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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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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Instead of seeing this level of learning as a flat expanse, barren with barely formed grammar to the horizon, picture instead that you’re on the 3rd floor landing up an infinite staircase. Your options for study-focus are endless.

This article isn’t just for advanced learners. I’m going to talk about why cooking is one really good way to open up doors to new vocabulary, grammar, and even to more confidence when using Japanese, and I’ll outline some ways you can get started. But, these techniques aren’t only limited to cooking either. Convert them over to other activities as well. Drawing, martial arts, whatever it is you’re interested in! Just make sure it’s a Japanese activity with plenty of Japanese vocabulary to get the most out of it.

Private Speech

If you’ve ever taken a Japanese class or tried to use your Textfugu-polished skills with a Japanese friend, you’re probably familiar with how nerve-racking it can be to have a Japanese conversation. You try to keep up with the facts of what you know they said while filling in the gaps of missing vocabulary. You conjugate verbs and structure the sentence pattern in your head for what you’ll say when it’s your turn to speak. On a daily basis – if you live in Japan or work in a Japanese company – this can be outright exhausting.

There are all kinds of reasons to keep up that practice (for starters: it does get easier and less nerve-racking). But today I want to focus on something a little more basic: talking to yourself (with a focus on cooking). You probably do it in your main language all the time, but how often do you do it in Japanese? Second-language researchers have a special word for “talking to yourself”. They call it “private speech”, and “it emerges most often in the face of some challenge” (Ortega 220). One researcher, Tomlinson, conducted and compiled studies where EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students were given time to compose their thoughts before needing to present them. He suggests that “without an effective inner voice, we cannot produce meaningful public speech” (Tomlinson).

“Meaningful” in this sense means that you’ve had a chance to process the topic or issue at hand before speaking. That said, private speech in our native language seems less complex and more reflex, like the “Crap!” you hiss when you spill your coffee. Nothing meaningful there? Well, what would you say in Japanese for the exact same scenario? What other things could you say in this context in both English and Japanese? There are lots of these situations where not knowing what to say at such a basic level might remind you of how limited your Japanese is, and that could lead to some pretty negative feelings with the whole experience. Not good – generally and specifically when you’re trying to get better at the language.

If you’re facing the plateau and thinking “What next?”, private speech is a good place to get started. It is so daily and basic and personal, yet it is mostly untaught in language learning. So setting up situations where you could talk to yourself (or your cat) is a good stepping stone towards a more complete fluency.

Cooking Vocabulary

I talk to myself a lot. I also talk to my cat, which is almost the same thing as talking to myself. This “private speech” happens mostly when I’m cooking. We all love food, so how about we spend a little time upping our kitchen-ready vocabulary?

• ingredients: 材料（ざいりょう）・具財（ぐざい）
• pot: 鍋（なべ）
• pan: フライパン
• boil:　茹でる（ゆでる）
• bake: 焼く（やく）
• stir-fry or sautee:　炒める（いためる）
• fry: 揚げる（あげる）
• steam (verb): 蒸らす（むらす）
• steam (noun): 蒸気（じょうき）
• to chop finely: みじん切り（ぎり）
• number of portions: 分量（ぶんりょう）
• to prepare (ahead of time): 整える（ととのえる）・用意する（よういする）
• left-over: 余った（あまった）
• in-season ingredients: 旬（しゅん）の食材（しょくざい）
• to peel: 皮（かわ）をむく
• to whisk: 泡立てる （あわだてる）
• sour: 酸っぱい（すっぱい）
• salty: 塩辛い（しおからい）
• savory/umami: うま味（み）
• mouth-watering: よだれが出そう（だそう）
• watery: 水っぽい（みずっぽい）
• bland/thinly flavored: 味が薄い（あじがうすい）
• healthy: 体に良い（からだによい）・健康に良い（けんこうによい）
• crumbs: パンくず・断片（だんぺん）
• to stir or to mix: 混ぜる（まぜる）
• to soak, put in marinade: ～に浸す（ひたす）

Obviously, before being able to talk to yourself in Japanese while cooking, you’ll need to know the relevant words pretty well, so consider making some flashcards or an Anki deck. The idea is to become familiar enough with them that you are able to recall them while doing the related task (in this case, cooking) so that way we can use them later during private speech, ingraining them into our minds.

