I didn’t go to Japan thinking that grocery shopping would be easy – in fact I didn’t give it much thought at all!

On my first trip to a Japanese grocery store I found that I could identify the general sections of the store but from there it went downhill. My initial discovery was that very little of the product packaging was labeled in English. This made what would have been a quick and easy task at home quite challenging. My goal was simple; I needed to get something for dinner and to start stocking the empty cupboards in our new home. That shouldn’t take too long right? Well, after about a half hour of wandering up and down the aisles and analyzing the various packages to determine if I could glean their contents I gave up and headed for the fresh produce and meat. I had a lot more success there and actually put some items in my basket.

So what was the end result? I spent about forty five minutes in the store and all I left with was some eggs, pasta, ground beef, garlic and some peppers. My first home cooked meal in Japan was spaghetti! Not really what I was aiming for but then we had to eat something!

Alas, when you can’t read Japanese, grocery shopping is an adventure in trial and error. Here are a few instances that further demonstrate the challenge:

Standing in the baking aisle for I don’t know how long staring at opaque packages (like at home) trying to tell the difference between sugar and salt!

On a future trip I had the same problem with flour and cornstarch. In that instance, I was lucky, one of the packages had a picture of an ear of corn on the front – hooray!

But my worst experience had to be the day, much later in our trip, when I saw some salmon at the fish market. It was a beautiful color of red and looked very fresh so I purchased it to serve to my husband and a friend for dinner that night. I got home, prepared the salmon as I always did, and brought it to the table. I took one bite and thought “This is horrible – it’s too salty!” It turns out that I had purchased salted salmon which is very common in Japan but definitely not what we were expecting. I begged the guys not to eat it, but they did. Our guest even said it was good (now that’s a great dinner guest!). From that day forward I was very cautious whenever I bought salmon and would always point at it and ask “shio?” which translates to salt in Japanese.

Grocery shopping got a lot easier by the end of our stay but I always dreaded when my husband asked “Can you please find me some …?” My response was often a sarcastic giggle as fulfilling his request was not always as easy as it sounded!