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Curry is the No.1 home cooking dish in Japan!?

Speaking of popular dish of home cooking, miso soup or stew have been the typical examples. But among teens today, curry and rice is ranked as the best of all exceeding “Nikujaga” (simmered meat and potatoes), hamburger steak, and many other popular dishes.

According to statistics, the Japanese eat curry and rice 84 times yearly, which means every 4 days. Especially the people of Tottori are somehow crazy for curry flavor and taste. In fact Tottori prefecture is planning to boost the development of their prefecture with curry!

They enjoy various curry flavored cuisines, such as curry Zouni in new year and curry Taiyaki for snack, for example. There are as many as 200 kinds of curry sauces available in supermarkets in Tottori. Nevertheless the population of Tottori prefecture is smallest in Japan, their curry consumption has recorded as No.1 in Japan several times so far.

Why are they so crazy about curry?
It’s because Tottori is where pickled shallots are produced, which are considered good match for curry. It’s also said that the people in Tottori are rather conservative, and they tend to stick to the foods they like. Curry is just a good example. Curry is also convenient for double-income family because it’s kept for days once it’s cooked.

How would you like to eat curry coffee, curry cake, curry ice cream, curry parfait with a pickled shallot on the top and whatever you name it with curry flavor?
I’d feel bored of all curry tastes, especially sweets with curry taste just look yuck, even if I am told it’s my silly prejudice against them. :p

Do you like Japanese curry?

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Contributor Bio: Kirin is a Japanese woman spending her life so far somewhere around Tokyo. She now works from home and is also spreading Japanese kawaii culture and etc. through her popular blog, Tokyo Kawaii,etc.
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20 comments - What do you think? Posted by kirin - February 14, 2010 at 8:11 am

Categories: Japanese Food Tags: curry

currysuki~

Was that Kitano Takeshi in the small window. Rad.
somegirl

I LOVE Japanese curry and my mother-in-law curry’s one of the best. My four year old son’s favorite food is curry rice and if he had his way, he would eat it everyday (so far four days in a row is his longest). We eat everything from Bali curry, Thai, Indian but so far I love Japanese curry. I am also willing to try all the strange curry mixtures, even curry ramane. Our hometown has a curry festival every year since I first came to Japan, and this festival is one that we look forward too every year. Long live curry!!
hidflect

Thanks for exposing a major flaw in Japan. Food technology. There’s a passive-aggressive foot-dragging on the part of distributors to provide the smorgasbord of international variety that I suspect is motivated by a nationalist attitude to defend “Japanese” food. How come smoked meats that fly from Italy cost twice as much as the same meat flown even further on to Australia?

Try asking Japanese this question and you’ll get all sorts of ridiculous answers; “It’s the distribution costs” is one favourite. OK – so a loaf of bread should cost 4000 yen then. It’s at least 4x the size and is trucked from regions much farther than the local docks.

Or they’ll point out that a dish like lasagna IS available in Japan… you just need to go to a specialty store in Azabu to get it and pay $12 for a slice. Or the last line of defence; “Japanese prefer yakitori/udon/whatever”. How the hell would they know? They never get the chance to sample the 1000′s of dishes available.

Failing that, it’s some mumbled excuse about rents being higher in Tokyo causing delicious foreign food to be unavailable. I would’ve thought rent costs would hit every foodstuff, not just foreign ones.

There WAS a decent, genuine Indian curry house I went to on the top floor of some building in Yokohama. Every lunchtime there’d be a queue around the floor of people desperate for something OTHER than the totally ignored pilaf/bento/tonkatsu stores that dominate every restaurant area. Full every day until it was mysteriously closed down and the populace forced back to the “joys” of the regular restaurants.

And so… we’re left with this slop called “curry”. If you want to eat cheaply, you just don’t have much choice.

hidflect

Also – I don’t mind anyone down-rating this comment but I’d like to read the reason why…
nagoriyuki

Why does sushi cost high in foreign countries? Food prices depend on not only distribution costs but also supply and demand. (and often on national agricultural policies as well.) You can’t eat cheap lasagna in Japan because Japanese people don’t eat it so often as other peoples do. It may be true that we don’t have much choice when we want to eat cheaply, but that’s merely a result of the economic theory that the more we consume one thing, the cheaper it will be. In Japan, curry was introduce earlier than lasagna. Thus curry has been more popular and cheaper than other food. That’s all, I think.

hidflect

Good effort. But it doesn’t explain why imported food products to a city of 20 million people cost more than the same products sent further to “inaka” like Australia with some cities having only 200,000 people. There’s also a cultural bias in Japan left over from the days of poorly-fed serfdom that anything foreign but especially related to protein/animal product must be expensive. That’s why cheese is such a crazy price in Japan. There’s no economic rationale to its pricing since it’s produced locally and consumed very widely. It’s 5-8x more expensive than other countries. But milk is about the same cost as other countries. The problem? Cheese is a “foreign” luxury food and threatens sales of bento. Solution?* Price it up way, way high.

http://billowykimono.blogspot.com/ Senor Science

I live in a semi-rural area and at the Brazilian store I can get great cuts of steak for US prices. I can also get several kinds of South American style cheeses that are affordable.

