This might be surprising if your concept of cartoon characters is based on American models. Sure, all kinds of improbable things exist in American cartoons that we don’t think twice about. Walking, talking animals – that’s so normal it’s boring. Sponges that wear pants, whatever. But not usually a fillet of fish that gets on Twitter and says “Please eat me, I’m delicious.”

But for the last few decades at least, cute characters that are live, walking, sometimes talking, foods, have been totally normal in Japan. And it turns out they have historical precedents that go WAY back.

Anpanman: The Granddaddy Of Modern Food Characters

Anpanman: He’s your classic superhero. He wears a cape, he fights for truth, justice and the Japanese way. And… he’s a bread roll with sweet bean paste inside.

His friends are other types of bread – plain sliced white bread, buns filled with melon or curry – as well as humans who apparently see nothing odd about the situation.

Anpanman apparently never gets stale. After starting as a manga in 1973 and as a TV show in 1988, it aired its 1,000th episode in 2009and its 25th movie in 2013.

Anpanman also set the stage for using these characters for merchandizing, having been used to promote almost every conceivable product including other foods (isn’t that kind of like cannibalism?). I’ve even seen him on boxes of okonomiyaki mix, which isn’t something I imagined was marketed to children.

Perhaps Anpanman’s most direct modern descendent is Kogepan – modernized in part by making him the emo version. Unlike the cheerful, pink-cheeked Anpanman, he’s full of existential angst: Having been left in the oven too long, till he’s burnt, Kogepan is depressed about no one wanting to buy him. Yes, instead of rejoicing that he’ll escape being eaten, he’s miserable that he can’t fulfill his life’s work as a bun. He drowns his sorrows in milk, which makes him drunk.

Like Anpanman, Kogepan’s friends are all different kinds of bread, but his relationships are far more conflicted. He’s jealous of the pretty, unburnt breads, the Kireipan, and I can’t blame him – the cheerful little strawberry breads annoy even me.

But bean paste buns are far from the only walking, talking foods, as we’ll see on the following brief journey through Japanese foods, characters and history.

Beyond the Bun

Traditional sweets like Anpanman have always been big in the food-character market. In another animation from the 1970s, a taiyaki, the fish-shaped pancake filled with beanpaste, comes to life and swims in the ocean:

およげたいやきくん

Later in the 90s, three dango brothers and their tango song had a huge hit:

だんご三兄弟

Nowadays though, almost any food can be made into a character. It’s easy to make fruits and vegetables come to life by giving them faces and arms and legs. From just one company, San-X, there are over a dozen, including Amagurichan, a chestnut who’s impatient to be eaten, Mikan Bouya, a mikan (a citrus fruit like a tangerine), Mamepyon, a family of peas, and Soreike Otamachan!, an onion.

Elsewhere we find an NHK character who is a bitter melon and the incredibly adorable Nameko mushrooms.

Prepared dishes can come alive too. In the picture book and anime Oden-Kun, all the different ingredients of oden are made into creatures: you’ve got your boiled egg, your various fish cakes, and your chunk of daikon radish:

Fusion Food

Food character designers often go beyond giving a fruit or bread a face and limbs, resulting in strange, unnatural chimeras combining food with other creatures. A simple example is Momobuta, who’s a cross between a peach and a pig:

Hokkaido, too, has been all aboard the hybrid food train. The northern prefecture is known for a few main things, one being a bear, the other being various types of food (salmon, melon, onions, to name a few). How do you combine those things? Oh, let me count the ways.

First, let’s start with this melon-higuma mascot mashup.

Okay, so maybe this one’s not as “kawaii”

From there it can go many different directions, including bear+salmon, bear+onion, bear+crab, bear+squid, so on and so forth. Koichi happened to have the bear+crab and bear+squid combinations on hand and took a picture:

My favorite food-creature combination, though, is the San-X characters Nyan Nyan Nyanko. These little cats were presented in various scenarios over the years where they were incorporated and/or transformed into every conceivable dish and type of cuisine.

Their first appearance was a festival theme, where they were various traditional foods you’d buy at festival stalls, like takoyaki:

Next came traditional sweets eaten with green tea, which of course also had a cat in the cup.

Over the years they appeared as dim sum, burgers, onigiri, bubble tea, school lunch, sushi, Western sweets like cream puffs,… just about everything you can think of.

If you think too hard about this, it ought to be incredibly gruesome. Instead, it’s adorable. With every limited edition iteration you could buy stationery, stickers, plushes and what have you, so it is sad but good for my personal budget that the cats appear to have been retired in 2010 after ten years of appearing as various foodstuffs.

Classical Characters

Anthropomorphic food turns out to have some pretty ancient precedents in Japanese art. What’s funny about the early examples is that they also seem to presage another Japanese invention: the TV show food battle.

In the 15th century, a fashion started of illustrated stories of battles between food characters. In the Shoujin Gyorui Monogatari, an army of vegetarian foods, Shoujun, led by the lord Natto, battled against the seafood army led by the lord Salmon. The vegetarian army won, killing the lord Salmon in Nabe Castle.

The picture above is a similar battle from 1859. Although these stories are humorous, this one is said to have a pretty serious historical context: a cholera epidemic. The vegetarian foods won the battle this time too, supposedly symbolizing the fact that they were less likely to spread cholera (presumably because cholera is a water-borne disease).

Other Edo-period anthropomorphized food includes this lovely dancing ear of corn:

There are also precedents to the food-creature chimeras. The famous folktale of Momotaro, the Peach Boy, is about a boy who was born from a large peach floating in a stream. There’s at least one illustration where he is half peach, half boy

Maybe that version didn’t stick because it was too hard to believe that anyone was desperate enough for an heir to raise that creepy creature as their own.

Modern Battle of the Food Characters

With all this as background, it no doubt seemed totally normal for Sanrio to decide to have a new character contest where all twenty of the candidates were some kind of food, or something combined with some kind of food.

Fairly standard sorts of contestants included dog-mochi sweets, panda rice balls, an egg, and my favorite, a long negi onion.

Others were really stretching it, if you ask me, especially some of the food-animal fusions. Yeah, a giraffe’s horns do look a little like mushrooms, but if you have a whole bunch of mushrooms growing out of a giraffe’s head, it just gets creepy:

And I love tanuki like nothing else, but I cannot accept the combination of a tanuki and kiritanpo, a cylinder of pounded rice that a specialty of Akita and Aomori prefectures:

And the public seemed to agree with me that those were overdoing it, because the winner is the one that’s the foodiest of all. Kirimi-chan the salmon fillet has nothing added but tiny dots for eyes and a line for a mouth, and a tiny body. Simple, like Hello Kitty’s expressionless face. In fact, she might not look all that out of place in one of those fifteenth-century battles of the anthropomorphic seafoods.

