adventurous spirit, MG. Do you remember what was in the bento that you found so offensive? Was it animal, mineral or vegetable?

Japanese food falls into several categories. I'll list them starting with the most common/popular, to the highest cuisine styles.

1. Street food, including yakisoba, tako yaki (octopus in batter balls) and okonomi yaki (Cabbage pancakes), modan yaki, tai yaki (fish-shaped cakes filled with red beans) etc

2. Street-style bento/bowl food, including rice with seaweed and grilled salmon, chicken kara-age, gyudon (beef bowls) etc

3. Izakaya food (pub food), which is a bit like tapas, in that it's small plates of all kinds of interesting yummies, fried and otherwise. My favourite is grilled eggplant in soy sauce

4. Ramen noodle shops can range from the hole-in-the wall to more expensive restaurants, but are usually the kind of food you grab on-the-run, which is why Japanese love to slurp their ramen as fast as they can.

5. Chinese food, which is appropriated to the Japanese palate, like gyoza (fried dumplings), haru maki (spring rolls), cha han, mabo dofu (chili with tofu) etc

6. Pizza restaurants are very popular. You can sample very Japanese style pizzas, that have kim-chi (pickled cabbage) or kamaboko (fish cakes) on them. Some pasta restaurants can be quite classy, usually because they have a European trained chef.

7. Kateika which is home-cooked food, including grilled fish, like salmon and mackeral, rice, miso soup, nabe yaki (hot pots) vegie and rice dishes like gomoku gohan, curry rice, omu rice (a kind of omelette) etc


8. All-you-can-eat restaurants sell food like shabu shabu and suki yaki and are very popular, usually offer all-you-can drink as well.

9. Sushi, including sashimi and all the varieties of sushi. Some sushi places are VERY expensive.

10. Soba restaurants specialise in all kinds of traditional noodle dishes and can be quite revered for their particular style.

11. Kaiseki Ryori is high cuisine, serving some of the foods you would find in osechi ryori and include the food served at a ryokan (Inn), like clear soups with rare mountain vegies, sashimi and delicacies in seafood. We were teated to some kaiseki ryori last time we visited friends in Japan and my favourite was tiny slices of hard butter in between slivers of dried persimmon. It was delicious!

I've probably left some out, but there you have it. Even after you've lived in Japan for some time, it can be quite difficult to become comfortable with some of the high-end stuff, unless you have an absolute love of seafood in its simplest form, because the flavour is usually very subtle.

Go figure-The Japanese are some of the healthiest humanoids on the planet, their food production still pretty much in the same hands it's been in for centuries.....they eat lotsa fish, seaweed, and fresh veggies.....

In the U.S., we don't grow our own food anymore....big agri-biz (evil white people) grows it, corporate manufacturing packages it, and Madison avenue sells it, and the pharmaceutical companies are there to sell us their wares, when the food the evil ones grow, gives us pain and disease....Aren't you glad you live in such a world??? Paradise and Purgatory, at the same time.....

I grieve daily that I am not in a place and time at present, that I do not have control of my own food sources and supplies-I would grow most of my food myself, raise my own chickens, goats, rabbits, etc.

The only thing I want to have to buy is grain and the omega oils I can't get from not living near the coast.

The United States is full of the most diseased people on the planet, but this could be corrected in a single generation-makes a person wanna make radical changes-("calm down choggie, you can't change it, simply work within it.")


ok. I'm better now....

I really can't remember what was in them. It was 2:30 in the morning and we were cramped on a tiny bus. I just remember that all the good tasted like seafood, even things that shouldn't have (it has a way of penetrating other foods)

But by it's self, I enjoyed a lot of the seafood there.

A lot of food tastes like seafood in Japan, even though it may not be seafood itself. This is because the basis of Japanese cooking is dashi, which is the stock of kombu (kelp) and fish flakes, like bonito. It's called the flavour of the sea and dashi is used to boil vegies, it's mixed with the egg in omelettes and egg rolls, it's the broth used in miso soup, noodles and hot pots and much more. Even rice is boiled with some kombu, so it can have a seaweedy taste.

Dashi is easy to make and very good for you. Most young people in Japan use the instant dashi packs, but older women/men know how to make the real deal. I was fortunate to meet some older talented women who passed on a lot of their knowledge to me.

We eat pretty well, including home-style Japanese cooking about 2-3 times a week. Thanks go out to Kuri sama, Daisy and Mayumi san for their patience and care in teaching me to cook kateika ryori. Arigato gozaimasu! Taihen osewa ni natte imasu yo!

Stop it Persephone! Yer makin' me all hungry!