G&T's Japanese food experience...

... or two Germans lost for words while dining out in Japan.

Everyone knows that Japanese culture is one of the most complex and one of the hardest for all Westerners to comprehend, let alone putting it into practise in the correct way. Even if you try hard, you will encounter numerous situation where you wonder "why are they doing this" or "what have I just done wrong".

First of all, Japanese and Western views on how to enjoy a comfortable meal are very different. Sitting down on a nice and soft chair in a restaurant hardly exist in Japan. The best you can get is a pillow on top of their tatami mats, which hardly adds to your comfort. In fact, after travelling through Japan for 3 and a bit weeks, we started to judge places to eat and sleep by the pure existence of chairs. I guess, IKEA (or any other furniture store) has a really hard time to get business here. This is how we had dinner at a traditional Japanese B&B. Obviously we chose the wrong dress code:

Secondly, speaking while eating is still not very common. That's why there are numerous restaurants with automated vending machines. These "quick bite - no speak" restaurants become one of our preferred lunch options. This is the way they work: In front of a restaurant you find a big box with lots of buttons on it like pictured below. These are automated vending machines where you can chose a dish, pay for it and receive a dish voucher. If you are lucky, you can see pictures of what you are going to expect. However, in most cases you are faced with lots of unrecognisable Japanese characters. In a way you can't go wrong as most of the dishes are udon soups (Japanese noodle soup) in different variations. We always enjoyed judging the dish by the price, then pressing a button and hoping for the best. Once you receive a voucher, you present it to the kitchen staff inside and minutes later you receive your dish.

The same system at Japanese beverage vending machines that are literally everywhere. All different drinks are sold through these vending machines including cold AND hot drinks:

Thirdly, bowing in pretty much any occasion is just normal and of course considered very polite. It's quite funny to realise that we automatically started to bow while talking to locals as well. This short video below is a nice example of a Japanese train attendant:

Finally, we found a restaurant in Hiroshima that epitomises Japanese food culture in a nearly bizarre way. It's a nice example of people not really talking to each other as you sit in your own booth and you don't order food by speaking to a waiter but by pressing buttons on a machine. A little curtain in each booth blocks the view to the inside and also never really makes your waiter fully visible to you. Your food gets served through this curtain and as soon as the food is served the curtain gets fully pulled down so you can enjoy your udon soup in privacy. Have a look at the video below. It's bizarre and hilariously funny at the same time:

Of course, everything is followed by a nice Japanese bow behind curtains: