Travelers Can Enjoy Japan’s Most Popular Pastime!

TOKYO – The favorite pastime in Japan is not shopping, attending sports events, watching television, sightseeing, soaking in hot spring spa baths, or even patronizing the country’s huge network of “love hotels.” It’s dining out!

There are over 800,000 general eating and drinking establishments in Japan, and if this doesn’t seem like a very large number, one has only to recall that the whole country is only about the size of the American state of Montana, and that some 80 percent of this landmass is uninhabited because it is made up of great mountain chains.

Expressed another way, over 90 percent of Japan’s 126 million people live in a combined area about the size of a single county in Montana.

In Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and other major cities there are numerous three-and-four-block districts that have as many as five hundred restaurants of one kind or another. Single buildings often have from ten to thirty or forty restaurants in their basements and on upper floors.

In addition to these fixed restaurants, at any one time throughout the year there are an additional several hundred thousand portable food stalls on the streets selling such things as baked sweet potatoes, O’den (a kind of stew), yakitori (barbecued chicken on sticks), and okonomi (a kind of seafood pancake quiche).

Then there are several thousand konbini, or convenience markets, that sell ready-made breakfast, lunch and dinner meals, attracting hundreds of thousands of customers daily.

And if you have the idea that it might be difficult for foreign visitors to find familiar restaurants in Japan, there are some 30,000 American and European restaurants, 61,000 Chinese restaurants and 3,200-plus eating places categorized as Oriental restaurants -- not to mention some 4,300 hamburger joints.

Now there is something new that has added a more expansive dimension to dining out in Japan – large food theme parks that seem to be proliferating like, well, like bugs bunny.

While Japan’s conventional theme parks have had some tough years since the early 1990s, not so the new breed of food parks. These new dining courts appeal to people across the board, from nearby office workers and shoppers to families that want to eat out in a fun atmosphere at bargain prices.

Food courts [as opposed to food parks] are old hat in Japan. Almost every major office building in the country has its own food court – as do department stores. But this new phenomenon has broadened the food court theme to the park and village concept.

Interestingly, all of the restaurants in some of the food villages serve only dish – like soba noodles or okonomi.

The best known and most popular of the okonomi theme restaurants is Okonomi Mura, or Okonomi Village, in Hiroshima. The “village” takes up three floors in a high-rise building, and attracts over one million diners a year, including thousands of foreign visitors. The other top nine food theme “villages” and “parks” in the country are:

Raumen Stadium, in Fukuoka (ramen noodles)
Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum, in Yokohama (ramen noodles)
Yokohama Curry Museum, in Yokohama (curry dishes)
Naniwa Kuishinbo Yokocho, in Osaka (variety of Osaka specialties)
Shimizu Sushi Museum, in Shizuoka (sushi from nearby port of Shimizu)
Ramen Yokocho Shichifukujin, in Hiroshima (ramen in Showa era shops)
Ramen Jokamachi, in Kumamoto (“castle city” style ramen)
Ikebukuro Gyoza Stadium, in Tokyo (different styles of deep-fried dumplings)
Jiyugaoka Sweets Forest, in Tokyo (confections to die for)

Foreign visitors cannot say that they have really “done Japan” if they have not sampled at least one or two of the new food villages.

Copyright © 2007 by Boye Lafayette De Mente
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Boye Lafayette De Mente has been involved with Japan, Korea, China and Mexico since the late 1940s as a member of a U.S. intelligence agency, student, journalist, and editor. He is the author of more than 50 books on these countries, including the first books ever on the Japanese way of doing business: Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business, first published in 1959 and still in print, and How to Do Business in Japan, published in 1961.

To see a complete list of his titles [each one linked to Amazon.com’s buy page], go to his personal website: http://www.phoenixbookspublishers.com/.