A quick hit here. I keep telling you to ask for food without things – katsuo flakes, ground beef, bacon, whatever. What are the secret words for doing this?
X nuki de onegai shimasu.
Or, what I like to do is ask a little more hesitantly because sometimes it can’t be done, and the server gets uncomfortable. So I often ask X nuki de dekimasu ka?
Finally, I’m not sure if saying sakana wa nigate desu works for other foods, but I’ve heard someone say that about sushi. So try out X wa nigate desu when you need to explain yourself to a confused waiter.
You may already know that the fish katsuo is often found in foods that have dashi or stock. It most often comes in the form of flakes/powder that is used in the broth or sauce, or sprinkled grossly on top of something. (Can you tell I LOVE katsuo? 
) The flakes are called “katsuo bushi.”
Even if you’re armed with the knowledge that the dashi in soba or udon is full of fish (and smells like it too), do you know all of the other foods that you can find katsuo in? Here is a quick list based on my own experiences, some of them traumatizing.
Common:
- salad dressing (almost all of them in the grocery store)
- hot sauce (I’m not making that up)
- ume paste
- Japanese pickles
- ponzu sauce
- daikon salad (common in izakaya, comes covered in katsuo flakes – you can ask for them to not be added)
- <i>hiya yakko</i> (cold tofu with soy sauce, ginger, and.. katsuo flakes sprinkled on top – ask for it without them!)
- tare (dipping sauce) for cold noodles and tenpura
- age-dashi tofu (comes on top in flakes, and as the name implies)
- the inside of onigiri that don’t say they have katsuo bushi in them
- that nice hijiki, bean, and fried tofu salad that is often in cafeterias and buffets – it’s marinated in katsuo dashi
Sometimes:
- red pasta sauce in a jar
- probably the same pasta sauce in a restaurant
- inside of veggie sushi rolls that don’t specify “katsuo bushi” – mine was an oshinko (pickle) roll
- on top of otherwise harmless yakisoba from a street fair
Uncommon but scary and true:
- INSIDE OF PIZZA CRUST without warning of course
Have any more katsuo stories/warnings you’d like to share below? I would be happy to get some more opinions and experiences here.
Those of you who live in or near Yokohama – such as IUC students like I once was – may already know about the great but expensive shopping one can do at the VIVRE grocery store in Minato Mirai. Yes, they have an amazing imported wine and beer selection, limited and expensive cheese for those of you who eat it (but it’s not that white processed “cheese” you’re going to get elsewhere), a crappy produce section, and a whole ton of Western food and snacks. Pasta, sauce, taco fixings, frozen hash browns. Everything.
However, Minato Mirai isn’t the end-all of shopping in Yokohama, especially for veggies. Here are a few more places you should check out for both good or interesting produce, and for some surprisingly cheap imported food that you may be missing.
- Yokohama-bashi shopping arcade (Yokohama-bashi shotengai 横浜橋商店街). About halfway into this long shopping arcade is a small Western imported foods store, on the east side of the arcade (so if you’re walking south from the subway, it’s on the left). If you’d believe it, this place has canned beans – including the elusive BLACK BEANS that I never found elsewhere in the two years I’ve lived in Japan – for 100 yen. YES, 100 YEN. I am typing in caps because usually a can of beans in Japan costs up to 500 yen. This place is about the same price as buying it in the USA. You can find Yokohama-bashi shopping arcade by taking the Yokohama City Subway to the Bandobashi 阪東橋 stop, then walking east along the main road for a block or two.
