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The story
It started with a post about a meal from an Okinawa trip that didn’t suit the poster’s taste, and comments pointing out how salty and sour the food was quickly piled on. On the other hand, some praised soki soba, taco rice, and champuru as “surprisingly good,” splitting opinions right down the middle.
The discussion eventually expanded into comparisons with the food culture of other regions like Osaka and Tokyo.
What people said
I think so too
it's surprisingly decent
so kids probably love it, right?
They had taco rice too, so I'll try that next time
so they boil or grill up offal and flour-based stuff instead
The hotel breakfast's spam musubi was so salty I had to laugh
No way that's true
Tokyo's cramped, the food's bad, and it stinks
Even the tap water tastes bad
Clear water actually means fewer nutrients, you know
That basically means it's a dead sea, doesn't it?
Pairing it with egg is the best combo!
That's way too obviously someone who's never actually tried it
Looks unappetizing
That's expired
Throw it out
Background and Key Points
Okinawa was a fully independent kingdom — the Ryukyu Kingdom — until Japan annexed it in 1879, and it stayed under US military occupation until reversion in 1972, nearly two decades after the mainland. That separate history produced a genuinely distinct cuisine: pork-heavy dishes like rafute and mimiga, Spam (imported via US bases) worked into spam musubi and champuru stir-fries, and soki soba, a wheat-noodle dish with stewed pork ribs that has little in common with soba elsewhere in Japan, which is buckwheat. Champuru itself is an Okinawan word meaning “something mixed,” reflecting the islands’ role as a historic trading hub with China and Southeast Asia rather than a mainland Japanese prefecture with funny food.
The thread’s actual fault line wasn’t “Okinawan food good or bad” in the abstract — it was between specific convenience/hotel items (spam musubi, bento boxes, a “miso soup set meal” described as a trap) versus proper cooked dishes (soki soba, taco rice, champuru), which multiple posters singled out as the good stuff. Nobody was defending the bento; several people who tried the actual restaurant dishes came away won over.
What’s likely to be missed here is that the saltiness complaints aren’t really about “Japanese food” at all — Okinawan cooking developed independently of the refined, dashi-forward flavor profile mainlanders associate with Japanese cuisine, so judging it by that yardstick is comparing two different food traditions. The thread’s detour into mocking Osaka and Tokyo cuisine (“Tonkin”) is standard 5ch regional rivalry noise and has no real bearing on Okinawa’s food itself.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nanademo Jikkyo G) thread “Okinawan Food Is So Bad It’s Shocking.”
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