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Two of the most common questions we were asked by our students in our first few weeks of classes was “Can you eat Japanese food?” and “What do you eat in Japan?” The first is apparently due to the fact that most of our students think that we have absolutely no experience with Japanese culture in any form. This is reinforced every time we go out after classes with them by their amazement at our ability to use hashi (chopsticks) and their utter disbelief any time I even spit out a simple Japanese phrase, let alone something close to a complete sentence. The second question, I suspect, is out of concern for our health, since it seems hard to believe that Americans wouldn’t starve to death without eating the “very, very big” portions that we get at home.

To be honest, they might actually be right - I would always be hungry in Japan if we weren’t cooking for ourselves most of the time. While I love most Japanese food, it just doesn’t seem to fill me up. Plus, we naturally feel more comfortable eating familiar food on occasion.

We have a pretty good variety in our weekly menu. I cook anything from tacos to cajun pasta to stirfry. We’ve managed to make macaroni and cheese (not out of a box), Thai curry, and even pizza several times:

Baking is probably the most limiting aspect of what we cook at home. This is primarily because of our incredibly small kitchen and the complete lack of a stove:

The only way I pull off the pizza is by putting it into the small broiler that we have below the hotplates and cooking it for a matter of minutes. We do have a microwave that also functions as a convection oven and we’ve been told by several friends that this can be used to bake, but we haven’t actually given it a try yet. It seems like a feat anyways, considering that there’s no temperature setting at all.

Naturally, we also eat Japanese food on a regular basis. While we’ve had one or two situations in which Anna was somewhat sickened by the food (notably anytime she has to eat raw fish other than sushi rolls), we haven’t been served many meals which we couldn’t eat. On the contrary, most of the food we eat is incredibly delicious, even some things we wouldn’t expect, such as the small amount of whale (sorry Greenpeace) we tried when we first arrived. Moreover, according to most of our students, most of the strange meals you might have heard that the Japanese eat, such as dolphin or whale, are not widely popular. Of course, the one exception to that is horse sashimi (raw horse), apparently a true delicacy. I still haven’t decided whether I can bring myself to actually eat horse or if I did whether my sister would ever forgive me.

Overall, Japanese food is really delicious and our homemade American meals or a relatively good selection of ethnic food in Numazu give us a chance to get some variety in our diets. And, of course, on occasion we’re good Americans and we eat perhaps our most famous export: