Traveling Ninja Notes: Food in Japan

We are a bit of a foodie couple. Ok, probably quite a foodie couple haha. We enjoy cooking together, trying new restaurants, and having people over so we have an excuse to cook a bunch of food.
It is probably no surprise, then, that one of the best parts of our trip to Japan was the opportunity to get the real deal on known favorites and try lots of new food and drink items.

Vending machines was one of the culinary adventures we thoroughly enjoyed. They are everywhere, usually two or three at a time so if you cannot find what you like in one, move along to the next one (or cross the street, or walk around the corner). We found vending machines with cigarettes, beer, hot and cold tea and coffee, hot soup, soft drinks such as coke and various flavors of fanta, sports drinks including Pocari Sweat and CC Lemon, and fruit flavored waters like peach (delightful), pomegranate and guava. Sometimes vending machines are used for food orders at restaurants, we got to experience this at a tonkatsu restaurant (fried pork cutlets) on our final night in Okinawa. Luckily they had an English menu...otherwise we might have just hit some buttons and hoped for the best :D

Convenience stores were another readily available and convenient option for food and drink. We found they were far easier to find than supermarkets, and just as affordable for the amount of food we needed. You could get eggs, meat like sausages and bacon or sandwich fixings, occasionally fruits and vegetables, bento meals they could heat for you or send home cold for you to heat, and all manner of instant snacks, cup noodles and delightful treats. They also sold ready made sandwiches, hot steamed buns, rice balls stuffed with fish or seaweed or.... was not sure on some of them :) Good ones sold fried chicken or vegetable patties and other miscellaneous things that we sampled but did not always figure out what we were eating.
Drink options included hot tea and coffee, lots of cold beverages, alcohol, as well as boxes of instant or brew tea and coffee and hot chocolate. They were great if we needed a snack on the go, and provided enough options we could pick up breakfast items to save on having to find something before we set out adventuring for the day.

Approx. $2 for a cup of sake :)

All the hot drink options at a convenience
store, the cold options took up a couple of walls!

Dinner was usually the meal we would eat out, and we enjoyed a delightful range of things. Our go-to choice when we were indecisive or too tired to try deciphering menus was to find a noodle shop. But often we would pick a direction and wander until we found something that looked yummy. Japanese restaurants often have pictures in the menu, or plastic molds of the food or both, so if all else failed we could point at what looked delicious!
We only had one funny night where we felt as if our food-ordering skills got a bit subpar. We had spent all day out on an island exploring and were feeling pretty tired so we opted for a Chinese restaurant that was only a block from our apartment. This was of course the one place with minimal photos and no models, but we felt brave anyway. We thought we were ordering a set meal that came with chicken and some miso soup and a salad, so Troway wanted a bit of extra chicken. We thought the "extra" we ordered was an appetizer size of kara-age (Japanese-style fried chicken, which is divine). In reality, we ordered a meal-size one, oops. Never mind we thought, as I was sure that for myself I had order a medium size mabodofu (a Chinese spicy beef and tofu dish), which meant I could help out with the fried chicken. In reality I had order two meals for myself as well, a large order of the mabodofu and a delicious chicken fried rice. We are sure the chef must have thought we were seriously gluttonous foreigners! We gave it a good effort but we definitely could not get through it all.