Food in Japan by Ashanti Long

I have been attending Kansai Gaidai University located in Osaka, Japan since the semester started in August.  I am taking classes such as Japanese (of course), Kanji, Japanese Popular Media and Society, Religion in Japan, and Geisha, Gangsters and Samurai.  During my time here I have realized that food is expensive.  You want to get out and enjoy Japan, but the food is like “wow”.  So, I have been experiencing eating different foods that I have never tried before like squid and octopus. Now this is coming from a guy that really loves chicken nuggets and doesn’t eat bread.  Sometimes I did take a chance on cooking and really enjoyed that.  Of course, I cooked chicken and rice and even tried dumplings.  You can check out the pictures and I must say it didn’t turn out too bad.  I even found a McDonald’s, love my McDonald’s hotcakes, and a Domino’s Pizza. Domino’s Pizza is a little pricey costing about 1629 yen or about $15 dollars for a small.  You can also get cheap sushi and reasonable noodles (which are amazing).

These are a couple of restaurants I really liked:

Kura Sushi in Osaka.  This place has cheap, awesome sushi.  They have sushi on the conveyor belt where you can just grab the sushi.  You can also order the sushi and it will come right to your table on the conveyor belt.  There is one on the bottom that has continuous stuff coming out that you pick from and the one on the top sends your orders to you.  Each plate was different colors and the price was based on the color of the plate.  You pretty much calculate your plates. 

Ages Café in Hirakata, Osaka.  It was a more kind of American place. Ages had pizza and curry.  I also made a great friend that works there. The atmosphere was great, and the food was good. The pizza there had toppings like fish

The Bamboo Forest was an awesome place for food, shopping and sightseeing.  My sister came to visit, and we enjoyed several places there.   These are foods we tried:

Yakitori is raw meat that you choose and cook yourself.  People will help you if needed.  It cooked pretty fast.  We tried to cook cow tongue and it tasted pretty good. 

Yakiniku is basically grilled beef. I read that it is known in English as “Korean style barbeque”.  The Japanese meat is really good, and it is cooked in sauces like soy or sake or sesame oil. 

Takoyaki is another food that is different.  It is large chunks of battered octopus.  My sister thought it was way too mushy.  I didn’t think it was too bad.  We also tried squid (with the tentacles) and it was surprisingly good. 

Snoopy’s Chocolat was there as well.  They had all sorts of chocolates including the ones that looked like the Charlie Brown characters (of course).  The chocolates are made of all types of ingredients like cocoa, yuzu, wasabi and sake. 

The food in Japan is really good and as you see there are so many different types of food to try.  If you visit Japan, remember to take a chance and expand your palette.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *