However, if you get the right restaurant and are lucky enough to be able to make yourself understood, you can get a good vegetarian meal in Japan. This was a small hippy-organic restaurant we discovered by using the Web. The first night, we failed miserably. We said, "no meat, no fish", and they seemed to understand--so we got shrimp and pork. Well, shrimp is neither meat nor fish, and apparently in Kobe, "meat" means "beef".