I live in countryside Japan where it does not cost a lot more to buy a bento than to cook one yourself. Before moving in, I used to think it should be easy to

I live in countryside Japan where it does not cost a lot more to buy a bento than to cook one yourself. Before moving in, I used to think it should be easy to be vegetarian in a Buddhist country but it is not. Japan's culinary habit is that a good meal needs to have a lot of different ingredients in it. From a dietetics point of view, that's great but it often means that even in most salads, you'll have a few pieces of bacon or chicken, a shrimp or some grains of minced meat. That still makes for a very meat-light diet and I would switch to a no-meat-at-all in a heartbeat if those bentos and salads came in vegetarian versions, but that makes it almost impossible to totally avoid meat.