During my stay in Kyoto for university, we had one vegan girl with us. We all thought she would suffer a lot due to everything having fish in it (dashi).

However, she managed really well. She found so many vegan restaurants and dishes that even our teachers were quite surprised. She also knew the most food-related Kanji of us all and thus knew exactly what to look for in stores/restaurants.

So yes, you can totally get by in Japan as a Vegetarian/Vegan, but you have to do a lot of research/looking up beforehand

Kyoto is a uniquely good place for vegetarian food in Japan - there are a lot of Buddhist temples from which the monks etc. follow vegetarian diets, and the traditional Kyoto cuisine is simple vegetable-based meals. Even someone who did the same amount of research might struggle in Hakata or Sapporo.

Yes, Japan is actually not terrible for vegetarians/vegans, especially these days where even Mos Burger has good plant-based options. But you need good language skills and local knowledge. Even most Japanese locals won't know how to help.

For onigiri, there are vegan varieties even at combini like kombu, daikon, or ume-shiso. They don't have a lot of protein though. At a dedicated onigiri place you can often find natto, bean, tofu, or egg onigiri, as well as inari.

A lot of vegan restaurants are just marked as "Japanese restaurant" on Google maps. Many of them don't market or present themselves as vegan. There are especially a lot in Kyoto, which has traditional specialties like yuba and shojin-ryori.

If for any reason you want protein bars, Japan has a decent amount of them in drugstores (although I think North America's are better).

I find this very hard to believe. Japan, and Asia in general, has plenty of vegetarian food. Any guide can point you to restaurant with suitable dishes.

Potato chips would be way down in my list, unless I had a very tight budget... but then I wouldn't be in Japan.

With a guidebook/website you can easily find some restaurants with vegetarian options in cities, or vegan restaurants (although they tend to also serve ultra-healthy low calorie dishes). But in towns you may be out of luck and it can be super frustrating trying to explain that you don't eat fish or dashi which normally has fish in it especially if you don't speak the language well. It's common that a restaurant will not make you anything. Certain areas pretty much only have ryokans as accommodations, you're expected to eat there and they won't always accommodate you.

In the recent few years, "plant-based" options are popular in conbinis and chain restaurants. But half the time they are seasoned with meat extracts. I would say "plenty of options" is stretching it, you really have to put effort in once you get out of a city. I get GP's comment and I've known other people that, if a known vegetarian Japanese option isn't available, stick to pizza, Indian restaurants and a few reliable things from conbinis so they can travel without it being a hassle.

Nepalese restaurants are also all over the country and reliable veg friendly options. They sometimes serve only Indian food but the menus are made to Japanese taste so it's fun to try as something new. They also often stick to the Japanese tradition of offering free rice refills by having free naan refills instead, at least until recent inflation.

Japanese cuisine doesn’t use large amounts of meat but most dishes are prepared with some ingredients of animal origin. Fish stocks are ubiquitous, for example.

I can only imagine that a strict vegan would have a hard time finding suitable food.

On the other hand, a typical omnivore Westerner will usually eat far less meat than usual while in Japan.

> Well one thing that is sort of notable about Japan/Onigiri but left off this blog is that they will all contain fish.

They don't. There are onigiris containing beef or chicken. Also shrimp, except if you count that as fish.

Edit: of course, I reacted to this before reading the next sentence about vegetarianism... There are also rice balls with nothing else than salt, usually called shio-musubi. And as others have pointed out, there's also umeboshi.

There are vegan onigiri, even at 7-11s, if I recall. I think salt, umeboshi, and kombu onigiri are safe. But yes, some surprisingly contain fish sauce which would otherwise be vegan.

(I live in the Boston area and can even find vegan onigiri at the local Japanese market, Maruichi.)

Umeboshi onigiri still contain fish broth ingredients? There’s always the plain salted onigiri too

Btw careful with chips in Japan, most varieties have meat extracts in them

Umeboshi is made from Japanese plums (more like an apricot) salt and purple shiso, nothing else. The salt is ground into the Shiso (Perilla plant) to draw out the liquids and then sprinkled on washed ume (plum) and then left to ferment for weeks. The salty shiso draws out the liquid of the Ume and dies the green plum a dark purple color. Extremely high salt content, but no fish whatsoever.

Make it more complex: Katsuo Umeboshi is one of a famous type of Umeboshi that contains fish taste

A local guide would be invaluable to recommend vegetarians options. Also, be very explicit if eggs or milk are acceptable, because there's very few strict vegetarians in Japan. Even monks and nuns who practice Buddhist vegetarianism consume milk.

IIUC, the original Buddhist teaching is that getting involved in taking life smears your karma, not necessarily that consuming the results will. Confucianism influenced branches tends to take the latter interpretation so that's what a lot of Asian(Japanese or Chinese) guys would say, but hardcore Indian style counterintuitively is that everything already on the platter is lost cause and even wasteful to refuse, given one does not actively seek it or support it.

My highschool teacher had an anecdote on this. There was a small, yearly post-event party which a Buddhist guru is invited to join. One time there were couple chicken wings for each. They feared the guru would have some words on consuming meat, or others next to him has to take the extra, but he saw no problems with it since it was offered and presented to him passively, and just stated he has to reasonably clean the bones and that that isn't a fast process. From next time on the party had become strictly boneless, but not vegetarian.

Eggs and milk are vegetarian, just not vegan.

Eggs or dairy specific abstinence is more associated with variations of vegetarianism than far stricter veganism, for example lacto-vegetarianism.

Umeboshi onigiri reliably does not have fish broth ingredients.

If it makes you feel better many fish don't have a cerebral cortex. Their level of sentience is on par with insects, which is a popular protein suggested by some flavors of vegetarians (or at least was).