The Japanese say that their cuisine is either not liked by foreigners, and then they don't like it so actively that they won't take anything Japanese in their mouths, or, on the contrary, they like it very much, and then they prefer it to everyone else.
Japanese like variety most of all, and that's why in Japanese cities you can find restaurants of Italian, French, German, American, Indian and, of course, all variants of Chinese and Korean cuisine. But abroad, the Japanese quickly begin to yearn for their most simple dishes, which include, first of all, gokhan - white lumpy and loosely cooked rice, cooked without salt, without oil, without additives at all. They eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. However, fresh rice is necessarily accompanied by appetizers of intense taste - sweet and sour, spicy and salty, salty and sweet, and there is no end to their diversity. As in China, in Japan food is divided into basic and additional food. Japanese did not eat bread at all before, but now they eat a lot, mainly in the form of sandwiches, but it is a second-rate food when there is no possibility to eat rice. The modern proverb says that a bad wife in the morning feeds her husband tea about sandwiches, and a good one will not be lazy to get up half an hour early and cook hot rice.
The Japanese eat very little meat, but it still remains a certain luxury for them, consume very little fat. Dairy products in the olden days were not known at all, now eat cheese, butter and yoghurt, but also a little. So it is still possible to provide that the food of Japanese people consists of three components: rice, vegetables and fish.
Vegetables in Japan are all sorts of things, and not only known in Europe, but also about which Europeans have no idea (blossoms of bittern, lotus rhizomes, spicy leaves of the handrail). However, the most important vegetable is radish, which is eaten raw, grated, salted, sour.
There are many species of fish. This includes not only the fish itself, but also other marine products - shellfish of all shapes and sizes, crustaceans from tiny shrimps to giant crabs, trepangs, sea urchins (eat their caviar), even jellyfish (they are dried, then planed and boiled). There are also many forms of cooking vegetables and fish: they are salted, kvassed, dried, dried, dried, marinated, sugary in caramel (fish too), stewed, boiled, floated, fried, baked in dough or batter and processed by many other wise ways. Japanese eat raw, natural and fresh products most often, only dip them in salty sauce or spicy seasoning. This is how they eat not only vegetables, but also fish, shellfish, crayfish, squid and octopus.
Most Japanese soups are made on the basis of decoction from vegetables, fish or dried fish shavings. Soups are made with pieces of leaf and root vegetables, various mushrooms, small mushrooms and other components.
Fruits are mostly eaten fresh. Sweets are made of rice or legume dough, oilseeds, gelatin.
The main drink of the Japanese is, of course, tea. Japanese drink green tea during Japanese meal, and with sandwiches and European confectionery - ordinary red. Japanese sake rice vodka is unstable, about 1-6 degrees of alcohol, and is usually drunk heated. In recent times, beer has become the most popular beverage.
The peculiarity of Japanese cuisine is that even in the most ordinary home meal, not to mention the banquet, a lot of attention is paid to how the set table and each individual dish looks like. Dishes; cups, bowls, bowls, plates, and saucers come in a variety of shapes - round, square, polygonal, and shaped. They are selected so that they would harmoniously contrast in color with the dish served. The dish itself is decorated - sliced, arranged according to certain artistic rules. So a well-decorated Japanese table is a beautiful still life, a real work of art.
What about chrysanthemums? They go for food, but do not play a special aesthetic role. There are several varieties of chrysanthemums that are bred as leafy vegetables for the sake of edible young leaves and small, unremarkable flowers. Having sliced them into slices, they make salad dressed with vinegar or some sour sauce. The salad is a little bit bit bitter, but, in general, delicious.\