One of the cultural differences I have never been able to overcome in all my time in Japan, is that of eating a Japanese style breakfast, ie fish, rice and miso soup. Lunch or dinner, no problem, but not breakfast. This leaves me with two options, go without, or look for toast or cereal or something more agreeable to my stomach.

We often discuss amongst ourselves how Japan’s reputation of being such an expensive country to live, is possibly not so true any more. The two reasons for this are that prices overseas have been steadily increasing, whereas in Japan they have been stagnant for over a decade. The other reason is that if you are eating and living an ex-pat lifestlye (as we suspect the people doing the ratings do), then living is expensive. You still have to pay extra for larger apartments (with gaijin height kitchen benches), steak dinners, and yes, western breakfast cereals!

For example, my preferred Japanese cereals (albeit made by Kelloggs, a US company) are Choko Crispies, and Frosties. A 275gm box of Choko Crispies costs around 450yen. The recommended breakfast serving from Kelloggs Japan is 40grams per day. I dont know what midget scale this is from, but one of these boxes will last me all of about two servings. Which is pretty poor in terms of cost/performance. Although they taste mighty good.

My solution is a common one amongst people here when faced with such cultural differences- ring home and ask for help! Nothing that a huge box of Weetbix sent from home cant fix. Cant beat a Red Cross package!