The Grocery List

Now that you know words to use while you’re cooking, I’ll give you some to use while you’re making your grocery list. As you can see, we’re going through and learning vocabulary for various activities revolving around the main activity, which you know is cooking.

• leafy greens: 菜っ葉（なっぱ）
• rice flour: 米粉（こめこ）
• wheat flour: 小麦粉（こむぎこ）
• ground (pork, etc.): 挽き肉（ひきにく）
• cuts of meat: there are so many, so take your pick
  
• oil: 油（あぶら）
• seafood: シーフード or 魚介（ぎょかい）
• spinach: ほうれん草（そう）
• sake used for cooking: 料理酒（りょうりしゅ）
• herbs/spices: 香辛料（こうしんりょう）
• black pepper: 胡椒（コショウ）
• frozen: 冷凍（れいとう）
• soy/soy milk: 豆乳（とうにゅう）
• fermented: 発酵させた（はっこう）・　発酵食品（はっこうしょくひん）
• the bacteria in yogurt: 乳酸菌（にゅうさんきん）
• gyoza wrap: 餃子の皮（ぎょうざのかわ）

In theory, you could come up with some other word lists as well. What about words for cleaning up? What about words for various kinds of (completed) dishes? The list goes on and on. Start out simple and work outwards. You’ll start to see some overlap between lists, which is good, because that will help you pinpoint more common words. Then you’ll start to find words from your lists becoming useful in other situations as well. The more you branch out the more you’ll be able to talk about. Sure, talking about cooking isn’t all that useful in most situations, but after a while the important stuff floats to the top, kind of like the scummy bubbly stuff that you scrape away when making sukiyaki.

One Approach

Knowing all those words is just half the process. To practice using them and setting up situations where you’re talking to yourself, here’s my procedure:

Step 1: Find a recipe written in Japanese. I used to watch an NHK show called 今日の料理（きょうのりょうり, Today’s Cooking) and found the recipes online after each episode so I could try making the food myself. But it’s easier to just go to Cookpad, one of the largest recipe sites out there. There is a wide variety of recipes, so finding something that you have the means to make should be no trouble. Finally, for recipes that use hard-to-come-by Japanese ingredients (like na no hana), there are usually appropriate substitutions to accommodate what’s available to you, which some English sites describe, such as Makiko Itoh’s Just Hungry.

Step 2: Once you have a Japanese recipe picked out, read through it once to test your reading comprehension. Diagram step-by-step what you understand from the first read-through. Even with English recipes, I diagram what has to happen at each step because otherwise, I mess the dish up.

Step 3: Highlight the words you don’t know, look them up, and do what you feel is necessary to remember them. Otherwise, the next step will probably solidify your memory of those words.

Step 4: Go through your kitchen and name the ingredients you do or don’t have for the recipe. Obviously, do this in Japanese. This could be where you start talking to yourself! Write up a grocery list for the items you don’t have. Use quantities and counters.

Step 5: Then, go to the store, shop around with your grocery list that’s written in Japanese, bring the stuff home and start cooking delicious food.

Cooking with Cat: A Case Study

For example, I love nikujaga, and stumbled upon a recipe for nikujaga croquettes.

Looking through the ingredients, I highlight the words I can’t read:

I look those up, (ついかの, “additional”, and てきりょう, “appropriate amount”), and put them into Anki to memorize. I look through the steps, draw my diagram (realized when I was done that I drew regular ねぎ, while the recipe calls for 玉ねぎ):

And then I went on to find out the readings and meanings for ざら、お勧め、and じっくり, and add them to my list to memorize.

The recipe calls for nikujaga leftovers, but I have none. So I’ll need the ingredients for nikujaga, plus a few things for the croquettes. My shopping list:

• ジャガイモ、４個
• 牛肉薄切り（ぎゅうにくうすぎり）３００ｇ.
• ショウガ、１かけ
• 玉ねぎ、１個

I tell myself what I need:「ショウガ切らしてるよー。肉も買わなきゃ。」 “I’m out of ginger. I need to buy meat, too.” And I tell my cat:「モモちゃん、買い物行ってくるね。晩ご飯に必要なの。」 “Momo, I’ve got to go get some things from the store. It’s needed for dinner.”

When I return, it’s time to make food. I start cooking the Nikujaga, make croquettes with it, and talk to myself. In Japanese!

