When you're tired of Japan, you're tired of rice

I've been here for roughly seven months and seventeen days. I haven't written anything about the food yet. Rest assured, I am still me.

In keeping with Shinto values of harmony and purity, the Japanese diet depends a great deal on the seasons and the quality and freshness of the ingredients. Technical jiggery-pokery of rice aside, I think this attitude towards freshness is what makes Japanese sushi much tastier than that which I've encountered in Blighty. I'd be prepared to lay money on it being a reason why fruit and veg are so expensive here. Another possible explanation for the high price of greens is that what little workable farmland there is in Japan is mostly given over to rice. Rice yields more per unit of land than any other crop and so, in many ways, has formed the backbone of the empire. They can be quite nationalistic about their rice, sometimes proclaiming that it's the best rice in the world. I'll admit it's tasty, but you can't make a risotto with it.

The Japanese do a great deal of importing - from what I can gather, the indigenous diet mainly consists of rice, daikon radish, sundry mushrooms including shiitake (not pronounced "shite ache"), soy beans and fish. Shinto's spirit of harmony has created an assimilative culture - many "Japanese" dishes come from other parts of the world. Yaki Niku (cook your own meat) for example, is Korean in origin. The practice of frying food is, apparently, owed to China, and even Tempura, variously depicted as shrimp or vegetables deep fried in a thin batter, was introduced by the Portuguese Jesuits. I've asked some Japanese people what a typically Japanese (ie, with no external influences) meal consists of. Rice has been the first word on their lips. Everything else is merely an accompaniment; fish, maybe some lotus root...then they tend to trail off embarrassedly.

They're great believers in the natural flavour of food, hence their partiality to raw fish. Sauces are usually served as dipping condiments in separate dishes, and rarely mixed. My method of throwing anything I can find in a big pan and cooking it for hours at a time hasn't been expressed here, although I've found solace in Miso Udon - udon noodles cooked in miso soup, miso paste being a preserve of grain, salt and soybeans. Soybean jam is often the centre of Japanese deserts, wrapped in a parcel or ball made of ground rice, formed into a paste...yummy, sticky, fat and really healthy.

Regional variations of dishes are marked, but all local cuisines are represented in Tokyo and Osaka, the latter being the nations culinary capital. Osaka Takoyaki (octopus in balls of batter) and Okonomiyaki (savoury pancake made with cabbage and a variety of other ingredients, the name meaning "cook it as you like it") are considered the finest in Japan, although my beer addled brain chose to forget this gem of a factoid whilst I was actually there (sorry Matt). Kyoto is home to a variation of the aforementioned bean jam and rice cake, the rice parcel folded into a neat little triangle and coloured green, maybe with seaweed.

In the introduction to the edition of “Naked Lunch” that I’ve read, William Burroughs explains the term as the moment when you look at what’s on your fork (or nestling between your chopsticks) and suddenly realise what it is, where it’s come from and it’s relation to you. I’ve experienced the very antithesis of this several times since coming here, often looking at what I’m eating and thinking “what exactly is this?” I know that Surusuru is made with tofu, natto, raw egg, seaweed and…some bizarre white gloopy substance that generally befuddles me. It’s nice, but utterly impossible to eat with chopsticks. Natto itself is a classic weird bit of food - it’s fermented soy beans. If you can get over the fact that it looks like snot and smells like feet, it’s quite tasty, but again, eating it with chopsticks is an uphill struggle. Natto is almost a point of victory for the students when we’re talking about Japanese food and my enthusiasm for it - when we finally get to Natto and I confess that I’m not keen on it, I can almost hear them thinking “Ha-ha, we are inscrutable.” Despite the surface ickyness, Natto is one of the healthiest foods known to humanity. Japanese food as a whole is incredibly healthy, contributing greatly to their longevity and the resultant density of population...although the lack of habitable space probably has something to do with that also.

This next bit isn't for the faint hearted...

The expression “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse” is beautifully (or grotesquely) realised here - Lyle, another ALT, has told me about a place where you can ride horses in a lovely paddock, and finish up your day with a horse burger. I'm curious about eating horse, but as of yet, I've not tried it, and as for whale, I've only eaten it once - it's very expensive (you'd think they were endangered). My eating ethics have undergone a drastic shift over the past few years anyway, but more so since I came here - I’m not sure I would have eaten whale if I’d been told what it was beforehand, but since eating it and finding it to be incomprehensibly tasty, it’s made me re-reconsider a few issues. Lyle didn’t partake of horse burger, and I quite understand that - in the English speaking world we’re not brought up to consider these animals as food. The idea of a nice fat Sunday roast would be anathema to Hindus the world over.

I've heard stories about restaurants where you can eat tentacles cut from a live octopus. The fact that the twitching suckers attach themselves to your tongue is considered part of the taste experience There are places where you can eat whole fish, still wriggling. Now that's fresh. I’ve eaten whole (dead) fish since I’ve been here. Yes, their eyes were removed, but tuna heads are quite popular in Japan, the eyes being "the best bit". Whilst on that whale-munchin' night out with the Rinko staff, I partook of sashimi squid - this isn’t slices of squid lovingly laid out on a shiso leaf; this is a whole, albeit small, squid, complete with eyes and internal organs. There is nothing quite so alarming as the sensation of squirting squid guts when you’re not expecting it. Or when you're adventurously practicing your reading in a yaki niku restaurant and get served a dish of intestines. Even some Japanese people find that just a bit weird.

Love Japanese food as I do, they aren't really that into ovens...right now I am salivating at the mere thought of a baked potato with beans and cheese...mmmm...roll on Christmas.