So although she is brand new, she’s way more old school than anyone probably imagined.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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The truth is that Japan is probably nowhere as expensive as you may think (or fear). Even living in Tokyo can be manageable, assuming that you get a reasonably priced place to rent. This article hopes to introduce to you some ways of coping and forcing down your costs.

This is more meant for people living in Japan than touring it (though there’s nothing stopping tourists from using the tips here). Also, the stuff here has been formulated mostly by me and other students in Japan – and as you may or may not know students love to save in ridiculous ways to spend money on ridiculous things! Some of the tips here may seem extremely trivial but hey, a yen saved is a yen spendable on something else.

Food

You need food to survive so you’ll definitely need to spend some money on this. But there are ways of suppressing the cost.

1. Cook.

This may be obvious at first, but keep with me here, it gets more specific. Assuming that you know where to shop for your ingredients cooking may be able to slash your expenditure on food to one third of what it might be without. One friend (American, Male) spends less than 10,000 yen a month by cooking three times every day. Is three times a day too much? Cook two portions for dinner and leave half for the microwave for lunch tomorrow. Saves you both the money and the expense.

Even if you don’t want to cook whole meals, even just cooking the rice and bringing it with you for lunch (mainly applicable for students) will save you money in the long run.

2. Shop Smart – At The Wholesale Market

Wholesale markets (ie. 業務用スーパー) are places where restaurant owners go to buy their ingredients. These places are your friends especially if you cook a lot. There are a few good places worth keeping in mind.

1) Costco: Readers from North America and the UK may recognize this. Yes it’s in Japan too. You need to pay 4000 yen for the membership but if you’re sharing a house with people, you can split it up. Anyways, if you’re living nearby it’s definitely worth it as things are quite cheap.

• Official Site to check shop locations
• Further Reading: Costco Japan, by Danny Choo

2) Gyomu Suupaa (業務スーパー): My personal favorite. Quite widespread throughout the whole country. Generally very low prices, especially if you don’t mind frozen foods or large product sizes. Some produce (generally vegetables) may be cheaper somewhere else, but this is generally a safe bet for low prices.

For example …

138 yen for 500 grams of frozen vegetables is probably going to be the cheapest you can find. (It’s usually even cheaper – it’s the end of winter now so vegetable prices are a bit higher than usual)

And also…

19 Yen udon!

3. Shop smart – And Late If You Don’t Plan To Cook

9.45 pm at my local supermarket (note: mine’s a 24 hour one so the discounts aren’t that steep. For supermarkets with a closing time discounts can go all the way until 50% before closing)

Most supermarkets will start offering discounts for their ready-to-eat food nearing closing time. Generally, 2-3 hours before closing 10% discount tags start to get tacked on. As closing time approaches these go up all the way to 50% discounts – you can get a nice ready-made meal at a very reasonable price if you go late to your supermarket near 9 pm.

4. Miscellaneous Tips From Me And My Friends

Buy 輸入食品 (imported foods), like meat from America or Australia, or frozen food from China, bananas from the Philippines, etc. never buy Japan 国産 (made domestically) stuffs.

Yes made-in-Japan produce tends to be more expensive indeed.

Buy strawberries meant for jam/juice at a lower price – jam/juice strawberries usually look quite terrible and are close to being overripe but they taste great still. And are cheap, for about 198jpy per pack over here in Kyoto. … I find them in random supermarkets.

Never done this myself but sounds legit – better than being overcharged just because of the unnecessary packaging.

If you like tea, forget buying even the 2 liter bottles they sell. Buy tea packs instead (and buy bottled water online if you don’t like tap).

Making your own tea is really a lot cheaper than buying it. And bottled water online is much cheaper than buying it in the actual stores.

In MCD (Macdonalds), check the keitai (mobile phone) coupon before buying anything. Also, having 2 or 3 100yen burgers plus one 100yen S size drink would be enough to make you as full as buying those expensive set meals.

Ie. subscribe to the Line/email mailing lists of restaurants such as McDonalds, Sukiya etc. They often send discount coupons to subscribers via these lists.

If you’re eating out consider places (usually family restaurants（ファミレス） such as Gasto if you just want somewhere to have a nice long chat with people. They have things called drink bars ie. a free flow of soft drinks, tea and coffee for an unlimited period of time. Also consider this if you need to study etc.

Stalk out your local stores. Some of them may have special days of the week / month where they have big discounts on a certain item eg. meat. Shop according to the calendar after you find this out.

Avoid: convenience stores… you pay for convenience, not for the value. If there’s a convenience store there’s probably a supermarket nearby. Find the supermarket and shop there.

Avoid: being picky. I don’t know what you Europeans call bread. As far as I am concerned if it’s made out of raised flour and is fluffy it is bread. We all have our pet peeves of how Japan bastardizes/does not have (it usually is either-or) our favorite national food which we miss – but demanding it is going to cost you a bomb. So you might as well start learning how to cook/eat Japanese stuff! Hey that’s what you’re here for right?

General Shopping

What about other shopping related things, then?

1. 100 Yen Shops

The first thing that you need to do when you arrive to Japan is to find the nearest 100 yen shop and raid it for anything you possibly need. Daiso and Seria are the more major ones. Go to their websites, search for the nearest one to your house and plunder it.

2. Point cards…

What you may (not) want to do

This can help you to save money in the long run. But get too many and you’ll find your wallet bursting with plastic.

Generally drug store point cards may not be very useful because they tend to go along the lines of 1 point per 100 yen spent, and 500 yen redeemable after reaching 500 points. Which means you need to spend 50,000 yen to get the discount. Not very useful in my opinion.

Instead consider getting point cards for the big electric stores such as Yamada Denki or Yodobashi Camera – you’ll probably need to go there occasionally for printer ink/appliances etc if you don’t buy those online. Those give you 10% of the amount you spend in terms of points so that helps in the long run.

3. Consider Shopping Online

Photos by Thomas

For Sayonara Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn – kudos if you get the reference.

Nowadays you can get everything and anything online and usually for a reasonable price. Some websites you may want to check out are:

1. http://kakaku.com/ – helps you directly compare the same product being sold over multiple sites so that you can make the best buys.
2. http://classifieds.gaijinpot.com/ – full of second-hand stuff which people want to get rid off for cheap or for free. Watch out especially for “sayonara sales” from people leaving Japan.
3. http://www.nitori-net.jp/ – for furniture
4. Groupon / Groupon-ish sites – such as http://www.groupon.jp/ or http://ponpare.jp/. These can get you good deals for eating out/travel/whatever if you keep your eyes open and snap up the attractive ones.
5. Portal sites – such as http://www.rakuten.co.jp/　and http://www.qoo10.jp/ are also worth looking at. That being said whether the deal is good depends on the individual vendor.

4. Also consider buying things second-hand.

Check for 2nd hand shops (リサイクルショップ) such as 2nd Steet which sell a whole variety of goods second hand. Recycl-navi is another website listing these 2nd hand shops in each prefecture.

