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The story
A thread on 5ch’s Nandemo Jikkyo (“Anything Goes”) board asked, in essence, whether people from the countryside who claim “Tokyo food is bad” have actually ever been to Tokyo. The poster argued that with its huge population and sheer number of restaurants, Tokyo offers everything from high-end establishments to neighborhood Chinese joints. That drew a swift rebuttal: “The water’s bad, so it’s a lost cause.” The discussion eventually escalated into a citation of a prefecture-by-prefecture tap water ranking, which placed Tokyo at a middling 36th place. Some commenters also pointed out a flaw in the comparison itself: people tend to judge “Tokyo has great food” by high-end restaurants, while judging “the countryside has bad food” by cheap, everyday spots — turning the thread into something more nuanced than a simple Tokyo-vs-countryside spat.
What people said
Everything's here — high-end spots, neighborhood Chinese diners, ramen, sushi, cuisine from every country
And yet people from the countryside: "Tokyo food sucks!"
What about authentic Osaka takoyaki?
Gindaco is from Gunma (not Osaka)
W-well, Wanaka's popular worldwide thanks to Es Con Field… (voice trembling) (Wanaka is a famous Osaka takoyaki chain; Es Con Field is a baseball stadium in Hokkaido)
Even a place with a long line was bad.
Which place did you line up at?
Standing in line at a tourist-trap spot and standing in line at a place like Meat Yazawa (a genuinely well-regarded Tokyo restaurant) are two completely different things.
Tokyo's hand-me-down storefronts (shops that move into a previous tenant's old space as-is) are exactly the kind of places with rotten old plumbing.
Oh really? So even those run-down-looking, long-established restaurants out in the countryside have brand-new pipes putting out clean, delicious water?
Wow, amazing~
Where did Tokyo rank on that list again? If you're from a region that ranked above it, of course the food's going to taste worse to you.
21 Fukushima
22 Hiroshima
23 Tochigi
24 Gunma
25 Mie
26 Wakayama
27 Aichi
28 Kochi
29 Yamaguchi
30 Oita
31 Nara
32 Fukuoka
33 Ehime
34 Kanagawa
35 Kyoto
36 Tokyo
37 Shiga
38 Okayama
39 Ibaraki
40 Saga
41 Hyogo
42 Nagasaki
43 Kagawa
44 Saitama
45 Osaka
46 Chiba
47 Okinawa
Guess it was right after all that I, a countryside guy, thought it tasted bad.
Kyoto — everything was delicious! Like, refined, you know?
Even the rice and miso soup were incredible.
These days the countryside's tap water is terrible too!
"Nagoya food is bad." What comes to mind?
Probably Nagoya specialties like miso katsu or miso nikomi udon, right?
But when it's "Tokyo food is great," suddenly people start talking about how great the high-end French or Chinese food is.
Tokyoites don't realize they use a different standard when trashing the countryside versus glorifying Tokyo.
For what it's worth, you can get high-end French and Chinese food in Nagoya too.
Tokyo = ramen, right?
Well then it's bad. Jiro lol (Ramen Jiro, a famously divisive ramen chain)
Osaka's even worse than Tokyo, and Kyoto's not much different, so I guess it's all bad.
I'm not from Osaka, so I wouldn't know.
So it doesn't sound like Tokyo's actually bad because of the water, then.
Kyoto's tap water isn't bad to begin with.
It's because the base water quality is just different — hardness, everything.
I want you to try the water from my hometown just once.
Are we talking well water?
If it's tap water, it all comes down to the purification systems — and Tokyo's the best at that.
They make drinkable water out of sewage with actual crap mixed in.
And then they go "Tokyo food's nothing special," "Tokyo food sucks," acting like they've figured Tokyo out. That's honestly hilarious.
It's not really that they lack money, more precisely they lack information.
Though I guess in a world where information is money, that might tie back to having no money anyway.
Is there actually any data on that, I wonder?
So Jiro is what comes up as an example of bad Tokyo food?
What you're talking about is standing-eat udon stalls.
Where did anyone say Jiro was good?
Then your Japanese is off.
Do you understand what context means?
Nobody's out there saying Jiro represents Tokyo ramen.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
This kind of “Tokyo vs. the countryside” debate is a 5ch staple, but what caught people’s attention this time was the prefecture-by-prefecture tap water ranking cited in the thread. No source was explicitly named, but surveys of this kind — often published by home appliance makers to promote water purifiers — are frequently cited on social media and are said to reflect regional differences in water sources and disinfection methods. That said, this is not an official government statistic but the result of a single survey, and it’s worth noting that the Tokyo Metropolitan Waterworks Bureau itself promotes its high adoption rate of advanced purification treatment as a key selling point. Some replies in the thread pointed out a double standard in the comparison — judging “Tokyo food is great” by high-end restaurants while judging “the countryside’s food is bad” by cheap, everyday spots — highlighting the kind of goalpost-shifting common in these regional debates. Opinion split over the claim that Tokyo’s “great restaurants” skew toward the expensive end, met with the counterargument that this describes tourist-oriented spots rather than reality — and that particular point was never resolved.
※This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Countryside Resident: “Tokyo Food Sucks!” — Apparently Has Never Been to Tokyo“.
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