Comic Strips

The thing is that Japanese culture places a lot of value in excellence and attention to detail. Traditional Japanese cooking is comparable to traditional French cooking in that regard (and yes, I'm aware that not all japanese cuisine is high-class traditional fare, but even a basic dashi stock or a ramen broth are things that people take pride in and pass on their recipes, complete with regional variants and a lot of subtlety and nuance).

Anyway, I lived in japan for a few years in my twenties and I traveled around and tried a lot of different regional specialties and variants on some of the classics. I also frequented a lot of chains like Sukiya, Yoshinoya, and all the different konbinis. So my description isn't limited to fancy kaiseki-ryori in centuries-old ryokan villages. Japanese food, even the basic stuff, has a certain quality to it, which is hard for gaijin to imitate unless they train for years with a Japanese chef.

I preface this with all that so you don't assume I'm speaking from ignorance. Since returning to the US, I've been disappointed with the quality of "Japanese restaurants" here. I've been to a couple in New York that were good. I could tell the owners and staff were Japanese by the quality of the food alone. Overhearing them speaking Japanese to each other only confirmed it.

But there isn't much of a Japanese diaspora in my area, and the "Japanese restaurants" around me are all run by Chinese families. I've stopped expecting Japanese-quality Japanese food from these. Sometimes I still go just to get my fix. But it's not the same. The ingredients are different. The ratios are off. The love and care, passion, pride, and everything else that goes into Japanese food just isn't there, and it shows up as different tastes, different textures, different aromas, etc.

Not to mention it's just hard to find some things here. Famima chicken just isn't a thing here. Even Karaage is hard to find. Oden might as well not exist. All the different kinds of yakitori (quail egg, cartilage, horumon, etc.), matsuri specialties like okonomiyaki and takoyaki, taiyaki, and so much else; the little shops outside the train stations and all the smells and tastes that go along with them; so many regional dishes like motsunabe, okinawa soba, etc.; and just so much else (donburi, ebi furai, chawanmushi, onigiri, korokke, katsu curry, soba/udon shops and all their interesting toppings.). Ugh, I'm drooling just thinking about it all. But I digress.

Obviously no one shop could do all of that, but "Japanese food" outside of Japan is typically very limited in options. Some sushi, mostly westernized variants. It's rare to find many options for nigiri, or any at all but I've never seen a kaitenzushi in the US. Occasionally a ramen shop (if you're lucky, but even then the broth just isn't right, the chashu and shoyu tamago just aren't right; and good luck finding moyashi namuru!). Other than that, you're probably limited to a few things listed as appetizers. Maybe gyoza, edamame, and a couple other things that are considered popular in the west.

It's just not the same though. It's not just the selection, it's the quality. The ingredients, the recipe, everything is just off.

Korean, Thai, and Filipino food are all amazing, by the way. I've been to all three of those countries too. And just like with Japanese cuisine, each one has so much variety that just gets lost in the US. They substitute a lot of local ingredients which just aren't the same, they don't offer dishes that seems too strange to the western palette, they tweak a lot of dishes to make them more suitable to the average westerner, etc. I've never had a pad kra pao in the US that even came close to measuring up to how it is in Thailand.