Japanese foods that surprise Western visitors

Japanese cuisine is broad and most of it presents no challenge at all to a Western palate. But there’s a category of foods that appear without warning on izakaya menus, at restaurant counters, and on dinner tables in Japanese homes, producing reactions that range from curious interest to immediate refusal. These are the most common ones.

Shirako — the most unexpected texture

Shirako (白子) is the sperm sac of cod, monkfish, or pufferfish. It’s served raw as sashimi or cooked in nabe, tempura, or grilled. The name in Japanese literally means “white child”, which clarifies nothing. What clarifies everything is when someone tells you what it is after you’ve already eaten it.

The texture is creamy, almost like very soft tofu. The flavour is delicate, oceanic, without the strong marine punch of other parts of the fish. Japanese people consider it a winter seasonal delicacy, and at sushi or kaiseki restaurants it tends to be quite expensive.

A family member arrived in Japan ready to try everything. At dinner on the first night, shirako arrived at the izakaya. He ate it without asking. He liked it. Five minutes later, someone explained what it was. The expression on his face was hard to describe but impossible to forget.

If you find it on a menu, it usually appears as 白子 or sometimes as “milt” on English menus. It’s worth trying before you know what it is, if you can manage that.

Horumon — offal on the grill

Horumon (ホルモン) is the umbrella term for beef or pork offal in Japanese cuisine: intestines, stomach, heart, liver, lung. They’re cooked primarily on a grill at yakiniku restaurants or in nabe stews. The origin of the name is disputed — it may come from Osaka dialect (hōru mono, “what gets thrown away”) or from the German word Hormon, which entered Japan through medicine.

The texture varies considerably depending on the cut: thick intestine (shimacho) is chewy and fatty, stomach is firmer, liver is softer. The flavour is intense and animal, without the refinement of more familiar cuts. In Osaka in particular, horumon has a long tradition — there are specialist restaurants that have been serving only this for decades.

For anyone already comfortable with offal — tripe, sweetbreads, black pudding — the step isn’t that large. For someone who has never eaten organ meat, it can be quite a lot.

Umeboshi — the plum that hits hard

Umeboshi (梅干し) is a Japanese plum (botanically closer to an apricot) pickled in salt for several months. It’s small, wrinkled, deep red, and has a flavour that combines extreme acid with extreme salt in proportions a Western palate isn’t prepared for.

It’s eaten with white rice, inside onigiri, in bentō boxes as a colour centrepiece, or alongside green tea. It has antibacterial properties that made it, for centuries, a natural preservative in traditional Japanese cooking.

The problem for anyone who didn’t grow up with it is that the first bite alone — without rice — is jarring. There’s no way to prepare for it. It’s like biting directly into the most intensely cured olive imaginable, multiplied.

When my family visited Japan, the only one who genuinely appreciated the umeboshi was my grandfather. He’s spent most of his life in the countryside, surrounded by strong cheeses, cured meats, and heavily salted olives. He ate it slowly, nodded, and said it made sense. The rest of the family left it on the plate.

The lesson is that umeboshi connects with people who already have experience with intensely flavoured traditional foods. If your culture involves strong pickles, aged hard cheeses, or cured meats with bold flavours, you’ll probably find it interesting. If not, the first time may not go well.

Uni — the sea urchin that’s all or nothing

Uni (雲丹) is the gonads of the sea urchin. Served raw on sushi or as a donburi (rice bowl). Hokkaido is considered to produce the best in the world, and at a good restaurant in peak season a single piece of uni sushi can run ¥3,000–5,000.

The texture is creamy, almost liquid. The flavour is intense, oceanic, with a very specific sweetness that doesn’t resemble anything else. For people who like it, uni is one of the best things to eat in Japan. For those who don’t, the flavour is overpowering and lingers.

One warning: if the uni smells strongly of ammonia or has a very yellow colour, it isn’t fresh. Good uni smells like the sea but doesn’t assault you. If the price on a tourist menu seems very low, it probably isn’t worth it.

How to handle these situations

The most practical approach is to decide your position in advance: either you ask what everything is before eating it, or you don’t ask and try first. The second option is generally more interesting, though it carries its own risks, as the shirako story demonstrates.

What doesn’t work well is asking for a partial explanation, because in Japan waitstaff can be creative with English translations and you may end up with a description that tells you nothing useful.

For a gentler entry point into divisive Japanese food, see our guide to natto, the fermented soybean dish most Japanese people eat for breakfast.

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Related reading

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• Udon and soba: Japan’s essential noodle guide
• The five supermarkets I actually use in Japan (and what each one is for)
• Japanese curry: what it is, types, and where to eat it