Vegan Japanese Food
noA Complete Guide
Japanese cuisine makes heavy use of rice, noodles, vegetables, seaweed, soy products, and mushrooms. But as a nation comprised of several large islands in the Pacific, no cuisine is more rooted in seafood than Japan’s. Not only is seafood a primary ingredient in many Japanese dishes, fish-derived seasonings are so widespread as to be almost inescapable. All of this gives Japanese food the distinction of being one of the most plant-based of all cuisines, yet simultaneously one of the least vegan-friendly. In fact, it’s so difficult to reliably order a vegan meal at a typical Japanese restaurant that you probably shouldn’t even make the attempt. In many cases the food comes infuriatingly close to being entirely vegan while still missing the mark.
Fish is easy enough to avoid, but fish-based seasonings are not. That’s mostly because of a seasoning powder called dashi, which is usually made primarily of fish flakes. Dashi shows up everywhere in Japanese cooking. They put it into soups, sushi rice, dipping sauces, dressings, and many other savory dishes. Dashi provides the umami flavor that can’t easily be replicated with other common Japanese ingredients. Of course, there are vegan versions of dashi, but you’re likely only going to find that in vegan restaurants and cookbooks.
Pork is not a traditional part of the Japanese diet, but it has become a popular Japanese food in recent decades thanks to Japan’s proximity to China. It’s commonly put into gyoza dumplings (a Chinese favorite that has become a popular appetizer and bar menu item in Japan), and Japanese vegetable dishes often contain tiny amounts of pork seasoning. A great many Japanese chefs habitually put fish or pork seasoning in all of their dishes.
Japanese Recipes
While obtaining vegan food from Japanese restaurants is tricky to say the least, making vegan Japanese food yourself is easy enough.
You won’t find Japanese-style recipes in most general-interest vegan cookbooks. So if you’re interested in learning to cook Japanese food you should get ahold of a vegan cookbook specifically devoted to the cuisine. There are only a few vegan and vegetarian Japanese cookbooks in print, and the most popular vegan title dates all the way back to 1999: Japanese Cooking: Contemporary & Traditional, by Miyoko Schinner. At just 174 pages it’s relatively short, but Schinner is a superstar chef in the vegan world who covers a lot of ground without wasting words. Her cookbook does a superb job of introducing you to Japanese cooking techniques, and will enable you to prepare authentic versions of many classic dishes. That said, the vegan cookbook market is long overdue for a comprehensive book on the topic featuring extensive full-color food photography and high-end production values.
Vegan Japanese Staples
Getting started cooking Japanese food involves gaining familiarity with the key ingredients. Here are some of the main vegan staples of Japanese cooking.
Miso
Miso is one of the key ingredients of both Japanese and Chinese cooking. It’s a fermented salted soy paste that delivers an a earthy, savory, umami flavor to a variety of soups and broths. When made through traditional means, miso is quite expensive since it ferments for years at a time. There are numerous varieties of miso, from blond to red to rich dark brown. Brown misos are by far the most common. You never want to boil miso or expose it to high heat. It’s usually stirred into broths just before serving.
Tofu
Tofu is as popular in Japan as it is in China, and appears in a wide variety of dishes. Here’s our brief guide to tofu if you want to learn the basics.
Soba and Udon Noodles
These are dried straight noodles packaged like spaghetti. Authentic soba is 100 percent buckwheat, and costs at least quadruple the price of Italian pasta. Cheaper sobas are 90 percent wheat and only 10 percent buckwheat. If you’re going to eat soba, get the good stuff. Udon noodles are 100 percent wheat, are thicker than soba, and resemble a flattened spaghetti noodle.
Both Soba and Udon are traditionally served in a tsuyu broth, which is typically made from soy sauce, ginger, wasabi, and dashi.
You can also use these noodles in a variety of non-traditional ways, such as topping them with peanut sauce, mixing them together with sautéed vegetables, or as the base of a seaweed salad.
Gomacio
One of the the most popular Japanese seasonings, it’s made from roasted black sesame and salt. Gomacio adds a nice texture, saltiness, and a bit of protein. It’s terrific when shaken just before serving onto soups, noodles, or rice dishes.
Since it’s just two ingredients, you can save a lot of money by making gomacio yourself. Even if you rarely serve Japanese food, gomacio is well worth keeping on hand as it’s a wonderful seasoning for almost any dish.
