A Years Worth Of Japanese Food
Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.
For folks who are wondering what your diet would look like if you lived in Japan for a year. A collection of 365 photos taken during my brekkie, runch and dinner time in Japan - stuffed in the video below for your viewing pleasure.
All photos taken from my weekly series A Week in Tokyo where I post loads of photos of my life and work in Tokyo which includes visiting embassies, hosting Internet related networking events and also my work in the anime, entertainment and internet field. The latest A Week in Tokyo write up is here.
If you can't see the video above for any reason then the low res is at YouTube.
Back to the subject of food, many Japanese folks who have visited the UK tell me that the food was horrible - I love the food back in the UK! Nothing beats some fresh chips n savaloy! Music in video used with permission from Beings.
Poll: Japanese food in your region tastes...
-Great
-Average
-Pile o steaming camel poop
the latest
latest episodes
That's a whole lot of salt and MSG. I love Japanese food, but I think a year of it would kill me.
he said: "runch."
www.angryasianman.com/images/angry/mryunioshi.jpg
UK is known internationally for its bad food, not just in Japan. I've never experienced it first-hand though.
Wow. You eat really well!
I subsist on rice now for several months. And I mean only rice, and sometimes topped with furikake. I'm desperately poor now. Last year, when I had a good paying job, I ate like this...
My best memory was eating a 3.8 kilo tarabagani (king crab), with a head bigger around than my waist! At nearly 300$ or so, I could only do it once, but damn was it good...
I think the British reputation for bad food is a little bit out of date now... things have improved. People now more generally accept that it is no great sin for your food to taste nice, and people also seem to realise that it is possible to eat healthy things which taste nice too.
Although we'll probably never get rid of the people who live entirely on frozen chips and frozen lumps of reformed chicken in breadcrumbs... but fortunately those people aren't generally running the restaurants.
@wakaman you say that, but after having been in Japan myself for a short while, I've noticed that healthy is the norm, not the exception. This leads me to believe that they are doing something right.
1) I would agree with #5; British food these days can be pretty great. The recent culture of Gastro-pubs has revived British "classics" and put new, interesting spins on them. Eating out has become more common, and I think people are probably to some extent more adventurous in their tastes than they used to be. Food has become more tied to pleasure and skill than it used to, I think - look at the rise of celebrity chefs in British media, and the popularity of recipe books by same chefs.
2) Japanese food in my area (Brighton, in the South of England) is not bad at all. There's a couple of great noodle bars, one or two decent sushi places, and being by the sea the fish is generally readily available, despite falling stocks (that said, I don't know whether the sushi fish is local or not... hmm). There are a couple of pretty fancy high-end Japanese restaurants, too. My American boss complains that that's not enough, and that the quality isn't great compared to the US, but if you put it in the British context, it's not bad at all. Most town's on the South Coast don't have such a racial/cultural/gastronomic diversity.
Aren't the Japanese famed for their longevity? And a lot of that seems to be put down to their diet.
The best thing you can say about food in the UK is that there's quite a lot of non-British food - but that's not always good.
I live in London near Golders Green which is known as a Jewish area but recently has become increasingly Japanese, the Japanese restaurants are largely frequented by Japanese people so I take that as a recommendation!
Punctuation Nazi says title should read:
"Year's Worth," not "Years Worth"
@BritSwedeGuy:
I disagree. There's plenty of good British food*, but some of it is cooked badly or on the cheap, and some of it is not to other peoples' tastes.
The examples Matthew Walton gives of bad convenience food that Brits eat aren't even particularly British cuisine. (Chicken Kiev, I wonder where those come from?)
*e.g. Sunday roasts, steak and ale pies, pork/game pies, sausages, kippers, hot puddings...
#10
Came here to say that.
/Space Junk
Well, every country has its share of bad convenience food.
Woah dude, do you eat take out everyday? I'm on vacation here in Toyama and I only eat out like twice a week. The rest of the time it's homemade salads, soups, and whatnot.
Japan has among the highest rates of gastric cancer in the world. The diet is simply not very healthy.
Many variables contribute to Japanese longevity (comparable to places with very different diets, such as Sweden and Andorra), but regarding diet it is their low caloric intake that is most notable.
Because of the Japan-France love affair, there's a very sizable amount of good Japanese restaurants here in Paris-- particularly in the 9éme and 3éme.
Bad British food? You can't read, or don't have friends who tell you where to eat. Try Princi on Wardour St, London W1, just to start.
