My mom has been a vegetarian since before I was born, so I grew up vegetarian. This means I don't eat any meat or fish. I can count the number of times I've tasted meat on one hand. The times that I have tried meat, I was either tricked into tasting it or I accidentally ate a dish not knowing it had meat in it. In Japan, a lot of dishes have seafood or meat, so I have to be very careful about what I order and eat.
Japan has three writing systems: hiragana, and katakana, and kanji. Just like you'll learn how to read in the future, I also have to learn how to read in Japanese. Because there are three different ways of writing, I have to learn how to read again and again. So, what do Japanese writing systems have to do with food? When shopping for food, I have to read the ingredients to make sure it doesn't have any meat or seafood. However, since I am still learning to read, this can be very difficult. I usually use Google Translate's camera feature to take a picture of the ingredients list and translate it into English.
When ordering food at a restaurant I have learned Japanese phrases such as, "Do you have an English menu?", "Does this dish have any meat or seafood?", "Can you prepare it without meat?", "I am vegetarian", and so on.
