Here, for your viewing enjoyment, are many more photos of a few different kinds of Japanese curry -- from smaller chain restaurants, cafeterias, and out-of-the-way places.

Above, the standard katsu/cheese combo at Curry Kitchen, abbreviated karekichi. Like Go Go Curry, it uses the ticket system -- you walk into the shop and use a vending machine to buy tickets that have your order printed on them, then hand the tickets over to the staff behind the counter when you sit down.

Combined with the fact that curry takes about five minutes to eat, it's a marvelously effective system: You go in, grab your tickets, sit down, are quickly served your food, then get out of there ten minutes later, max.

This is especially helpful when you consider that there's a Karekichi located right in the middle of Akihabara, making it a perfect quick lunch in the middle of a day full of videogame shopping.

It's a run-of-the-mill Japanese curry: Nothing special, but tasty, convenient, and infinitely customizable (provided you can read Japanese and work the ticket machine, I mean). It would win raves in the U.S., but compared to what's out there in the rest of the country, it's average.

I know what you're thinking: Kohler, does Japan make below-average curry? Of course. Here's an example. This is the katsu curry at Central Cafeteria, the eatery inside the Makuhari Messe convention center. This is where you go to escape the Tokyo Game Show for half an hour and recharge for the next half of the day.

It's not very good. You can tell just by looking at it. The sauce tastes like it came out of a can printed with the image of Chef Boyardee's Japanese uncle. Even the fukujinzuke pickles on the side are bland. The hile-katsu ("filet," as opposed to the fattier rosu that most pork cutlets are made from) are alright.

And really, what you need to know is that nothing in the Messe is very good to eat. That's one of the best things about Japanese curry: If you're faced with a selection of bad food, you can be pretty sure that the curry will be the least bad thing.

There's actually a food court of festival-type food stands on the Tokyo Game Show floor, if you want to eat really truly bad curry.

Here's a more upscale, but still convenient and affordable, curry. You may have heard legends about the basement floors of Japanese department stores, about how they are massive food-malls where delicacies of every concievable type are arrayed before you, where affluent Japanese housewives go to purchase gourmet ingredients for a lavish dinner.

All of these stories are completely true. Tokyo Roux, pictured above, sells to-go curry in the basement of a few different stores (this one is in tony Ebisu), with a variety of totally different sauces: Standard, spicy, flavored heavily with seafood, etc.

I was introduced to Tokyo Roux by the game designer Kenji Eno, and we ate it together in his office. While I did notice a couple of tables set up by Tokyo Roux's stall in the Ebisu department store, you probably would only want to buy this if you had somewhere else to go and eat it. I recommend Kenji Eno's office.

The photos above are from Manten, a little shop in the Jinbocho curry district of Tokyo. Jinbocho is the home of amazing "European curry" restaurants like Bondy, but Manten is more traditional.

The reason I went there a little over a year ago is because it's one of the highest-rated curry shops on Japan's Curry Database web site. Apparently, a friend told me, it's only rated that high because of how much food you get for the money -- not because it tastes very good. He was right. Manten is okay, and the lines out the door during the lunch rush (easily the longest I've ever waited for curry) clearly illustrate that there's an appeal here for the salarymen of Jinbocho, but I wasn't really impressed.

Finally, there's Homemade Curry Time, which will probably also be familiar to Tokyo Game Show travelers as there's one in Akihabara right by the Electric Town exit and one in the Kaihim-Makuhari train station near the show itself.

Much like Curry Kitchen, it's a decent if unspectacular ticket-based curry shop that hits the spot when you need it, but not the sort of place you'd visit if you weren't under pressure to find curry immediately so you can get back to videogames.

Homemade Curry Time also has "spicy black curry," a hot roux that's so deep brown it looks black. Interesting if you're looking to experiment -- or if you've eaten the normal stuff every day and want to change it up a little.

"Popping open the can releases a distinct curry aroma, even if the insides don’t really look like it. Or taste like it: The liquid inside the can is very thin and the faux rice is completely bland. The miscellaneous bits of curry don’t have any distinguishing flavors. The ingredients include chicken, carrots, mushrooms and garlic but each spoonful tasted the same to me: tomato, tomato and tomato."

I don't know if I approve. Is it possible for Japan to create a curry so weird that even I would not eat it? Maybe.

Osaka's Nerd District Offers Curry Rice in Cans [Wired.com]

Is there anything particularly European about it -- more so than regular Japanese curry, I mean, which entered the country through English cuisine? Not that I can see. My experiences with "European curry" have simply been that the ingredients are top-quality and the flavors much more robust. You'll pay a little more -- more like $15-18 for one person versus less than $10 at a typical curry lunch counter -- but for the serious curry aficionado on a trip to Japan, it's more than worth it.

