A Side Quest from Work Exchange: Cooking with Japanese People, for Japanese People

I went back to the community café at Mineyama Station, "まちまち案内所 (Machimachi Information Center)" (I wrote about my first visit in the previous post, 〈A Day Trip in Kyotango: Kumihama, Amino and Mineyama〉), for a second time.

Side quest: invited to cook at a lunch diner

A few days later I came back to Machimachi for the second time and met the owner (whose Chinese is amazing) and the man in charge of planning the "一箱本棚オーナー制度" (a shared bookshelf where each person owns one box). We chatted a lot in my broken Japanese and Chinese.

One of the staff invited me to her workshop to make a lunch diner together: braised pork rice, chicken soup, pickled tomatoes and other Taiwanese-style dishes. It was like triggering a side quest. Besides my work exchange in Kumihama, I got to run a restaurant for the first time, and it was very memorable.

This staff member is Shiho-san, who makes tofu for a living, and her workshop is in Iyo. Shiho-san loves Taiwanese food and knows the common ingredients (for Japanese people the signature Taiwanese flavors seem to be star anise / five-spice powder and fried shallots). She's happy to try all kinds of methods, and she's very good at adding or swapping ingredients, making creative but tasty dishes on a traditional base. The lunch diner is hosted by Shiho-san once a month, and usually a few older ladies help with prep and serve out front. This time I helped with recipe suggestions and prep.

What we made

• Braised pork rice: We used astringent persimmon (Mino persimmon) in place of sugar. I've kind of forgotten, but I think the pork was hand-cut. The braised eggs were a last-minute addition and probably didn't soak up much flavor, but at least the pork was braised the night before! Shiho-san added pickled vegetables and fresh greens on top.
• Sesame oil chicken soup: I used a good amount of sesame oil, but in the end the sesame flavor was very mild. We later added daikon, tofu, jujubes, and a few leaves for decoration.
• Pickled tomatoes: Nothing special XD
• Douhua: We used softer nigari tofu to make douhua, and it was really very close to the real thing (I think it could sell in Taiwan). It wasn't the classic peanut version, but red beans are the easiest and a very common topping! (It was peanut season then, but maybe peanuts in Japan are expensive? Shiho-san mentioned that if she ever gets the chance to visit Taiwan, she'd like to try Taiwanese peanuts.)

On Japanese side dishes and taste

Japanese people don't like or aren't used to eating one flavor all the way through. There always has to be something else to go with it. For example, the braised pork rice got some leafy greens on top. We're used to having greens on the side too, but Taiwan and Japan seem to understand the side dish a little differently. Ours is a dish with its own proper name, like braised napa cabbage or braised bamboo shoots, while theirs seems more decorative, mainly there to change up the texture.

The pickled tomatoes are also a small "箸休め" (chopstick rest) dish, meant to reset your palate after a heavily flavored main, and they seemed to have an even lower status than a side dish (?).

They also don't seem to like very strong, stimulating flavors. For example, the braised pork was made runnier, and it can't be the thick, oily, salty or sweet kind that goes with rice. And sesame oil chicken soup made entirely with rice wine, still with a bit of the alcohol flavor, and with a layer of oil floating on top, is probably hard to get used to.

Afterwards

Later, in May 2026, I did a work exchange with Shiho-san, which became the last work-exchange stay of my working holiday.

Further reading: 〈A Day Trip in Kyotango: Kumihama, Amino and Mineyama〉