Sushi vs. Home cooking

Living in the United States, the only real Japanese restaurants are sushi bars. I love to sushi but I have heard that in actually, the typical Japanese person doesn't eat sushi that much, only on occasion. The food is a lot more basic that is eaten in the home than an elaborate sushi roll (An example might be serving a cooked salmon in comparison to a finely prepared salmon skin roll). Can anyone tell me what the average Japanese person eats at their homes and how often is sushi consumed? Thanks

It depends on your preference but if you ask me how often I go to a sushi restaurant, my answer would be once every month or less frequent. But I often buy "packed sushi" at local supermarkets for lunch/snack.

We eat variety of foods both at home and outside. For example, I ate toast, sunny-side egg, milk tea and fruits for breakfast, Okonomiyaki (Japanese-style pancake) for lunch and Hiyashi Chuuka (Chinese-style cold noodle) for supper.

My typical day would be:

Breakfast: a cup of ENglish tea, yogurt, a piece of cheesemelt toast
Lunch: (If I'm at home) Maybe a pack of instant noodle, maybe a couple of "onigiri" rice balls (bought from a neighborhood convenience store), or I might cook up some "soba" or "udon" noodle, with either hot soup or cold dip depending on the season.
(If I'm away from home at work) Maybe some pasta, or Japanese noodle, or Japanese style lunch set (consisting of something like a bowl of rice, "miso" soup, grilled fish, with some side salad and pickles)
Dinner: A bowl of rice, "miso" soup with tofu, stir fried vegetables with tofu, or grilled fish, etc., and some vegetables on the side.

Sushi? I seldom go to any sushi restaurant; if I buy any packed "sushi" for supper, that would be only during warm season, and a few times in a month, I'd say (I prefer having something warm for dinner).

When I visited my mother-in-law's home in Japan (on two occasions), we never had sushi at home and maybe ate sushi out 3 times.
A normal meal included rice, Japanese vegetable/pickles, some sort of seafood (cooked or sashimi) a/o meat (usually pork or chicken) and sometimes soup (especially in winter).
At home, we usually have a meat or fish, miso soup with lots of veggies & wakame and rice.
There are some great recipe sites for Japanese homecooking on the web, just google it. They will give you a good idea of what Japanese home cooking is like and bunch of easy & great tasting recipes too. Also, this site has some good info on Japanese food.

We have sushi about once every 1-2 months, usually for some special occasion. I think it is not far from the nationwide average.

A huge variety of dishes otherwise. A very small selection is introduced here:
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2035.html

Making nigiri-zushi requires very special technique. It's not that easy to become a nigiri-zushi chef, moreover, no common housewife can make them.

A lot of people make chirashi-zushi at home, but generally speaking it's a "festive dish". So most people make them when they're having guests or when there is a family celebration of some kind.

I don't, but a lot of families commonly make temaki-zushi at home. All family members including children will roll your own in a cone shape.

Norimaki is also a common dish in Japanese households. A lot of people make them for their picnic.

Genuine sushi bars in Japan are scary :) because they don't have a price list. You sit there and eat, and when you're leaving, the chef gives you a 100 USD worth bill per person. So that's nothing a commoner can visit every week.

However, in the recent decades, kaiten-zushi bars have become common, where quality is lower but so is the price. And there is an absolutely fixed price list! A lot of families with small kids and low income go there often. Kids also love to watch automatically circulating bar counter.

Btw, the type of rolls you get in say the U.S. with mayo and avocado and spicy sauce and all is hardly available in Japan. You can only get them at the few American style restaurants. When I lived in L.A. in the early 70s, sushi bars were more genuinely Japanese style. But I do like the newer style as well, although I haven't been to one overseas.

So what do we eat? A bowl of rice, miso soup, grilled fish and boiled vegetables would be your typical Japanese homemade dish, but we eat a lot of other things too, from curry to spagetti.

Thank you for all your insight :-). You get a really distorted view of Japanese cuisine living here in the US. Now it makes more sense because I always wondered if everyone in Japan was like a professional at sushi because of the illusion that they eat it so often. It actually is more like a western meal in the sense that you have soup and vegetables with a main course of meat or fish and sometimes noodles. I guess we all aren't so different after all ^_^.