Speaking as someone who has worked at 2 real Japanese restaurants (owned by actual Issei with real sushi chefs from Japan) in Ohio and northern KY, I would like to make a plea on behalf of all employees to the midwesterners who claim such intimate knowledge of Japanese food and etiquette:

1. The point of sushi is absolutely and completely not to pour twenty-five gallons of soy sauce all over the tray. Period. If you can't enjoy Japanese food without enough sauce to choke a saltwater fish, stay home and order pizza. Same goes for ginger. The food is the point, dammit!

2. Edamame does not need to a: be served warm and b: have soy sauce dumped all over it--those things are practically basted in salt already.

3. American customers are invariably the messiest, sloppiest, most demanding pack of bums who walk into a Japanese restaurant and always compare unfavorably with the almost always soft-spoken, kind and undemanding Japanese customers. If you don't want the wait staff bitching about you in the kitchen, be polite, don't pour soy sauce all over the damn place (like the veritable lake of the stuff I mopped up after one particularly memorable evening), don't freak out if you find out that sushi and Japanese food taste differently from what the American palate has come to expect, and get over how elite, sexy and intelligent you are for being willing to eat OMG RAW FISH! There are sushi places in the most backwater tiny towns in Japan, and farmers eat that stuff. Eating it and drinking a fine delicate wine, then heading out to see the latest artsy film at the independent theater doesn't raise your IQ or your general worth as a person, and chances are your server with her 2.50 an hour paycheck and fake smile plastered on her face knows ten times more than you do about sushi and washoku in general, so get over yourself. Seriously. It's just food.

4. Forchrissakes don't rub your chopsticks together when you split them--that's really rude and the only people who do that are those who want to show off how incredibly knowledgeable they are about Japanese culture, while in fact they are simultaneously displaying an incredible lack of that very same knowledge. Look around you--do you see any of the Japanese customers doing that? No? Wonder why...