My girlfriend and I just went to Paris - amazing Japanese food in what is basically the Japanese district (see above). Cheap (for Paris), big portions, quick, friendly, buzzy and well tasty.
"The best thing you can say about food in the UK is that there's quite a lot of non-British food - but that's not always good."
Eh? How so? Traditionally British food is thriving, and the popularity and presence of "foreign" food both a) reflects the UK's multi-ethnic and multicultural make-up, and b) shows that British people are more adventurous in their eating habits than they used to be.
Ohio had some really good japanese restaurants that serve "authentic" japanese food. Bento boxes, fresh sushi and properly made miso soup.
Atlanta Georgia on the other hand sucks at best its just sushi at worst which is most of them its combo asian restaurants. For some reason they have chinese/thai/japanese and rarely just the cuisine of one. The japanese food is always americanized with lousy american style vegetables. They could just have a nice seaweed salad or japanese pickles but they probably think it would be too weird and instead blow it.
Ive seen frozen fish served as fresh sushi way too often. Stuff that is still frozen when they pull it out to prepare.
very cool, what a neat idea! I think I saw some repeat dishes in there :-).... now you got me hungry..
We visited Japan 8 years ago and a significant part of our trip enjoyment was the incredible food. The best gyoza I've eaten to date was at the train station near Himeji Castle.
I live in the NYC area and there are excellent Japanese noodle shops in NYC (Menchanko Tei comes to mind) as well as good sushi restaurants. However, my favorite place is a little restaurant called Ocha in West Caldwell, NJ. But nothing beats the fish in Japan.
Go to the Happy Hotai Sushi Bar in Osaka. Ask for the chef, Seio. Tell him the guy who looks like Jack Bauer sent you. He'll probably bring out a couple bottles of Sake and have a drink with you.
Not much Japanese food in Minnesota. I won't touch sushi any more or much fish, too much mercury. We have Lao and Hmong around here.
I'm sorry, but after reading the lengthy rapelay video game discussion, all I can see in those photos are the little hypersexualized schoolgirl figurines in their micro-miniskirts.
And I LOVE food.
Sigh.
Danny, what do the non-yuppies eat?
@ #1 wakaman
That's a whole lot of salt and MSG. I love Japanese food, but I think a year of it would kill me.
Not true. Not high in salt, nor high in MSG. Japanese food is really tasty and nutritiously healthy and it's from the good flavour balance in the dishes themselves. I lived there for a year and while eating heaps. I managed to also lose 5kg. Best year of food in my life, I still believe.
An interesting thing happened in the fortnight after I came back (to Australia). We had fish and chips for dinner, one of my favourite food before the trip and it made me sick. Too much oil, we believe, was the cause.
Yum, I love Japanese food, and UK food.
The trick is with any food to not eat the rubbish.
Simple really.
No cuisine is "better" than any other.
Danny, is it right that you are Jimmy Choo's son?
It said on your site that you used to work as a shoe designer so I naturally assumed, London...Choo....shoes....Jimmy Choo of London.
Or are you taking the piss?
If you don't believe me about the salt and msg, take a look at the back of just about any packaged Japanese food product. It's in just about everything, even things you'd never expect, but especially in the sauces, spices, pickles, seaweed, batters, miso, and anything else not raw.
Japanese food is based on a long history of preserving things for incredibly long times. This has resulted in a salt and pickle-based cuisine. I find most Japanese non-sushi meals to be cooked to death and feel that they are very far from "fresh". I would love to find someone to show me conflicting evidence; Recipes, restaurants, or other places that make fresh and light Japanese cuisine not laden in salt, vinegar, and msg.
Honestly, I have always suspected that some of the bizarre quirks and curiosities of Japanese culture can be explained by a population being slowly and massively poisoned by monosodium glutamate.
Waka = Wakabayashi (若林), by the way. I love Japan.
Yes, Danny IS Jimmy Choo's son. If you look on his website, there's a video of him at his dad's workshop and more.
#11: Sausages. You forgot the sausages...
Could part of the reason that people seem to look healthy in Japan be that if you are ill or handicapped or in any way "defective" it is considered shameful and you stay out of sight?
I could eat like this once in a while, but I'm not seeing enough vegetables to suit me. Personally, I like a little more raw veggie crunch in my diet, and a lot less noodles and deep fried food.
I just got back from Japan and I have to say that my hometown, Dallas Texas, has some world class Japanese restaurants. Not just sushi, but authentic foods like okonomiyaki, hand made soba, curry rice, kushi-age, shabu-shabu, takoyaki and the like. Mmmm Japanese food. About to make some dashi right now.
