Tips for Japan

Japan: food etiquette

• In Japan, never stick your chopsticks upright in your rice.
  Between bites, your chopsticks should be placed together right in front of you, parallel to the edge of the table — and nowhere else, says Mineko Takane Moreno, Japanese cooking instructor and co-author of "Sushi for Dummies." (If there is a chopsticks rest, you use it, putting the tips you've been eating with on the rest.) But sticking them upright in a bowl of rice is even worse: During funerals in Japan, the rice bowl of the deceased is placed before their coffin ... with their chopsticks upright in the rice. So what would she rather see: Someone doing that at a meal, or asking for a fork? Mineko doesn't hesitate. "Asking for a fork," she says.
• By: travelkit.msnbc.msn.com
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