Japan's Chocolate & Confectionery Culture

About this book

Travel guides give Japanese chocolate a paragraph about Valentine's Day. This book makes it the whole map: a field guide to the makers, towns, customs and cakes behind the most gift-laden sweet on earth.

200 entries in eight parts, each in one fixed format — What It Is, Roots & Place, Taste & Texture, and How to Enjoy & Where to Find It. Dejima's first bitter bars and Morinaga's 1899 workshop; the chocolate towns of Sapporo, Kobe, Kyoto and Okinawa, from Royce' to kokuto and home-grown Yanbaru cacao; the full gift calendar of honmei, giri, tomo, gyaku and jibun choco, White Day and the Salon du Chocolat; bean-to-bar ateliers and ganache flavoured with yuzu, miso, sake and sakura; the yōgashi classics from Christmas cake to baumkuchen; regional souvenirs from Shiroi Koibito to forty-seven prefectures of Kit Kat; festival choco-bananas, kissaten hot chocolate and cacao stouts; and the frontiers of koji chocolate, plant-based craft and a Valentine's custom reinventing itself.

No maker is ranked and no shop's prices or hours are asserted — shops change them; makers, towns and customs endure. A glossary and theme indexes close the book, so you can plan a February, a souvenir run or a whole journey by chocolate instead of by map. Every entry runs to more than 200 words of its own, with no sentence repeated anywhere in the book.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.