Being Vegetarian in Tokyo
Being vegetarian in Japan can be quite a challenge for a visitor to these shores. It isn’t impossible but it does take a lot of effort.
I have been here since 1999, and most of the time I have succeeded in not eating meat. Most of the time! I ate curry bread for lunch two or three times a week for about a year before someone told me it contained mince. I felt really silly because I hadn’t realised. But the first time I bought that for lunch I asked them if it had meat in it. No meat was the answer. Mince isn’t meat.
This is largely a result of the writing systems employed in Japan. Meat is seen as being quite different from meat products such as ham or bacon. This means that if you say, “No meat please” you can end up with salami on your pizza - and the Japanese person who took your order is quite justified in serving you the salami!
Meat, fish, egg, pig, dog, etc., are written in kanji - chinese characters while food like mince, salami, ham, bacon are written in katakana (the alphabet used to write words of foreign origin in Japan). So conceptually they are quite different.
It pays to learn the Chinese characters for meat, fish, pig (as they combine to make most of the types of animals or fish you are likely to be offered) as well as the katakana words from ham, bacon etc. Impossible if you are here for the short term, but indespensible if you are in for the long haul.
If you learn to recognize a few words you can survive quite well here. All foods are clearly labelled in Japanese as to their contents. However you will be surprised to find food as innocuous as apple pie to quite often contain pork. Most brands of mayonnaise are also highly suspicious, although the cheapest one at our supermarket is quite safe.
Before I came to Japan I had the idea that apart from the fish Japan would be a reasonably vegetarian friendly place. One reason I have heard for this is that following Japan’s defeat in the second world war there was a large push to get people to eat more meat (particularly red meat) and dairy products. The aim of this of course was to make the Japanese people bigger and stronger. The effects of this are quite noticeable if you visit a school in Japan. The kids at intermediate and high school level are much bigger and taller than their grandparents!
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