Japan = Vegan Hell? ビーガンにとって日本は地獄ですか?

everything in Japan has meat in it that
is the first sentence of an essay of sorts I'm gonna read out here written by a guy named Tim Rogers in 2010 I want to give a shout out to a guy named Haruki who has a channel here on YouTube called sustainable vegan it's one of the very few channels on YouTube that I can say has fewer viewers that I do he's talking about veganism in Japanese and in English anything in German these Japanese guy now living in Germany but he makes he makes videos talking about veganism in all three languages and reflecting all three places I found this essay complaining about how awful it is to be vegetarian or vegan in Japan almost at random I mean one of the kind of strange and wonderful things about the Google connected universe is that you search for something you search for six different words and then you stumble on some of this so I ended up finding this essay because it contains the word vegan and a couple of other words that I was searching for at the time and I'm really glad I did find it now I'm coming back to Haruki at sustainable vegan I found his YouTube channel and I wrote to him I sent him an email and he he's actually written an e-book on being vegan in Japan and I bought it I forgot I think $5 is very reasonable price for a low price but I thought to myself before I bought this ebook about how to be vegan in Japan how to cope with being vegan in Japan I thought well I hope this book doesn't just confirm what I already know that it's pretty much a matter of surviving on getting onigiri at 7-eleven and the bad news is about the book I read it and it confirms you'll pretty much surviving on getting onigiri at 7-eleven I've lived in quite a number of different cultures if you click through my videos here on YouTube you will see some reflections on what it's like to be vegetarian or vegan in these different cultures possibly the worst culture of lived in a tree was France although I've lived in different cultures in Asia one of the weird and terrible things about Japan is that it is right next door to Taiwan and Taiwan maybe has the strongest culture for veganism in the world in Taiwan if you go into a 7-eleven there is a serious selection of packaged vegan food frozen food whatever and it is marked as vegan explicitly and there are government guidelines that define veganism at the factory where they make that food the vegan food cannot be on the same conveyor belt as any meat or dairy containing food which is a little bit insane but hey I obviously it's nicer to live in a country where the regulations are too strict rather than a country that where the regulations don't exist in general Taiwan has responded to its I don't know challenges of modernity and its cultural legacy of Buddhism and miscellaneous Chinese traditional religions by really forming a tremendously vibrant vegan subculture now unfortunate I want also has an incredibly vibrant meat-eating majority culture mmm let's not digress too much here and my points is not by the way that you should judge a country but what you should get what you can get at 7-eleven but that is symptomatic 7-eleven is not a good place to get food as a vegan it's not a great place but the fact that you can get Taiwanese vegan food everywhere that in Taiwan you can get a vegan option even at a 7-eleven even at a gas station even at these places reflects the extent to which that whole island that whole culture in that country has really accommodated vegans as a significant voice and I have met and spoken with vegan guys in Taiwan who were in the army and they told me that you can be vegan in the Taiwanese army which I still find hard to believe but they say it so I gotta believe it alright Japan is right next door to Taiwan guess what Japan is respond to modernity and the legacy effects of Buddhists and animus Tara touch in a totally different way and Japan is too old reports one of the worst and one of the hardest places to be vegan anywhere in the world I'm going to provide a link to the original essay by Tim Rodgers I have exerted the text that I'm interested in here I'm not reading the whole essay the essay has other complaints about while living in Japan is so hard just fine you can read it all if you want to and also I've omitted some of the digressions that kind of only make sense when you read them on the page and wouldn't make sense to read them out loud so some minor minor revisions of this article everything in Japan has meat in it potato chips pretty much always have beef or pork extract in them I've watched ingredient labels with perverse interest over the years something caught my eye while looking over the white bread ingredient labels one day or two or three years ago about half of the makers of white bread include lard as an ingredient this is a thing that I know happens in white bread in other countries however since phrases like lard ass and tub of lard successfully penetrated the deepest levels of the collective modern english-speaking human consciousness food companies all over the place are avoiding the words of parents on their ingredient labels mini bread makers substitute oils butters or God help us margarine well I can now curiously report that on a recent trip to a supermarket I couldn't find a single loaf of white bread that didn't have lard it so what he says is true here in the old days in a country like Canada bread biscuits like old-fashioned British style cookies like a ginger cookie they all had lard in them you you really have to talk to your grandparents your great-grandparents to remember those days here because that has gone out of style in a huge way but as I've been mentioning the importance of Buddhism in the religious heritage of Japan and Taiwan keep in mind he's not mentioning the other big reason why Lord lard I'm not used to pronouncing the word duh doesn't come up often conversation me the other reason why lard disappeared from those ingredient labels was because of the Jewish minority and the Muslim minority in these countries that did not want to see dead pigs in those ingredient lists so that's another case of a very differently motivated form of minority diet politics changing the world in some small way anyway this guy in Japan couldn't find a single loaf of white bread that did not have lard in it um J pan obviously does not have a history of having Jewish and Muslim minorities trying to campaign to get rid of those ingredients in Taiwan and elsewhere I mean bread itself is still kind of regarded as a foreign food and look obviously you can have a digression here about bread made with rice flour and different kinds of local buns but like you know they do regard a loaf of bread basically as a European invention and import and yeah depressingly in taiwan too most of the bread there had had butter had milk powder in it they want this fatty filmy quality to be in their bread although in both Europe and North America now we don't really do that anymore that that went out of style like 50 years ago plus all right back to this essay here I could rattle off curious examples for ours like how unquote Indian curry powder I liked happily advertised now with beef extract on the cat the Japanese variety of Bakos bacon flavored bits which are completely vegan in America list pork extract as the top ingredient in Japan even though according to a foreign friend brave enough to eat them regularly they smell and taste exactly like American Bakos coincidentally a meat-free soup stock once changed they're labeled who proudly advertised now tastes more like crab and had never tasted anything like crab I checked the ingredients it now definitely had crab in it you can see where this is going the absolute best example however involves a riemann shop it used to go to because they offered a vegetarian friendly ramen servicing riemann ramen llama and lo me my I mean this is not really an English word and it's not really a Jeff he's worked in this context either ramen type of noodles the vegetarian raymond was unique and delicious it was also distinctively lacking in iridescent grease bubbles floating on the surface of the soup I have a lot of fun lately making up the weirdest fake reasons for not eating meat my favorite one is saying that I don't eat meat because I wouldn't want to ingest an animal weak or dumb enough to enter a life of slavery under another species therefore the only meat I would eat would be that of an animal which a human cannot kill digression obviously this guy just speaks Japanese really well if he can get across this kind of sophisticated joke but hey this explanation recently drew the serious response well if you can't kill the animal then you can't eat it distant gently highlights another problem I have with Japan that people don't get sarcasm or irony anyway this ramen shop caught the attention of some Society of Japanese vegetarians they have a little magazine which in Japan means that it's a huge glossy printed on cardboard affair costs around $20 and comes with a free six hour DVD they asked to have their little logo put on the menu standing outside the ramen shops so the few vegetarians would know that this place was safe the vegetarian people featured the ramen shop in their magazine that's how I found out about it not long after this happened the chain coincidentally took off people really loved their extra pork bone marrow ramen the number of locations multiplied eventually someone higher up in the administration of the parent company was right here in a checklist of things they could do to make more money rather than humbly ask the vegetarian magazine if it was all right to remove the vegetarian magazines logo they decided to humbly apologize that the recipe a change and the vegetarian ramens broth now included poke pork bone marrow so they would have to stop advertising it as safe for vegetarians this topic applies to me pretty directly so I've researched it on and off over the years I have yet to find a single not high class Chinese restaurant in Tokyo that serves a single vegetarian dish in China however nearly half of everything is vegetarian that's the half I eat so this pause here this is also an interesting thing with vegetarianism and veganism within Asia is regarding it as foreign in this case Japanese people thinking of vegetarianism as something Chinese one that comes from China in Thailand also sadly they really think of vegetarianism as Chinese as a Chinese import in reality Thailand has its own reasonably ancient tradition of vegetarianism that is not surprising because Thailand is a terrible Buddhist country so of course they do Cambodia and Laos also have their own indigenous traditions but it is true that today in Bangkok or any big city in Thailand almost all of the commercialized vegetarian stuff is Chinese in name Chinese in form it's owned and operated by Chinese people and the style of the food is Chinese and there's good reason why somebody growing up in Thailand today would just regard vegetarianism as a foreign idea is something that comes from China and that's a disadvantage in a lot of ways obviously if you think of vegetarian food as an exotic foreign import you're not thinking of it in ethical terms you know you're not engaging with the underlying issues in any meaningful way that you might be right also of course I don't know what part of China he's talking about in some areas of China it's really hard to find vegetarian food in some areas it's easier mmm this kind of regionalism exists even within Taiwan Taiwan is a tiny country but actually one city to the next there are there big differences in China meat is associated with wealth and success a Chinese friend once told me that Chinese restaurants in Japan only serves dishes with meat in them as some kind of subconscious celebration of their finding success in a foreign land once Japanese co-worker insisted on my ordering some food at a company party I was forced to attend pause being forced to attend accompany parties this is one of the many dangers of being an employee in Japan I'd excuse myself the day before the party saying I'd only be able to sit in for half an hour at the most a moving truck was coming to my apartment that very night it was a very real legitimate excuse this guy explained to the waitress in painstaking detail that we needed a salad with no chicken no shrimp and no to Nanette the waiters looked over the little notepad in her hands this salad it'll only have vegetables in it would you like something with substance the man thought for a second bacon okay said the waitress and hurried away a minute later I was going to get up where are you going the guy asked I've got to run I said I've just ordered you a salad he replied the salad came there it was with bacon oh I said I can't eat this it has bacon in it you don't like bacon it's meat no it's not the man was being deadly gravely serious we argued about it in the Politis tones possible for maybe three minutes look man I don't eat meat I know what's meat and what's not meat was my ultimate closing art his closing argument in the Japanese tradition was the same as mine only with one of the words in the first sentence changed look man I do eat meat I know what's meat and what's not me we ended with a little agree to disagree thing we parted ways both knowing that we were right only to this day I kind of have the edge because I actually was right