"Ryan Ginstrom" <ginstrom@hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:37fkgtF5d1ossU1@individual.net...

> But your garden variety Japanese supermarket bacon sucks big time.

Mm. It's not bad, it's not good. It's better than the American bacon I've 
tried. It never seems to cook very nicely though. If you fry it, it just 
gets slowly drier. If you try to grill it, it doesn't go crispy, it just 
shrivels up into something like beef jerky. I like the kind of smoked bacon 
which is on sale in the UK. But cheap British bacon has added water in it, 
which isn't delicious.

Anyway, there are lots of varieties of bacon on sale in Japanese 
supermarkets, including the "ham" kind which you mention, but I've also seen 
other kinds. I've tried buying smoked bacon here, but what I didn't like 
about it was that it was sweetened. Also, the price was rather high.

> That's
> why I was so pleasantly surprised when I moved to Okinawa. Here, in just
> about any supermarket you can buy actual, hand-cured bacon, either by the
> side or pre-sliced and sold hakari-uri. And the taste is fantastic -- like
> what Americans used to eat in the 50s or earlier. Piggy bliss.

That sounds good. I wonder why this only happens in Okinawa.