I have been living in Japan for almost a year now and I wanted to share my experiences with other vegetarians who are either already in Japan or are planning to visit. In short, there’s nothing to worry about. There are plenty of options you get, they may not suit your taste or preferences of cuisines but you won’t be restricted to eating bread & butter.

Below I am going to share a few learnings that I had along the way and they may help you in finding a restaurant or a takeaway food joint to take of the belly needs.

Happy Cow

This is probably one of my most appreciated ideas of a website and app for finding restaurants and convenience stores who are happy to cater to dietary restrictions. You can find places that are Vegan, Vegetarian or provide Veg-options and filter results by distance, rating, type of outlet, etc.

Here is how a typical search looks like:

Happy Cow — vegan/vegetarian restaurants in Tokyo

Google Maps

Google has been investing decades worth of engineering and intelligence practices to serve the needs of different kinds. One of those needs it serves well is the location-based “Near me” search. A simple “Vegetarian Restaurants near me” or “Vegetarian Restaurants near Tokyo” usually spits out multiple results in the area for you to choose from. The results can be then filtered by rating, distance, etc. My personal experience includes major business hubs (i.e. Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka) and the tourist destinations (e.g. Sapporo, Izu) but I am sure it would do great in many areas.

A simple search would look like:

Google Maps — Vegetarian restaurants result for Tokyo

Japanese Restaurants

If you are in Japan, if you don’t go to a Japanese restaurant for at least one meal then you haven’t tried the best of their cuisine. I always stereotyped Japanese food cuisine to be unfit for Vegetarians but to my surprise, I was very very wrong. There are many Japanese restaurants that cater to the needs of Vegetarians (and even Vegans) but you may not find those restaurants in the searches from Google or HappyCow. While there would be many such restaurants, I will list down a few (in no specific order) that I have been to and have had one of the nicest experiences of Japanese Perfection in the Art of Food.