Sea salt and citrus soft-serve ice cream.

You can find soft-serve ice cream everywhere in Japan. It is based on this simple equation: where you find tourists, you find vendors selling soft-serve. Where you find anything at all worth seeing, you find tourists. Every place in Japan boasts something worth seeing. Therefore, soft-serve is everywhere. This is a good thing.

Vanilla, strawberry and matcha are the standards, but the best part about soft-serve in Japan is its use as a vehicle for all manner of seasonal, regional and barely-edible ingredients, meaning that any decent tourist attraction will have its own special flavor. I like to try them all. I look it less as gluttony and more as a hobby, like collecting stamps. Except with nothing to show for it but some torn cone wrappers and a small ice cream belly.

Squid ink soft-serve ice cream.

Many soft-serve flavors I've tried have been both strange and delicious, like houji-cha (roasted green tea), shionami (sea salt), umeboshi, and tomato. Others have been less weird but just as good, like kuri (chestnut), iyokan (a kind of citrus fruit) and sakura (cherry blossom). Only one flavor was bad enough to force me to abandon the cone: ikasumi (squid ink), purchased at a stall near the famous Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo. I remember it tasted almost like chocolate, but there was something wrong beneath the almost-chocolate, a shadowy squid taste lurking below the surface which drove me to abandon ship.

What makes all these flavors so easy to eat is the fact that it is soft-serve (sofuto kuriimu in Japanese) rather than regular ice cream. If I had to maneuver around chunks of frozen tomato, I don't think I'd be as happy as I am eating a cone of something smooth and yielding that tastes faintly of tomatoes. (If you are wondering, this particular soft-serve reminds me of a fresh mozzarella and tomato salad, but sweet, of course.) The cutting-edge of food is all about changing the textures of familiar foods into something more unexpected, but foams and flavored papers are nothing next to Japan's national program of soft-serving everything under the Rising Sun. I'll toast my cone of kinako to that.

When I was around six years old, my family started going to a Japanese restaurant near our house, a place with the type of fare usually found in suburban Japanese restaurants in Southern California: chicken teriyaki, shrimp tempura, yellowtail sushi rolls. What I remember liking best, besides the neat little compartmentalized trays the kids’ meals came in, was the tsukemono, just a few bites of crunchy, salty pickled cabbage that arrived in a little dish before the rest of the meal. I also liked the box of candy given out at the end of the kids’ meal, chewy pieces of unindentified sweetness wrapped in edible rice paper. Once I was brave enough to eat a single orange pearl of salmon roe from my dad’s plate. I thought it was weird.

These were the humble beginnings of my life in Japanese food.

Twenty years later I moved to Japan to teach English at a public school in the solidly suburban town of Ogaki in Gifu Prefecture, proud of my long history of sushi-eating, excited about the prospect of eating real Japanese food -- and completely unprepared for the assault of new flavors, textures and fish parts I was about to encounter. Eight months later, I am obsessed. I wander around the grocery store for an hour, just looking. I daydream about the chestnut ice cream topped with warm pumpkin I ate on a street in Kyoto in early autumn. I can only be persuaded to leave my apartment, some days, by the prospect of a good meal at a new izakaya. And I only want to write about food. I want to tell people about all the incredible things I’ve eaten, want to make them understand why I love the food here as much as I do. Mostly, though, I want to remember. After my two years here is up, I’ll move back to Los Angeles and I know -- despite the fact L.A. has the highest population of Japanese people in the United States, despite the existence of conveyor-belt sushi restaurants and Little Tokyo and Torrance -- there is going to be so much I will miss.

So that is why Delicious Coma is here. To document my two years of eating, while learning about and celebrating what it is, exactly, I’m eating. A couple months ago I had a dream in which I had woken up from an extended coma to find all my friends from the U.S. around me, there to welcome me back to the world. I realized it was obviously a metaphor for my time in Japan, my car-less, responsibility-less, well-paid, low-stress time in Japan. So yes, it’s true I’m living in a coma at the moment. But what a delicious coma it is….