Q9:TAKUHAI

TAKUHAI, or DEMAE, means home delivery services. In Japan, you can order various kinds of foods such as sushi and pizza on the phone.

Almost all sushi restaurant offer a delivery service and it's very popular. But sushi is too expensive for ordinary people. So they can order out for sushi only on special days such as their birthday and New Year's Day. However, some sushi franchises offer a delivery service at a very low price recently, which has been attracting many young people.

Link to a sushi delivery franchise:"Chagetsu"


Pizza is also very popular and common. There are more than a thousand pizza delivery shops in Japan. So you can order out for pizza wherever you are.

Link to a pizza delivery franchise:"PIZZA-LA"

Chinese dishes such as Ramen and fried rice are inexpensive and hearty meals. Many Chinese restaurants serve not only Chinese dishes but also other kinds of foods such as curry and Donburi.

Unagi dishes are very expensive and high-class meals. Unagi, Japanese eels, are usually served at upscale restaurants called Ryotei and they cost around 3000 yen. A eel is very tasty but you cant't cook it on your own because it has a poisonous blood, and that's why it's so expensive. Most people order it on a special day called "Doyo Ushi No Hi" as a traditional custom. "Doyo Ushi No Hi" is not a holiday or a national event, but it has been said since the Edo period(1603-1868) that eating eels on the day make you healthy and prevent you from illnesses. In fact, a eel is very healthy and nutritious food. So, people of the time probably knew the fact from their experiences.


In Japan, there are many other delivery services such as newspapers, milk, and so on. And you can get these services wherever you live. This is probably because Japan is a heavily-populated country as companies providing delivery services can carry their goods very effectively.




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Q8:Dagashi

The word "Dagashi" means Japanese cheap snack foods. It consists of two words, "Da" means futile or negligible and "Kashi" means a snack food or a sweet stuff. Most of them are priced very cheap because the main consumers of them are kids, especially elementary school students. There are hundreds of kinds of Dagashi and each of them has its own distinctive flavor.

Link to the Japanese Wikipedia:"Dagashi"

Generally, they are classified into chocolates, gum, corn(or potato) snacks, and sour or spicy snacks. Su Kombu, a pickled kombu, is a very sour Dagashi. It is popular not only among kids but also among adults because they eat it as a appetizer. Tirol-Choco is a very popular chocolate which has a wide variety of flavors such as strawberry, green tea, Mochi, pudding, and so on. Umai Bo is the Japanese most popular Dagashi. More than a million packs of it are sold every day. It is extremely cheap, at 10 yen a pack, and it also has a very wide variety of flavors such as cheese, curry, Natto, Mentaiko, and so on. Maybe you don't know Natto and Mentaiko, but they are very common and popular foods in Japan.

Stores selling Dagashi are called Dagashi-Ya. You can buy hundreds of kinds of Dagashi and some toys there. And some stores serve light meals such as Okonomi-Yaki and Yakisoba. In the 1970's and 80's, a number of Dagashi-Ya had had arcade games, which attracted many kids.

In the past, there had been numerous Dagashi-Ya in Japan, but most of them had closed in the 1990's and 2000's. There are several reasons why they had closed in a short period of time. The biggest one is , I think, the increase of convenience stores. The number of convenience stores in Japan had risen very rapidly in the 1980's and 90's. Almost all of them sell snacks, sweets, some toys and video games at all hours. So the number of Dagashi-Ya had fallen as the number of convenience stores rose.

Most Japanese people feel nostalgic when they think about Dagashi-Ya because it reminds them of their happy childhoods and their old schoolmates. But none of convenience stores bring such a feeling because they are standardized by its franchisor and don't have its own characteristics. Convenience stores improved the lifestyles of Japanese people, but also deprived them of precious experience.





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Q7:HORUMON

HORUMON stands for HORUMON-YAKI. HORUMON means "offal" and YAKI means "burned" or "grilled", so the word HORUMON-YAKI means a grilled offal. It's a kind of YAKINIKU, a grilled meat, and it's popular in the Kansai district, especially in Osaka.

