One thing that shocked the natives the most (other than the fact that I could say a few words in Japanese) was the idea that I not only ate Japanese food on a regular basis, but liked it. There seems to be an unwritten law that gaijin, are not allowed to like Japanese food. Granted there are some foreigners who aren't adventurous, and they're missing out on a lot.
Although I didn't necessarily like all of these mentioned below, here are a few things that the typical 'European' is said to balk at:

Raw eggs: The general opinion seems to be that people don't get enough protein in the typical Japanese diet, so a lot of cafeterias provide raw eggs to go with your meal. Just crack the egg, mix it in rice with a little soy sauce, and there's your protein boost. Raw eggs are used in dipping sauce for sukiyaki and other nabe dishes. Though a little strange at first, the taste and texture tends to grow on you. In over eight years, I have yet to come down with salmonella poisoning. I love raw egg on top of a raw beef and vegetable dish referred to as bibimba at Japanese/Korean restaurants.

Really, really fresh sushi: My first encounter with this was at a little sushi restaurant a friend and I found while hiking in Hakone. As we recovered from the cold drizzle outside and feasted on top-rate sushi and beer, the couple next to us decided to splurge. The man pointed to a large fish swimming in the tank behind the counter. The chef netted the fish out of the tank, cracked it over the head with the handle of his knife to stun it, then took it back into the kitchen. When he reemerged, the fish had been neatly arranged on a plate with head and tail intact and the midsection turned into artfully arranged sashimi filets. The head and tail were still moving.
My friend and I drank more beer and watched in fascination as the couple beside us ate, and the fish's tail continued to flex gently like it was still thinking of swimming. I've heard that the chefs pour sake down the fish's throat to keep this reflex going long after the fish is dead.

After yet more beer, we decided to try some of this for ourselves, though we tried the economy size version. We pointed to a much smaller fish in the tank. The chef netted it out, put it on the cutting board, and zip! zip! zip! the next thing we knew, the fresh meat was on top of two lumps of rice on a plate in front of us. It was delicious, very sweet, though I had a hard time enjoying it when I saw the other fish staring accusingly at us from the tank. Probably thinking, "You ate Fred, you monsters!"


Pickled sea cucumber: This was served to me along with other delicacies at an expensive Roppongi sushi house by a prospective boss. Though a sea cucumber in its natural element looks like a giant grey booger, the pickled and sliced serving was delicious. When he got the bill, my boss learned not to issue food challenges anymore.


Horse sashimi: My coworkers ordered this to go with drinks at an izakaya once. This overloaded my squeamish factor, so I didn't try it. And no amount of sake was going to make me.

Follow up:

The whole fish: Fish markets sell fish gutted and split in half for easy broiling. Everything else, though--skin, eyes, gills and bones--is still intact. During my year in a Japanese homestay, I got really good at picking the meat off a broiled fish with a set of chopsticks. Other than that, I generally refused to eat things that still had their eyes attached unless I'd had a lot of beer first.


Sardine Surprise: My second day in Tokyo, some friends and I went on a whirlwind tour of several animation studios in the city. At last we stopped at a little coffee shop for food and a chance to unwind. I ordered a ham sandwich, which seemed harmless enough until I bit down on it and tasted something weird. Peeling back the bread, I found half a sardine remaining. Evidently, the others at the table found this hilarious and it broke the ice with our tour guide, who'd been a bit ovewhelmed at the idea of carting three gaijin women around.


Mmm, calcium: Okay, whose idea was it to mix in smelly little whole dried fish with rice crackers? If I want extra calcium, I'll drink milk.


Whole baby octopi in fish egg sauce: It was an otsumami (beer snack) served to me at a local restaurant before I made my main order. I don't even think I cared, though the waiter did an amusing enough double take at my empty dish to cheer me up at least a little.


Soft Shelled Crabs: One of my neighbors was a culinary historian, and she took me and my landladies on a couple of tours that involved some really good food. On one of these tours we had a wonderful box lunch that included a tiny soft-shelled crab, tempura-fried whole. As I tried to figure out how to tackle peeling it, I watched the woman across from me pick hers up with her chopsticks and bite it in half. I looked at mine, curled up in its little bento compartment like a little spider, and it looked back at me. No thanks.

Unfortunately, this got noticed, and since I was the only woman at the table under the age of fifty, the others felt it was their sworn duty to nag me to "clean my plate." "That poor little crab will cry when they throw it away." I had a choice of eating it or getting nagged to death. It tasted a little like popcorn.



Smelly Things

The natto test: Many a foreigner has been rated according to whether he or she could eat natto. Natto is made from fermented soybeans and has a sticky, slimy texture that produces lots of fine strings between clumps and makes the whole mess hard to eat. Some people are grossed out by the texture, others by the smell. I've been told that about 50% of Japanese--especially those residing in the Kanto region--don't like it either. Again, this may be a regional thing.
I failed the natto test, quite unintentionally, at a conveyor belt sushi shop. I thought the seaweed roll had negitoro (tuna) in it, so I grabbed the plate off the conveyor belt and shoved one roll in my mouth. Surprise! I discovered natto tastes just like it smells... like something that has been decomposing underground for a while. I bet that amused the chef.


Underground adventure: The basements of most major Japanese department stores house the food section, and you can find a treasure trove of new and delicious things down there. I'd go down there to buy bento (box lunches) to take into the movie theaters. Usually these basement food markets are full of vendors loudly hawking their produce, made fresh daily. As a foreigner, I got a lot of attention: "Hey, gaijin-san! Try this! Japanese delicacy!" For the most part, I happily sampled everything offered except for what looked like tentacle spaghetti in a pink sauce. From the pungent fishy smell emanating from that stuff, I never got the nerve to try it.

Japan and the rest of Asia is full of fascinating and extremely unusual foods. But you know what I found offended Americans the most? What caused Americans to grimace and stutter and backpedal and say this was an outrage? Something so simple and commonplace in Japan that I had forgotten all about this until Dave Barry brought it up: