It’s not often I miss English food. Given that my mother wasn’t British, I never really grew up eating standard English meals. As a result the food I like most is usually readily available here. Occasionally I do miss things I can’t get in Japan. After a particularly vicious bout of tonsillitis I found myself craving Heinz tomato soup only to find a distinct lack of it in my local supermarket. There were lashings and lashings of corn soup but the tomato soup was conspicuous by its absence. Also, there only seemed to have canned soup of the condensed variety on the shelves. This caused a great deal of confusion when I came to prepare it, not having tried to decipher the instructions beforehand.

It’s not just soup though, enter a branch of Mr Donut, the most popular doughnut repository in Japan, and you will notice a vast amount of ringed doughnuts and no hole-less doughnuts at all. This didn’t affect me for a long while but one day I went into a bakery and saw a vast amount of doughnuts that looked as though they were deep-fried.

This seemed quite exciting to me, by this point in my Japan adventure I had realised food that I was used to in the UK can have a completely different version here. Japanese curry is different from curry sold in the UK, for example, which in turn is different from that which is sold in India. Well, I assume that is the case, I’ve never been to India. Anyway, I took this deep-fried bun to the register, paid my money, bit into it and got a shock.

I had discovered that Japanese curry is not only a different taste but it is often found inside deep-fried doughnuts. Known as curry bread, these buns are never referred to as doughnuts at all. That would just be silly.

This terrible tale put me off eating any kind of filled doughnut until I could read the little sign next to them that told me what is inside. Once I could, I began to discover something shocking. I began to realise that there are no jam doughnuts in Japan. Raspberry, strawberry, blackcurrant nor even gooseberry varieties are available. Instead the Japanese prefer beans inside their doughnuts.

Not just any bean though, azuki bean. Azuki is a sweet bean and the paste inside the doughnuts is further sweetened by adding tons of sugar.

Happily I have found one regular flavour of filled doughnut while here. It may not be my favourite but it has its fans.

Lovely. Yellow. Custard.

Due to a ridiculous visa problem which I won’t go into here, I have found myself unable to start my new job until I get it sorted. This means that I have been unable to work for the last couple of weeks. Finding myself between jobs during hanami season hasn’t been the worst thing in the world, drinking in the park under the cherry blossom with friends has been relaxing. However my favourite thing about it is that I can now call myself a ronin.

Think of the word ‘Ronin’ and what does it mean to you? To the average westerner it is bloody cool, isn’t it? It conjures up images of a wandering samurai, two swords in hand. Wandering from town to town, no fixed address, nobody knows his name. Maybe he is wearing a kasa straw hat, covering his face, people talk in hushed voices as he passes them. He is an enigma, dispensing his own unique form of justice before moving on.

If I describe myself as a ronin, that is what I want people to imagine.

Unfortunately, the word’s meaning nowadays is nowhere near as cool. It just means someone who has failed their university entrance exams. In Japan, if you fail a university’s entrance exams you don’t simply go to a different university, you wait a whole year and then try again. As a result people may be doing this for years before they get in or give up and it can be quite shameful. People without a job are also tarred with the same brush.

In fact ronin has been a badge of dishonour since feudal times. According to samurai code, if a samurai loses his master for any reason they are supposed to commit suicide, so anyone who failed to do this was discriminated against. While some became mercenaries or bodyguards they often became bandits or involved with organised crime.

It has been quite fun describing myself as a ronin for that last couple of weeks but while I have been imagining Rurouni Kenshin or Robert De Niro, the look on people’s faces shows they are thinking of Arnold Rimmer.

So if you ever meet someone who calls themselves a ronin, they are not trying to be cool, they simply are trying to get into Oxford when somewhere like Hull would suit them better.

Learn about some funky transforming kanji toys.