Explore everyday life in Japan
Traveling and sightseeing in Japan means being exposed to foods and snacks of all kinds. No matter where you go in this country, there will undoubtedly be a local food that you should try eating. Said in another way, everywhere you go in Japan, there will be a local specialty, or a local variation of a national dish that you should not only try eating, but look forward to eating with company.
The way I grew up, eating was something you either did when you were hungry, when you were having a craving of some kind, or when something caught your eye—cotton candy at a local fair or popcorn at the movie theater. Eating was also something that I did largely by myself, meaning that if I wanted to eat something, I bought it and ate without giving much thought to the people around me. If the people I was with wanted to eat something else, that didn’t affect me in any way. If we shared, we shared, if we didn’t, we didn’t. Food was rarely the focus of my social interactions and outings.
In Japan, however, I have found things to be very different. I have ruined more than one outing by not being hungry, and by not being hungry, not wanting to participate in eating local foods or sharing snacks with the people around me. I have been called a bore quite a few times by my wife for not showing enough interest in the free sample grazing stations of souvenir shops and the rows of snack food stores that often line the avenues around major shrines and temples.
Since moving to Japan, I have found that food holds a very special place in the culture here. It seems to me to be the centerpiece of socialization. Yes, you can sit down and talk with your friends. Yes, you can take a walk together. Yes, you can go out and do any number of things that you want with a variety of companions, but it doesn’t quite become an experience in Japan until you have eaten something together.
Sharing food with someone here is said to make the food more delicious. I would even go so far as to say that sharing food with somebody here is essential to creating a memory, something that also holds a special place in Japanese culture. By sharing food with friends, or even strangers, you are often connecting the place and the time to the food, whether local or not, and connecting the food to the moment, the moment to the season, the season to the conversation, the conversation to the taste, and the taste to your first impressions of the food itself. In other words, you are sitting down and creating a very rich memory that hits all of the senses. You are creating something that will be, in the long run, more memorable than it would have been otherwise.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.