As I mentioned earlier, I bought that guidebook for Japanese supermarkets. The address I gave seemed to be correct, and I've ordered several other items from Amazon since that first order. The delivery services in Japan are a lot more customer-friendly than in Germany. If you are not at home for the first delivery attempt, they leave a notification in your mailbox (pretty standard so far). The notification provides you with the parcel's tracking number, the delivery person's cell phone number, and the customer service's phone number. So you can call either the delivery person or the customer service and request a redelivery. The redelivery can even be at the same day, or you can specify any other day, and the time of day you want your parcel delivered. The time of day is divided into six time slots, and the two most interesting time slots are the two latest ones: 6-8 pm and 8-9 pm. If you don't call to schedule the redelivery, they will automatically try to deliver it again on the next day (and maybe even the day after that... but I haven't tried that yet). So, no more annoying trips to the post office, and no more waiting around for half a day because the delivery is scheduled for "the afternoon"!
The only problem is, of course, that it would be advantageous to understand Japanese for making the phone calls. The calls are 100% automated, though, and there is a blog describing the procedure for one of the delivery companies. So it should be doable even without speaking Japanese. But somehow, Skype won't let me call the customer service's number, and I don't have a Japanese phone yet. Luckily, the staff at the International House office are very helpful and offer to either hold parcels for you, or make the rescheduling call.
But I got sidetracked. What I really wanted to write about was the guidebook. It really surpassed all my expectations. It has descriptions of everything you find in a Japanese supermarket, detailed explanations of the labels found on foods, many pictures of product packaging, and cooking instructions. And, of course, it lists the Japanese writing for all the products, including the most common variations for many products (like the different types of oil available).
Now I can finally make informed decisions about what I buy!
For example, I'm now able to find the soy sauce in the entire shelf full of brown-ish sauces. Some of them are regular soy sauce, but there are also low-salt variants. And many of the sauces are derived from soy sauce, but contain some other ingredients, too (they are mostly intended for special purposes, for example as noodle or meat sauces). And, of course, vinegar can have a very dark color, too.
I also know what all the fruits and vegetables are, how they should be cooked (or not), and how they are commonly used in meals.
Oh, and my initial guess was correct: the white stuff I wrote about is indeed tofu! With the cooking instructions and recipe ideas contained in the book, I feel up to trying some of the variants... I'll tell you how it went.
However, there's one area that isn't covered in great detail in the book: sweets! So I'm conducting large-scale experiments in that area... I'll document the progress I'm making in a separate blog post ;-)
