Tokyo boasts similar food theme parks devoted to ramen, gyōza, ice cream, and desserts. If you don't like takoyaki, you're not entirely out of luck: the stand we visited, Aizuya, also offers radioyaki. You would think radioyaki would mean "takoyaki that grows arms and legs after exposure to nuclear radiation," but no, it replaces the octopus with konnyaku and beef gristle. Konnyaku is a noncaloric gelatin made from the root of a plant closely related to the stinking corpseflower.

Something about Tokyo's exuberant modernism made Iris and me feel like the city existed just to make us happy: Cheer up! the waving maneki-neko cats seemed to whisper. You're in Tokyo!Iris and I came back with a list of Tokyo attractions we never made it to on our first trip, a list about a month long. And we started to drive Laurie insane by breaking into misty-eyed reminiscences about our cherry blossom days in Japan.

Iris and I will eat at a skeezy yakitori joint and enjoy char-grilled chicken parts on a stick. We'll go to an eel restaurant and eat several courses of eel, my favorite fish. Iris's favorite is mackerel, saba no shioyaki, tearing off fatty bits with our chopsticks. We will eat our weight in rice... we'll have breakfast at Tsukiji, the world's largest fish market. And we'll eat plenty of sushi from a conveyor belt.

In Oishinbo: Ramen and Gyōza, Yamaoka and the gang are on an assignment to help a lonely gyōza chef find a new recipe and true love. While investigating, they have lunch at a dumpling restaurant that boasts "100 types of gyōza" on the sign. (Incidentally, a cute thing about Japanese restaurant chains is that they often put the word "chain" in the name, like, "Gyōza Chain Hanasaki.") They eat dumplings with fillings like garlic-miso, flaked salmon, and Chinese roast pork.

Japan isn't meat-crazed in the same way as the USA, but when the Japanese want meat, they want it as marbled as the Parthenon. The most popular topping for ramen is pork belly, streaked with fat, rolled up like pancetta and braised for hours in pork broth until fall-apart tender, then sliced into a perfect round.

I've long been a fan of Hi-Chew, the Japanese fruit chews, for their resilient texture and uncannily accurate fruit flavors: sour cherry, apple, grape, pickled plum, and especially mango, which is closer to the flavor of an actual tropical mango than most imported mangoes.

The oyakodan is delicious. It's perfectly representative of the subtler side of Japanese food, not the guts side. I dipped my spoon through the omelet and pulled up a scrag of egg, a cube of chicken, and a clump of rice. It was one of those predestined combinations, like shrimp and grits, rounded out perfectly by the hint of soy sauce.

We did go to a skeezy yakitori place, however, which is where Iris discovered bonjiri, chicken tail, the fattest, juiciest bit of the chicken, and the best to grill on a stick and brush with sweetened soy sauce.

Buying fish in the supermarket in Japan is a delight, even if the fish is displayed in styrofoam trays, as it is at Life. The most common supermarket fish, mackerel, also happens to be my favorite, and it's sold in a variety of precise quantities. Want three small mackerel fillets? Sure thing. One large? Right over here. Mackerel costs practically nothing and is a snap to cook with the fish grill. I also tried marinated aji (Spanish mackerel) but skipped the salmon.

Yōshoku is the Japanese take on Western foods; much of it was created during the Meiji period (1868-1912), when, after centuries of isolation, Japan began importing goods and ideas from the outside world, including food. Yōshoku dishes such as hambaagu (salisbury steak in brown sauce), curry rice, potato croquettes, and "spaghetti naporitan" are now much-loved comfort food. They're also so unlike the dishes that inspired them that they tend to be really hard for Westerners to appreciate.