Okay. So you know Japanese food generally comes in a bunch of different bowls on a tray to disguise the fact that they’re actually giving you feck all food, right? Now the typical custom is to go back and forth between bowls; it’s generally rude to, say, eat all of the rice, then all of the tofu, and so on. This, like most Japanese cultural quirks, apparently has some cultural significance that a Westerner could never hope to grasp. I, of course, have a different theory.

OK, Japanese rice. It goes with everything. Unless you’re eating noodles or Western food, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a bowl of rice sitting there, waiting for you. Now, most people haven’t actually had Japanese rice, which is wildly different from Chinese, Spanish, whatever. The basic quality of it is that it’s made with so much starch that it’s practically glued together. There’s a fine line between starchy rice and mush, and the Japanese have managed to master walking that line. This makes the rice just as rice-like as any other, but also stick together so it’s easy to pick up with chopsticks (until you hit the end of the bowl, then it starts getting technical).
The other effect of this is that it removes any taste that the rice ever had. Keep in mind that this is boiled rice, not fried rice. Fried rice is served here in a dish called cha-han (literally, “rice with actual flavour”) and it maintains the starchy effect, but actually has flavour due to this mysterious frying. I bet the word “frying” comes from something meaning “to add flavour to horribly bland food”. But anyway. Japanese rice has less taste than distilled water. This is generally negated by other things being added to it, such as in gyudon where the pork actually radiates some flavour into it. Or in sushi, where some flavour is added to make it “special”, although if done wrong it starts to make your stomach feel fairly “special”. But when you’re served it normally, it’s just a bowl of plain rice. And of course, it’s a mortal sin to mix anything in with it, and anyone who does gets an army of samurai descending on them with righteous fury.
Now, I’m usually an advocate of “you can NEVER have enough rice”, but there’s only so many chopstick-fuls of bland that you can take before it starts getting ridiculous. So I believe the Japanese realised this and decided “Hey. How about we make it a cultural tradition that you have to switch between bowls all the time? Then we can still have our staple food but not have to keep shoving it in our faces and pretending we’re enjoying it!”
And thus, the Japanese eating lifestyle was born.

Tink there’s a lot of food there? Think again!