In Japan, you're never far from a great meal. Restaurants often specialize in just one dish and pay close attention to every stage, from sourcing local ingredients to assembling the dish attractively.
And as you'll quickly discover, Japanese cuisine has great regional variations – a point of pride among its people.
Sushi
The signature dish of Tokyo – nigiri-zushi – is the style of sushi most popular around the world today: those bite-sized slivers of seafood hand-pressed onto pedestals of rice.
Spend a little coin at high-end restaurants or grab a cheaper option at a kaiten-zushi where ready-made plates of sushi are sent around on a conveyor belt.
A few sushi etiquette notes: sometimes (and often at higher-end places) the chef has already seasoned the sushi and thus it does not go in soy sauce (staff will note this).
Also, it's totally fine to eat it with your hands. The pickled ginger (called gari) served with sushi is to cleanse your palate between pieces.
Ramen
Ramen originated in China, but its popularity in Japan is epic. If a town has only one restaurant, odds are it's a ramen shop.
Your basic ramen is a big bowl of crinkly egg noodles in broth, served with toppings such as chāshū (sliced roast pork), moyashi (bean sprouts) and menma (fermented bamboo shoots).
The broth can be made from pork or chicken bones or dried seafood; or a combination, falling somewhere on the spectrum between kotteri (thick and fatty) or assari (thin and light).
Japan's top ramen pilgrimage sites are Fukuoka, where the speciality is tonkotsu (pork bone) ramen, and Sapporo, where the specialty is miso ramen.
Shōjin-ryōri
Shōjin-ryōri is a Japanese Buddhist vegetarian cuisine, which specifies no meat, fish, onions or garlic be used; instead you'll be served tofu prepared in more ways than you imagine possible.
Try it in Kōya-san, at one of the mountain monastery's many shukubō (temple lodgings).