「あっち（ゃ）！！、舌やけどしちゃったよー。うん、大丈夫、生きてるよ私ー。スープの味がなくなっておかゆみたいだけどね、ははー。“Ah! I burned my tongue. Yeah, Momo, I’m okay. Just lost my taste buds and now the soup tastes like mush.”

「準備（じゅんび）おっけー、あぶらあぶら～、油をいれて・・・軽く（かるく）炒める・・・と、２分ね。ももー、マイバッグいじらないでー！」“Ok, that’s ready. Now…oil. Put the oil in (the frying pan) and sautee for… two minutes. Momo, stop messing with the shopping bags!”

「あー、コンロに飛（と）んでる油拭（ふ）かなきゃ～。どーせ沸騰（ふっとう）するの待たなきゃだし、お皿も洗いつつ古くなった冷蔵庫（れいぞうこ）でも片付（かたづ）けますかー。タッパーも洗わなきゃだしね」“Now I have to clean up all that splattered oil around the stove… I’ve got to wait for it to boil, so I may as well wash some of these dishes and get rid of the old leftovers in the fridge. I need some clean tupperware, anyhow.”

「うわっ、鍋にこびりついちゃった、しかも焦（こ）げてるし！」“Crap! It stuck to the pan. And it burnt!”

If the grammar in these sentences is new, maybe the whole phrases are things to repeat and practice, the way you might practice some lines from a J-Drama. The above lines come off as neutral to slightly girly (bold-text is more feminine). So if you’re looking for Japanese that is more boyish or more samurai-ish or whatever, look into Japanese gendered language.

Conclusion

That picture up there- scary? Hundreds of feet above ground with nowhere to go but down? Sure. But that’s not what “The Plateau” has to look like. Cooking and talking to yourself is, I hope, a new and exciting trail for those who are independently studying Japanese.

Start out simple. You don’t have to be making complete sentences from the get-go. When you need negi, just grab the negi and say “negi” to yourself. Or, when you’re eating some of your nikujaga, say “nikujaga wo tabeteiru.” Simple things like that will start getting you in the habit of speaking to yourself in Japanese. As you need to learn new things you will learn them, allowing your vocabulary blossom and grow like some kind of weird tree that feeds off of knowledge.

And like I mentioned before, you don’t have to do this with cooking either. Choose your own activities, talk to yourself about them, and allow this habit to infect other things after you feel pretty comfortable with one. Don’t kill yourself doing this and just let it grow naturally. Human nature will take over and you will become curious about how to say this or that and you will get better, so long as you’re having fun with it.

Sources

• Hashi. “Why Japanese Food Tastes So Good—Umami“, Tofugu. Jan. 18, 2012
• Itoh, Makiko. “About Japanese Ingredients and Substitutions“, Just Hungry. Aug. 15, 2008.
• Itoh, Makiko. “Ready for spring’s fresh bounty“, Japan Times. Feb. 22, 2013.
• Koichi. “Japanese Gendered Language“, Tofugu.
• Koichi. “Studying With Japanese Drama: The Step-By-Step Guide”, Tofugu. Jun. 10, 2010
• Ortega, Lourdes. Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Hodder Education, London: 2009.
• Tomlinson, Brian. The Inner Voice: A Critical Factor in L2 Learning. 2001.

Now that it’s the weekend, we can take a more fun approach to things. That’s why today’s post is about the YouTube series “Rino which eats world various dishes”

“Rino which eats world various dishes” is part cooking show, part Japanese parents using their adorable children for internet fame. The basic premise of the show is that the mom of two little kids (Rino and Yuuma) makes a bunch of famous dishes from around the world for her children.

She’s not a pro chef by any means, and the food probably isn’t 100% authentic (whatever that means); but it’s fun to watch her cook up these very different foods and to see the kids’ reactions.

The show covers all types of food, from Southeast Asian foods like Pad Thai, satay, and pho; to European foods like Zuccotto, Wiener Schnitzel, and Berliner; and even a few foods from home, like natto okonomiyaki and Nagasaki chanpon.

There’s a lot of variety, and it all looks incredibly delicious. Here are some of the more popular episodes from the series:

You can find the whole playlist of “Rino which eats world various dishes” here.

The plan for this article is twofold. First, I’m going to go over a couple recipes to get you started. These are things that I think are good, solid, all-around meals that you can do at home. After that, I’ll go over the things you need to know to get started yourself (so that you can cook any number of shojin ryori dishes!).

