How Can You Eat Real Halal Food in Japan?

How can you eat real Halal food in Japan? The answer to the question is important for local Muslims as well as Muslim visitors from other countries.  However, the answer may depend on who you ask.  Even local Muslims don’t seem to offer a unified answer to it.

So, to avoid any biases, we have listed some guidelines you can use to make sure that whatever you eat in Japan is actually Halal.  You may use similar techniques to verify Halal food in other countries as well. However, this article specifically touches upon the Halal food issues in Japan only.

Before we jump into the nitty-gritty details of our recommendations for verifying the authenticity of Halal food you plan to eat in Japan, let me share with you a personal anecdote I encountered at a famous resort town in the country some time ago.

The other day I visited Hakone, in Kanagawa Prefecture, a famous resort town some 100 kilometers away from the Tokyo Metropolitan area.  The purpose of my visit to the area was to conduct a basic survey on how potential Muslim visitors to the area could have dinner, lunch, or any other meal in the city which is popular for its hot springs and natural scenery among locals and foreigners alike.  However, to my dismay, I could not find even a single hotel or restaurant which was offering Halal or even Halal-friendly menus to their customers.

On the riverside, after visiting their city ward office and local tourism agency, I started making calls to various hotels and restaurants in the vicinity to confirm whether they were serving any Halal food dishes. To my total dismay, none of them said ‘yes’.  However, they told me that they could take the pork and/or wine out of the regular menu and thus serve the remaining food to their Muslim visitors. Many of them had been doing the same thing whenever they received a Muslim customer who would insist on having Halal-only food.

When you visit any restaurant in Japan, please be ready for a few surprises about their understanding of what Halal is and what it is not.  Unfortunately, some restaurant employees in the country wrongly think that ham or bacon is not meat. Please tell them clearly that you DO NOT and CAN NOT eat either of them as both of them are made from pork.

So, to make sure that you are going to eat Halal ONLY in Japan, please ask the following questions. Insha Allah, I hope you should be able to get something pretty close to what a Halal dish should be.

• What type of oil do they use? Salad Oil or animal-based oil.
• Do they use any amount of alcohol to prepare the dish you want to eat?
• Do they have any ham or beacon in their dishes?
• Do they have any vegetable which was not prepared by using wine
• Do they use any spices which are extracted from alcohol or pork products?
• Do they consume the same cooking utensils for cooking Halal as well as haram dishes? If yes, then the food will not be Halal no matter what other measures they take to make it Halal-friendly

The answers to these questions will help you make an informed decision on whether you would like to eat or dine at the restaurant in question or go somewhere else for eating something Halal.