Japan Ate 10 Billion Plates of Curry Last Year. How Did This Gloopy Import Become the National Dish?

From foreign novelty to national dish: beyond the timing and the technical breakthroughs, this may be the best illustration of how commercial vitality puts down roots in Japan.

Ten billion plates.

Spread across Japan's current population of 127 million, that works out to nearly 80 plates of curry per person a year.

By these latest figures, reported by Nikkei, curry is far more popular in Japan than ramen (6 billion bowls a year), which makes it the country's number one national food by any measure. More than 60% of Japanese people say they are happy to eat curry at a restaurant twice a week — and that does not count the instant curry they eat at home.

"Curry is a beverage." The line comes from the late Japanese comedian Uganda Tora, who invented the heavyset-comic look in Japan, and it tells you how far the enthusiasm goes.

It is genuinely puzzling. Japan has no curry tradition, and the Japanese, who prize delicate cooking and the natural flavor of an ingredient, have somehow fallen for a scalding, spicy, gloopy sauce. Stranger still, the chicken, beef and pork that usually go into curry are not stars of Japanese cooking either.

That love has built a huge market. CoCo Ichibanya, Japan's largest curry restaurant chain, had 1,296 stores in Japan as of this February, against just 161 overseas. Its parent company, House Foods, is also Japan's largest curry food company. In its newly released first-half fiscal 2017 figures, net profit for April through September rose 2% year on year to 4.3 billion yen (about US$38 million), on sales of 143.4 billion yen. The Chinese market helped drive the growth, but 90% of sales still came from Japan itself. Then there are Japan's 55,000-plus convenience stores, every one of which sells curry rice bento, curry pork cutlet bento and curry udon bento.

And the earliest Japanese description of curry? "A foul-smelling sauce."

So how did it become the most-eaten food in Japan? One thing is worth settling first. Indian curry, Thai curry, British curry and Japanese curry share a name, but they differ enormously in taste and ingredients — they are not even the same concept. To Indians, "curry" is an umbrella term for all sauces, not a fixed way of seasoning food. You cannot walk into an Indian restaurant and order "a curry," any more than you could walk into a restaurant in China and order "a stir-fry."

Lizzie Collingham, who holds a doctorate in history from Cambridge, traces the origins of the dish in Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. The word "curry" is linked to the Tamil word "kari," meaning "a special spicy sauce that used heat and fragrance to mask the gamey smell of mutton."

Recipes left by the Mughal Empire suggest curry's earliest prototype was a grilled-meat sauce favored by the Mongols: "onion, garlic, almonds and spices were added to curd, turning it into a thick paste that would cling to meat." The Portuguese, who then held India's west coast, lent a hand too. They carried whole shiploads of ginger and cinnamon out of India, and brought in the American crop that would change Asian cooking most of all: the chili pepper.

It was the British, who landed in India after the Portuguese, who gave curry its name. In 1810 a British company called Crosse & Blackwell (C&B) cut through the confusion: out of hundreds of Indian sauces it picked spices such as turmeric, pepper and curcuma, standardized a single recipe, called it "curry," and sold it abroad. It was the first company in the world to make a household curry powder to industrial food standards — stable flavor, safe, long shelf life — and its commercial success created the prototype of the curry we all meet today.

After the Meiji Restoration, which began in the 1860s, the British brought curry to Japan. The taste was strange, but curry was treated as "civilized, enlightened Western cuisine," and it won people over by being foreign. In Natsume Soseki's diary of his student years in Britain, and in the newspapers of the Meiji era, curry was described as a British import, not an Indian dish.

Dipping bread into curried meat broth became a craze in Japanese high society, a habit that belonged to the upper class. More than half a century later, the actor Takeshi Kitano would eat curry at a department store as a boy and still think: today was too extravagant.

What actually spread curry among ordinary people, improbably, was the Japanese Navy.

One central task of the Meiji Restoration was to build a modern army and navy on the Western model. How far did the navy take its admiration of the British? The red bricks for the naval academy buildings were reportedly imported from Britain — to say nothing of food, dress and daily routine, all of which followed British custom.

Curry, then a favorite in the British Navy, balanced meat and vegetables and kept well, and it had one more advantage: mixed with rice, the thick paste did not spill easily, which made it ideal on the constantly rocking deck of a warship. The Japanese Navy took to it fast. To this day Japan's navy keeps the tradition of eating curry every Friday. On long voyages a sailor's sense of time goes dull, and the strong taste of curry rice was used to remind the crew what day it was.

As sailors went home or left the service, they took the recipe into ordinary households and everyday restaurants. The Meiji Restoration had exposed the whole country to the shock of industrial civilization, and copying the West at the table was one form that took. It was seen as a modern way to live.

If the Japanese first came to curry out of longing for foreign things, what completed the local invention of Japanese curry was the addition of three vegetables: onion, carrot and potato.

Washoku, traditional Japanese food, has always followed the principle of one soup and three dishes — miso soup plus three small sides to eat with rice. That underlying resemblance is what made curry rice feel familiar. On top of that, the Japanese always eat curry rice with fukujinzuke, the pickles served with a meal. To make curry rice feel like a proper meal, they added that familiar side too.

But what pushed curry much further was the rise of domestic companies, which brought prices down and improved the taste. Amusingly, it took a case of fraud — cheap goods passed off as the real thing — to put Japanese curry on the map.

The original curry powder recipe was a trade secret, held tightly by C&B, which meant Japan's curry market depended entirely on imports.

