The world is going crazy for Japan and Japanese food - but I beg to differ

Although I might look a bit thuggish, with two heavy armloads of faded tattoos, I'm actually quite polite.

If somebody puts a meal in front of me, I will generally do my best to eat it.

As long as it's food.

And I'm not sure that seaweed, for example, is food.

I know that it's edible, but rose bushes and jungle vines are probably edible, too. I just wouldn't choose them from a menu.

Or wrap fish in them.

For me, one major characteristic of a good meal is that it is cooked.

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.

Japanese is not my favourite cuisine.

In fact Indian is my favourite cuisine, and almost every Indian dish is arguably overcooked.

No Japanese dish is overcooked.

Much of it has never been near a cooktop or a hob.

But everybody except me seems to love it.

Even my own son would prefer a barely cooked Japanese lunch to a hearty, flame-grilled hamburger.

But I do enjoy Japan and I find myself in the country now and then, most recently on a press tour of the Kii Peninsula on Honshu island. For six days on the peninsula, we ate all the time. On several nights, we had nine- or 12-course banquet dinners.

Curiously, one of the courses was always rice.

But rice isn't a course.

Nor is it a side dish.

It is a bed for chicken curry.

But not Japanese chicken katsu curry, because Japanese chicken katsu curry is made with a thick, glutinous, single-flavour gravy. It is the worst chicken curry in the world, with the exception of a blue chicken curry I once bought by the roadside in Myanmar which made me violently sick for 24 hours.

There is, however, one Japanese curry that I recommend to everyone (although nobody ever takes me up on it).

On the ski fields of Hakuba Valley, I discovered hamburger curry.

This is exactly what it sounds like - a minced beef patty swimming in spicy sauce and served with rice - and a fine Japanese example of fusion cuisine.

In the rest of the world, "fusion" cuisine almost always seems to be a fusion of Japanese and something else. It generally signifies that part of an otherwise warm and cooked meal will be served either rare or raw, and perhaps with seaweed.

Sometimes, I was served five different types of sashimi. I thought that if I ate them all every day, I would normalise for myself the idea of consuming raw fish.

It didn't work, though.

Some Japanese dishes look closer to ornament than aliment. I once mistakenly ate the table decoration at an Australian health camp, thinking it was part of the plant-based lunch, so I was careful to not make similar rookie errors in Japan.

I never ate the tablecloth or the napkins, for example, and I feel that contributed to the quietly sophisticated image that I was eager to project.

Because I would love to like Japanese food: it sounds worldly, cosmopolitan, urbane and cultured, like mastering a difficult foreign language or figuring out how to get hot water out of a hotel shower.

But the truth is I grew up eating hot food in a cold country (England) and I'm probably too old to change.

And as for the armloads of tattoos, well, they bring their own problems to a visit to Japan ...