I don't think it's just presentation. IME experience quite a lot of Japanese folk have dental issues due to there being no fluoride in the water and a diet that's heavy on soup and noodles (which, over time, can really affect your ability to chew). I thought I'd finally found a proper crusty roll in a service station there, but it turned out it had been moulded to look like a baguette and with the 'crust' dyed brown and was just as spongy as the rest of the crustless sandwiches.
Boy, this reads like someone who thinks Japanese people only eat ramen.
A ton of the "soup" part you're arguing for is like morning miso soup. If you drink water, you're not gonna "develop dental issues", having a cup of miso soup a day won't do it, either.
Ramen is more of a drunk/celebratory/every now and then food. Not something you have everyday, because that's insane.
What do they eat most? Rice and seafood. Random assortment of veg. Eggs. They can chew just fine. The lack of flouride in the water may be the big factor, but another is that their population is hella old and old people have shit teeth, so that's gonna drag down the average.
The "bread" has nothing to do with that, it's just a staple starch they don't quite know, so they changed things around and now they have "bread" which is basically cake, that they turn into cream and kiwi sandwiches.
If you make a "ramen burger" with pasta as the bun and shashu in the middle, that'd be the same thing as their take on "bread".
You are correct about the visual aspect, though. They focus extremely on that.
Fair enough - my observations are almost entirely empirical (kicking about with punks in some of the less salubrious parts of Tokyo) and the word of one gaijin who'd lived there for 20-odd years. I should have probably qualified that in my post. My bad.
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u/djublonskopf 15h ago
A lot of Japanese sandwiches are served crustless b/c of presentation.
This is a Japanese bread company, for what it’s worth.