Great slideshow, Danny.
I recently came back from a long business trip that ended with three days in Japan. I have always liked Japanese food (I live in Philadelphia and have traveled quite a bit around the Country) but nothing in the US comes close to the food in Japan.
Everything I ate was exquisite, from the Kobe raw beef down to the eel bento boxes we ate on the bullet train. I had wonderful hosts there who took the time to show me as much of the local cuisine as possible in my short time there.
What struck me most was the appreciation for detail and wholesomeness. Even the dried squid bits were satisfying in taste (surprisingly delicate) and texture (chewy, just this side of GummiBear.)The Japanese have found pleasure in the most seemingly mundane foods and celebrate its essence. If I had to make a selection on a place to live based solely on food, I'd be hard pressed to find a place better than Japan.
#25 Yes, Danny is Jimmy Choo's son.
I think the health of Japanese people has more to do with the relative lack of "food science" compared to North America/the west. They don't put high fructose corn-syrup and a long list of unpronounceable stuff with "modified" in the name of it into everything. Freshness is more important than longevity, especially since people don't goto big box stores and buy a year's worth of _anything_ at a time.
And curry rice being authentic Japanese food? It's Japanized Indian food! (and delicious)
I'm with #23, what do the common folk eat on a daily basis?
Reading your guest blogs inspired me to go back and read through all your WIT entries, and I found the food pr0n was what I was truly enjoying. Thanks for the video of all the nummies in one spot!
Man you eat well! Last time I was in London I had a square pie with mushy peas and mash and it was pretty good. If you made a video like that of English food though it wouldn't be anywhere as appealing overall for me.
Minneapolis, Minnesota has a few good Japanese restaurants, unfortunately almost all of which are outrageously expensive for a college student. I miss sushi but I can't afford an $80-$140 simple dinner for two. Kaiten zushi needs to work its way to America. What I wouldn't do for a Sushi Hana Tei in my neck of the woods.
I'm from Melbourne where we're blessed with some very fine restaurants of pretty much every type of cuisine from around the world.
In one street near where I used to live I had
* decent Japanese
* excellent African
* Fantastic Kebabs (and various other Turkish stuff cheap too!)
* amazing pizzas (of the slightly less Italian more modern variety)
* fantastic Italian (including more traditional Italian style pizzas)
* really good Afghani
* excellent Thai
Within about 3 blocks of this street there is also some of the best greek food I've ever indulged in and some amazingly good Japanese that is also very cheap.
So I think I'm blessed with an excellent choice of food in this very fine city.
When I travelled to Japan I found the food amazing, however I missed the ability to find the range of cuisines easily (part of this was probably not knowing my way around I'm sure).
When I travelled to the UK I found 90% of the food incredibly expensive (but maybe that's just everything in London) and of not all that great quality. In London I also had the advantage of being taken out by locals who assured me they were taking me to some of the best places both in terms of value and quality.
The one exception to this was English pies and pasties. God damn I miss those awesome pasty places at all the tube stations.
I mentioned in another Japan thread that my dad spent some time in Osaka. He said that when he came back the first thing he noticed was just how many fat Americans there were.
Here in Mississippi, we have a surprisingly large selection of Japanese cuisine. More restaurants open each year recently as well, so the competition and quality has only increased.
Jackson, MS and Hattiesburg, MS are notable for good quality meals and chefs that can cut a mean slice of fish, but I'm sure other parts do as well.
I'm still wondering... what do the non-yuppies eat?
With respect. Your gallery shows a person ordering at whim and with abandon anything he wants. Well bully for you, I'm impressed by your choices which seem abundant and very tasty.
Just wondering what the other side's choices are?
Fang on, Danny, don't take offence, just wondering.
I'd like to see 365 days of meals recorded in a slum hovel. That would be interesting.
Actually, forget I spoke Danny. You were showing us what a rich guy eats and nothing more -- I exceeded the brief with my previous comments. Please accept my apology. The food looks very tasty.
Oh yeah, those rich guys, always eating hamburgers, sandwiches and sushi which is ever so expensive.
Whilst there does seem to be the odd fancy meal shown in the video the vast majority of it looks like pretty standard food in Japan.
What most people would eat if they had a job and ate lunch out.
@45 The average Joe would be having a lot more konbini bentos I think. 今ã¯ä¸æ™¯æ°—ã ã—