Japanese food, for the most part, is very simple (no wait, this isn’t boring. stay with me). Salt is the predominant seasoning, root vegetables are king and meat is lightly marinated if at all. The Japanese have turned this into a virtue over the past century or two, preparing delicate pairings to compliment the subtle flavors of fish, rice and other ingredients. Go watch something like Tampopo or Iron Chef and the importance placed on matters of the palate is pretty obvious.

But in the end, like all cuisines, the Japanese ate what they could find. In a mountainous archipelago like Japan, this meant rotting beans and black crap they scraped off rocks, occasionally complimented with goo from a plant that looks like a penis. Having been totally isolated from the rest of the world during the birth of serious international trade, spices are almost unheard of.

The Japanese never had much to work with, and I think the food kind of sucks because of it. Don’t get me wrong here, I really do enjoy the eats in this country and they’re a lovely departure from the hohos and chef boyardee I eat at home*. But even though the menu here is inspired, complex and painstakingly crafted, it’s bland as hell.

Save curry.

What they eat here is the blunt instrument of the curry world, and any subtlety the crafty Indians bestowed upon the dish was lost in the culinary game of telephone that brought it to Japan. It’s a baffling departure from the norm – Japanese curry amounts to throwing a brown brick into a pot of meat and vegetables and watching it thicken, bearing little resemblance to carefully arranged appetizers or the noble nigirizushi.

But you know what? Nigirizushi tastes like friggin’ styrofoam sometimes. Japanese curry will make your tastebuds roll in ecstasy after weeks of white rice topped with bullshit, and the Japanese were so quick to adopt the first crappy food the British dumped on them that they must have realized it too. It is an oasis of flavor in a desert of soy sauce.

Like I said, Japanese curry came from the British, who are also famous for having sucky food and replacing it entirely with curry as soon as they got the chance. I’m going to postulate the following: people with lame cuisines love curry. Here’s another example – the Germans, whose entire catalogue consists of mashed potatoes and tubes of meat, have come up with the ingenious-yet-still-disgusting currywurst**. Nasty, but necessary.

I can prove this with a counter example, too. The Vietnamese, despite being right next to Thailand (where various forms of curry are endemic and delicious), never really added it into their repertoire. This is because Vietnamese food is already awesome. You can find curry dishes and there actually is such a thing as Vietnamese-style curry, but it’s unrefined and hardly popular at all. With food that’s actually exciting and dynamic, there’s little need to brute-force your food into something mouth watering.

So what is it about curry? Hell, how do you even define curry other than “a bunch of spices”? I don’t know, but good lord I’m glad the Japanese love it too.

*I do not actually eat hohos

**I am allowed to reference nothing but wikipedia