Most of what passes for Japanese food in the U.S. is meat in teriyaki sauce and made-in-USA varieties of sushi rolls. For some strange reason, most of the low-cost "Japanese" restaurants in this country are run by Koreans or Chinese.

I am a Japanese-English translator, and when I attend conferences in Japan, one of my priorities (and a priority of the other attendees who live outside the country) is to eat authentic Japanese food, in all its freshness and variety, as much as possible.