For clothes, Shimokitazawa (Tokyo) for example has lots of second hand clothing shops. Find out where the second-hand clothes districts are if you want to save up.

5. For weird souvenirs:

With this kind of stuff you can’t possibly go wrong.

Need to get some souvenirs for a short trip home? I recommend Don Quijote. When you’ve got a departmental store which sells things like these you probably can’t go wrong.

Transport

Getting around can be a big expense. Trains, buses, taxis… you name it. Here are some ways to save money on transport.

1. Cycle

If you’re in Japan for more than ~6 months this will likely save you money unless you live very nearby to a convenient train station. After all…

• Buses are around 200 yen per ride. This adds up quickly. You might as well bike to the nearest station.
• Having a bicycle also widens the area you can shop – meaning that you probably can shop cheaper with one.
• Bicycle vandalism / theft is not common in Japan so it’s unlikely that you’ll have to pay extra beyond the buying the bicycle.

2. Kaisuuken

If there’s a route that you frequently use and which your commuter/student pass does not cover, you may consider getting some kaisuukens （回数券）. The system differs from company to company but some may for example sell you 11 tickets for the price of 10 for a single route (eg. JR East, Hankyu). Some may even sell off-peak hour kaisuuken for even steeper discounts.

They expire in about 3 months so only buy these for routes you reasonably use. Also, this may not be compatible with your IC card so you’ll have to keep the paper tickets in your wallet if you do so.

3. Special Tickets (eg. Seishun 18)

Tourists to Japan may know of the JR rail pass which allows for unlimited Shinkansen and JR use within the period of time. Unfortunately that’s limited to tourists. But, even if you’re a long-term resident in Japan there’s other things you can use.

Consider:

1. Limited area unlimited use passes – For example Kyoto residents will know about the 500 yen, 1 day free pass on Kyoto city buses. JR East offers unlimited railway use for a day within the 23 wards of Tokyo for 730 yen. This may be useful when you need to pop by multiple places in a day.
2. The Seishun 18 – Very useful if you like watching countryside scenery / have time to spare. A useful and relevant article can be found here

4. Buses are good too.

Especially if you want to travel long distances. For example, the cheapest trip between Tokyo and Osaka is around 3500 yen single-way; the same trip on JR (excluding the Seishun 18) would cost at least 8000 yen and take around 9 hours if you’re just riding local trains. Plus you get a seat.

Willer Express may be good if you’re not confident of your Japanese ability, but otherwise Rakuten has a whole slew of bus operators in its travel section.

5. Budget airlines for very long distances.

Because at long distances…

1. The availability of bus routes dwindles. Plus, 14 hour bus rides damage people’s sanity.
   2) Trains become increasingly expensive and take very long too.

At shorter distances do note that because airports are less convenient than major bus terminals, it may be more expensive (and take longer when adding waiting time etc) than buses.

Note: Hitchhiking is not often practiced in Japan. Wikitravel has an artice about if you want to try though.

Avoid: The Shinkansen. Yes it cuts down the traveling time to around 2 and a half hours between Tokyo and Osaka. But the title of this article is how to save money not how to zip across Japan. Plus, an extremely roomy 2 seat-per-row overnight bus costs about 10,000 between Tokyo and Kansai (cheaper than the Shinkansen) – take your pick.

Lodging / Rent

1.Rent

Really can’t be avoided but there are a few things you can do:

• Consider moving into a share-house such as those operated by Oakhouse(English) instead of a typical apartment. Saves money and you can make friends albeit at the cost of having to share amenities.
• Try apartments without the 敷金 (shikikin – something like a deposit) and the 礼金 (reikin – the money you have to pay as thanks, yes seriously). Also ensure that the shikikin and reikin aren’t just reflected in an inflated monthly rent price.
• Because the Japanese are very particular about having a bathtub / ofuro, searching for an apartment with only a shower may be cheaper.
• From a friend: “I’m not sure but somebody once told me that there are special offers like renting an apartment where some poor soul committed suicide … and it’s much cheaper (c)” Another friend says, “Yeah I’ve heard of places being cheaper because of suicides or murders, too. They call it 事故物件 (or 訳あり物件）.”

Oh, right, Tofugu wrote about that: “How To Avoid (Or Even Find) A Stigmatized Property In Japan”

Worth a shot maybe?

2.Temporary lodging

If you find yourself needing to stay someplace temporarily (for example, when traveling within Japan) you may want to consider the following options:

• Capsule Hotels: Available in the major cities. Cheap but I HIGHLY RECOMMEND (from personal experience) to buy some 100 yen earplugs if noise bothers you.
• Hostels: Consider the youth hostels operated by this group (English map). Same thing applies, ear plugs recommended.
• Wikitravel also has an article on camping if you really don’t want to spend any money on lodging.

Utilities

Generally you can’t do much in Summer – if you can make do with a fan instead of the AC that saves you quite a bit of money though. HOWEVER, it’s more than possible to keep warm in winter without the heater.

Behold the creativity of me and my friends!

• “Since electricity is cheaper from 11pm to 7am, only charge your computer, wash clothes and use anything that needs electricity during that time”
• Get a wearable blanket like the ones that they sell at Don Quijote. Very fluffy, comfy and is able to surprisingly negate the need for external heating.
• Pair the above with 100 yen room shoes for the cold cold floor. Or if you don’t want to…
• “Stick huge hot water bottles under your feet in bed/at your desk. I recommend the metal kind that can be reheated on the stove.” – If you’re the type to get literal “cold feet”.
• “Hang wet clothes in the room to save on humidifier bills!” (Note: this saves on having to use the clothes dryer too. Make your own clothes lines or buy indoor clothes hanging racks from Nitori)

Entertainment

Unless you like playing games in your dormitory or are content with the internet, you won’t be able to avoid spending on this. These are the ways you can make the most bang for your buck though.

1. Karaoke Deals

Karaoke is quintessential if you’re living in Japan (and a good way to shed your sense of shame). Anyways…

1. Karaoke freetimes (フリータイム) are your friend, especially if you’re a student who doesn’t have to wake up the next morning. Most times, taking a free time is more worth it if you’re staying more than 2-3 hours anyway.
2. Some Karaoke chains have special deals on weekdays such as men’s night etc. One that I frequented had a deal where on Thursdays (for men, Wednesdays for women) Karaoke was free for 2 hours if you just bought a drink.
3. Sign up to be a member. This usually automatically gives you a discount.

2. Amusement Centers

Round 1 also has an all-you-can play giant sports-and-arcade facilities for a flat fee. (A full list of shops can be found here, look out for the ones with SP (スポッチャ) highlighted in their labeling.

Kansai residents can also take advantage of Beaver World which offers the very same things PLUS Karaoke PLUS bowling under the same price.

Watch out for: Free flow drinks at Izakayas

While having free-flow alcohol may sound like a good idea, be wary of deals which are actually deceiving.

