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The story
Italian jockey Mirco Demuro’s comment that “Italian food in Japan isn’t tasty” became a hot topic on 5ch. The discussion spread to why Japanese and non-Japanese palates differ, touching on salt levels, MSG (glutamic acid), and differences in ketchup seasoning.
What people said
There's just one thing about eating in Japan that disappoints me: Italian food.
There are tons of restaurants everyone calls "delicious," but to me, none of them are. I guess the "taste" is just different from the real thing back in Italy.
It's a matter of personal taste, so there's no point in me saying I think Japan's version is better.
He's saying Italian food in Japan is seasoned for Japanese tastes and doesn't suit him — so it's pointless for a Japanese person to counter with "well I think it's tastier than the real Italy!"
Pizza and pasta are hugely popular here, and Saizeriya's doing great business too.
I'd guess the opposite — too sweet, if anything.
That's literally what they just said.
There's places like Olive no Oka ("Hill of Olives"), you know.
There's a ton of delivery pizza
Plus pasta sauce sells like crazy too.
Then why do I, a Japanese guy, also think Italian pasta from Italy tastes better?
That's just personal preference too
There's no flavor everyone likes, just one the majority tends to prefer.
Isn't that true everywhere in the world though?
Asians are more sensitive to picking up amino acids as umami, while Europeans are weaker at that and perceive fat as delicious instead
That's why Europeans put in a shocking amount of butter, right?
We're talking about Italy here, and you bring up "drowning in butter"? Come on.
How do you know that's the majority?
Because a business can't survive without selling to the majority
Look at what sells well and you get a pretty good read on a country's preferences.
Insanely cheap
"Everything you eat in Japan is salty and bad"
The thing Japanese people mistake for "tasty" is really just "salt"
Cut the salt on the same dish and Japanese people will suddenly say it's bad
Well yeah, change the salt level and it's basically a different dish.
Nope, wrong.
It's MSG.
Japanese people are addicted to glutamic acid, so without added seasoning it feels bland to them.
Foreigners find Japanese food overpowering because they're not used to MSG.
But live here two years and you'll end up just like the rest of us.
apparently it comes down to memories and past experiences stored in the brain.
Whether the brain judges a dish as tasty or bad depends on what memories you made with that food in the past, and whether they were good ones.
So there's no such thing as objectively "delicious" or "bad" food — it's just electrical signals in the brain.
It's all mental
The body's just responding to the mind, as always.
That's why everything tastes bad to foreigners when they come to Japan —
too much salt, so everything just tastes like salt, and they're sticking their tongues out going "blegh 👅"
Yet the conveyor-belt sushi joints and ramen shops in Shibuya are packed with foreigners…
If you grow up assuming ketchup is supposed to be salty, American ketchup will shock you with how sweet it is.
Yeah, the whole sense of it is just different.
Hasn't Demuro lived in Japan a long time, though?
That's a separate issue.
Italian food in Japan uses different ingredients and different methods, and that's exactly what an Italian means by "not tasty."
It's the same as a Japanese person thinking American California rolls aren't good sushi.
Osakans probably also have some anti-Tokyo spite mixed in there too.
I don't hear much about Osaka's food being great, honestly.
Osaka people can only beat Tokyo on udon and okonomiyaki, so they cling to just that and spin it into their whole food-pride argument.
Background and Key Points
Italian food’s reputation problem in Japan traces back to how it entered the country: pizza and pasta arrived not through direct Italian immigration but through postwar adaptation, filtered first through American influence and then reworked for Japanese ingredients and palates — producing dishes like mentaiko pasta, wafu (Japanese-style) spaghetti, and Neapolitan ketchup-pasta that have no real Italian counterpart. Saizeriya, the dominant Italian chain mentioned in the thread, epitomizes this: cheap, mass-market, and seasoned to Japanese standards rather than imported ones. Demuro, an Italian jockey who has raced in Japan since 2010 and has lived there for over a decade, is speaking as someone with a lifetime baseline of the real thing — which is precisely why long residency didn’t change his verdict, contrary to what poster >>94 assumed.
The thread didn’t split over whether Japanese Italian food tastes different — everyone agreed it does. It split over why: one camp pointed to salt levels, another to sugar (citing Japanese ketchup’s savory-salty profile versus American ketchup’s sweetness), and a third invoked MSG/glutamic-acid sensitivity as an East-Asian trait foreigners haven’t acclimated to. A separate argument broke out over whether “what sells” (Saizeriya’s success, pizza delivery volume) proves the adapted flavor is simply what most people here prefer, or just what’s cheap and available.
What the thread never engages with is that this isn’t unique to Italian food — Japan has a long tradition of “yōshoku,” Western-derived dishes (like doria, hayashi rice, or Napolitan spaghetti itself) that were never meant to replicate a foreign original, they’re domestic inventions with borrowed names. Readers unfamiliar with that history might assume Japanese restaurants are failing to copy Italy accurately, when in many cases they’re not attempting to at all.
※This article is an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Nanademo Jikkyou G) thread “An Italian says: “I have zero appetite for Italian food in Japan” — Japanese reaction: “?!?!?!” *SHUBABABABABABA*“.
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