A Few Shojin Ryori Recipes

Although this is just a drop in the bucket in terms of what you could potentially be making, these are recipes that will get you started. Although I put these together with the idea that they’d make a nice “set,” the first two can be cooked on their own as an entire dinner. When you eat shojin ryori at a temple or restaurant, usually you get a ton of different little dishes. If you want to eat shojin ryori like you’re supposed to, though, you eat a main dish, a side dish, and some rice. This keeps things simple so you can concentrate on being a Buddhist monk, in theory.

P.S. If you like these recipes, be sure to subscribe to the Tofugu newsletter. I’ll be adding another simple recipe to that in the coming weeks.

Kenchinjiru (Kenchin Soup)

Kenchin Vegetable soup comes from Kenchoji Temple and is a great dish for the colder winter months. The interesting thing about this dish is the tofu, I think. It’s crumbled into the soup instead of cut into pieces. This came to be when a temple acolyte dropped a block of tofu, shattering it to pieces. Instead of wasting it (boo boo in shojin ryori), he cooked it with some vegetables and people seemed to like it (I bet he didn’t tell them he dropped it on the ground until after). Ever since then, this soup has been known as “Kenchinjiru” or “Kenchin Soup,” named after the temple it came from.

Ingredients:

• 4-6 dried shitake Mushrooms (fresh is okay too)
• 150g (5.5 oz) gobo (Burdock root)
• 2.5 cups water
• 300g (10.5 oz) daikon, peeled and cut to bite sized wedges.
• 1 block of konyaku, cut into bite sized pieces
• 200g (7 oz) carrots, peeled and cut into bite sized pieces
• 3-4 tablespoons sesame oil
• 100g lotus root (3.5 oz), peeled and cut to bite sized pieces.
• 2 tablespoons shoyu (soy sauce) for sautéing
• 2.5 cups konbu stock (see staples)
• 4 tablespoons saké
• 1 block firm tofu
• 4 tablespoons shoyu (soy sauce) for soup
• 2 tablespoons red miso (or 3-4 tablespoons white miso), optional but recommended!
• 100g of greens (i.e. baby spinach, collared greens, etc)
• Small amount of ginger juice

There are a lot of ingredients here, but the important thing to know is that you can substitute many of them. Kenchinjiru is typically a soup you make with leftovers, meaning you can do nearly any kind of vegetable. This also means that the amount of vegetables doesn’t have to be exact, either. Experiment and play around with it, adding more of the vegetables you enjoy most!

Recipe:

1. Soak the shitake in the water for 10 minutes. Drain. Soak for another 30 minutes in the 2.5 cups of water. Remove the mushrooms but keep the water as you will use it later. Remove the stalk and cut into thinnish bite-sized slices.
2. Peel the gobo and cut into thin bite-sized slices. Soak them in cold water for 5 minutes to remove bitterness. Drain and put aside.
3. Cut the daikon into bite sized pieces and soak in cold water for 10 minutes to remove bitterness.
4. Cut the konyaku into bite sized pieces and boil for a couple of minutes. Drain and remove.
5. Heat up the sesame oil in your soup pot (or in a separate pan) and stir fry the gobo, shitake, konyaku, daikon, carrot, lotus root, and shoyu (2 Tb) for around five minutes.
6. Add the shitake water, konbu stock, and sake. Bring to a boil. Cook on low heat until vegetables are tender (30-45 minutes). If there’s any scum / froth forming on the top, remove it with a spoon.
7. Crumble the tofu block into the pot and mix it in. Add the 4Tb of shoyu and 2Tb of miso. Stir gently for a while until you think the miso is dissolved.
8. Add your greens and cook them lightly. Add a small amount of ginger juice to taste.

When you serve this, you can add a little more shoyu to individual bowls as well (to taste) depending on how addicted to salt you are. This soup is great served fresh and gathers more taste over time. Goes really well with a side of freshly cooked rice.

Vegetable Tempura

This recipe’s a bit tougher. It’s one thing to make tempura using egg. It’s another to make it without egg, and that’s exactly what you have to do with shojin ryori. If you get it right, I think it tastes much better. In fact, you shouldn’t need any sauce to dip it in (shojin ryori isn’t too into sauces).