- Hama-ko (はまこ or 浜こ) grocery store. This store is in the PIO ぴお building across the street from JR Sakuragi-cho station 桜木町駅 and in roughly the same building as the Sakuragi-cho subway station. It’s on the first floor. The easiest way to find it is to come up from the subway (or exit the JR station and go down the big escalator that goes toward the subway) and walk toward the area with signs for Noge-cho 野毛町. In this area, you can down down the stairs to floor B1. This floor has Daiso, a large 100-yen store. Hama-ko is at the top of the mini-escalator to the right, that goes up rather than down. Go up this tiny escalator and Hama-ko will be obvious to your left – it’s just kind of an open space with groceries in it, not a separate store. If you continue going up the second escalator here, you will exit to the street in Noge. So why Hama-ko? It’s extremely cheap, and has not only good produce, but also a lot of produce I don’t see elsewhere. The clientele of this store is generally other foreigners, but they’re all from elsewhere in Asia. Things I’ve bought here include tiger lily buds, pea shoots, goya (bitter melon), and really great fruit. Their fruit is cheap and amazing. A big thing of strawberries for 250 yen. Yes. Also a lot of canned food, like that canned Thai curry sauce, and many Chinese sauces/ingredients. Of course, you can also get a lot of Japanese products here too – soy sauce, pickles, mirin, oil. Especially if you’re looking for a surprise vegetable – like the tiger lily buds that I bought for no reason other than that I had no idea what they were – this is the place to go.
- Western food store inside The Diamond, in Yokohama station 横浜駅. You can most easily find this place by exiting JR Yokohama at the West Exit and going down the stairs outside into The Diamond underground shopping mall. Start walking down the main corridor that you will end up in at the bottom of the stairs. When you can, go left and walk over about one corridor, then make a right and keep walking the way you were before, parallel to the original corridor. The store is right around here. I’m sorry to not be able to give a name or more detailed directions, but I only went once with a friend right before I left Japan. However, this is a great place to get some Western food for cheaper prices than you might find elsewhere – canned beans for about 200 yen, canned fruit, muesli and granola, herbal tea for 500 yen per box, etc. There is, of course, candy and coffee here. It’s a bit better than the typical selection and way cheaper than most other imported food stores. So it’s worth your while to walk around inside The Diamond around this area to find it. It’s one of those very open stores without any real walls, so if I remember right it is on a corner. You will be able to tell what it is because it will have stuff stacked all over the place and lots of people looking for deals. Also, it is in the direction of Takashimaya.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I was reminded by a new comment just today – I haven’t updated this in a LONG time. It’s hard for me to maintain steam on new projects, especially one about living in Japan when I’m not actually there. But still, this is the blog I was wishing I could have read instead of figuring this stuff out the hard way myself, and I’m sure I’m not the only one out there. So I have a fresh determination to pass on some of what I know about making your life easier as a veggie in Japan! (Let’s hope I can keep it up for longer than 12 hours.. 
In other words, 申し訳ありません！
Here’s one of the books that saved my life when I first moved to suburban/countryside (inaka) Japan in 2003 without any knowledge about how to live as a vegan in Japan. I had no idea what I was in store for (and especially because 5 years ago, there was MUCH LESS that I could eat, and the farther you get from Tokyo or Kyoto, that’s the case too). But this little book and being able to read Japanese pretty well made my home cooking life much, much easier. It also gave me a little basic knowledge about Japanese cooking, eating, and ingredients that made me feel much more brave about exploring the different and new vegetables and other ingredients I could get at the grocery store and at the awesome farmer’s market that took place in a drug store parking lot down the street from me. (Oh, how I miss it!)
The link is to Japanese Amazon.com (where I note that the price is just enough to get you free shipping – so what’s stopping you?), but you can but it in the US (and I presume other countries) too. Actually, I bought it in my last year of college and brought it to Japan with me.
One thing I just love about this book is that it taught me a lot about more traditional Japanese food – the recipes in it aren’t “new” just because they’re vegan. I learned about some great Japanese comfort food in here, and the winter soup and stew recipes are especially awesome.
One downside, however, is that you can’t get a lot of the fake meat ingredients in Japan, and so you can only make things like kara-age tempeh (one of my favorites) in the US. Well, unless you find some place that will sell you tempeh (probably somewhere in Tokyo does this?) for an incredible markup. Well, just a warning that about 70% of these recipes can be made in Japan, maybe 20% only in the US, and 20% only in Japan (I’m just estimating here, but some of them use a lot of fake meat, whereas others use a lot of products that I don’t really see in the US, like mochi, daikon greens, konnyaku, and okara).
In any case, I don’t think you’ll regret getting this. My own copy is bent, torn, and covered in various liquids – it’s gone through two trips to Japan, to Pittsburgh, to New York, and to Michigan. I’ve been using it for 6 years now and it’s been a great help.
