The Travesty of "Japanese Cuisine" (in the USA)

Numerous restaurants and take-out establishments have sprung up in the United States over the last decade, particularly in the south, claiming to offer "Japanese cuisine."  Far too many of these offer an ersatz variety of culinary monstrosities that don't even resemble anything found in Japan.  I have never found a true Japanese person either among the management staff or clientele of such eating establishments.  Once in Boone, NC, I found two good ol' white boys behind the sushi counter making what they called "Spicy Tuna Rolls" with Texas Pete hot sauce!  It's a wonder that these places aren't sued by the Japanese government for misrepresentation of one of the finest cuisines in the world.  

I have found that too many Americans expect, when they go out for "Japanese" food, to be served a goopy concoction of mayonnaise, ketchup, and God-knows-what-else, that has come to be widely known as "shrimp sauce," which they use as salad dressing or, worse, pour over prodigious mounds of fried long-grain rice or carnivorous portions of meat.  They have also come to expect their entrees to include an ample portion of overcooked candied carrots!  For the life of me, I cannot tell you the origin of these "culinary phenomena" (I use the expression lightly).  But I can assure you that in my twenty years of living in Japan, I have never encountered anything vaguely resembling these gastronomical travesties, and I am utterly certain that if you searched high and low from the northern island of Hokkaido to the southern island of Okinawa, you would never find "shrimp sauce" or candied carrots, except perhaps on some American Military base with restaurants claiming to offer "Japanese cuisine."  

The sad thing is that restaurants offering such fare are now proliferating like rabbits because a market has developed for this stuff!  And so the vicious cycle of fake "Japanese cuisine" continues to spiral dizzily out of control.  I can imagine how scandalized a Japanese visitor might be if I took him out for "Japanese cuisine" in North Carolina.  Even more bizarre, I can imagine how dumbfounded one of my fellow North Carolinians who was familiar only with this stuff would be if I took him out to an authentic Japanese restaurant in Japan: "What?!" he'd likely ask, incredulously, "No shrimp sauce?!"

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