Ingredients:

The great thing about vegetable tempura is that you can tempura just about anything, so long as it’s fairly solid. What you use is really up to you. Here are some examples to get you started:

• Kabocha, cut into thin slices
• Carrots, cut into thin slices
• Fresh shitake caps
• Brocolli
• Sweet potatoes, thinly sliced
• Wherever your imagination takes you!

No matter what you choose, though, you’re going to need some stock ingredients to actually cook these vegetables with:

• 1 cup cake flour
• 1 pinch baking soda
• 1 pinch of salt (optional)
• 1 cup ice water

Recipe:

You’re going to want to take the three above ingredients and mix them together. Don’t overmix it – some lumps are okay. This concoction shouldn’t be too thick, otherwise there will be too much batter on your vegetables (should be thin and see-through when you apply it).

Heat up some oil to 170-180 degrees. Oil should cover the bottom of the pan (or, if you have a deep fryer you can probably use that). Dip the vegetables in the batter, lightly covering. You should be able to see through the batter easily. If you want to be fancy, green colored things look good with only partial batter, leaving some green showing. Fry both sides until it looks cooked (lightish brown), remove, and put on some paper towels. Pat the oil off.

Tempura is best served right after it’s finished, so serve right away!

Ringo Umeboshi Ae

Mmmm. Time for dessert! If you’re lucky enough to have picked up some umeboshi off the shojin ryori ingredients list, then lucky you! You can probably make this. Feel free to double the recipe if you want more. You’ll need:

Ingredients:

• 1 medium apple (how about Fuji?)
• 4 large umeboshi
• 2-3Tbs of sugar
• 1 tsp Mirin

The tricky part about this recipe is the umeboshi, though. Umeboshi vary in terms of how sour they are. If you have a very sour umeboshi, poke some holes in them and let them soak in water for a few hours. Alternatively, you can add some more sugar. It may take some playing around and experimentation to get this recipe right depending on your personal taste preferences and the umeboshi you have gotten. Here’s the standard recipe, though.

Recipe:

1. Cut and peel the apple, then cut into bite sized pieces.
2. Rinse the apple in lightly salted water. This will help the apples keep looking youthful and fresh. Blot dry with a paper towel (we don’t really want to add extra saltiness, here).
3. Remove the umeboshi pits and turn the rest of the umeboshi inside out. Add sugar and mirin, then heat on low until things are nicely blended together. Let it cool a bit.
4. Mix the umeboshi sauce with the apple slices to serve. Yum!

This is a pretty standard style shojin ryori dessert experience. You won’t see any cake (it’s a lie, after all) or anything overly sweet. Desserts usually consist of something fairly mild, or even sour (like umeboshi!). Fruits are great for this, and you’ll see apples served as dessert quite often.

Bonus: Take some hot water (180 degrees Fahrenheit) and squeeze some ginger juice into it to make ginger tea. It’s a nice compliment to this dessert. You can also use ginger shavings from the ginger you used with the Kenchinjiru.

So How Was A Month Of Shojin Ryori?

I gotta say. Cooking shojin ryori style is a lot of hard work. There’s a lot of ingredients and they take a lot of tender loving care. You’ll be spending a lot of time running back and forth from pantry to cutting board to stove to recipe book, frantically putting things together while everyone patiently waits for dinner. In fact, the term “gochisou sama deshita,” which you say after a meal in Japan to express your thanks for it, literally means “running around.” Why? Because this is exactly what you have to do when you are making a shojin meal. Experience goes a long way, here. I found that as I was able to manage more tasks and focus my care on the food, the food got better as well. I’m sure I still have a long ways to go. Just be sure to not give up after the first try. It takes a while.

Besides the actual experience of cooking, eating nothing but shojin ryori food for breakfast and dinner (I just ate vegetarian regular food for lunch) had its health benefits as well. Although I didn’t keep track of weight or anything, I’m definitely a little less chubs, all while ignoring calories, because numbers, eugh. I don’t have any experience with dieting, but this seems like a really healthy and steady way to shed some pounds. Do this for a year and you’ll be feeling pretty damn good, I think.

I definitely found that after two or three weeks Ifelt better as well. Things like miso, seaweed, and root vegetables are just so great for you. I have more energy and I feel more concentrated. Oh, and did I mention my hipster jeans fit better? So good for squatting down to take pictures with a Holga Polaroid.