Tamari and Shoyu
In a bottle, these two black liquids are impossible to tell apart, but they’re made very differently.
Tamari is a byproduct of miso-making—it’s the liquid decanted as the soy paste ferments. So tamari has just three ingredients: water, fermented soy, and salt. Owing to its expensive production process, it’s pricey and much sought after.
Shoyu is made from a mixture of mashed soy and meat. It’s usually cheaper than tamari, but still significantly more expensive than mass market soy sauces.
Mushrooms
There is no culture that embraces mushrooms as much as Japan. Any grocery will have five or ten types of mushrooms—and not a single one of those horrible American-style button mushrooms in sight.
Sprouts
The Japanese love of mushrooms is nearly matched by their love for sprouts. Unlike the United States, you won’t find alfalfa or clover sprouts in stores. Every Japanese grocery will feature mung bean sprouts as well as two or three bright-green sprouts, most commonly daikon radish and soy.
Wasabi
Wasabi is a ridiculously hot radish paste. The wasabi radish is one of the most difficult foods in the world to grow and is right up there with saffron and truffles in terms of being obscenely expensive. Here’s a moving and beautifully filmed seven minute documentary profiling an eighth-generation wasabi farmer in Japan.
Unless you’re dining at an extremely expensive sushi restaurant the “wasabi” you’re being served is almost invariably horseradish. You can buy tubes of this phony wasabi for about a dollar. The fake stuff is still delicious. Squirt a couple centimeters’ worth into a couple tablespoons of tamari, mix it up, and you’ve got a superb dipping sauce for vegan sushi.
Seaweed
Japanese meals frequently include a small side dish of seaweed. Most often it’s either wakame (broad, bright green strands), or hijiki (jet black, thin curly strands). Seaweed is incredibly nutritious and is one of the rare foods that’s rich in iodine.
Rice
Rice is so popular in Japan that rice cookers are found in most kitchens. Sadly, the Japanese eat a lot more white rice than brown. Sushi rice is merely short-grained white rice that’s rinsed thoroughly and cooked with a bit less water than usual. This causes the rice to bind up together, which makes it perfect for nori rolls. It’s also possible to prepare short-grain brown rice this way. The rice won’t stick together was well as if it were white, but your nori rolls will be much more healthful.
Pickled Ginger
Thinly-sliced pickled ginger is often served alongside sushi. It’ll clear the palette between pieces of vegan nori. It’s my unshakable belief that vegan nori rolls, pickled ginger, and Asahi Prime Rich beer constitute the holy trinity of Japanese cuisine.
Umeboshi
The idea of eating a dried salted pickled plum might sound off-putting, but it’s well worth trying since it’s one of the signature meal accompaniments of Japanese cuisine. You can also eat fresh (not dried) plums called umezuke, which are prepared the same way. Both umeboshi and umezuke plums are thought to promote better digestion and enhance longevity.
Maybe the best way to experience umeboshi is to serve it like the mango pickle garnish that’s beloved in Indian cuisine. That is, finely chop a couple umeboshi up (removing and discarding the pits!) and serve it a little alongside your favorite rice dish. Both umeboshi and mango pickle are sour, salted fruits with that pack a big hit of umami.
Popular Vegan Japanese Dishes
Here are some of the most common dishes in Japan that are either always vegan or easy to prepare that way:
Edamame
Edamame (pronounced Ehdah-mah-may, with the accent on the first syllable) is the Japanese word for soybeans. It’s probably the most popular side-dish or appetizer in Japan. Nearly every bar in the country offers edamame. Just like English peas, soybeans grow in an inedible pod, each typically containing three to five beans. A soybean is two or three times bigger than an English pea. Because soybeans contain some fat, they’ve got a richer, deeper flavor than peas. In restaurants, soybeans are sometimes steamed and served in the pod, which you’d pop open like peanuts in the shell. Other times the pod is removed and they’re served in a small dish, alongside dipping sauce, and eaten with chopsticks.
Seasoned Cucumber
Seasoned cucumber runs neck-and-neck with edamame as Japan’s most popular appetizer or bar food. And like edamame, it’s one of the few items you can get while eating out that’s all but guaranteed to be vegan. This dish is always made fresh. The chef cuts a piece of cucumber into strips, roughs up the skin so it’ll absorb the seasoning, and then adds tamari and sesame oil. That’s all there is to it. It’s a cheap and easy appetizer or beer accompaniment that’s remarkably healthy.
