When I was little, I was almost always a proud member of what my mother called "The Clean Plate Club." This means I always ate my food, even the weird things my sisters gagged at, like crab and Chinese broccoli and fishy fish. But as I grew older and graduated from the Kids' Menu and its tiny baskets of chicken fingers, servings at restaurants suddenly became impossibly, ridiculously large and I lost my membership to the club. I inevitably cleaned my plate into a doggie bag.

In Japan, there are no doggie bags. You either eat or you waste your yen, so everyone eats. And how they eat! Food somehow magically and gracefully disappears from their plates, every grain of rice scraped up, every stray piece of ginger gone. I've mastered the art of eating every piece of rice in my bowl (the secret is to constantly herd the stragglers into the larger grouping of rice with your chopsticks -- try it!), but actually being able to accommodate every piece of rice in my stomach is a different battle. I'm convinced it's 90% psychological. For years I have been served oversized American plates of food, gigantic plates drenched in pasta sauce or ranch dressing, plates meant to remind me there will always be plenty, I never have to worry -- so when I get something at a restaurant, I automatically think, "I'm not going to finish." But that is slowly changing. Maybe it has to do with eating at izakayas, casual restaurant-bars that serve small plates of food. You order lots of little things and eat your way through them with your friends, then order some more. There's something less daunting about eating little morsels of food off of a tiny plate. It may also have to do with the daily training I get from the school bento lunch. Oh, a piece of some sort of root covered in tempura batter, two strange, starchy little balls AND a boiled potato, all in addition to the box of rice, the main dish (usually fried) and the pickles? Sure, why not!

So with this intense training, I've been finishing my food almost always when I go out. And then there's the matter of the sushi-eating contests.

Ranking high on the list of very good and very Japanese ideas is the kaiten (conveyor-belt) sushi restaurant. You sit at a table or at a counter next to a constantly moving conveyor belt carrying plates of one or two pieces of sushi. You grab what you want, as much as you want, and at the end, you push a button and the waiter comes over to count the plates and figure out your bill. Each plate is 100 yen (about $1). Genius! There are also hot water dispensers at the table, so you can serve yourself unlimited green tea, and if you want a certain type of sushi, you can order it via a computerized screen or an intercom system at the table.

The last sushi-eating contest was held at Kappa Sushi, only a few minutes' bike ride from my apartment. It was me and seven guys, so I thought I was doomed to lose, but happily I managed eight plates, beating two people and tying with another. It wasn't even that hard to keep eating and eating. It was less that I was completely stuffed and more that I didn't want to taste sushi again for awhile (especially since the sushi at Kappa is not very good.) The winning eater, just so you know, finished an awe-inspiring 24 plates of sushi.

Last night we braved the almost-40-minute bike ride to a different kaiten sushi place, one that featured the added weird bonus of microchips in the plates, so as you drop your empty plates into a slot in the table, the computer continuously tallies your total. Every five plates, a little video game comes up on the screen and if you win, a prize drops down from a dispenser mounted above the table. This time, the sushi was much better and maybe I had also worked up an appetite from the bike ride, so I managed eleven plates of sushi and two plates of fruit. The new winner unseated the previous champion with a whopping 26 plates and four plates of fruit. (The fruit is key, you know. It rids your mouth of the taste of sushi and invigorates you enough to keep eating.) Our table of six people managed to tally up 120 plates -- but we only won three prizes from the video games! That's just not right.

I kind of fear my return to the U.S. at this point. I'll have to go through reverse training to remind myself that I SHOULDN'T finish everything on my plate. A few trips to BJ's, with its pizzas and Pizzookies, should do the trick. Mmm...Pizzookie....