Most Izakayas will require you to order at least 1 item in addition to their automatic starter. Thus, what may look like an 800 yen 2 hour free-flow may actually be closer to 1500 when adding the starter and a dish (around 500 yen perhaps). Not to mention that the drinks are often heavily weakened.

Bonus! Free Travel!

Occasionally some of the local tourist bureaus of lesser-known cities will be fishing around for foreigners to tour their city. These are often conducted free of charge and all they require you to do is to write feedback forms / some PR material for them.

Occasionally google searching ”外国人モニターツアー” may yield you some promising results so be on the lookout for these.

By the way, add your suggestions to the comments – I may collate them into a Part 2 post with the ideas that you all have.

Relevant article:

• (Tofugu) 25 ways to save money while traveling in Japan

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Alright, I presume everybody’s interest in hige-man’s bento work has begun to ripen at this point. Let’s review his profile once again, to get the rice-ball rolling.

Stats:

Name: Keisuke Umeda
Age: 31
Occupation: Designer at a game company
Passion: Bento Art
Distinguishing Facial Feature: Majestic Mustache
Web page: Umeda no site

Q: Tell us about your bento art career.

I modestly began making bento about 2 years ago. I didn’t even realize that that my passion for bento art had been gradually escalating over that period of time.

In the summer in 2013, my bento art was selected to be shown on an NHK TV program called サラメシ (sarameshi). I held my bento art exhibition in the fall of that same year. I also published a book with a collection of my bento pieces that came out shortly before my exhibition.

I’m planning another exhibition this year, too.

Q: How long have you made bento art?

About 2 years. I make a bento box every day, except when I’m too busy, when I oversleep, or when I don’t have any ingredients for it.

Q: Why did you start making bento boxes?

I got sick of eating cafeteria food. I also wanted to brush up on my cooking skills. Moreover, after the Tohoku earthquake, I started taking food safety more seriously and gave more consideration to what I put in my body. Managing my food in this way is good for my health and helped me save money, too.

Q: Why did you start designing bento?

I’m not really good at cooking and don’t have much time either. On the other hand, I wanted to enjoy lunch time. I contemplated how to do it and I soon realized that I could be creative. I realized designing bento is a great way to enjoy it. I have some bento friends at work and it became something for us to talk about, as well. The more we enjoy our lunch time, the tastier the bento becomes – to me.

Q: What do you usually do after making it?

Naturally, I eat everything. Every grain of rice disappears. I’ve never had leftovers. If I made bento boxes like the ones I do and didn’t eat them, it would mean I’m just playing with food in a creative way. I’d rather treasure and respect the food and I show that respect by eating it.

This is MY LUNCH and if I don’t eat it, it means I don’t eat lunch.

There is a saying in Japan, “If you don’t finish your meal, your eyes will be crushed.”

Q: What kind of bento boxes do you make?

Pictures!

「クチビルべんとう」(Lips-bento)

「ヒゲべんとう」(Hige-bento)

「桃べんとう」(Peach-bento)

「サンマたちの横顔べんとう」(saury fish’ side faces bento)

「春風べんとう」(spring breeze bento)

「コンバットべんとう」(combat bento)

「ちりめんじゃこべんとう」(dried young sardines bento)

「フランクフルトべんとう」(Frankfurt sausage bento)

「フグべんとう」(Fugu bento)

「おでんべんとう」(Oden bento)

「金目カブト煮べんとう」(Beryx splendens helmet bento)

「松坂牛の、肉じゅうたんべんとう」(Matsuzaka beef carpet bento)

「コーンまっ黄っ黄べんとう」(Corn pitch yellow bento)

「タコウィンナーべんとう」(Octopus shaped wieners bento)

「生々しいべんとう」(fresh [flesh] bento)

「ひじき黒ゴマべんとう」(hijiki seaweed and black sesame bento)

「デッサンべんとう」(rough sketch bento)

「モンドリアンべんとう」( Piet Mondrian bento)

Q: What do you think of men who make their own bento boxes and how do other people react to it?

I think that’s good because they can be more careful about the food they eat.

People react interestingly every day and it’s fun to hear their inquiries; “Does it taste good?”, “Are you really eating that?”, “Is it hearty?”, “Why did you start making bento boxes like these?”, “What’s today’s bento?”, etc…

Q: What is your favorite bento you’ve created and why did you choose it?

“Hanasaka bento” (Translates to Flower Bloom bento)

A bento’s life is as short as a flower’s, but each one of them remains in the heart and it will stay alive as a part of our body.

Similar to the flavor of my tears, I will never forget the saltiness of the pickled radish and pickled Japanese plum as well as the welcomed tingle provided by the sansho pepper in this bento.

“That was the bento I made for the NHK TV program. It took me 2 hours”, he laughs.

Q: Have you made a big mistake before?

There are actually a lot of bad mistakes.

The most memorable one is Nanakusa Bento (the seven spring herbs bento).

In Japan, people eat rice porridge with seven different spring herbs on January 7. I used those herbs, just as they are found in nature, for my bento. It turned out to be just like eating grass. It was disgusting.

However, sometimes an interesting-looking bento box, albeit bad tasting, can become a popular topic of conversation at lunch time and is often even brought up again later on. In that sense, making a mistake is not all that bad.

Q: If someone told you they wanted to start designing bentos, what advice would you give them?

I would tell them that pickled Japanese plums have an antibacterial effect, so they preserve pretty well.

In my bento box, I often put them underneath the design.

Q: Could you tell us a bento story of yours that you haven’t told anyone yet?

It’s Kani bento (crab bento).

I couldn’t put the lid on the bento, so I ended up opening up the shell and started eating a little bit of it in the morning. It almost made me late for work. Furthermore, none of my bento friends showed up in the cafeteria during lunch time, so I ended up eating the luxury bento without anyone around to see it before it was eaten. It was pathetic.

Q: As for bento-making, is there anyone you respect?

My mother.

She made bento boxes everyday when I was a child. At the time I thought it was just a trifling thing, but now I know how hard it is to continue making bento everyday. Now I really appreciate what she did for me and I respect her even more.

Q: Is there anyone out there making bento that inspires you?

Actually, I get inspired by many things, not only by someone’s bento but also by anything from different cuisine to pictures to movies to scenery to my travels.

But I’m trying to find inspiration from the ingredients themselves.

Q: Is there one particular incident involving bento that has changed your life?

Bento has changed my lunch time, myself, and has made sight and gradual changes in my life and in a small way it has also changed the daily lives of the people around me.

For example, because of bento-making, I got to be on television, held an exhibition, and was even interviewed by Tofugu-san. It’s very fun and I believe bento will continue to make such changes in my life.

Q: Share with us what your favorite bento goods and tools are.

There you go!

The first one is bento goods that I design and sell. Please contact me via my website for more information.

This second one is my collection of some of the tools that I use or have used in the past.

Q: Do you think you could make a Tofugu bento? If you could, how much would it be?

I think I could, but it may be a very plain bento. The price is free because THAT’S MY LUNCH, YO!

A few days later, the picture arrived. Mecha Kawaii! Thank you Ume-chan!

Ingredients: Rice, a cherry tomato, 2 black beans, and seasoned ground meat called Soboro.

——At the end

Thank you for your interview. If you are interested in Hige-man Ume-chan’s bento art book, get in touch with him via his blog, http://www.k3.dion.ne.jp/~umetin/.

Chuhai, Chu-Hi, Chūhai

As much as it pains me to admit, I’m sure some of you are unfamiliar with the nectar of the gods (aka chuhai/chu-hi). I wrote a post about how much I love the stuff, but I’ll give you a quick rundown here.

Conventional Japanese chuhai is made with shochu (Japanese alcohol around 25% ABV) or vodka, and flavored soda water. They are sold in cans and they are delicious. They come in many flavors and are cheaper than beer with ABVs ranging from 2% to 9%.

There are many different manufacturers of chuhai and it’s been around in Japan for a long time. They seem to be viewed as more of a “girly” drink, kind of like Smirnof Ice and Mike’s Hard are in America, and kind of taste similar to these malt beverages, only much better.

The bottom line is that chuhai is cheap, tasty, varied, and awesome.

The American Chu-Hi Blunder

Okay, so Takara Saké – they’ve been making Chu-hi since the late 70s and are a huge name in the business so it’s no surprise that they were the ones to break down the international barriers and bring this drink to the USA. What is a surprise is the decisions they made while doing so.

From the Takara Saké USA website: “Chu-Hi was the first Japanese-style sparkling cocktail to appear on the Tokyo drinking scene in the late 70s. In summer 2012, we renewed our Chu-Hi. We added ‘JPOP’ to the product name, and now we have 2 flavors – Grapefruits and White Peach.”

So apparently these had been around for about two years already, but I only just recently discovered their existence myself. The only place I’ve seen them is at the local Japanese market. I haven’t seen them in any normal grocery store, but that doesn’t really surprise me.

I tried to figure out what made them decide to bring this over to America after so long. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any real information concerning this. I can only surmise that they read my whinings about it on the internet and decided to do it just for me. I appreciate the effort, Takara, but in the end, you’ve disappointed. Let me tell you why.

Ingredient Changes? Really?

When our most loyal Tofugu reader Joanna W. informed me of these American Chu-Hi, she also commented on their taste. She stated that they did not taste all that great and just reminded her of flavored malt beverages from America, like Smirnof Ice, and not in a good way. She wondered if the Japanese ones tasted this way and how anyone could be as crazy about them as I was.

Upon hearing this, I became concerned. Was the flavoring just bad on these Chu-Hi? Had Takara made a mistake? Or, wait – oh no… had they changed the formula to “appeal” to American tastes?

Unfortunately, the answer was yes. They had changed the formula. These were not the Chu-Hi that I loved. They were a bastardized version that disgraced the name.

For whatever reason, Takara decided to make these American Chu-Hi with a malt base instead of shochu/vodka like they do in Japan. The result of this is that the American Chu-Hi just taste like crappy Smirnofs. They are not new, exciting or refreshing. They’re just one more lousy flavored malt beverage that brings nothing new to the table.

Since the ingredients for Chu-Hi aren’t exactly listed out online, this is the only change that I am aware of. There might be other slight changes, but the malt/shochu change is so huge that I don’t even think other smaller changes would matter that much. I bought each of the American Chu-Hi flavors recently and gave them a taste test. Here’s what I thought.

Taste Testing

The first thing that made me wary of these American Chu-Hi was the fact that they came in bottles. Chuhai in Japan was always in cans – never in bottles. Something is wrong here.

The next thing I noticed was the price. Chuhai in Japan was cheaper than beer. The prices ranged from maybe 60yen ($0.60) to 110yen ($1.10) or so, depending on the strength and can size. They were an amazing deal. Now these American Chu-Hi – they were priced at an unreasonable $2.75 (~280yen). Already I’m grumbling and I haven’t even tried the thing yet.

On the bottles, they say that they’re great over ice. I always had chuhai out of the can in Japan, but I decided that I would try these American ones both ways. First just out of the bottle, and then over ice to see if there’s a big difference.

Grapefruit: 6.5% ABV, $2.75 a bottle

From the Bottle:
This tastes just like a Smirnof, if Smirnof made a grapefruit flavor. That’s not a compliment. This tastes much less like grapefruit than its Japanese counterpart and tastes a bit too heavy and sweet and just not good. I think I would start to feel sick if I had more than one or two of these.

Over Ice:
This tastes just like a Smirnof, but over ice. This improved the flavor a bit since the ice melting made it a little bit lighter and not as sweet. The ice improved the drink, but it still didn’t make it good.

As grapefruit was my favorite chuhai flavor in Japan, this drink was a gigantic disappointment.

1/5 Stars, would not buy again

White Peach: 6.5% ABV, $2.75 a bottle

From the Bottle:
Similar to the grapefruit, this tastes very similar to a Smirnof. The initial taste of the peach is quite pleasant though, but immediately after that initial taste comes the oppressive malt taste that ruins the flavor. Definitely better than the grapefruit, but not by too much.

Over Ice:
At first I thought that the ice really changed the flavor for the better because the oppressive malt taste was absent at first, but soon the taste returned and it tasted much like it did before, but colder. Not much of an improvement.

The peach was better than the grapefruit, but not by much.

2/5 Stars, would not buy again

Conclusion: These do not even deserve to be called Chu-Hi. Do not judge Japanese Chu-Hi by these imitations. There is no comparison.

But Why Were the Ingredients Changed?

I learned from Chopsticks New York that Takara Chu-Hi “reached the U.S. market two years ago with a slight modification of base ingredients and flavors to meet the American people’s palate. This August, TAKARA SAKE USA INC. re-released it by renewing its name to JPOP, revamping the package and tweaking the flavor. ‘We changed the recipe of the malt alcohol, the base of the drink, in order to get refreshing flavor. As a result, its carbonation became more noticeable on the palate,’ says Mr. Hirokazu Nishikawa, General Manager of Marketing in TAKARA SAKE USA INC.”

WHY, TAKARA, WHY!? Yes, maybe Americans prefer more carbonated, malty type beverages that they are familiar with, but not when they cost so much and offer nothing new but two (underwhelming) flavors. If you expect people to pay $2.75 for a bottle of this, it should at least be new and exciting and worth the steep price of admission. Ugh.

Again, I was unable to find much info concerning exactly why they made this change and the whole thought process behind it, but I am incredibly bummed out about it. I also don’t like how they added the JPOP moniker to it. I don’t know if they are trying to be clever with the JPOP by saying it’s like Japanese (soda) pop, or if they’re trying to relate it to J-pop as in Japanese pop music or they just thought JPOP would be easier for Americans to remember than Chu-Hi, but I don’t like it. I think it’s silly.

