A lot of people think that a foreigner wanting to eat foods from home is a tacit rejection of Japanese cuisine. It's not. You can enjoy all of the lovely food around you in Japan as an addition to what you knew and loved back home. It doesn't have to be a wholesale replacement one way or another. That being said, you really can't easily get things here that you can back home, like whole wheat bread. If you can get them, they're often much more expensive or offered in a way which suits Japanese tastes and are not quite "right". There are a lot of things I have learned to do and cook as a result of the costs or limits placed on me by living in Japan. Because of the high cost of cottage cheese, for instance, I've learned to make it myself and that in turn has helped me learn to make paneer (Indian cheese) as well. I've also experimented and developed many recipes that I almost certainly would have not done had I remained back home where I could easily get familiar foods.
I'll miss the way in which life in Japan has encouraged me to learn to cook or prepare things I would simply have picked up pre-made in a store back home.
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