I covered a small lunch place called Mitsuboshi, which bills itself as "French curry," on Wired.com last month.

I'd also recommend Bondy, with locations all around Tokyo.

Tokyo Curry Mania: Mitsuboshi's "French Curry" in Nakano [Wired.com]

Japanese language version: 日本滞在レポート：『ミツボシ』の欧風カレー [Wired Vision]

These days, Kanazawa curry -- known for a sweet brown sauce made with caramel among other unique ingredients -- has been making a name for itself in Akihabara, Tokyo's electronics/otaku district, where three different restaurants are now open within about 100 meters of each other serving different takes on K-curry.

One of them is Go Go Curry, naturally.

I wrote about this development for Wired.com on a recent trip to Japan. Check it out!

Tokyo Curry Mania: Kanazawa Curry Takes Over Akihabara [Wired.com]

Japanese language version: 日本滞在レポート:「金沢カレー」の探究　[Wired Vision]

There was certainly no lack of restaurants trying to create Japanese curry, that's for sure. There are many Japanese places in the city center, but they largely focus on ramen. A few of them, though, serve chicken katsu curry -- just chicken, never pork.

Wagamama, which also has some locations on the U.S. east coast, features the bizarre monstrosity above: A thin lukewarm chicken katsu, a football-shaped mound of rice, and cold, unappetizing yellow curry that tasted much more Indian than Japanese. All this for just €12.95, about US$18.

Wagamama was actually quite popular with Dubliners on their lunch breaks. I got in right around noon, and immediately after I sat down a massive lunch rush piled in, lining up all the way up the stairs and straight out the door. And lest you think me a fool for ordering the curry at a noodle shop, may I point out that Wagamama was selling tons of curry. People apparently loved it. Oh, Ireland... if only you knew.

Yamamori Noodles, located just across the Liffey river north of Temple Bar, wasn't that much better. At least their chicken katsu curry (€12) was a nice brown color and tasted Japanese. The katsu itself, like Wagamama's, was not very warm and pounded thin. But the big disappointment was that there was, like, a tablespoonful of curry sauce on the plate. As if it were ketchup on a burger.

Luckily, Yamamori sells extra curry sauce for only €.50 (about 70 cents), and I was handed a comparatively huge bowl of curry. So there's a fix for that issue.

Still, though, having tried Dublin's two most prominent Japanese restaurants, my advice would be to avoid trying to find J-curry here in the first place.

I never did try it, but the concept doesn't sound so strange when you're a curry junkie. Okay, maybe the name sounds a bit too much like the "Good Morning Burger" from The Simpsons, but look: Eggs! Vegetables! Really, how else would you start off your day but with curry?

Karen and I have, of course, had curry for breakfast before, but not at a restaurant. Just leftover curry from the night before, which tastes even better because all the flavors have had eight hours to hang out and get to know each other.

Going back to Tokyo next week. Maybe I'll pass by this again. Maybe this time I'll do it.

On a recent return trip to Volcano, I found that a lot had changed. The curry didn't taste that much different, but it was all arranged properly, on real dinnerware with metal utensils. It made the experience so much better that I felt Volcano needed to be re-rated. I'd actually recommend it to people, now.

(Unfortunately, the cheese is still placed on top of the katsu and not in the sauce, which isn't really where it's supposed to go.)

While I've left our original review intact -- you can't erase the Internet any more than you can unring a bell -- I've changed it from a "2" to a "3".

If you Americurry readers ever think we should go back and re-review a restaurant's curry because significant changes have been made, for good or for ill, please let us know!

On the one hand, this may be because I waited so long to write this review -- we were in LA for E3, you see, and it's always quite busy. But on the other hand, it's also probably because Hurry Curry was so completely unmemorable. If I was served this curry at a regular old Japanese restaurant, I might have been pleasantly surprised. But because it's a place that specializes in Japanese curry, Hurry Curry was more of a letdown.

My katsu curry was pretty straightforward, the roux served in a small bowl alongside my cutlet and rice. I traded my friend Christian a piece of my pork for a piece of his chicken and immediately regretted it; while the pork was okay, I found the chicken to be dry and not especially tasty.

Hurry Curry's sauce was alright, easily the best part of the meal. Christian recommended the spinach and mushroom topping (pictured above), which is mixed in with the sauce and adds some pretty delicious vegetable flavors and textures to the whole deal.

Hurry Curry does score some points for including a wide variety of toppings, including some I'd never seen on another curry place's menu, even in Japan. Fish katsu? That sounds interesting. (But why no cheese?)

I wanted to like Hurry Curry a lot more than I did. It's got a great name. The staff wear T-shirts that say "I [heart] Curry." How awesome is that? We at Americurry also [heart] curry. But while Hurry Curry isn't a bad deal, there's a Curry House right across the street, which is right where I'd go, next time.

