Restaurant food containing vegetables

My son is traveling in Japan, on a tight budget, and tells me he is missing his vegetables! He is eating a lot of onigiri and udon, I gather, and wants to find some affordable food that includes vegetables (beyond a few slices of spring onion). Any idea what he should look for? He is not vegetarian - just wants to eat nutritious food. He occasionally picks up a package of raw carrots at a grocery store, but other options would be good to know. By the way, he does not want to eat tempura because he has been told the batter typically contains shrimp, which he does not eat.

The budget restaurant chain called Ootoya serves a lot of vegetables with their meals, although they may be more concentrated in the Tokyo area (the restaurants, that is, not the vegetables). [ http://www.ootoya.com/ ]

I have always had the same problem while traveling in Japan--how do you get enough vegetables, especially on a budget?

One thing I do is occasionally splurge on a lunch buffet (they can be surprisingly affordable) and maximize the opportunity to eat veggies. Natural food buffets (�gshizen shoku baikungu�h) are popular and have a lot of vegetable choices. Chinese food buffets tend to be a little cheaper and are also likely to have at least some tasty vegetable dishes. But not all buffets have a lot of veggie choices, so you have to kind of check them out in advance.

Another thing I do is buy a bunch of o-sozai (which are basically side dishes of the sort one might eat as part of an ordinary Japanese home-cooked meal). They are sold as take-out in grocery stores, department store basements (pricey, but sometimes marked down an hour before closing), or even neighborhood shops that specialize in o-sozai. I eat these in my hotel room, sometimes making a full meal out of them and sometimes snacking on them to complement restaurant meals that are lean on vegetables. Some are good cold, although most benefit from being warmed up. (The place that sells them often has a microwave, or sometimes the hotel does.) O-sozai are not limited to vegetable dishes, but there are usually at least a few available that are primarly vegetables. Japanese pickle sets are often sold in the same places as o-sozai, and those are good, too.

And I do buy carrots, sometimes. The places that sell them almost always also have cherry tomatoes, and those tend to be very good in Japan.

To get vegetables, you have to be willing to spend a little more than for rice and noodles. It's just the way it is.

There are many pre packaged salads at any conbini (convenience stores.)

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I'll let him know your ideas (though he's not so into salads).

While I love the natural food buffets, I think they're more expensive than one might hope for on a tight budget. For example No No Budo is Y1600 for lunch, and Daichi no Okurimono is Y1800, whereas most lunches in normal restaurants are typically Y800-1000 these days.

Supermarkets are the best bet. You can easily get bentos (packed lunches, cost anywhere between 300 and 1000 yen usually) that contain a lot of vegetables, and of course he can buy raw vegetables and fruit. Carrots, celery, bananas and tomatos. All relatively cheap and you can eat them raw.

Ask for "yasai(vegetable) or nira(Garlic chives or Chinese chives) itame(stir frying)" when he orders "white rice", "chaahan(chowfun, fried rice)", "ramen", etc. at a ramen shop or a Chinese restaurant. Chinese restaurants have many different vegetable dishes, pure or mixed with meat, tofu & others.
Okonomiyaki(Japanese pizza) has a lot of cabbage and bean sprout, etc.
Shabu-shabu comes with a lot of different vegetables with thinly sliced meat.
Tonkatsu(pork cutlet) comes with a lot of thinly chopped cabbage that you can usually get many servings free.
He just have to look for dishes with a lot of vegetables instead of having only ramen, udon and soba. He doesn't have to worry about putting on pounds in Japan as you walk a lot.

rootles,

If he can't cook his own meals using the cheap dated vegetables usually sold in wagons inside supermarkets, tell him to find a university.

University students live on low budget, so there would be a lot of cheap diners around the school to serve the hungry young men. He can even go straight to the university cafeteria which will welcome all strangers.

Once there, ask for things like "yasai-itame" (stir-fried vegetables) or "ton-jiru" (pork and vegetable miso soup). As you may know, cooked vegetables allows you to get more vitamins, minerals and fiber than raw salads.

He can at least buy packs of 100% fruit juice at almost any kind of store.

If he likes udon, next time tell him to order things like "ken-chin-udon." Looks yummy, don't they?
http://www.google.co.jp/search?q=%E3%81%91%E3%82%93%E3%81%A1%E3%82%93%...