Food - The Motorhome Diaries

Before we went to Japan we thought that we would be unable to afford to eat out and took comfort in the fact that as long as we could boil a kettle we could live off pot noodles. We were very wrong.

There were many convenience stores along the road, Lawson Station or 711 stores that specialised in ready meals - plates of sushi, noodles, hot sausages and tofu, pot noodles, beer, wine, hot coffee etc. We regulary picked up a large platter of sushi and ate it in the driver and passenger seats of the van - preferably with a nice view.

yaki soba with plenty of ginger

Eating out was very affordable, often paying no more than £10-£12 for the two of us. As our cooking facilities were quite limited we ended up eating out most of the time.

Breakfast

Ordering food could be problematic as menus were not in English. Sometimes there were photos of dishes and sometimes there was a plate of plastic food in the window - plates of plastic food for display purposes being a Japanese invention. The original shop is in Gujo Hachiman.

We never saw breakfast cereal on sale so breakfast has comprised sliced banana with yoghurt. The first yoghurt was aloe and Cabernet Sauvignon, a bizarre mix and while not the blueberry flavour we had expected, it was surprisingly pleasant.

We did eventually find cereal in large supermarkets but milk would have been the next challenge. We never bothered.

We did not found much in the way of bread, save for the thickest sliced bread ever. Imagine English thick sliced toast loaf and then double the thickness of each slice and you are getting close.
We did find some mini bread rolls that appeared acceptable at a push but inside was a big dollop of custard - not unpleasant but another surprise and better than the next batch of rolls which had something that looked like jam but was probably a local bean confection. I needed to practise my katakana a bit more so to read what I was buying.

Sheila's lunch in Matsue

Gilroy at a viking restaurant

There were also buffet restaurants where you could choose from a vast range of food and even take a plateful of raw meat to cook at the gas cooker at your table.
Buffet restaurants are called viking restaurants. It is said that this originated in the Imperial Hotel Tokyo which was the first restaurant in Japan to serve buffet meals or smorgasbord meals and chose to call their restaurant a Viking restaurant rather than a smorgasbord and the name has been in the Japanese culinary dictionary ever since.

At lunchtime we ate out either in town or and at the roadside stations where there is always a cafe and ordering at these cafes was interesting. At the entrance was a vending machine and this is where you ordered the food and paid for it. You received a ticket from the vending machine and took it to the counter. When your number's called you collect your meal. A very efficient system but there are two problems, the first is that the vending machine does not always have a picture of the dish so you have to find someone eating something you fancy and then quiz them on the appropriate button to press. For this we rely on the Coleman Method which has been tested widely all over Europe and that is to find a young person who possibly speaks some English. The second problem is understanding what your number sounds like in Japanese and we need to practise this but once outside the main tourist areas of Kyoto or Tokyo we were the only foreigners so we stood out and people would indicate if our food was ready.