It’s known that the Japanese eat with chopsticks with almost every meal, deftly picking up even the tiniest morsels of food without a second thought. There are some important of chopstick manners that are practiced here, which you should be aware of if you ever find yourself eating with Japanese people. First, as you may know if you’ve seen our famous Japanese Manners T-shirt, you should never stick chopsticks standing up in rice, since this is done only at funerals as an offering of “last rice” for the dead. Similarly, don’t hand food to someone else’s chopsticks using your own — always put the food down on a plate or something first for the other person to take. Finally, when sharing food with others, it’s nice to turn your chopsticks around, using the back of your chopsticks to eat from a dish that others are also going to eat from, which keeps germs away from them. Using chopsticks isn’t hard at all by the way, and J-List offers a wide range of authentic chopsticks from Japan with handy features for gaijin like us, such as rough patches at the tips to make it easier to grasp that last grain of rice, or training chopsticks that are great for starting out with. Why not browse J-List’s chopstick, bento and other items now?