In 1923 a man named Minejiro Yamazaki succeeded in making a high-quality Japanese curry powder, and deliberately renamed his company S&B in the hope of taking on the market-dominating C&B. The market gave him the cold shoulder. Many restaurants would order only C&B powder, on the theory that domestic curry was not good enough.

In 1931 some unscrupulous traders began putting cheap domestic curry into C&B tins and selling it that way. They kept it up for several years and nobody noticed. Only then did people realize that Japanese curry was every bit as good as the imported kind, and cheaper — and the British monopoly broke.

S&B's little red tin of curry powder is still Japan's most enduring curry brand, with nearly 30% of the domestic market, second only to House. For Yamazaki's contribution to the industry, the Japanese government awarded him the third-class Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, in 1973, on the 50th anniversary of S&B curry powder.

House, the latecomer, jumped to become Japan's biggest curry company on the strength of a change to the recipe. In 1963 it launched Vermont Curry roux — sold in China as Baimengduo, the best-selling curry roux there — which for the first time added apple and honey, producing a sweet curry with a distinctly Japanese flavor. From then on the Japanese market was split between sweet (amakuchi) and hot (karakuchi).

There is a joke about that divide that everyone in Japan knows. "She loved sweet curry, and I couldn't stand it at all," the well-known TV host Hitoshi Matsumoto once said, explaining why he and a girlfriend broke up. In Japan, "we couldn't even agree on curry" can be read as "we were completely incompatible."

House made a sweet curry precisely to win over children and women. Because children could not take the heat of the curry then on sale, families cooking curry at home had to make a separate pot for the kids. When the sweet Vermont product first appeared it met unanimous objections; advertising and in-store tastings turned that around, and demand outran supply.

What finally made Japanese curry a national food were the technical breakthroughs in instant curry and sealed packaging.

Oriental Instant Curry, born in 1945, is the oldest instant curry brand still on sale. An early salesman remembered:

"We'd drive promotional trucks through the streets playing music, find a place where a crowd had gathered, put on a show, and then cook curry on the spot for people to taste. In those years there was so little entertainment that the trucks always pulled a crowd — we'd sell more than 1,000 bags each time. On the spoons alone, given away with the samples, the company produced nearly 30 million."

Department stores had a lot to do with spreading curry rice in the Kansai region. Ichizo Kobayashi, founder of Hankyu Department Store, was the first to put a food hall inside a department store. By the Showa era the Japanese knew curry well but still could not afford it, so Hankyu bought cheap beef straight from farmers and cut the price of curry rice, so that ordinary people riding the trains or browsing the store could eat it too. Hankyu was selling 13,000 servings of curry a day.

In 1968 Japanese curry had its real revolution. Otsuka — now the Fortune Global 500 company Otsuka Pharmaceutical — developed flexible plastic retort-pouch packaging on its own. The invention made "three-minute instant curry" possible and was a gift to the entire food industry. A year later Otsuka added three-layer aluminum foil packaging, which stretched instant curry's shelf life from three months to two years. Promoted at the 1970 Osaka World Expo, "three-minute curry in a bag" became a nationwide hit.

Timing mattered. After the 1960s the Japanese economy grew fast; along with the Osaka Expo, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics fed the boom, and demand for convenient, instant food climbed. Both instant noodles and instant curry were invented in this period. Curry over rice fit the demands of fast-paced work and life exactly.

There is also the Japanese love of rice. Figures from Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries show that in 1965 each person ate 118.3 kilograms of rice a year. A survey by Ajinomoto in 2000 found that plain rice, hand-pressed sushi and rice cooked with other ingredients (including mixed rice) were the three favorite staples in Japan — all of them rice.

Walk into a well-known curry shop in Osaka today and quite a few put on live music. The owners are mostly in their thirties and forties, and many are said to have come out of the music business.

More than 2,000 kinds of instant curry are now on sale in Japan, priced from 100 to 1,000 yen. As processing improves, even professionals can struggle to tell some of the high-end instant curries from the real thing by taste.

Product innovation is still the key to the Japanese curry market. In 2016 Asahi Group introduced a freeze-drying method that cut instant curry's three-minute heating time to 60 seconds, and sales that quarter rose 30%.

According to a survey by Fuji Keizai, total sales of instant curry will pass those of curry roux blocks — the kind that has to be simmered with vegetables and meat before eating — for the first time in 2017.

To fight the squeeze from instant curry, House Foods launched Kiwadachi Curry this February. It is not a solid block but an easily dissolved concentrated paste that gets to the table fast. Five months after launch, sales had passed 2 million units.

One challenge the curry market now faces: as more people live alone and more women work, the Japanese are moving away from rice at the family table, the young especially. Bread and noodles are taking its place.

Over the past 30 years Japan's food-service market has expanded 1.3 times, while prepared food — convenience-store rice balls and bento, above all — has grown 24% a year. Rice's share of consumption through the prepared-food and food-service channels rose from 15.2% in 1985 to 31% in 2015.

The curry industry has answered with products made for convenience stores. House launched Kokumaro Curry roux, adapting to smaller households by shrinking the large pack from 10 servings to 8. Otsuka Foods' Bon Curry cut the preparation time instead.

Everything, in short, is moving toward the more convenient and the smaller — portions for one person eating alone.

From foreign novelty to national dish: beyond the timing and the technical breakthroughs, this may be the best illustration of how commercial vitality puts down roots in Japan.

Cover image source: RETRIP[リトリップ]