Just wanted to clarify some things.....

Japanese restaurants in the West, especially in North America, is such a mish-mash because a lot of the chefs and owners/managers of "Japanese" restaurants may not be trained in traditional Japanese cooking, and tend to draw from other Asian cuisine, especially Chinese. So the sunomono salad that you ate in that particular restaurant could definitely have used bean threads. All I wanted t do was to point out that in traditional Japanese cuisine, bean threads are NOT used. The transparent noodles used in Japanese cuisine are usually made from kudzu, which is powdered arrowroot starch.

I'm all in favor of doing what works for you, but I wanted to make the distinction, especially for people who are not that familiar with Asian cuisine. The Japanese sunomono salad uses a lot of ingredients (octopus, daikon, carrots, cucumbers, wakame, shrimp, octopus, etc.) but the basic sunomono recipe taught in Japanese cooking classes are 1) cucumber and wakame; and 2) carrots and daikon (which is the one I posted), and oil is NEVER used because the dish is designed to appreciate the different flavors of rice vinegars and persimmon vinegars (when in season) available in Japan.