There’s no doubt about it: Japanese cuisine is way different than American food. If you have read my previous post then you already know about my dining adventure the first night. This post will recap some of the strange and interesting delicacies I tried throughout the trip.

A common type of restaurant is the hibachi, where you cook the food on the table yourself. We went to several hibachi, and they were all a little different.

[chicken noodle soup]

At this restaurant, the food was pre-prepared, but we still cooked it ourselves at the table. It was basically a huge pot of chicken noodle soup on a single gas burner. We got to add our own spices, which was fun.

[cabbage dinner]

Another restaurant featured a flat grill like I would use to make pancakes at home. But instead of pancakes, we had squid and sausage.

[squid]

We also had several courses of cabbage and full shrimp, which was enough to send a few people back to the hotel feeling a little ill.

[Korean grill]

One other hibachi restaurant we went to featured itself as a Korean grill. This grill was inset into the table and had a mesh top with a fire underneath. We were served a lot of meat with rice, which I liked. By the way, the room that 10 of us were sitting in had two grills in a space of approximately 5′ long by 12′ wide by 4′ tall. Yes, I had to crouch and I couldn’t stand up without bashing my head. In order to serve us, the waitress had to crawl through a low hole.

Some of the other strange food I tried included octopus dumplings, raw duck sushi, aloe vera (think soybean and coconut gelato), and fried cuttlefish.

I did my best to try everything; it’s important to go to Japan with an open min.