Taxis and pizza are as definitive to New York as Times Square and the Empire State Building. And so in my little Japan-New York compare and contrast survey, I was anxious to explore the Japanese versions.

Taxis
I didn`t exactly go out of my way to check these out in Tokyo. Sometimes you just need to break out the yen and take one, like when you`re standing on a blustery street corner with no idea where to go and not able to find the free shuttle that everyone says exists but everyone says in a different place and no one speaks English and you don`t speak Japanese beyond domo origato (thanks for nothing, Mr. Roboto!).

First off, Japanese taxis are tiny, like a lot of their cars. No SUVs or monster trucks here. The right hand door opens automatically for you - which my friend and I find out only after yanking on the left hand side door for several moments, stupid Americans! - and the taxis are very clean. On one travel site I read, an individual commented that the taxis are super duper, impressively clean. I wouldn`t say that. They`re just clean. And actuallythe ones I`ve ridden in so far have reeked of cigarette smoke, probably from the driver.

So the drivers. In New York you get a real mosaic of ethnicities and accents and, as the stereotype goes, long unpronounceable last names. You also get a variety of ages, from the young immigrant seeming to navigate the city streets for the first time with you as his very lucky first passenger, to the older native New Yorker with a bone to pick about that Hilary Clinton.

In Japan every single driver seems to be an older, gray-haired man. No paunchy middle-aged men, no 30 year olds with young kids, no young men fresh on their first real job. And no women, that`s for sure. My friend and I wondered why this is. Is this what salarymen do after they retire? And none of them, at least so far, speak English, though showing them the English in our guide books seems to work okay.

Pizza
Calling okonomiyaki Japanese pizza is a stretch. The only similarity is the shape, ie, round, though the okonomiyaki I`ve had so far is more the size of a Pizza Hut personal pan pizza than a real New York pie. They are actually more like Chinese scallion pancakes, just thicker and more chocked full of stuff like pork, seafood, cabbage, noodles, egg - sometimes beaten, sometimes whole - and even kimchee. You get to pick and choose what goes in your okonomiyaki.

The restaurants have a grill built into each table and you cook up the pizzas yourself. (We of course had no idea what we were doing and so the very nice waitstaff was always willing to help.) Then you can add a variety of sauces, including a dark sweetish sauce that reminded me of katsudon sauce and mayonnaise, which is slightly different than Western-style mayo.

My friend and I wondered why there aren`t more places like this back in the cities where we live (Boston for her). There seems to be at least one, according to the site I`ve linked to from this post. It seems like it would catch on. It`s interactive in that you have to cook up the pizzas yourself, a la Korean barbecue, and of course the food is tasty. We`ve decided that this will be our next venture, opening our own okonomiyaki place in New York, right after we get my dad to start driving a taxi.