Japanese Loanwords in Hawaii - Food

Food

• Anpan (ja:あんパン, 餡パン): A sweet bread filled with azuki bean paste and sprinkled on top with sesame seeds. Usually larger than the Japanese variety.
• Bento (ja:弁当, べんとう): Box lunch geared for portability for picnics, etc. It typically has rice, a main dish of meat or fish, and side dishes. It used to be food on a paper plate placed inside a thin cardboard box. Now, it's all in convenient styrofoam containers molded for each dish.
• Manju (ja:饅頭): Confection with sweet azuki bean paste inside a flour-based outside.
• Miso soup (ja:味噌汁): Soup made of fermented soybean paste called miso. Miso-shiru in Japanese.
• Mochi (ja:餅): Rice cake made of a special kind of rice that has been pounded into a sticky mass. Mochi may be sweetened or unsweetened. Commonly pounded and eaten during New Year's, as in Japan. Sweetened azuki beans are commonly included with mochi as part of a confection.

• Mochi crunch: Rice crackers seasoned with shoyu. Also called "kaki mochi". Called arare in standard Japanese.
• Mochi ice cream: Ice cream coated with a thin layer of frozen mochi.

• Musubi: Rice triangle wrapped in dried seaweed; may or may not have something in the middle, like a pickled ume or bits of fish. Spam musubi has a piece of SPAM luncheon meat on top. In Japanese the word onigiri is more commonly used for rice balls. Without further clarification, "musubi" usually implies the triangle variety (round balls of rice are only eaten at funerals).
• Shoyu (ja:醤油): Soy sauce. "Shoyu rice" is "soy sauce" sprinkled over rice. "Shoyu x" is some ingredient x cooked in soy sauce, e.g. "Shoyu chicken", "shoyu pork", "shoyu tofu". This term is so widely used that most Hawaiian residents are unaware that is not the widely used English language term for soy sauce.
• Sukiyaki (ja:すき焼き): Thin slices of beef, vegetables, and tofu simmered in a skillet or pan in sukiyaki sauce. It is also the title of a No. 1 hit song in the U.S. made popular by Kyu Sakamoto in 1963. The Japanese title of the song is "Ue o muite arukō—it has nothing to do with the food product.)
• Teriyaki (ja:照り焼き): Grilled meat basted with a sauce made of shoyu and sugar. Meat words such as "chicken" are often appended. A common dish in plate lunches. Often shortened to "teri", e.g. "teri burger".
• Tako (ja:タコ): Octopus. Often used in a local dish called poke (pronounced POH-keh) in which case it is called "tako poke".
• Tofu (ja:豆腐): Soybean curd.