[Nyororin]

Originally Posted by essex

yeah, thankfully i brought a ton of toothpaste too.

A note, more to MMM than you - in the past year or two, I have seen more and more toothpastes adding fluoride. Now it`s harder to find one without than with - so fluoride toothpaste is no longer one of the "virtually impossible" items it used to be. Even the weird salt and herb stuff grandmother-in-law uses now has fluoride.

there are a couple of local chains i've seen, but they tend to be super expensive and make nonpizza.

If you avoid Aoki`s and Pizza-La, you can usually find fairly decent pizza. Really good pizza takes some more looking around. I have never had Dominos in Japan but hear they are pretty close to the same as the US if you order one with the toppings you want. Pizza Hut in Japan is also pretty close to what it is in the US. It just depends on the toppings. I am almost tempted to say that if you ordered an Aoki or Pizza-la pizza with normal toppings (no mayonnaise, no corn, etc) that you could probably get something tolerable, but I kind of doubt that.

I find it`s a lot easier to get Italian style pizza in Japan than US style. Tons of restaurants have stone ovens and will make a fairly good Italian pizza - but not many delivery places. The refrigerated pizzas sold are also quite good if you add a little extra cheese and bake them.

well, i'm not attached to processed foods. an example is that pancake mix isn't too hard to find or that expensive... syrup, on the other hand, comes in small bottles and it's INSANELY expensive. so unless i can find some cheap syrup or non-"pure maple" type syrup, pancakes are out of the question.

Pancake mix is a processed food. It`s a prepackaged mix. As is the cheese powder for mac and cheese. A lot of things you don`t really think of as processed, in fact are.

even if i were to make the curry paste from scratch, some of the ingredients aren't something i've been able to find.

This is actually a lot easier than you would think. The ingredients are easily available, as are ready to go spice mixes. One of my favorite spice mixes is sold at Muji, which is pretty much everywhere.

i was also thinking of trying to track down some mexican ingredients, but i can't find tortillas (thankfully i brought a boatload of cumin with me from the states).

Mexican food isn`t big in Japan, so tortillas are pretty much limited to specialty shops. I would check out Kaldi`s - they tend to stock that sort of thing and have shops over most of the country. Looks like they have a couple near you. (Which reminds me, I need to head there in the next couple days. The local one has some great Thai curry soup on sale for 88 yen a pack. Bought one just to try it and it was almost as good as made from scratch stuff.)

I would say that to add variety to your meals, you should really just learn to cook some different things. Spices are really not hard to come by in Japan, nor are raw ingredients. It`s just knowing how to put them together to make something different.