Homestay in Japan: What do Local Japanese Eat at Home🏠?

Throwback to summer, I had an amazing homestay experience with a family in Tokyo 🇯🇵 One of the reasons I had chosen to stay with a Japanese family whom I’ve never met instead of a hotel was because I had always been so curious about what Japanese actually eat daily.

Prior this homestay experience, I had been told that Japanese people actually eat quite little. At first, I was quite doubtful about that as I’ve seen in Instagram all the time pictures of Japanese home-cook feasts 🥘 and they look super delicious 🤤 so I expected something similar from my host family.

On the first day of our homestay, the mother of the host family served us left over Mac & Cheese 🧀 on top of rice for lunch , a “fusion” of American and Asian cuisine 😂

That night we had Japanese style Chinese dish- Mapo Tofu with small little bowls of salad 🥗

I was quite surprised that they only have one main dish for 4 people. Back at home, we use to have 6-7 big dishes of food for 4 people (my family eats a lot). At last, I have to ask them to heat up some more rice even though I felt very bad because I was still very hungry after dinner.

Another night, we had pasta 🍝 with little but minced pork. I requested a dish of cooked veggies because I wasn’t able to get cooked vegetables for 4 days. However, it turned out that the little bit cabbage on top of the pasta was all the veggie she cooked 😅

Every morning, we eat homemade bread from The fridge and are heated up with the microwave. (There are about 30-40 bread in the fridge 😅)

The small bowls are Japanese pickles & potato salad 🥗 They were absolutely delicious 😋

These are some of what I eat in the Japanese Host Family. Even though I am not very used to the portion of food and the food was not as great as I have expecte, the family was very genuine and took good care of us. They have brought us around Yokohama and went to a couple of museums with us. We also cooked them a few Chinese dishes to thank them for such warm hospitality. ☺️

This is only my experience with a homestay family. The eating habits of each family are always different. I have heard that meat are not available in some host family which lived in some rural areas.