The quiz I designed started from a question I keep returning to. What actually makes a dish identifiably Japanese? Not the easy dishes like sushi or ramen, but ones that are unfamiliar, where the ingredients overlap with neighboring cuisines, and where recognition stops working as a shortcut. I wanted to see if people, including myself, could still make a judgment without relying on the obvious markers. What I found through making and testing the quiz is that the difficulty is the main thing. It exposes how uncertain the basis for identification really is.

The original inspiration came from a game I play often called FoodGuessr. You get an image of a dish, a list of ingredients, and a short description, then you guess the country. I like it because I learn dishes and cultures that I did not know about before. At the same time I noticed the social part of it. When I get answers right, especially in front of other people, it feels like I am showing a kind of knowledge. It connects to what we talked about in class with cultural capital, where food knowledge becomes a way of performing, being informed or well-versed. I noticed the “food adventurer” feeling in myself where unfamiliar dishes become something to decode. I did not want to copy that format directly. I wanted to slow it down and make the act of guessing less automatic.

I chose ochazuke, mitarashi dango, and nikujaga with a few loose conditions. I avoided dishes we already discussed in class. I avoided the most recognizable Japanese foods in the US context. I also looked for dishes that could easily be mistaken for other East Asian foods. I included mitarashi dango partly because I grew up eating it so it was more personal research for me. What connects the three is that their identity is not immediately visible. You do not get a full sense of what they are just from looking at them. Their meaning sits in how they are used, when they are eaten, and the contexts they belong to.

The goal of the quiz was close to what we did early in the semester when we broke down dishes people already associate with Japanese food and asked what actually supported that association. At the time, I noticed how much I was relying on instinct rather than analysis. Ingredients, familiarity, and presentation were all mixed together without much clarity. I wanted to recreate that exercise but in a form where people had to make the judgment themselves instead of being guided through it.

One thing I noticed while building the quiz is that ingredients are not a stable way to identify cuisine, especially within East Asia. Soy sauce, rice, mirin, and dashi appear across multiple

cuisines, just in different forms. They help narrow things down but they do not fix identity. Even when two dishes share similar ingredients, the result can feel different depending on how those ingredients are handled. That was clearer in practice than in theory. The quiz made me pay attention to what else people were using when ingredients failed as a signal.

Visual and structural cues started to matter more. In the dishes I selected, Japanese cuisine often showed restraint in presentation. Colors stayed close to natural tones. Plates were not crowded. Components were separated instead of fully mixed together. Even the containers mattered, like ceramics with visible glaze or lacquer trays. You can see each part of the dish without it being hidden under another layer. I started noticing that this separation changes how you read the food. You are not looking at a single mixture but at distinct parts placed together.

There is also a physical structure to how the food is built. Many dishes are shaped around small portions that fit chopsticks. The movement stays controlled and segmented. Even in simple dishes like ochazuke or nikujaga you can still see the structure clearly. The components do not disappear into each other completely. They stay legible on the plate.

Flavor is harder to pinpoint but I noticed a pattern in what I chose. The dishes rely less on strong spice or heavy seasoning. Dashi appears often as a base which gives depth without making the flavor too bold. The result is usually more subtle than immediate. Nikujaga builds flavor through simmering until everything softens together. Ochazuke is even more minimal with rice and tea and very few additions. The taste depends on the basic components rather than added complexity.

When I look back at the quiz, it worked in the way I expected. People did not find it straightforward. They had to rely on different kinds of judgment depending on the dish. Sometimes it was ingredients, sometimes visual structure, sometimes familiarity with other cuisines. That inconsistency was the point. It showed that identification is not fixed. It shifts depending on what you have seen before and what you are comparing it against.

The quiz risks becoming similar to FoodGuessr if it only ends with correct or incorrect answers. What I was trying to push was a different kind of attention where the question is not only what country a dish belongs to but what I am actually using to decide that. In practice, I found that the judgment comes from a mix of partial knowledge, visual cues, and comparison with other cuisines even when that comparison is not fully conscious. That lack of a single method and consistency is not something I fully resolved in the quiz, but it is what made the process more revealing to me than the answers themselves.