Filed under: tips
This one is a weird tip that I picked up from listening to how a Japanese friend explained by vegan-ness to a chef once. (It was at a very small izakaya, in a building filled with host clubs – awesome! Anyway, the chef was cooking right next to us, and we shouted our orders through the window in the wall that divided the kitchen from our table. I would go again if I could ever find this place on my own!)
Here’s what my friend said when he was explaining that I don’t eat fish:
sakana wa nigate desu. (魚は苦手です。)
Even though it didn’t make a lot of sense to me (it literally means “she’s bad/weak at eating fish” in the same way you can be bad at drawing or bad at jogging) at the time, the chef nodded and said “oh, okay” as though it were the most natural thing to say about someone with a weird request. I don’t think it really distinguishes between disliking something or having an actual allergy or health problem with it, and I have to say that’s one of the things I enjoy about Japanese at times. It can be a very specific and very vague language, and I’ve noticed that in cases that refer to how you might describe yourself or your preferences or shortcomings, you can get away with less explanation than you would in English. “I’m bad at fish.” If only I could say “I’m bad at eating animal products” and have that make sense to people in the US, who usually want to interrogate me about it. (well, that’s a complaint for another time!)
I was hesitant to use this one for a while because it just seemed so weird to me, even though it apparently communicated the necessary information to the chef. (What my friend said at the time was, we need to leave out all of the fish and katsuo flakes and katsuo broth, because my friend is bad at eating fish.) I was getting ready to use it, though, in an ochazuke restaurant in Landmark Tower (Yokohama) with a friend from my Japanese language school. I told her about it before the waitress came. “What?” she said. “That’s insane. I’ve never heard that.” Well, we tested it out.
Guess what – it worked! The waitress didn’t bat an eye (unlike the usual reaction I get to “please leave out the fish because I don’t eat fish”) and I got my ochazuke with yuzu broth instead of dashi, and with no little clear fish on the side (for your reference, they’re called “jako” じゃこ).
So, try out this phrase sometime when you want to make sure no katsuo flakes come on top of your hiya yakko or daikon salad!
Filed under: tips
This is going to be a quick one. Want to eat okonomiyaki with your friends but don’t want those damn dried shrimp in your pancake? Eat eggs but just don’t want the fish? Here’s the secret.
Say to the waiter/waitress: sakura-ebi nuki de さくらエビぬきで
I know I’ve said before that “special requests are not often honored in Japan,” but this is one that I’ve never had a problem with. On top of that, it’s a great example of the need for extreme specificity when you’re requesting anything. “No fish” won’t cut it. Neither will “no shrimp (ebi).” I asked for okonomiyaki with ebi nuki de, and even chiisai ebi nuki de and both times I was left picking tons of tiny dried pink shrimp out of my batter. Finally I asked a native speaker what those little ebi are called, and she said, “oh, SAKURA ebi.” And it’s worked every time since then.
Good luck! Enjoy your okonomiyaki for me since I’m trying to stay away from the eggs and mayo (but miss that delicious brown ソース on those pancakes!).
By the way, some veggie varieties of okonomiyaki that I’ve seen and eaten are: veggie (yasai やさい／野菜), corn (corn コーン), ginger (it comes out BRIGHT PINK!) (shoga しょうが／生姜). Watch out for “pizza” and “cheese” because every time I’ve seen these they come full of meat! Although I’m sure they would leave it out if you asked oniku nuki de – okonomiyaki places (especially the cheaper ones) are some of the more accomodating establishments I’ve been to.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: about, introduction, philosophy, vegan, vegetarian
Why not?
The short version of this is, if it is vegan, it is also vegetarian. The reverse isn’t true. Not every post here will be about vegan food; sometimes I will post tips for vegetarians or those who want to avoid eating pieces of meat but don’t care so much about flavoring or extract.
My thinking is that it’s also not that hard to find dairy and egg products to introduce back into your diet if you want to, and I’m not even going to go there with fish. I’m going to snap if I am told one more time, “Japan is great for vegetarians because there is so much fish!” So my philosophy with this blog is to try to err on the side of vegan as much as possible, because I think we can agree that no matter what your views, being vegan in Japan is not easy. We need a little extra support sometimes!
If you’re wondering about that star in the veg*an of the blog title, it’s a shorthand for vegan/vegetarian.
