Japan's Curry Culture

About this book

English books about Japanese food teach you to cook it, or chase famous restaurants. This book does the traveller's other job: a field guide to one beloved sauce in all its Japanese forms — what each curry is, where it was born, and how it is eaten at home.

200 entries in eight parts, each in one fixed format — Roots & Home Ground, Roux, Soup & Rice, How to Eat & Local Custom, and Where You Meet It & Official Check. Sapporo's soup-curry family in twelve bases and toppings; Muroran's curry ramen and Sendai's beef-tongue pot; Jimbocho's dark European pots and Shimokitazawa's soup-curry lanes; the naval curries of Yokosuka, Kure and Sasebo and the Friday tradition behind them; Kanazawa's strict plate of thick roux, cabbage and steel; Osaka's sweet-then-hot paradox and aigake spice plates; Mojiko's baked curry; Kagoshima's black pork and Okinawa's bitter-melon and agu pots; and curry's whole second life in bread, udon, soba, hot pots, school lunches, retort pouches and revival festivals.

No shop is ranked and no shop's prices, stock or hours are asserted — shops change them; styles, cities and customs do not. Every entry closes with the one official check worth making before you travel for that dish. A glossary and an index by family close the book, so you can plan a journey by sauce instead of by map.

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.