So do I think anyone is going to try this and think it’s better than anything currently available in America? No. Do I think anyone will buy it again after trying it once? Definitely not, especially when it costs so much more than what “America’s palate” is already used to.

Western vs Japanese Alcohol “Taste” Confusion

Speaking of America’s palate as compared to the Japanese palate, this isn’t the first time it’s been an issue. We’ve written about Japanese beers and Japanese whiskies before, and there are reasons why you don’t see these alcohols with the saturations that Japan has. In the end, the tastes are (supposedly) different. When’s the last time you saw someone drinking an Asahi outside of an Asian restaurant?

Koichi helped to weigh in on this topic a little bit as well:

When you look at the history of alcohol in Japan, it’s quite interesting. The competition between beer companies in Japan revolves around how dry the beer is and how much koku (rich taste) it has, with quite a bit of emphasis on the dry side of things. This pairs well with foods that the Japanese eat. An Asahi Super Dry certainly pairs with my katsu/ramen/yakitori much better than, say, a double chocolate stout, or something like that (or even a Budweiser, for that matter). This has become considered a very “Japanese” taste to the Japanese. In some cases it becomes a bit of Ninhonjinron pride, if you ask me, which results in the thinking of “only Japanese people can understand this taste.” Obviously this isn’t true, but this is probably why the American Chu-Hi version got sugared up and malted, because that’s what “Westerners like.” They thought they’d make more money this way and probably don’t understand why things didn’t work out. If only they hired John on as their American Chu-Hi CEO.

In the case of whiskey it’s basically the same thing. Although you see some trickling of whiskey coming over to America, you’ll notice that certain Hibiki whiskeys, like the 15+ year old variations, are not sold outside of Japan. This is because non-Japanese “won’t understand the Japanese taste,” which I’m guessing is just their way to keep all the good whiskey to themselves, because wow those are some good whiskeys.

—Koichi

In the end, I think there’s a confusion about “Japanese taste” and “Western taste.” Sure, you have to take into account what kinds of foods you’re pairing these alcoholic drinks with, and that does make a difference, but a lot of assumptions get made too, which means the original Chu-Hi recipe gets carbonated, malted, and sugared up for our “Western” tastes.

The Future of Takara JPOP Chu-Hi

In my opinion, Takara made a colossal mistake with their American Chu-Hi. Quite frankly, I’m amazed that it’s still even being made. I’m also really surprised that I hadn’t heard of these American Chu-Hi until now even though they came out in 2012, but that just speaks to their unpopularity.

I expect these American Chu-Hi to do terribly, and eventually get pulled from the market, so if you have any interest in trying them out and discovering what all the disappointment is about, do it now before it’s too late.

I really wish that Takara would have had more faith in the American people and their willingness to try new things. Maybe I’m outside the norm here, but I like to try new things and get excited when I see something new and appealing at the grocery, especially when it’s in the booze aisle.

If Takara had made these things in cans with their original recipe and priced them more aggressively, they would have been an overwhelming success (with me, at least). But as they are, I’m never going to buy them again.

Shame on you, Takara. Shame on you.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Cooking on American TV is basically always nonfiction. Japan has this type of show too, so in both countries we can watch how-tos that teach us to cook elaborate dishes from scratch, whether we set foot in the kitchen ourselves or not. And for better or worse, there’s been cross-fertilization: the US now owns the TV cooking competition, a genre we borrowed from Japan after the successful importing of Iron Chef (a show that I loved, but that I think now has a lot to answer for).

But in Japan there are also many series where cooking and food are a central element of fiction. In these series, chefs are main characters, average people are obsessed with a certain dish, and even the plot may turn on a particular detail of a special recipe or ingredient.

Sure, in the US we have shows where the characters gather to eat in a certain restaurant or bar. There was one old show, Alice, about a waitress in a diner, and historical shows like Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey may have a shot of the staff working on dinner while they’re talking about something else. Maybe you can think of one or two more. Contrast this handful of shows with the fact that on a fansub site like gooddrama.net, there are enough shows with food that you can actually search for it as a separate genre, and that isn’t all of them.

Numbers aren’t the most important difference, though, because comparing those few shows to Japanese food drama is like comparing apples and oranges, or sushi and a Maine lobster roll. Take two tales that involve a soup-maker. You may have seen the Japanese movie Tampopo, where (in between other odd unrelated food-centric vignettes) the plot follows a woman who owns a ramen shop and is working to come up with the perfect recipe. We see her slaving over variations of broth and getting the advice of experts who make comments on her noodles like “They have sincerity, but lack substance.” Compare this to the most famous soup-maker on American TV – the character on Seinfeld who’s famous for yelling at people, not for obsessing about the details of his cooking.

The focus on culinary detail in Tampopo is far from unique. Japanese dramas reflect an obsession with the quality of food that that isn’t seen on American TV – reflecting the fact that it’s also not, I’m sad to say, part of American culture.

Becoming A Chef

Let’s start by looking at a particular sub-genre of the food genre in Japanese television shows. Yes, the story of “becoming a chef” seems to come up so often that I’m giving it its own category.

Western food: Hungry!

Start with a drama where the title fits this theme perfectly: Hungry! (Hanguri!). As a child, the main character, Yamate Eisuke, wanted to follow in the footsteps of his mother, a French chef with her own restaurant. Instead, he forms a rock band with three friends, but as the series opens, he’s nearly 30 and they haven’t broken through to the big time. He goes to his mother and tells her that he wants to return to her restaurant and study to be a chef again. Unfortunately this touching reunion is marred by the fact that his mother has a heart attack and drops dead.

Further complications ensue when he declares he’s going to take over the restaurant: his father has already sold it to a rival restauranteur, who in the course of the series becomes obsessed with Eisuke, going back and forth between wanting to ruin him and trying to hire him. (A relevant side note is that this bad guy is played by Goro Inagaki, a member of SMAP, which is a band that has its own line of food products at Japanese 7-11s, something else we’d never see in the US.)

Along with that business rivalry, which turns very personal, there are romantic complications, fights with his friends – but even the interpersonal drama usually turns on the food. One character’s family runs a small market garden nearby where the restaurant buys vegetables. She falls in love with Eisuke’s cooking first and then, as a sort of side effect, with him. And the rival tries to make trouble by convincing that family to sell all their produce to his restaurant instead. I definitely can’t think of an American series where the bad guy’s plan of attack consists of buying up all the tomatoes.

And much of the emotional drama is about Eisuke’s struggle to learn to be a French chef worthy of his mother’s legacy- a process we watch in extreme detail. Don’t watch this show when you are Hungry! yourself, because a huge amount of screen time is spent on shots of prepping, cooking, plating and serving French food. They’re so serious, they present the name of the dish on-screen when it is served. In fact, they’re so serious that there is a recipe book based on the series, and the star took French cooking lessons as part of his preparation for the drama.