All that being said, do I recommend it? It’s definitely not an easy lifestyle choice to carry through with. It’s a lot of work and the food isn’t going to taste good for a while (until you get better at this kind of cooking). It’s just hard work, and although I’m a huge fan of this type of food I also wish I could chain a Buddhist monk to my kitchen to cook all this for me. That being said, you get faster with time and it’s not all that bad. If I had to go back and do it again I definitely would. Also, going forward I’m going to keep making shojin ryori food and stay vegetarian 6 days a week, or so. It just comes down to how much healthier I feel now that this month is over.

Getting Started With Shojin Ryori

So now you’re convinced. You want to put yourself through the trials and tribulations that are shojin ryori. Okay! I can help you get started. These are the books that I used (especially the first two). They’ll keep you busy for a long time and get you easily through your first month of cooking.

The Enlightened Kitchen

This was actually the book that got me interested in this idea. I came across it in the bookstore and leafed through it. It made me remember all the awesome shojin ryori food I had had in the past and made me realize that I could make some of this food myself! It’s written by a lady who’s married to a shojin chef in Japan and has a mix of traditional and modern. It’s a great getting-started book because it caters to the Western reader without jumping the shark. If you only buy one book I’d recommend this one, though after a month or two you’ll be craving for more, I think.  [Amazon]

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Shojin Cooking

This book is a bit old and was written by Keizo Kobayashi, someone who went around gathering recipes from various Buddhist monks and temples. I like this book a lot because it’s no frills and very simple. Sometimes it’s too simple, though, not giving enough information for a newb like me to cook the dish properly the first time. That being said, I’ve always been able to figure things out though, and the things I learn during that process have been invaluable. This book is full of traditional recipes. If you’re planning to be very diligent about this point, “Shojin Cooking” is your kind of book. Still, I’d recommend learning the basics from Fujii’s book (above) before diving into this one for a better overall experience. [Amazon]

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Kansha

Kansha is written by Elizabeth Andoh, who also wrote Washoku (a similar Japanese cookbook that includes meat-things). Kansha is all vegetarian though it doesn’t necessarily focus on shojin ryori, though it never claims to do so. It does, however, have plenty of shojin ryori recipes, not to mention many other vegetarian recipes as well (almost as good, right?). What I like about Kansha is that it doesn’t get too fancy. It stays pretty simple and traditional most of the time, the food is good, and it has a lot of pictures and recipes. I haven’t had time to go through this book as thoroughly as the first two, though I’m excited to try out many of the recipes in here. I’d recommend this as your third book should you exhaust the first two, though it is very good. [Amazon]

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Nobu’s Vegetarian Cookbook

Last is Nobu’s Vegetarian cookbook. Nobu’s sort of a big-time chef, and I think that shows in the cookbook. Many of the recipes are too fancy for my taste, though there are plenty of gems in here as well. I learned a lot about the science behind Japanese vegetarian cooking which gained me a deeper understanding of how everything goes together (which has helped tremendously). I’ve also done a couple recipes out of this book and they’ve turned out nicely. Although I’m not really into the fancy “modern” vegetarian cuisine in this book I have found it useful. I’d recommend it as the fourth book in your collection of Japanese vegetarian cook books. [Amazon]

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So there you have it! A month (plus a little) of shojin ryori experience down on paper for you all to read. I’m not particularly good at this whole shojin ryori thing yet, but I do hope to get better. If I can’t live in a temple on Mt. Koya, this is the second best thing, though it’s a very, very far second.

So, are you going to give it a try as well? Let me know in the comments what you think, and I’m happy to try to answer any questions as well, if I can.

So what are the foundations? In my mind, they are the stocks, the rice, and the sauces. The sauces are extremely easy and don’t take much effort. The rice, while just rice, is very important to get right. Rice really pulls all the dishes together and serves as a sort of “reset” between bites. Then finally there’s the stocks, which are probably in 30% of the shojin ryori recipes out there. This means that each meal will probably consist of some kind of stock. Because stocks are the hardest (in my opinion), we’re going to start with that and work our way down.

Dashi (Stocks)

When it comes down to it, dashi = umami. Umami was discovered by Dr. Kikunae Ikeda who figured out that umami (the fifth basic taste, apparently) comes from the amino acid glutamate. Now, here we’re going to learn about the traditional Japanese dashi stock, which comes from konbu, though it’s good to know that the term “dashi” refers to all kinds of Japanese stocks, the most common of which uses fish flakes as well as konbu for the flavor. Dashi is pretty much the main reason why it’s hard to be vegetarian in Japan. Everything is full of dashi that has been made with fish (it’s delicious, by the way).

Here we’re going to learn about vegetarian shojin ryori dashi, though. When making dashi, your goal is to add this umami taste to your food. Now, because umami comes from glutamates, one thing we can do is look at how many glutamates different ingredients have.

Konbu: 2240
Wakame: 9
Tomato: 246
Shoyu (Soy Sauce): 782

*These numbers are milligrams of glutamates per 100g

Another thing you can get umami from is guanylate, which can be found in various dried vegetables. By far, the winner in this realm is shitake mushrooms, which have 150 mg of guanylate per 100g. This will come up again in the stocks section so take note.

But, notice something out of place in the list above? That’s right, tomatoes have quite a bit of umami, at least compared to most non-konbu ingredients. Ever wonder why your pizzas and spaghetti sauces tasted so good? That’s right, umami. Try to see if you can detect the mystery flavor the next time you eat something with lots of tomatoes.

Konbu Stock

Konbu stock can be made from dried konbu. Usually you can find this in a regular grocery store, though it really depends. One thing to make certain of is that you have dried konbu. Not just any seaweed will do. For example, wakame has almost no umami magic in it (see the umami-magic list above).

There are a ton of konbu stock recipes out there and I’ve tried them all. This is the best one, and I’ll tell you why afterwards:

Ingredients:

• 6×6 inches worth of dried konbu. Wipe it with a damp paper towel.
• 1 quart of cold / room temperature water

Nice and simple, right? You’d think that it would be hard to mess up, but you would be wrong. Follow closely now. First, fill up a glass container (glass is preferred just because vegetable broths soak up outside flavors very easily) with 1 quart of water. Then, put your dried konbu in it. Cover this container with something and then wait for 5-6 hours. When that amount of time has passed, put the konbu into a sealed container. You’ll probably end up using it in something or another. If it starts growing a white filmy thing, throw it away. This is not good.

So how is it possible to mess up something like this? Well, there are many recipes that do it the wrong way. Here’s how they screw up (don’t do these things).

1. They have you warm up the water to speed up the process. If you have to do this in a pinch, it will make your dashi more quickly, but it will also taste worse. This is because the enzymes that break down the umami and allow the flavors to melt together work best at lower temperatures. When you heat things up they break apart faster for a while, but then they will become inactive. Just make sure you start your dashi earlier.
2. They don’t have you put in enough dried konbu. The richer you want your dashi, the more konbu you should add. I wrote 6×6 above but I usually put a bit more than that. Probably around 8×8 inches worth of dried konbu?
3. They don’t have you cover the container, which means other smells and tastes can sneak their way in. You want your dashi to be as pure as possible for a better taste.

The main things here are to make sure you start early so you don’t have to rush and thus compromise the taste of everything your dashi goes in. If you follow these simple rules your dashi will be splendid!

Shitake Stock

Shitake stock doesn’t get used nearly as much as konbu stock, but it’s an important one to add. It’s about as easy as konbu stock, too.

Ingredients:

• ~8 dried shitake mushrooms
• 2-3 cups warm water
• 2-3 cups room temperature water

There are a lot of different opinions on this, but you have to remember: shojin ryori is full of deliciate flavors. So, we’re going to make a delicate stock. First, put your dried mushrooms in the warm water. This is the get all the bitterness and crap out of your shitake mushrooms. After 15 minutes, drain the water and refill with room temperature water. This is going to be your stock. When the mushrooms are nice and tender (you like touching those mushrooms, don’t you pervert?) you can remove the mushrooms for use in some other recipe and then keep the shitake mushroom stock for whatever you want.

Konbu + Shitake Mushroom Stock

Lastly, here’s a little hint. For umami explosion, you can make stocks that  contain both konbu and shitake. That means you’re getting tons of glutamates and guanylates. That’s double the umami right there for you. If you do this you can expect a richer broth. I use this in some soups and stews to add a little extra flavor when I’m feeling feisty.

Making Rice

Rice is like The Dude’s rug, it really ties the dishes together. When eating Japanese food, you tend to have many different things to eat from. Each dish will have a different texture or taste, allowing you to have the most satisfaction possible while eating your meal. Instead of just eating all your rice at once, for example, you’d come back to it every once in a while to sort of reset your mouth before moving on to the other taste. Suffice to say, it’s important.

