Japanese restaurants are famous for their appealing dish models designed to attract customers.
Want a proof? Take this! Just impossible to resist! 
For reference: this fish is called guji or amadai. Here’s its description in Japanese Wikipedia. And the restaurant was in Kyoto on Nishinotoin Street. Bon apetit!
Yakogai (夜光貝) is a giant sea snail for which Okinawa has always been renown for. They live a nocturnal life on coral reefs and grow up to 2 kg with the shell. At the Makishi market in Naha, you can try the taste of a fresh yakogai.
The main building hosts a seafood market on the ground floor and restaurants on the upper floor. You can choose the shell (still living) which you like, bargain over the price and ask the seller to call for a restaurant owner to take care of the animal.
The yakogai shells are not cheap, they cost around 2500 yen per kg, which means you have to prepare from 1500 to 4000 yen depending on the size.
The restaurant charges 300 yen for serving the shell, but you usually end up ordering side dishes too. In this case it was prepared half as a raw sashimi and the other half was stir-fried (itame).
Finally the taste. Yakogai sashimi has a structure and taste similar to tsubu-kai which means it is crunchier than other types of snails in Japan. The stir-fried part tasted particularly good.
Definitely worth a try if you are into seafood and visit Naha.
If you go to Okinawa from Honshu, chances are you will arrive just for lunch, like I did. There seems to be no better place to get introduced to local cuisine than Makishi market in Naha, just 20 minutes from the airport.
Feeling dizzy with all those glittering colors I chose something different for my first lunch.
When Japanese maple turns red shopkeepers in tourist destinations prepare “momiji tempura” – maple leaves deep-fried in dough.
Unlike real tempura which extracts the taste of food, in “momiji tempura” the leaf has no taste and lends only the shape to the final product. Taste depends on the dough and differs depending on a place, but basically is similar to many crispy snacks that go well with a drink.
But don’t count on finding this snack everywhere. I have seen them being prepared in destinations famous for maple leaves viewing, but those a little bit on the countryside with some nostalgic feeling to them. Like Takao (高雄) in Kyoto or Mino (箕面) in Osaka.
So you heard Kobe beef is delicious but expensive? Here’s a venue in Kobe that will overturn both stereotypes serve you a very good burger.
Ok, 12 USD for a beef sandwich is not cheap, but still for Kobe beef one zero is missing, I guess.
Edit: And I was wrong with my sarcasm! The Kobe beefsteak burger served there is really good. Quite some time ago it was served in two pieces in a folding box, that you had to fold and clap to combine the pieces, but now it is served in a paper tissue. It looks like this:
This is how you prepare rice cakes in Nara. You take the rice and beat it until it gets green!
Japanese rice cake made from glutinous rice is called mochi (餅). It requires quite laborious process to produce a smooth mass. Most cakes sold nowadays are machine-made, but beating the rice is still a popular outdoor event in Japan in winter.
A special kind of rice is first boiled then put into a wooden mortar and pounded with wooden mallets.
Nakatanido (中谷堂)—a shop in Nara—offers not only fresh pastry, but also a performance when preparing it. The rice mass is pounded manually (at least in the last stage) in a high-speed show that the shop owners became famous for.
The rice cake itself is not sweet, however filled with anko sweet bean paste it becomes a confectionery called daifuku mochi (大福餅). You can read more about it in a Wikipedia article.
The green color comes from yomogi grass. The rice mass is put into a machine that forms the cakes and injects sweet bean paste. Then the cakes are wrapped in kinako soybean flour.
You can visit the shop online at Nakatani-do (unfortunately all in Japanese), but it’s better to come in person and taste their yomogi mochi. One piece costs 130 yen and you can buy it almost immediately as it was prepared.