One such chain is Wako, and it has a few locations in Los Angeles. The katsu is excellent, but the reason we're writing about it is because if you like, you can get curry sauce poured on top of your fried pork. Although Wako's curry sauce isn't amazing in and of itself, the whole dish was put together so well that I can't help but give it high marks.

Serving curry sauce at the proper temperature is key to the experience; lukewarm curry is gross. Wako's was warm and satisfying, poured liberally over the large katsu and big portion of rice. While many places are stingy with their curry (regardless of its quality), there was more than enough to go around at Wako.

Fresh shredded cabbage is typically served alongside katsu, and sometimes with curry (cf. Go Go). That Wako's curry is accompanied by a big pile of cabbage is not lost on the traditionalist in me, although I was disappointed that it was coated in lots of sticky sweet yellow-colored dressing. (If I go back, I'll ask them to leave it off.)

But what really makes Wako's curry shine is, of course, the katsu. It's giant. It's breaded with excellent panko. It makes up for any other deficiencies. If your favorite part of katsu curry is the katsu, Wako's might be exactly what you need.

And then there's this absurdity above. In addition to a whole variety of your typical fried objects, Wako also features "cheese katsu." It's a thin slice of pork wrapped around a mound of gooey orange and white cheeses, which is all breaded, fried, and sliced so that the cheese runs out and begins to congeal. It is remarkably delicious; it is also remarkable that I and my dining companions are still alive to tell you of its glory.

The menu doesn't feature cheese katsu curry, although you might try special-ordering it and see what happens.

Like all restaurants that have curry on the menu but don't specialize in it, customization options are thin on the ground at Wako. You can't pick a spiciness level, and I found that their curry is actually quite spicy. My aforementioned dining companions pointed out that Wako's locations are in Koreatown, and that Korea in general likes things much spicier than Japan. Fair enough. (Indeed, the menu is written in Korean and English but not Japanese.)

Slightly harder to wrap my head around: The only spoons that they gave us were those oddly-shaped lacquerware spoons that are used for miso soup.

Regardless, if you live in Los Angeles, are a curry addict, and are getting a little tired of going to Curry House or Hurry Curry every time you need a fix, you might try Wako's take.

The best you could hope for with "restaurant curry" is that it would be unobjectionable. It would never be in the same league as Go Go or CoCo.

On a recent all-day excursion to Japantown -- we're pretty much seeing every movie at the luxurious Sundance Kabuki, these days -- Karen and I tried the curry rice at two different places we'd never been to before: Bushi-Tei Bistro and Sanppo Sushi.

Bushi-Tei Bistro is a recently-opened sister restaurant to Bushi-Tei, the Michelin star-rated fine dining French/California fusion restaurant up the street. The casual bistro features a wholly different menu, mostly made up of rice and pasta dishes borrowing from Japanese and Italian cuisine.

We'd hoped the restaurant's high standards would carry over and create something more than the usual lunch-counter curry, but they did not. The best thing about the pork katsu curry ($12.80) is that it is topped with a kurobuta pork cutlet, thick, juicy, and perfectly fried. Unfortunately, the curry sauce itself was way too salty, making the whole dish disappointing.

You can also get your curry plain, or topped with two large fried shrimp. But as appetizing as it looks on the picture-menu outside the restaurant, we weren't impressed at all with the final product. (Not to mention the fact that it took a really long time.)

Sanppo Sushi's curry was similar -- no frills, just rice, sauce, katsu, deep red fukujinzuke pickles, and a couple of cocktail onions. (Does anyone actually eat those...?) It was served, hilariously, in a gigantic deep ramen bowl, which made eating it a bit awkward.

But the sauce, for restaurant curry, was actually pretty good -- even though the thin, dark-meat katsu was a disappointment, especially after Bushi-Tei's kurobuta. I'm usually opposed on principle to giant chunks of vegetable in my curry -- especially when it's something like Manpuku where you can't find the curry for all the potatoes. But Sanppo's chunks of stewed carrot were small enough and well-cooked enough that it didn't bother me.

We did make an interesting discovery, though. I noticed that the menu listed "beef curry" and "katsu curry," both priced at $10. I got the katsu, and Karen's husband Patrick ordered the beef curry. But I noticed that my curry also had chunks of beef in the sauce, and I didn't see any difference between mine and his. So if you order "beef curry" at Sanppo, you're getting ripped off -- it's katsu curry, with no katsu, for the same price.

If all I had ever eaten was "restaurant curry," I'd be of the opinion that Japanese curry is an interesting, though ultimately underwhelming, food. I wouldn't understand its greatness, and we certainly wouldn't have started a website about it. Sadly, this is often the only option for anyone looking to try Japanese curry in America. I don't think I'd order the curry at either place again, although Sanppo's gets the edge in this impromptu battle.