Common Misconceptions About the Japanese, Part One

First, lemme just tell you really quickly, there was a 6.1 earthquake in Tokyo on Saturday. I was on the 7th floor of a building, and let me tell you, that's a heck of a trippy experience. Amazingly, I haven't heard anything about anyone getting hurt, and all the Japanese in the room with me when it hit were extremely blasé.

Also, I feel like I had another essential Japanese experience last night – I went to the club and didn't come home until the trains started running the next morning. It was bananas, I didn't get home until 8am. Now, on to the business of dispelling your feeble misconceptions:

Japanese People are Skinny Because they Eat a Healthy Diet – FALSE!

Despite what you might think, it's not like Japanese people sit around eating Sushi and seaweed all day and basking in their uniformly flawless, healthful diet. Let me give you some examples of what much more typical daily fair is, at least as far as I can tell from what I've seen people eating in Restauraunts. There's way more deep fried stuff and meat in the typical Japanese meal than you might expect, and not that many vegetables.

Ton-Katsu - Very similar to a chicken fried steak, except that it's breaded and fried pork, usually with a little layer of fat just under the breading. Most often served on rice with a dollop of (sometimes greasy, but never spicy) curry sauce. Fried cutlets of various sorts are hugely popular.

Tempura - This is the only Japanese dish where you'll find large pieces of vegetables – and here they're deep-fried, and accompanied by breaded and fried shrimp and fish.

Gyudon - A bowl of rice topped with thinly-sliced cooked beef and onions. Great with shredded pickled radish. A real fat/sodium feast for the arteries.

Noodle Bowls - Japanese eat three kinds of noodles regularly – Soba, Udon, and Ramen. Soba is a thinner buckwheat noodle, Ramen is very narrow (you're probably familiar with it), and Udon (my favorite) is a fat, slippery noodle in a rich sauce. These would actually be closer to healthy, except that it's rarely just noodles. A few popular variations include putting a cake of deep-fried shrimp on top and dropping a raw egg into the broth.

So, if the Japanese are pounding down all this fried meat, why are they, like the French, so uniformly thin? Mostly, I think, because while they may not eat the most healthy food, they eat a lot less of it. Portions here are small – even the home-grown hamburger chains like Mos Burger serve very small burgers.

More misconceptions to be dispelled soon.