It’s hard to believe now, but Japanese cuisine hasn’t always been a worldwide staple. I grew up in Chicago, and in a relatively adventurous food family, and I can’t remember trying Japanese food until I was in my 20’s. And I’m not that old. And sushi? That was pretty much unheard of (and the idea of eating raw fish unthinkable). They had a few sushi restaurants in the big cities on the West Coast and maybe a few in Manhattan, but that was about it.

Now? Japan is second in the world in Michelin-starred restaurants behind only France (which is behind only Japan for comics, so it evens out). Tokyo has more than any city in the world. The website pickyeaterblog.com used a sophisticated model to choose the world’s most popular cuisines by tracking stuff like social media traffic, travel statistics, and number of restaurants in major global cities. In their results Japanese placed second, only narrowly behind Italian (thanks to pizza).

The Japanese themselves have certainly become quite sophisticated foodies, but it wasn’t always that way. Not only is this an island, but one that’s been isolationist for almost all of its history. With the country cut off from the world, not only did the populace have no exposure to non-Japanese food, they were limited by what ingredients they could source. The easiest (though not foolproof) way to tell if a food item is native is whether it has a Kanji name or not, though some things did sneak their way in through China and Korea.

What people today (including the Japanese) think of as the most iconic Japanese dishes are not, in fact, always Japanese in origin. Tonkatsu was brought here by the French. Tempura has its roots in Portugal (the European country – along with Holland – with the longest and richest history of interaction with Japan). The Japanese never ate salmon (including sushi and sashimi) before Europeans brought it here. And ramen, one of Japan’s most popular exports, emigrated here from China (but nevertheless has no kanji).

Contrary to widely-held Western myth, cows and associated food products are not European imports. They’ve been known here since the 2nd Century AD after being introduced from China. But the eating of meat has been discouraged for much of the intervening two millennia, after Emperor Tenmu – a devout Buddhist – issued a decree against the consumption of most domestic animals in 675. This created an “untouchable” caste associated with the butchering of animals and tanning of hides, but some meat consumption always persisted (especially in the mountains of the north). It was indeed the opening of Japan after the Black Ships that saw the eating of meat become widespread at last – both because of cultural influences and more availability of meat products to the common people.

Broadly, food here is grouped into two categories. Washoku is Japanese food, and Youshoku is “foreign”. But there are a lot of fuzzy definitions of that these days, as the Japanese put their spin on foreign cuisines like curry and pizza. Hell, there were no sushi rolls in Japan before foreign tastes exerted their influence. There’s a whole subset of “Japanese Chinese” for example, which is nothing like the various Chinese cuisines I knew before I came here (which may not have been “authentic”, but I did live in the Bay Area, which probably gets as close as anywhere in North America if you’re selective).

One very important aspect of Japan’s food culture is kyoudo ryouri (郷土料理), the regional specialty. Japanese are obsessive about regional identity, something that asserts itself in a myriad of cultural elements (like dialects). Every prefecture, city, and even decent-size town will have local specialties they proudly try to hawk to tourists. Most everyone knows about Osaka and takoyaki or Kobe beef, but those are only the tip of the iceberg. Hokkaido is my personal favorite in this respect, featuring not just the nation’s best produce, dairy, and seafood but Sapporo specialties like soup curry and Sapporo miso ramen.

Ramen certainly represents one of Japan’s biggest food exports, origins aside. From hipsters in San Francisco to shopping malls in Kansas and markets in Hamburg, ramen is now eponymous worldwide. I love it but limit my intake because it’s just hard on the system. Japan’s #1 food export, though, is inarguably sushi (it trailed only pizza in that Picky Eater survey for most popular dish). Unlike ramen sushi is actually pretty healthy if you don’t go nuts on the shoyu and limit intake of fatty fish (mercury). You can get great sushi in any major city in the world now, if you can afford it. The biggest difference being in Japan is that you can get good sushi cheap here, and in the States at least cheap sushi was generally a dismal proposition.

Of course, Japan also possesses a rich and diverse history of distilling and brewing alcoholic beverages. Sake alone could be the subject of many bespoke articles, so ingrained in Japanese history and society is it. There’a also shochu of course, and the 20th Century saw the country venture into whisky and beer. Taketsuru Masakata is regarded as the father of Japan’s whisky industry (I pass by the distillery which bears his name every day on the train). He came from a family important in sake since the 1730s, but went to Scotland to study whisky distillation and would go on to found what is today one of the world’s richest and most revered whisky industries.

For this piece, Nicc asked me to talk about my favorite food and drink moments from any medium, not just anime. And two came to mind immediately for me, both from American film. One is Sideways, where the character played by Paul Giamatti has a bottle of legendary French wine (1961 Cheval Blanc, from Bordeaux) which he obsesses for the entire movie about finding the “perfect moment” to open. The other is Big Night, Stanley Tucci’s film about two Italian-American brothers (played brilliantly by himself and Tony Shaloub) trying to open a restaurant together. The whole film is a celebration of food and cooking, but the moment that most stands out for me is Tucci’s character (the front-of-house brother, not the chef) making an omelette in an extended single take without dialogue.

There are many others I could point to. The mama-san making corn tempura in Still Walking. All of My Dinner With Andre (though it’s not really about the food). Mr. Creosote from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (which also features “The Salmon Mousse”). You have to give a shout-out to Dungeon Meshi just for sheer creativity. “Eat a Duck I Must?” from Shinryaku Ika Musume. The Ramen Jiro episodes of both Space Dandy and BokuYaba. Food is life, so they say – it’s both sustenance and pleasure, a necessity and a luxury. As such it’s hardly surprising that it’s such a big part of not just Japanese fiction, but every medium in every language.