Will MIss #350 - natural food dyes

Lunch meat in Japan is its own brand of "scary".
Many foods in Japan have common preservatives and chemicals added to them just like back home, but one thing the Japanese are careful about is food dyes. Unless a food is imported, it's quite rare to find a food that has had its color altered with chemical dyes. Most of the time, natural coloring extracted from carrots, potatoes, annatto, turmeric,

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Won't Miss #333 - necessities that are not available

Disposable heating patches on sale in a plethora of sizes.
This was a hard post to title, but it comes about because of my increasing decrepitude as my age advances and the fact that there are some things which are easy to get back home which are damn near impossible to locate in Japan. For reasons I do not understand, getting a hot water bottle or heating pad is difficult here. A sort of heating

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Won't Miss #306 - carb and calorie bombs

This plain-looking bit of sponge cake is a calorie bomb waiting to explode onto your thighs.
Early on in my time in Japan, most products did not have complete nutritional data on them. In particular, calorie information was not commonly given. These days, you find it on most, but not all foods. Generally, mass-produced food by major companies have such information, but traditional snacks or foods

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Won't Miss #285 - allergy issues

The cold and flu seasons and the allergy seasons are the times when you see the most mask wearing. This picture is from the former, but what the heck.
Before coming to Tokyo, I never had any allergies. I credit this partially to good genetics, but also to having grown up in a rural area with clean air. Living in a city with pollution tends to eventually cause some people to develop allergies. It

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Will Miss #260 - my dentist(s)

Best dentists (and hygienists), ever.
I can't speak to the quality of dental care everywhere in Japan, and I have mentioned before that it is irritating having to get treatment in multiple stages due to the way in which the national health insurance works. However, I have had nothing but the best dental care in Japan. This is in stark contrast to the horrific experiences I had in America with

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Won't Miss #255 - MSG

Jars of "Aji Shio" at a local convenience market. It's the only type of salt on offer.
One of the many mistakes that foreign folks make early on in their stay in Japan is buying salt with MSG or MSG instead of salt to put on their food. Unless you know what it is, they look very similar and are not marked in an appreciably different fashion. In fact, in many convenience stores, they don't sell

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Will Miss #251 - free ambulance service

In odd contrast to the previous post about paying for emergency rescue services, ambulances in Japan are free. If you've fallen and you can't get up, you get a free ride to the hospital. Considering that many people back home in America won't call an ambulance when they need one for fear of the cost, this is a rather refreshing situation. Of course, there is a down side, and that's that some

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Won't Miss #223 - multi-stage dental work

The last time my husband and I went in for a dental check-up and teeth cleaning, he paid in cash and I used the Japanese national health insurance. For him, he got a good chat with the dentist and a full cleaning all at once for about 500 yen (about $5) more than I paid once the deductible was paid. For me, I got a (literally) 10 second glance in my mouth and my cleaning split into two

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Will Miss #222 - a little bit of everything

The Japanese have a belief that healthy eating requires that you eat 30 different foods every day. You don't have to eat a ton of any one food, but the general presentation of food in Japan is one which incorporates variety. In the U.S., unless there is a special occasion, there are usually three parts to a meal, four at most. We have a meat, starch, and vegetable component that are sometimes

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Will Miss #208 - healthy portion sizes

This picture is supposed to be ironic in light of the contents of this post. I thought I'd better make that clear for the humor-impaired.
When I say "healthy", I don't mean "big", but rather the right size for a person to consume and maintain a healthy body weight. Like many foreigners who first arrive in Japan, I thought that the portion sizes were puny for the cost and was critical of them

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