Nihon ryōri, or Japanese cuisine, is more than just fish and rice. A pickle vendor at a fish market in Tokyo sold just about every sort of tsukemono, from cucumber to lotus root to radish to turnip to tomato to myoga. If it was a vegetable and you could pickle it, it’d be here.

While it’s easy enough to locate pickled cucumbers, ginger, cabbage (and kimchi), or fermented soybeans (nattō) and miso, sometimes a girl wants a little spice in her life. Hot foods are a little harder to come by in Japan, but you can still find stores selling “spicy things”, as the kanji on the giant chili pepper reads. (They also had giant sticks of cinnamon for sale!)

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