Ramen
Ramen is to modern-day Japan what hamburgers were to 1970s America. You’d be hard-pressed to find a cheap or mid-priced lunch spot in Japan that doesn’t offer steaming bowls of ramen.
Traditional ramen caught on because it’s satisfying, filling, and made from the cheapest ingredients: fried noodles, meat stock, a few vegetables, and lots of salt. It has become a ubiquitous food for impoverished American college students because it’s filling, can be prepared in minutes, and you can find three cups for a dollar in many discount stores.
But ramen doesn’t have to be cheap and made from inferior ingredients. It can be both nutritious and gourmet. The fried noodles can be upgraded to whole grain, and a quality vegetable broth can be used in place of scary dehydrated meat powder. Any vegetarian Japanese cookbook will feature at least one vegan ramen recipe.
Sweet Potato
One of the most popular vegetables in Japan, sweet potatoes make a perfect side dish. They’re typically baked whole at relatively low heat for about an hour, then peeled prior to serving. They are a terrific accompaniment to rice, and are loaded with beta carotene and other nutrients.
Nori Rolls
Sushi is one of the fussiest cuisines imaginable, and as the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi memorably recounts, novice Japanese chefs spend years apprenticing to sushi masters. But the simplest sushi dish, the nori roll, is something anyone can master in minutes. You simply put a sheet of nori on a sushi mat, spread on some sushi rice, put a line of chopped vegetables running across the center of the sheet, and then use the mat to roll the thing up (sealing things up by moistening where the two ends of nori join together). Once you’ve got your roll, you use a serrated knife to slice off pieces about two centimeters wide. The most common vegan fillings include avocado, cucumber, roasted pumpkin, and pickled radish.
You can buy vegan sushi at most natural food stores. Any sushi restaurant will be happy to make it for you as well (although their rice may be seasoned with dashi.) The trouble with vegan sushi sold by non-vegan restaurants is it’s almost invariably overpriced. Almost no food is cheaper to make than vegan sushi but restaurants generally charge nearly the same price that they do for sushi made with expensive cuts of fish.
Nato (Rhymes with Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto)
Fermented chopped soybeans with a little tamari or shoyu mixed in. These are sold in every Japanese grocery. The seasoning packs of pre-made nato may contain fish ingredients, but vegan tamari or shoyu can be used instead. The nato itself is always vegan.
Mochi
Vegan Japanese meals may be tough to find, but desserts couldn’t be easier. That’s because the most beloved sweet in Japan is a rice dough and red bean concoction called mochi (pronounced: moehchee, with neither syllable accented). Mochi is nearly always vegan, and most varieties of mochi have a lot less sugar than typical western desserts. Serving sizes are saner too, since the typical piece of mochi can be eaten in one to three bites.
Macrobiotics and Shojin-Ryori
Whether you’re in or outside of Japan, vegan Japanese food is tough to find. So vegan dining enthusiasts will want to know about macrobiotic and shojin-ryori meals.
Macrobiotics is a style of eating invented in the 1930s by George Oshawa and subsequently popularized in the 1960s by Michio Kushi. As both Oshawa and Kushi were Japanese, the sensibilities of macrobiotic cuisine is Japanese as well. While macrobiotic meals usually feature fish, if that’s omitted pretty much everything else is vegan, since macrobiotic principles shun meat, eggs, and dairy products.
One virtue of macrobiotics is that its meals invariably feature brown rice, as opposed to white rice that is the default choice in Japan. Macrobiotic meals are often served in bento boxes, which usually have five or six compartments. A typical vegan macrobiotic meal might include some grilled tofu as an entree, plus sides of sweet potato, hijiki seaweed, pickled vegetables, adzuki beans, and some squash. Eaten once a week, I think it’s one of the healthiest and tastiest change-of-pace lunches you could have.
