Japanese Cuisine

Japanese diet always relied mainly on "grains with vegetables or seaweeds as main, with fowl meat secondary, and mammal meat in slight amounts.

As an island nation, the Japanese take great pride in their seafood. A wide variety of fish, squid, octopus, eel, and shellfish appear in all kinds of dishes.

Some of Japanese dishes that are well known outside the country are sushi, sashimi, tempura, and buckwheat noodles (soba).

Much like the haiku poem, traditional Japanese cuisine strives to make a presentation of the seasonality (shun).

Seasonality means taking advantage of the "bounty of the mountains" (e.g. bamboo shoots in spring, chestnuts in the fall) as well as the "bounty of the sea" as they come into season. The hatsu-gatsuo or the first catch of skipjack tunas that arrives with the Kuroshio Current has traditionally been greatly prized.

If something becomes available rather earlier than usual, the first crop or early catch is called hashiri.

Use of (inedible) tree leaves and branches as decor is also characteristic of Japanese cuisine.

For countless centuries, one of the greatest and costliest Japanese delicacies has been fugu, or pufferfish. Fugu contains lethal poison tetrodotoxin, an extremely potent neurotoxin and one of the most toxic substances known.

The Haiku poet Josa Buson wrote:

I cannot see her tonight
I have to give her up
So I will eat fugu

A single fugu contains enough poison to kill 30 people, although no fish is on record for staging quite such a massacre. There is no antidote, and so - human nature being what it is - the only food regarded as more alluring in Japan than raw fish is poisonous raw fish.

The restaurant preparation of fugu is strictly controlled by law in Japan and several other countries, and only chefs who have qualified through rigorous training are allowed to deal with the fish. However, domestic preparation occasionally leads to accidental death.

Despite all this fugu is popular dish. Japanese eat 10,000 tons of fugu a year.