Buying Rice

The difference between good rice and bad rice is pretty big, at least when you’ve had good rice before. With good rice, it’s almost as if you can taste and feel each individual grain in your mouth. With bad rice it’s all mushy and doesn’t have a distinct flavor. Buy good rice and you’ll thank yourself later (though your bank account may not). Look for rice that’s been nicely polished, too, it helps with the taste.

Oh, and in case it goes without saying, get Japanese style short-grain rice.

Preparing And Cooking Your Rice

Although your rice bag will probably give you a better method for making the particular rice you’ve bought, let’s go over some basic things here. For this particular “recipe” I’m just going to go with one cup of rice. Double or triple it as needed. Also, I’m going to assume you don’t have a rice cooker. Rice cookers are like magic and make delicious rice. This is the one I have, and it makes perfect rice (plays music, too).

1. Put the rice in a separate bowl. Rinse it out, drain, rinse it out, drain, rinse it out, drain. Do this around 3-4 times until the water isn’t so cloudy. If you buy highly polished rice one rinse or even no rinses will do just fine.
2. Put your drained rice in the pot you’ll be cooking in. Let it sit for 30-60 minutes.
3. Add 1 cup (plus a tad extra, I’d say a few tablespoons) of water to the pot as well. Cover it and bring to a boil, then turn it immediately to low heat. Let it cook for 10ish minutes.
4. Turn off the heat and let it stand (keep the lid on, this is important!) for another 15 minutes.
5. Open the lid and hope that you did it right. If you didn’t, go buy a rice cooker. Did I mention rice cookers are awesome?

That’s all there is to it. Rice is best served fresh. Second and third day rice isn’t all that great, though it makes for good chazuke (rice porridge). You may have to make adjustments to the timings above depending on your stove, though hopefully that does the trick for you. It worked okay for me, though I’m definitely just going to stick with the ol’ rice cooker.

Sauces

Although sauces are kind of not used in traditional shojin ryori, we’re going to include them here because hey, you’re probably not a Buddhist monk and neither am I. That being said, even if you do want to go 100% shojin ryori style, some of these are used in various dishes and not as a side dish (which is what shojin ryori tends to have problems with) so they’re still important.

In part 2, when I went over shojin ryori ingredients, I made certain sauces (like ponzu) optional. Why? Because you ought to be making your own sauces. It’s so much better this way. Invest in some good shoyu, rice vinegar, miso, and mirin. If you do this, you’ll be able to make everything, and it will be amazing.

Nihaizu:

1 Part Rice Vinegar, 1 Part Shoyu

You’ve probably had this sauce before. Goes really well with gyoza and many other things. It’s also really easy to make! Just some vinegar and some shoyu in even amounts.

Sanbaizu:

1 Part Rice Vinegar, 1 Part Shoyu, 1 Part Mirin (or sugar)

Sanbaizu goes nicely with salads and is used to make other kinds of dressings. If you make it with sugar, warm everything up in a pan and let the sugar dissolve.

Ponzu:

1 Part Lemon, 1 Part Shoyu, 1 Part Mirin

Ponzu’s the best. I probably use it on too many different things. It’s great for dipping meats into (though we won’t talk about that here, ahem), though you can also dip various things from hot pots, shabu shabu, and so on into this delicious sauce. Trust me, making it fresh like this is totally worth it, too.

Amazu

1 Part Rice Vinegar, 1/3 Part Salt, 1.5 Part Sugar

The most complicated of the sauces! Put everything in a pot and let it simmer until the sugar is dissolved (don’t forget to mix!). Then, let it cool. Amazu can be used for marinating vegetables as well as for salad dressings.

And Now You’re Ready To Cook!

Next week we’re going to take a lot of these staples and apply them to some actual shojin ryori cooking! There are hundreds of recipes out there, though hopefully we will be able to put together something nice and simple to get you started. The goal will be to give you a better idea of the ingredients and staples that go into all of this, as well as provide for you a stepping stone that allows you to jump up to the “next level” so to speak. Shojin ryori is very difficult to get right, to say the least, so it’s good to take things slowly.

So, get prepared to put everything from the these first three weeks together! Only one more week until this whole series is complete and you’re sitting on your laurels full of the best vegetarian food you’ve ever made in your entire life.

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Header Photo: emrank