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    Guide to Food Buying in Japan
    Guide to Food Buying in Japan
    Guide to Food Buying in Japan
    Ebook210 pages2 hours

    Guide to Food Buying in Japan

    By Carolyn R. Krouse

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    About this ebook

    A Guide for Food Buying in Japan takes the mystery out of shopping for Japanese food as well as household necessities while staying in Japan.

    Part 1: Before You Shop outlines what the shopper will encounter when shopping in Japan including the different kinds of local markets, and the methods of pricing and labeling products, and Japanese Kanji and Kana with Romanization and pronunciation of the Japanese ingredients and common necessities found in Japan.

    Part 2: Food and Household Needs describes different types of products, when and where they may be found, and how they can be incorporated into daily menus and recipes.

    A Guide for Food Buying in Japan includes comprehensive lists in Japanese and English of popular ingredients as well a household items. Basics from milk, eggs, salt, pepper, soba, tempura to laundry detergents, cleaning supplies and personal hygiene products--all indexed for easy reference. This book helps guide the shopper through each process in shopping for food or personal household products in Japan. The items are listed out clearly along with pictures to help identify the products.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTuttle Publishing
    Release dateDec 20, 2011
    ISBN9781462901739
    Guide to Food Buying in Japan

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      Book preview

      Guide to Food Buying in Japan - Carolyn R. Krouse

       PREFACE

      This book has been written with the intention of taking some of the mystery and expense out of shopping for food in Japan. My hope has been to create a handbook small enough to carry to the food market but complete enough to help the person who does not read Japanese to make informed decisions about most food and household purchases.

      Food floors, found usually at the basement level of major department stores, offer opportunities for you to become familiar with the wide variety of foods available. Sales counters there provide taste samples, complete with toothpicks to be used as forks and plastic bags for their disposal. There is also a large selection of pre-cooked take-out foods such as fried fish and chicken, salads, Chinese-style dishes, and many other items. At little expense, then, it is possible to learn to identify products found in local shops and supermarkets, and to explore dishes worth incorporating into daily menus or ordering in restaurants.

      Because markets in Japan carry an astonishing array of products, a comprehensive book on the subject of food buying would be too bulky to carry to the market. As a result, some traditional Japanese foods and some easily found Western foods are not discussed in this book. Readers interested in learning more about traditional foods will find many books on the subject. The Recommended Reading section lists a few of them.

      I am greatly indebted to the many persons who helped in this project, particularly to Harold Krouse, Nobuko Fukuchi, and Linda Sanders, whose kind support and skillful assistance continued throughout the preparation of this book. I would also like to thank Diane Robert, my mother, who taught me by example that the foods of other cultures will reward the person who explores them.

        PART 

      BEFORE YOU SHOP

      Note: The mention of brand names in the text and the appearance of products in the photographs do not constitute endorsements.

      1 • READING AND

           PRONOUNCING JAPANESE

      Some portions of food labels in Japan may be written in the Roman alphabet, called rōmaji in Japanese, but most labels are written in the Japanese writing system, which is composed of Chinese characters, or kanji, and two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana.

      KANJI

      The oldest form of Japanese writing came to Japan from China. An individual Chinese character is called a kanji; this term is also used for characters collectively. What distinguishes kanji from most other writing systems is that the characters represent meaning as well as sound. Each character was originally derived from a picture representing an object or a concept, but over the centuries the characters became much more abstract and abbreviated.

      In Japanese, there are usually several possible pronunciations, or readings, for a given character. For example, the character   can be read kome, mai, or bei. Some readings of a character are used when it appears alone:   alone is read kome and means (uncooked) rice. Other readings are generally used in compound words: mai and bei are found in, for example,   gemmai, brown (unrefined) rice, and   beika, the price of rice. (To complicate matters, the reading kome may be used in certain compounds as well.) Among words containing a given character, the correct reading of that character in each word must be memorized.

      A single character can represent a word of one syllable (  su, vinegar) or several syllables (  sakana, fish). Since kanji represent concepts, one can often guess the meaning of a word if one knows the meaning of the kanji that make it up, even if the pronunciations to be used in the particular case are not known.

      For the person who does not read kanji and does not know whether one character represents a word or a partial word, it is important to know that on food labels, individual words are separated from one another by a diagonal slash, a raised dot, or a space. This method is used in particular in the space for the list of ingredients.