In addition to macrobiotics, there is one other vegan-friendly style of Japanese cuisine. It was developed by Japan’s Zen Buddhist monks and is called shojin-ryori. The trouble is that, despite the Buddha’s precept against killing, the extent to which Buddhist monks practice vegetarianism and veganism varies widely between sects. But it’s a safe bet that if someone is proclaiming their food to be shojin-ryori, it’s almost certainly vegetarian and very likely vegan. Zen Buddhism may be the most ascetic of the world’s major religions, so it’s no surprise that shojin-ryori food tends to be minimalist and plain by Western standards. But while it can fairly be called bland (since, after all, observant Buddhists eschew strong spices as well as onions and garlic) it can also be some of the most healthful food you’ll ever encounter. shojin-ryori dishes typically favor staples like rice, sweet potatoes, sprouts, beans, steamed vegetables, and broths.
Gourmet all-vegan Japanese restaurants are rare, but there might be one near you. Some well-known ones include: Kajitsu in New York City, Shojin in Los Angeles, Cha-Ya in San Francisco and Berkeley, and Zen Japan in Australia.
Eating Vegan in Japan
Being vegan is incredibly easy in Japan—if you’ve got access to a kitchen. If you don’t, you’re going to be a very hungry vegan. Outside of Tokyo, vegan-friendly restaurants are uncommon. Some large cities in Japan still don’t have a single vegan-friendly restaurant. So if you’re going to Japan, spend the extra money to get a hotel or AirBNB with a kitchen or kitchenette. It’ll make the difference between being happy and well-fed, and having to make due with extremely limited prepared options.
As long as you do your own cooking, you can eat wonderfully. Japan is full of mid-sized supermarkets offering outstanding produce sections. Vegetables are reasonably priced and of superb quality. It’s fair to say that few countries can compare to Japan when it comes to high quality produce at low cost. There are a few exceptions here. Melons of various forms tend to be quite expensive. And mangoes are exorbitant. I’ve seen mangoes in the supermarket costing more than $25 apiece. That’s not a typo. Now granted, they were very nice looking mangoes but at that price a dozen mangoes could buy you airfare to Hawaii where you can often buy them for next to nothing.
As you would expect, tofu is widely available in Japan, and since it’s such a popular food prices are much lower than in non-Asian countries. You can find non-GMO tofu that costs one-third as much as brands in the United States. In addition to the sort of firm tofu you could find in most countries, fresh silken tofu is widely available. Soy milk is sold in every grocery, often in paper quart-sized milk cartons sold right next to cheap cartons of pre-made coffee. When I’m in Japan, my mornings always begin with a glass that’s two-thirds cold coffee and one-third soy milk, with a tablespoon of chia stirred in.
If you love mushrooms, you’ll adore Japan. You’ll find all sorts of wonderful varieties at very low prices. Ditto for sprouts. Fresh seaweed is widely available. You can nearly always find inexpensive fresh hijiki or wakame seaweed in your grocery’s refrigerated section. Many markets also carry vegan nori rolls.
If you can’t read Japanese, the Google Translate app is a godsend. As I mentioned earlier, most Japanese food seems to gratuitously contain tiny amounts of fish or pork. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pointed my phone’s camera at the ingredients list of what appeared to be a Level 5 Vegan dish, and had Google Translate reveal bonito flakes or chopped pork.
As you might expect, Japanese groceries carry a huge assortment of soy sauces, sometimes an entire aisle’s worth. Unfortunately, about half of it contains some sort of fish ingredient, so this is one area where you’ll always want to use your Google Translate app. Kikkoman makes an “ECOCERT” non-GMO soy sauce for the Japanese market that’s excellent, albeit more than twice the price of commodity brands.
You won’t be impressed by the availability of vegan dark chocolate. But apart from that, the snack offerings in Japan are excellent. There are a great many vegan potato chip options that seem like a step up from what you can find in other countries. You can also find excellent rice crackers.
In contrast to China and especially Thailand, Japan’s top breweries know what they’re doing. Get yourself some Asahi Prime Rich Beer. It’s cheap and as good as any US microbrew, and it’s a big step up from Asahi’s silver-canned flagship product, while costing about 40 percent less.
The most common alcoholic beverage in Japan prior to Westernization was sake, which is a wine made from rice rather than grapes. Alcohol content is similar to wine (around 13 percent, which is about as high as alcohol gets before most yeasts are killed off. Distillation is necessary to make beverages higher in alcohol than wine or sake.) Sake is traditionally served heated, but younger Japanese people today now favor drinking it refrigerated.
Japan has lower tariffs on hard liquor than just about any other country, and you can buy excellent bourbon and scotch for less than what you’d pay in the United States or Scotland.
Finally, I must mention one of the
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