There are various kinds of offal served as HORUMON-YAKI such as a liver, a tongue, a intestine, a stomach, a heart and a uterus. And both a cattle's offal and a pig's offal are served in the same way. HORUMON-YAKI is a very cheap and nutritious food, so it's popular among men. Recently, some young women also eat it because they think it has a positive effect on their health and beauty.

Link to a Japanese site:"JONETSU HORUMON"

The Japanese hadn't eaten offal for ages. In other words, they hadn't considered it as a food because they didn't know how to eat it, and didn't have a good way of transportation. However, Japan had suffered from the serious food shortage after the World War II, so they had to eat everything they had whether they like it or not. Fortunately, there were some Korean people in Osaka who knew how to cook offal and they taught it to the Japanese. The Japanese people called the cooked offal HORUMON, it means "garbage" in Kansai dialect. It had become popular soon. At that time, HORUMON-YAKI was just a vulgar food, but it has been improved for years and become popular also among young people.

Thus, the custom of eating offal became common after WWII. And now, there are various kinds of offal dishes in Japan. MOTSU-NABE, a offal stew, is more popular than HORUMON-YAKI in Tokyo and Kyushu. DOTE-NI, a offal dish stewed in miso, is popular in Nagoya and Osaka. The people in Okinawa has a unique cuisine culture, the Okinawan cuisine, which includes many kinds of offal dishes.

There are thousands of restaurants serving offal dishes now in Japan. I think a reason why that custom had become very popular in such a short period of time is that the Japanese have no taboo foods. They can eat almost all kinds of foods. In fact, most of them eat cattles, pigs, birds, fishes, shellfishes and some of them eat even sharks, snakes and insects. Styles of cooking is also various. There are many kinds of restaurants in Japan such as, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, German, Mexican, Hawaiian, Korean, Indian, Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish, and so on. You may think that they have no policy or belief or their own culture because they accept everything, but I think that accepting everything regardless of its origin is their culture and belief.





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Q1:RAMEN

RAMEN is a Japanese noodle.It has its origin in Chinese noodles, but it has been improved in Japan for more than 80 years. So it is considered as a kind of Japanese dish lately.

Ramen consist of noodles, soup and toppings.Each of these elements vary by locality and there are hundreds of varieties like pizza.They are generally divided into 4 categories by types of soup.

Soy sauce soup is the most popular flavor in Japan, especially around Tokyo.Pork bone soup is also very popular recently, especially around Fukuoka.Miso soup is popular in cold region, especially in Hokkaido.Salt soup is not so popular, but some females and ramen maniacs like it.

There are famous brands of ramen such as

Hakata ramen : pork bone soup with sesame
Tokyo ramen : Soy sauce with MENMA
Sapporo ramen : Miso soup with butter and corns

Link to a Japanese Wikipedia page:"RAMEN"


There are dozens of topping such as

Char siu
MENMA
Welsh onion
Boiled(or smoked) egg
Corn
Nori

Link to a Japanese site:"What kind of toppings do you like?"


If you have a chance to come to Japan,you should go to some grocery stores,especially convenience stores.You'll see dozens of kinds of instant noodles(cup ramen) there.Instant noodles are the most popular preserved foods in Japan.You have to select a brand by your own taste since each of them has it's own features.It is said that more than 500 kinds of new instant noodles are released every year.

There are famous brands of ramen such as

Nissin Cup Noodles
Nissin Chicken Ramen
Nissin Demae Itcho
Sapporo Ichiban
Sugakiya

Link to a Japanese Wikipedia page:"Instant Ramen"


As well as ramen,Japanese people eat other various kinds of noodles such as Japanese UDON and SOBA. In addition, Italian Pastas and Korean cold noodles(Reimen) are popular in Japan nowadays.Most of you may think that Japanese staple food is rice,but noodles are also staple food in fact.





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