I flew back to Sydney from my visit to Japan to a lot of questions. Many about the food.
"All that uncooked fish" my friends said. "All that rice. All those tiny portions. Carrots carved to look like flowers. And chopsticks." The questions came from left, right and centre, so I raised both hands to quell the chorus. "The food is wonderful" I said, "but let me tell you what really impressed me. The ice cream."
Ah, the ice cream. Any visitor to Japan, with a sweet tooth and a love of frozen desserts, is in for lots (and lots and lots) of sweet surprises. Ice cream, like sushi, is everywhere, with flavours that make offerings in other countries look very limited indeed. It's positively grumpy-making. Why can't we get treats like these?
This was a thought that kept occurring every time I discovered a new flavour - and I soon discovered I'd have to live in Japan for many months before I'd get to taste them all. All the old classics are here, of course. But then the fun starts. Top of the list for me was Green Tea, subtle and delectable. I'd tasted it once before, in Canberra, but this was a custom-made delicacy in a local Japanese restaurant. In Japan, it's ubiquitous; you can buy it in tubs or in cones or in small Haagen Daz cups, which sell for Y250 - about $2.75 (most small portion ice cream in Japan sells for about a dollar).
Haagen Daz is the upmarket brand that fills freezer display shelves in most Japanese convenience stores but there are many other brands and so many flavours, you just stand there in an agony of indecision. Apple Pie (chunks of apple spiked with cinnamon), Chestnut (delicious!), Caramel Custard, Espresso, Custard Pudding, Macadamia Chocolate Cake, Grated Yam, Sesame, Honey and Chocolate, Apple Sherbert, Nikka Whisky, Melon, Royal Milk Tea, Sweet Red Bean (azuki), Asian Pear, French Pear, Black Currant, Pearl (with a rum flavour), Peanut, Mulberry Leaf, Maple, Ponkan Orange, Molasses, Tulip Gelato, Fig, Carrot, Oshima Rose (from Hiroshima Prefecture), Soba Buckwheat, Tiramisu, Armagnac Raisin, and distinctly Japanese flavours like Sake and Wasabi (Wasabi? Yes, it taste great!) and specialty ice creams which come direct from dairy farms. There are regional differences, too. You'll find some flavours in Shikoku, for example, that you won't find in Honshu. And there are also ice creams with bizarre and quite unexpected flavours. Some are worth a try, others you won't want to know about.
Among the unimaginable offerings are Cactus, Chicken Wing (from Nagoya), Soy Sauce, Crab (Kani Aisu - from Hokkaido), Eel, Beef Tongue, Garlic, Grilled Seaweed, Octopus, Oyster, Potato, Shrimp (Sakura Ebi Aisu), Chinese Herb and even Mamushi Viper Snake, which is claimed to have aphrodisiac powers. You won't find these everywhere. Some are local specialties, confined to an area or a town. And mostly they'll be labeled in Japanese. But if you're adventurous, a "try-anything-once" visitor in search of the difference that is Japan, ask around.
Eating in the street, like blowing your nose, is not considered very polite in Japan, so what I usually did when I was in an ice cream mood was find a chair close by the store and watch the world pass by as I enjoyed some newly discovered taste. Incidentally, there are more than 40,000 convenience stores in Japan; Seven Eleven, Lawson and Family Mart are the ones you'll see on every other street corner and they're open 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. Along with ice cream, they offer the visitor many other snack products, like sandwiches, bread, rice crackers, chips, lunch boxes, instant noodles, salads and a range of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks.
So that's what I told my questioning friends about food in Japan. Of course, I told them about the 18-course dinner I enjoyed in Kyoto, served by sweet young things in pastel kimonos, about the sensational sushi at Mikuni, located at Tokyo's Central Station, about tempura with soba buckwheat noodles in Shikoku and the delicious, cook-it-yourself-in-boiling-water shabu shabu in Osaka. But I also told them about the unexpected delights of ice cream - how the Japanese have taken a Western delicacy and not only made it their own but have made it special - unique in all the world.
For information about Japan, go here.