      Note: For each syllable, the hiragana appears on the left, the katakana on the right.

      The following combinations are found in words of foreign origin only: 

      KANA

      Hiragana and katakana, referred to collectively as kana, are symbols that represent the sound of a single syllable (e.g., a, ka, kya). In this respect, kana differ from the letters of the alphabet, each of which generally represents a single sound. Unlike kanji, kana have no meaning in themselves. There are forty-six symbols in each syllabary; these are shown in the upper left section of Table 1 below. As shown in the bottom half of the Table, the symbol written to the upper right of a kana symbol converts" a voiceless consonant to a voiced one (e.g., k to g), and the symbol in the same position converts an h-sound to a p-sound. When the small symbols  , and   are written immediately after a regular-sized symbol (right side of the Table), the two sounds represented by the symbols are blended into a single syllable.

      The form of each kana symbol is much simpler than that of most kanji. Hiragana are rounded and curved, while katakana are angular. With experience, one can easily distinguish between the two syllabaries themselves and between each syllabary and kanji.

      Because kana represent sound only, it is possible to sound out a word written in one of the syllabaries and then refer to a Japanese-English dictionary in which the entry words are romanized. Japanese-English dictionaries in which the entry words are in kana also exist; in fact, these are more common than romanized dictionaries.

      Any word written in kanji can be written out in kana (for example, the words related to rice on page 13 may be written as follows: kome,  gemmai,  beika, ）.However, the kanji and the syllabaries have separate functions.

      Kanji are used to represent nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Hiragana have various functions, but with respect to food labels, this syllabary is used to write words native to the Japanese language for which no kanji exists or for which the kanji is considered outmoded or too difficult. Even when a certain kanji is in current use, however, a food packager may at his discretion use hiragana to represent the word. In other words, different firms, markets, etc., are not always consistent in their use of kanji and hiragana for, say, the generic name of a certain product. A further complication is that a compound word may be written half in hiragana, half in kanji.

      Katakana are used for foreign-derived words, for example,   bitamin, vitamin. Compounds of foreign and Japanese words are written in mixed katakana-kanji (e.g., , pori-bukuro, polybag); combinations of katakana and hiragana are also possible. Finally, katakana may occasionally be used instead of hiragana, often for an emphatic effect. A food label can thus appear with all three elements of the Japanese writing system, as well as an occasional word in the Roman or another alphabet.

      ROMANIZATION AND PRONUNCIATION

      Table 1 also shows the system of romanization (basically the Hepburn system) used throughout this book for the transcription of Japanese words. The following paragraphs discuss the pronunciation and romanization of Japanese, and explain in more detail the kana syllabaries, where appropriate.

      The five vowels of Japanese can be pronounced as follows:

      a as in father (not as in apple)

      i as in machine

      u as in put

      e as in set

      o as in old

      A macron over a vowel indicates that the vowel is to be pronounced with the same sound as an ordinary vowel but is to be held about doubly long (e.g., batā, butter; kyūri, cucumber; bēkon, bacon; budō, grape). For a long i, the vowel is doubled rather than shown with a macron (e.g., serorii, celery). In katakana, a long vowel is represented by a dash - (e.g.,   for batā,  for serorii,  for bēkon). In hiragana, a long a, i, or u is shown by adding the characters  , respectively (e.g.,   for kyūri). A long o is almost always shown by adding  , not, as might be expected,   (e.g.,   for budō).

      Most consonant sounds in Japanese are similar enough to those of English so that the use of English consonant sounds will usually result in one's being understood. G is always pronounced hard, as in give and get. Ts may be difficult to pronounce when it comes at the beginning of words; it sounds like the ts of catsup. The Japanese r should be pronounced like the British-English r in very. When the r comes at the beginning of a word (e.g., roppyaku, 600), a short d-sound can be substituted with a surprising amount of success.

      When two like consonants appear in succession, as in gappi, the date, the consonant sound should be held doubly long. In this example, saying the p-sound quickly (as in the English word happy) would result in an incorrect pronunciation. In kana, the double consonant is symbolized by a small   before the symbol containing the consonant sound to be doubled. For example, gappi could be written   or 

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