The Journey of 'Curry'
- Jul 22
- 4 min read
LOST IN TRANSLATION: LIFE OF A JAPANESE GIRL IN ITALY
‘There is no such dish as 'curry' in India.’
That was what a friend from India told me. I could not understand what she meant. Until then, I had never questioned the idea that curry was India's national dish.
For Japanese people, curry is a home-cooked favourite, loved by both children and adults, alongside fried chicken and hamburg steak. Say, 'We're having curry tonight,' and almost everyone pictures the same familiar meal. To my friend, a single dish called curry seemed strange. Across India, dishes have different names, different spice blends, and preparation methods depending on the region.There is no single dish called curry with a fixed identity like the Japanese curry rice we know. What we call curry is, in fact, a name that groups together an extraordinary variety of different dishes from the outside.
A few days later, I found myself talking about Japanese curry with a friend from Malaysia. 'I already knew about Thai and Indian curry, but I first discovered Japanese curry at a CoCo Ichibanya in Malaysia. At first, I found it too sweet and did not like it. Now it is a comfort food for me.' He told me he has one firm rule when he makes it: Japanese curry must be served with Japanese short-grain rice.
I found his story fascinating. A food culture born in India travelled to Britain, became a different dish in Japan, and was exported to Southeast Asia, eventually becoming part of someone’s everyday life. What a long and indirect journey. Culture does not spread in a straight line. It changes form again and again, taking on new meanings in each new place.
How did Japanese curry come to take the form we know today? From the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century, many different South Asian cuisines encountered through British colonial rule gradually came to be understood in Britain only as curry. Ready-mixed curry powder began to appear in cookery books and markets, turning these dishes into something reproducible in British homes. Complex food cultures that had varied from region to region were eventually translated into a form British consumers could understand, recreate at home and distribute.
Curry reached Japan during the Meiji period. By the 1870s, recipes appeared in Japanese cookbooks on Western cuisine. It was later adopted by Western-style restaurants and served in military meals. In the twentieth century, curry powder and ready-made curry products from food manufacturers became widespread. As curry was eaten at home and in school lunches, it gradually took root across the country. After the Second World War, solid blocks of instant curry roux transformed Japanese home cooking. Families no longer needed numerous spices at home. Almost anyone could prepare a familiar flavour with little risk of failure. In India, diverse cooking traditions belonged to particular families and regions. In Japan, some of that diversity was transformed into a reproducible home-cooked dish shared across the country.
Recently, making curry without ready-made roux has become a value in itself. People blend spices from scratch, avoid flour and create a curry of their own. Such dishes are often described as more 'authentic'. I find this ironic. It is precisely because curry roux, created to allow anyone to reproduce the same flavour, became widespread that doing the opposite acquired new value. The more standardised food becomes, the more we seek individuality. The more convenience becomes ordinary, the more inconvenience feels like a luxury.
In post-war Japan, the ideal of the full-time housewife became increasingly widespread. Why, then, were convenient foods like solid curry roux in demand? As I wondered this, I remembered something my grandmother once told me.
Homes in the past often had an engawa, and families were much larger. During memorial services and seasonal festivals, relatives gathered, matching plates were laid out, and cooking large quantities of food was simply part of everyday life. My grandmother supported that way of life, learning from her mother-in-law. Looking at her life, staying at home did not mean having plenty of time. If anything, responsibility for feeding a large household rested almost entirely on one woman. The promise that anyone could make it without failure was about more than convenience or cutting corners. Perhaps it was a social technology that helped families function.
In 1963, House Foods introduced Vermont Curry, made with apples and honey, marketed not for its spiciness, but for a mild sweetness children could enjoy. (When I told my Indian friend that Japanese curry contains apples and honey, she was surprised.) One of its famous slogans was: 'Three o'clock and six o'clock are House Time.' Advertisements repeatedly portrayed a warm family gathered around the dinner table. What stands out today is not the product itself, but the idealised vision of everyday life: a mother preparing a Western-style meal, a family eating together, happy and healthy children, and a home filled with security and comfort. The 'taste of Japanese curry' was not shaped by families alone. It was formed through school lunches, industrial food products, advertising, and memories of countless family dinners over generations. A shared taste gradually became part of Japanese society.
India’s spiced dishes were grouped in Britain as a single category, curry. In Japan, curry developed as a daily home-cooked meal. It later spread globally through restaurant chains as Japanese curry. Today, Japan produces countless hybrid dishes like curry bread, curry udon, omelette curry and soup curry. My Taiwanese friend speaks fondly of the katsu curry she ate in Japan. For my Malaysian friend, Japanese curry is comfort food. Meanwhile, in Britain, chicken tikka masala is described as a national dish. In Thailand, local dishes known as gaeng became known abroad as green and red curry. Some were adapted from foreign cuisines to suit the lives and tastes of a new place. Others were different dishes labelled curry externally.
All of these result from different societies translating foreign food cultures into forms they could understand and integrate into their way of life. We often use the word authentic. Yet an authentic place changes. Culture moves with people. It survives by being reinterpreted in each new place. Japanese curry is not Indian cuisine. Nor is it ‘inauthentic’. It embodies history. Japanese society translated a foreign culture into daily life and nurtured it over generations. Follow our journey @movimento.metropilitano
