The unsung Japanese cuisine

There are many things that are good about living in Japan and the food is definately one of the best. Regardless of whether you are a connoisseur who prefers the more exotic tastes like "sashimi" (raw fish) and natto (if you don't know, you don't want to know) or the type that more prefer something that goes well with a cold beer, there are plenty of good stuff for you to find here.

However, there is a darker side of Japanese cooking as well... On one side you have the Shabu-shabu, sushi, yakitori chicken and other dishes that creates delight wherever they go, on the other side there is a dark side which tell tales of cross-cooking gone terribly wrong and mayonnaise abuse way out of hand...

Tokyo is a big city, my lovely company has the office in one of the busiest parts of Tokyo with all types of food available at my fingertips. I can have real Indian curry one day and good mexican food the next. But in the outskirts, just in the pheripheral vision, there are horrors lurking...

Imagine a thing such as an american style pizza, so far so good, right? However, imagine that the crust no longer is a ordinary crust; it now is a thin layer of bread around a sausage that wraps itself around the pizza... Imagine that the tomato sauce is gone, instead replaced with a tartar sauce... Imagine a topping of smoked salmon and on top of it all large amount of mayonnaise sprayed over... If you're anything like me, you're already breaking out in a cold sweat. If you feel that you cannot take any more, I urge you to stop reading now, because the worst is yet to come... The name of the pizza is... "Gorgeous Salmon"...

This, my friend, is something that can keep me up late at night, huddling in my bed while the wind blows cold outside with sirens somewhere in the distance... What went wrong? Who thought this out? Who buys this? Who eats this?

Thank god they still have normal pizzas here, I'll order one of those instead!