Japanese food: Ando Natsu

Ando Natsu is a young woman with the dream of becoming a French baker. She starts as an apprentice at a cafe run by an older woman baker who she worships… who promptly drops dead. Watching these two dramas in succession, you get the feeling that making French food in Japan is not good for the lifespan.

With no idea what to do next, she stumbles into a wagashi shop in Asakusa. Wagashi are those exquisite traditional Japanese confections that are basically small edible works of art, made in different seasonal shapes including flowers. She sees that these sweets give the same joy to the customers as French pastry does, and asks to become an apprentice.

The title of this series and the character’s name actually refers to sweets – Ando Natsu is a pun on An-donut (a doughnut filled with sweet bean paste) which is pronounced the same in Japanese, and other characters often tease her by referring to this pun.

This series also spends a lot of time in the kitchen, referencing how hard it is to make the beautifully detailed sweets, how long the apprenticeship lasts, and the menial tasks the beginner is saddled with. Natsu washes a lot of dishes and gets very excited every time she’s allowed to do some simple part of the actual confection-making process for the first time.

Particular processes and ingredients in making wagashi are often central to the plots. In one episode, Natsu has to stay awake all night to supervise the fermenting of the starter for a special order for an important memorial service. She’s called away for a time to prevent someone from committing suicide. (Yes, really. The writers of this series did not fear improbable melodrama.) She thinks it still looks OK when she gets back, but in the morning, the master tells her it’s ruined. Fortunately, they’re expecting a delivery of koji, the starter for fermentation, and might have just enough time to make a new batch – till they find out the delivery truck was in an accident, and all the containers overturned and spilled.

Natsu thinks she’s solved the problem when she runs all over town and manages to buy a package of koji that comes from the same prefecture. Unfortunately, that’s not close enough. She’s crushed when they tell her they can’t use it, that without the exact same koji, they can’t claim to be selling the same sweets they’ve always made. The master explains in mystical detail that the skill of the chefs is nothing without the wind in the town, the atmosphere of the store, and the tiny living things in the koji.

You understand, this is like saying it’s not worth baking bread if you can’t get the same brand of yeast you’ve always used. For all I know this is true about wagashi, or even bread if you’re a true connoisseur, but that fact sure wouldn’t sustain that amount of drama in an American TV series.

Another element we see in Ando Natsu that frequently recurs in this type of drama is someone’s longing for a favorite food from long ago. One episode is about a woman who comes to buy their persimmon-shaped sweet which is the favorite of her dying father. For complicated and dramatic reasons they no longer make this sweet, but Natsu finds the recipe and tries to replicate it. This effort to satisfy a dying customer gets her fired (temporarily) for trying to pass off her inferior beginner’s work as the product of this revered generations-old shop. (Don’t worry, there’s a happy ending and the man does get his wagashi in the end.)

Cooking at Inns

Not all shows about professional cooks are set in restaurants. Some are about traditional inns, where the quality of the cuisine is a huge part of their reputation.

O-sen

O-sen, about an inn in Tokyo’s old shitamachi neighborhood, is practically an education in traditional Japanese cooking. (Like some others of these shows, O-sen is based on a manga – there are also many manga where fictional plots, settings and characters are food-related.) As we watch the training of a character who’s talked his way into a job in the kitchen without really understanding what this kind of cooking is all about, we learn about different kinds of miso, why a fire made of straw is best for cooking rice, and other details of extremely traditional Japanese cuisine.

O-sen is another show where a vital plot point turns on a particular ingredient. The cooks use a traditional hand-made katsuobushi, the dried bonito fish which is the fundamental ingredient in the broth used in nearly every Japanese dish, but is now mostly made in a more mass-produced way. The inn not only uses the hand-made variety, in fact they’ve always used the katsuobushi of one particular producer who is now threatened with being closed. Without this particular dried bonito, O-sen says, the taste will change, the food will no longer be their food, and the inn will have to go out of business.

There isn’t space here for me to explain all the intrigue that swirls around this – but all I can say is, I wish I lived in a country where dried fish can be so important to a plot.

Kamo, Kyoto e Iku

Along with the longing for a favorite food from the past, another recurring theme is people’s exquisitely accurate memory for such foods. Kamo, Kyoto e Iku is set in a traditional inn in Kyoto. One episode is about a couple who has been coming to the inn for 40 years. The woman, who’s had a stroke, loves a tofu dish they serve, so her husband brings her to the inn so she can have it again. While she no longer recognizes her own husband, she remembers the taste of the dish well enough to be disappointed that it doesn’t taste exactly the same. The inn’s owner goes to the 200-year-old tofu store to ask what’s happened. The tofu maker blows up at the suggestion that the tofu has changed, but eventually admits that the woman is right, that he’s gotten too old to make it properly. The happy ending comes when he teaches a younger tofu-maker his method, and the woman gets to have exactly the dish she remembers one more time.

Not Just Professionals

You’ll also find these elements in shows that aren’t set in inns or restaurants and where the main characters aren’t culinary professionals. My favorite example so far comes from Tokyo Bandwagon, which is about a family that runs an antique bookstore. In one episode the family is trying to reunite the cook from their local izakaya with a former momento. Long ago he wronged this man and can’t believe he will ever forgive him. They invite the cook for a meal and present him with a dish of simmered turnip. One taste and he basically says “OMG, it’s him!” and insists that no one else but his former master could have made that dish. He’s proved right when the man steps into the room for a dramatic reconciliation. It’s ridiculously improbable, but if you’re a fan of Japanese food, how can you not love it? (What’s more, how can you not weep with envy when they sit down to one of the family meals pictured above.)

I’ve also just started watching the first episode of a show called Lunch Queen. The main character is a waitress in a coffee shop who keeps a detailed notebook about places to go to eat lunch. A customer tries to convince her to pretend to be his fiancé as part of a ruse to approach his estranged family. She’s having none of it – till he tells her that they own the restaurant that makes the best omu-rice in all of Japan. I can’t wait to see what hijinks – and recipes – follow.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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“Hi there, I’d like to order some tuna, wild salmon, and snapper, please.”

“Great, I won’t bring you any of those, right away.”

Here’s the bottom line: If you’re eating sushi in the United States, chances are you’re not eating what you ordered. Oceana’s 2013 report showed that 74% of sushi in the US is mislabeled. Yes, you are getting screwed over by a combination of sushi shop owners, fish sellers, and fishermen. They’re making a lot of money off of it, too.

Fraudulent Fish

Oceana went around buying fish from grocery stores, restaurants, and sushi venues. By far, the worst offenders were sushi restaurants (we’ll get into some theories on why this is in the next section). Through genetic testing of the fish, they found that 18% of fish in grocery stores, 38% of fish in restaurants, and 74% of fish of sushi venues are mislabeled.

