Japanese Cooking and Food Culture

Many people simply equate Japanese cooking with sushi and sashimi, or they don't give it much thought at all To the Japanese, cooking is both about aesthetics and taste. In general, what we might consider fine or haute cuisine in Japanese cooking is known as kaiseki ryouri. In kaiseki ryouri, up to 20 or more small, discrete dishes can be presented to the customer. They can contain no more than a single morsel of food, albeit a beautifully arranged morsel. The flavors and colors are usually subtle, and the dishes are meant to please the eye. For this kind of food, expect to pay over a hundred dollars. This is not to say that the Japanese only have expensive tastes. They love a bowl of raamen (the proper phonetic spelling) as much as they do sushi. In fact, whole shows are devoted to finding the best noodle shops around that have the best and most flavorful broths and the most perfect noodles.

Food on TV

Shop owners keep their secret recipes for soup broths almost as closely guarded as the formula for Coca-Cola. Long before The Food Network came into being, the Japanese produced cooking shows devoted to topics, including a two to three-hour New Year's special entitled Sushi! Donburi! Raamen! For those unfamiliar with the term donburi, it's basically a bowl of rice with toppings such as beef (gyuu-don), chicken (katsu-don), and numerous others. The New Year's special involves Japanese TV personalities traveling around the country to find the best of the best in Japanese cooking. This food obsession has led to some unusual programs like the original Iron Chef. Japanese networks have even produced drama series about a sommelier, restaurants, and a family-run sake factory for example.

Several mystery stories on Onna to Ai no Misuteri, which airs stories over two 50-minute installments involved food or food tours, such as one storyline involving a soba, or buckwheat noodle, restaurant. As far as reality-based shows go, the long-running contest show called TV Champion has had numerous food-related competitions over the years, including several Christmas cake-decorating competitions involving master pastry chefs.

Some of the more bizarre ones involved a king of raamen competition (which is the best way to describe it). Competitors tried to prove they knew the most about raamen (which is actually a Chinese import originally) by identifying which restaurant bowls of raamen came from by tasting the broth and all sorts of wacky things. Of course, this is also a show that once had a competition about determining the king of sweating....At any rate, if you ever want to experience the freshest seafood in Japan, visit the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo and get a different look at Japanese cooking if you get the chance.