Japan is probably the only country where eating too quietly will get comments from people around you. The correct way of eating Japanese and Chinese noodles like ramen, udon and soba is to slurp them while holding your face near the bowl, sucking in the soup along with the noodles. There’s no upper ceiling to how loud you’re allowed to slurp, and making these noises is one way of letting whoever prepared the noodles for you know that you think they’re delicious. When foreigners come to Japan, they usually eat their noodles without making these noises, prompting Japanese to say shizuka desu ne (“you eat very quietly”). There are other differences in eating etiquette. In Japan, it’s perfectly okay to pick up your ramen bowl and drink the soup from it directly, although drinking out of a bowl might get a child smacked in the U.S. It’s okay to slurp Asian-style noodles, but spaghetti is another matter, and the image of an old Japanese man loudly vacuuming his pasta off the plate is very unsophisticated. Some table manner no-no’s are related to Buddhism, including the taboo against sticking chopsticks straight up in rice or handing food to someone else chopsticks-to-chopsticks (both of which are part of funeral ceremonies in Japan).
Eating some foods quietly is considered strange in Japan.