Also Trial (Which I affectionately call the Japanese Walmart) has both Japanese and imported meat for reasonable prices.

Needless to say, your full of crap.
helical

You got voted down probably because you sound like you’re just raving mad conspiracy theories with a twisted sense of how the Japanese perceive the world, which would have been funny if you were actually joking.

Your perception that perhaps protien based foods of foreign origin are seen as exotic luxury items seems to be somewhat accurate. Living here, that’s seems not too off the mark about the impression I get for how foodstuffs is marketed.

But the whole thing about a nation-wide nationalist conspiracy keeping foreign food down is pretty ridiculuous.
If you have a populace that would actually fork over the cash for inflated prices because they think that’s the appropriate price for these “luxury” foodstuffs, why would you sell it at a lower price when you could sell the same number and make a better profit with higer prices?
You should take note of the vending machines here with the default price of a can being 120 yen, the default unit of currency for games at the arcade being 100 yen. I too, thought that was a rip-off when I was used to the 50 cent cans and 25 cent games in America, but you get used to it, once you accept that that’s the normal price.

Again with the comparison with America, but the trend in Japan seems to be a greater willingness to pay a premium for quality goods, rather than settle for good enough products/services for cheap. That in turn allows leeway for the “because-I-can” markup in price, using premium ingredients and investing a lot of effort per dish, until it strikes a balance which is higher than in perhaps Australia.

For domestically grown foods, the price is inflated because the consumers demand inscrutable quality and appearances. You must have seen how fruit is ridiculously expensive here. The farmers start off with a patch, but then weed out any that have the slightest imperfections and end up with a tiny amount that has to sell at a crazy price to turn a profit … but it does, because the artificial scarcity makes it seem that much more valuable.

It sucks that some foods are expensive, but rest assured, no one is out to get you.
nagoriyuki

Then tell me why imported beef and seafood are cheaper than domestic products in Japan.
Imported cheese is expensive in japan because of the high tariff on it. The tax rate is almost 30%, and it is even applied to the distribution costs. This is decided in order to protect Japanese milk farmers, and that’s why I mentioned Japan’s agricultural policies just a little bit.

jcu

nago: i don’t know what landlocked country you’ve been to nago, but sushi is quite cheap in the west…i’ve even seen all you can eat lunches for about 920Y to put things in perspective.

also, Japanese curry tastes strange, but i guess it is different cultural taste…too sweet i think and even hot is not too spicy, and all packaged ones seem to have msg as one of main spices ._.

still, better than chinese and thai packaged curry though

Mark

Can you say for sure that sushi is quite cheap in all western countries. Sushi is friking expensive in Spain.
nagoriyuki

I just found Yo!Sushi costs twice and more than Japanese sushi chain.

Japanese curry is said to be inspired by the stew which had been served in British Marine, using more flour not to spill. I think that’s one of the reason why it tastes somewhat different.

Stereo

I do not understand your argument. Are you saying “food technology” is the major flaw of Japan? Or are you criticizing the price of imported foods in Japan.

Japan produces only 40% of its food consumption domestically. That means it imports 60% of its foods from overseas, which is highest among developed countries.
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%A3%9F%E6%96%99%E8%87%AA%E7%B5%A6%E7%8E%87
Actually, the potatoes or beans you are eating are probably imported. But distributors or restaurants do not advertise the fact the food is “import” for commodity products. On the other hand, if the food is a specialty like brand name cheese, the distributors will heavily advertise and price relatively high. This is why people get impression that imported foods are expensive in Japan.

If you go to a supermarket, look for the prices of domestic and imported potatoes and apples. The imports are usually less expensive.
Yojimbo

You want lasagna, go to Italy or back to the US. Simple.

Oh yeah, I rated you down because you’re a fish out of water, trying to swim on land. Either go back to the sea or evolve.

lawrence

Why the question mark? Anyone surprised?
m

Anything curry has to be delicious.
Chris

I haven’t had any Japanese curry but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I have yet to find any curry I like and I have eaten what others say is very good curry. I still try some once or twice a year thinking I’ll find some that I like.
Karisu

Curry anything makes me want to projectile vomit and scrub my tongue out with some sort of industrial cleaner.

Spicy-hot food needs to be banned from this planet.
a-mole

i only like japanese curry. I never liked the Thai, Indian and Chinese versions i ever sampled.
However, the 4 times i tried Japanese Curry (I always picked the brown one) with veggies and rice i LOVED IT.
it’s lacking this green/ yellow curry spice taste most others have.
anyone know what i am talking about? and most importantly..how can i recreate that deliciousness in europe?

http://www.zdwonline.de Haf

At least in German asia stores and probably also in asia stores in other countries, you can often find Japanese curry packages. If not, then they can probably order them for you. The brand Golden Curry is quite well known.
There are also several online stores where you can order Japanese foods and ingredients.

Curry is the No.1 home cooking dish in Japan!?

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