Veganism in Japanese Restaurants

A lot of Japanese food is going to be fish stock based. So you might get a vegan dish but if it's a problem that they're using the same cutting boards for meat products then again that's another problem. It seems like really on the menu everything cooked and fished up. And I made that mistake with some Aussie friends of mine who came over. We went to a tofu restaurant and said by the way we're all vegan here and the guy just looked at me and said well this has all got dashi in it. It's all fished up, so we had to relocate.