Yakiniku

(PICTURE: Yeah, that's a lot of meat.)

I recently mentioned to someone that I had not eaten much meat in Japan. Between the abundance of fish and tofu, it seems that meat doesn't appear to often on my lunch of dinner plates. Sure there is usually some chicken or pork in soup but that doesn't compare to big hunking slabs of meat which we too often eat in America.

Well, after not eating much meat for a couple of months, I dived into a meat orgy at a Yakiniku restaurant. Yakiniku is the term for Japanese grilled meat. At the restaurant you can order individual plates of the meat you want or pay a little extra and get all-you-can-eat. It wasn't a hard decision. I believe we ate about a dozen or so different cuts/marinades of beef, chicken, pork and squid. Besides the meat there were also sides of vegetables, salads, noodles, rice, garlic, and even ice cream -- with the choice of a topping -- at the end.

I'm not a vegetarian by any means but the next morning I felt like how a life-long vegetarian must feel after taking a bite of a hamburger for the first time in decades. Lets just say I had a tad bit of stomach pain.