J Japanese food is one of kind, no other country has food like theirs. Japanese food is known world wide and enjoyed world wide. There are probably many shops around where you live where you can purchase Japanese foods. J Japanese people eat carbohydrates like bread, noodles and pasta. They eat a collection of meat, fish, fruits and vegetables. They also eat famous, traditional dishes such as sushi, tempura and sukiyaki in their everyday diet.

In Japan the word for meal is gohan ( ごはん ), but this word actually means steamed rice but since rice is such an important food, gohan means all sorts of meals. When at the table and before a meal Japanese people say itadakimasu （いただきます ） to be polite. Itadakimasu means “I receive this food”, which shows thanks to whoever worked hard to make this meal. Once finished their meal, Japanese people say gochiso sama deshita （ごちい そさま） which means in English “It was quite a feast. ”

T The people of Japan had started drinking tea since the 8 th century. The tea leaves were imported from China at first and the Zen priest had studied there in China brought back with him tea seeds and utensils. The drink then became widely popular, especially amongst Buddhists Priests. Tea was then known as a medicine that could cure all kinds of sicknesses and diseases. B Between the middle of the 15 th century was where tea parties with a large amount of people attending became wildly popular where guests would bring delicious plates of food and some fabulous utensils. During the same time in Kyoto and Osaka, Japanese townspeople started to host their own but smaller tea ceremonies. This then started to catch on and became a popular activity amongst wealthy Japanese retailers. J Japanese people have a special way of preparing their tea, which is called either sado （さど） or chado （ちあど. This ceremony is a highly structured one, and it is the preparation of making green tea. Sado or chado means “way of tea” and was perfected in the 16 th by a tea master. Many people take lesson to learn how to do these ceremonies.

Japanese lunch boxes are called bento （べんと） and the word bento was meant to have originated from the 16 th century. It came from a man named Oda Nobunaga who was a military commander and at his castle would feed large quantities of people easy meals. The word bento was used to explain this way of handing out food to each person which Oda did. In a typical bento there is rice and a number of side dishes such as vegetables, meat, fish, eggs etc. A common side dish would be some form of a cooked egg such as tamagoyaki （たまご やき ). Some other well-known side dishes would include grilled fish, fried meat and fish cakes. For desert there might be some sort of fruit like an apple. It is considered to keep rice from going bad and yucky; a pickled Japanese apricot or umeboshi is placed on or inside a rice bed. Bento is made in many different ways and used to create pictures and animals like the pictures on the left. People use them when they can’t make it home in time to have a proper meal.

Sushi is Japan’s most recognised cultural food, it is a popular dish to Japanese people and enjoyed by many others world wide. Sushi contains slices of either raw or cooked delicious fish. Many different types of fish are used to make the different varieties of sushi. Sushi is an incredibly delicious Japanese food. Sushi is also extremely healthy and nutritional which is why many people eat it because it is both tasty and healthy. There are many different kinds of sushi, here are some examples: there is Futomaki, Hana-zushi, Inari, Oshi-zushi and Chirashi-zushi. All these sushi’s are different, both in the way they look and in the way they taste. Either way all these different sushi's look and taste delicious.