There are, after all, a lot of fish in the sea, and many of them look and taste pretty alike. Sometimes it’s a case of “one fish looks just like another fish.” Other times it’s “wow, this fish is way cheaper but I can sell it at fancier fish prices because they look and taste nearly the same!”

Even though this may be true (that they taste and look like the real thing) it can be dangerous. Putting aside the fact that you’re not getting what you think you’re paying for, certain fishes have much higher mercury levels. For example, if you’re pregnant and you think you’re getting one fish (that’s known to have lower mercury levels, and is therefore safer for your unborn baby), and you get another fish (that is known to have high mercury levels), but you didn’t know about this… well, I can imagine you’d be very upset about this. Not to mention the uncontrollable anal leakage that certain fishes can cause. Don’t worry, we’ll get into the gory details below.

Wild Salmon

Everyone knows that wild salmon is so much more delicious than farm raised salmon. Also, it has that beautiful orange color, unlike farmed salmon which is a sickly grey. But guess what? If you add canthaxanthin and astaxanthin to their food, it will turn their skin a natural wild color (this is not to say that doing this is bad or dangerous, wild salmon eat shrimp and small fishes that contain the same chemical, which gives them their color).

By putting these additives into a farmed salmon’s food, though, farmers are able to sell their salmon as “wild” salmon, because really, who’s going to know the difference? Plus, you get paid a lot more for the real deal wild salmon than the sad grey one. Chaching! $$$. The problem is, farmed salmon contains seven times the amount of PCBs, have more disease, and are prone to sea lice. They also have way less Omega 3, which I think is a reason why a lot of people eat wild salmon.

27% of wild salmon is mislabeled in this way, so things could be much worse.

Snapper

87% of snapper that got tested came back with the “not snapper” result. Odds aren’t good if you want snapper. However, if you wanted giltheaded seabream, madai, tilapia, Pacific ocean perch, widow rockfish, or yellowtail rockfish then you’re in luck, because those are the things that got substituted in instead. In case you don’t know, those aren’t “great” fish… but they are cheap! Too bad the savings isn’t passed on to you.

Red Snapper

With a “not lying” score of 7/120, red snapper comes in right after regular snapper. What kinds of things are being sold instead of red snapper? Let’s start with tilefish, which happens to be on the FDA’s “Do Not Eat” list due to high mercury. Then, we can move on to tilapia, which happens to be dirt cheap (and are then sold as red snapper, which is not as dirt cheap). Other fish you might be eating instead of red snapper are the Caribbean red snapper, crimson snapper, spotted rose snapper, Pacific ocean perch, yellowtail rockfish, giltheaded seabream, madai, and white bass. There’s a pattern here. A lot of these fish are quite cheap. Red Snapper is not so cheap.

Apparently, though, if you want red snapper you should go to Atlanta, Georgia, as it was one of the few cities that did sell real red snapper.

White Tuna

Here’s the deal. Never order white tuna. 84% of white tuna is actually escolar… and wow, let me tell you about escolar. Sure, it’s nice and oily and tasty. Also, it’s pretty low in mercury, not to mention it’s cheap. But, it also a fish that cannot metabolize the wax esters naturally found in its diet. These esters are known as gempylotoxin (that has the word toxin in it, I’ll have you know) which can cause gastrointestinal issues. “What kind of issues?” asks the proverbial reader inside this article. “Well, thank you for asking!” I reply. “Let me tell you: uncontrollable anal leakage as well as buttery, oily diarrhea!” The nickname escolar is the “ex-lax” fish, if that gives you any idea. [source]

There’s a reason why Japan and Italy have banned the importation of this fish. Other governments like Canada, Sweden, and Denmark require warning labels. That being said it is really delicious, so eat with caution. The word on the street is to stay under 6 ounces, though that’s going to vary person to person.

And More…

This isn’t anywhere near the end of the list. Chilean seabass and regular sea bass are replaced with Antarctic toothfish, which is probably too ugly of a name to call a fish you want to eat raw, so it’s sold as seabass. Then there’s Alaskan, Pacific, and Atlantic cod, which gets replaced with Asian catfish, threadfin slickhead, tilapia, and white hake. There’s more than this too, I’d recommend checking out the study yourself, though I think I’ve touched on the more popular sushi-related fish.

As you can see things aren’t what they seem. Have you ever wondered why cheap sushi restaurants are so much cheaper? You’re probably not eating what you think you’re eating.

On a side note before we move on, I’d also like to throw out an honorable mention to wasabi, which is rarely real either. Okay, now back to fish.

Who’s Fault Is This?

In the US, 84% of fish is imported. Out of all that fish, only 2% is inspected. So, who’s going to be the wiser? Companies importing fish can sell cheaper fish as more expensive fish and nobody’s going to know the difference 98% of the time.

From there, we get down the the middlemen selling the fish. Maybe they bough the fish as what they’re supposed to be. Now they can turn around and sell the fish down to the grocery stores and sushi joints as something else… Oh, you want some snapper? Here, I have some delicious and fresh tilap… err… snapper for you that I’ll sell for slightly below regular snapper prices! This deal is too good to be true!

If the fish manages to get down to the sushi chefs without being mislabeled, then it’s their turn to lie to you. 74% of sushi venue fish that was tested is mislabeled, you’ll remember, which makes me think a lot of this corruption is at the sushi-restaurant level. Grocery stores are only at 18%, probably because they’re not out to make a big profit. While this isn’t true across the board, most sushi restaurants aren’t run due to one sushi chef / shop owner’s passion for sushi. They’re there to make a profit, and sushi restaurants in the US are some of the most profitable around. I’ve always thought this, but now I’m certain. If you’re doing sushi to make a profit you’re going to stretch that profit as far as you can. How do you do that? You mislabel fish, and you mislabel a lot of it.

So that’s why sushi fish is mislabeled so much. I find it hard to believe that they don’t know better, unless they’re not buying whole fish (which is possible, I suppose). They see the money they could make by charging inflated snapper prices for tilapia and rock fish and start slicing.

What Can You Do About It?

Of course, it’s not like every sushi restaurant is bad like this. There are plenty of really good, really high quality sushi restaurants that I’m sure are giving you the real thing. Of course, if you’ve ever wondered why one sushi place costs so much more and tastes so much better, perhaps this is going to be a reason why.

Oceana has some suggestions for how to prevent yourself from getting swindled, but they’re not all that helpful. They say you should ask questions, think about the cost of the fish (if it’s cheap, it’s probably a cheap fish), or purchase the whole fish. Since we’re talking about sushi, all of those things are much more difficult. You could get to know your sushi chef and hope that you can trust him or her, but there’s only so much you can do before you either insult the chef for suggesting they may be screwing you over or just plain getting lied to.

I’ve always known that the state of sushi in America wasn’t that great, so I was sad to run into this study. I will certainly feel much more paranoid and suspicious, and I’ll never ever order white tuna again.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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