Curry Day

January 22nd is Curry Day.

After eating far too much mochi and every variety of nabe, it's nice to change to youshoku (Western-style food).

Curry day comes from the history of Japanese school lunches, or “kyushoku”. It seems that lunches were served for poor students at various schools on an ad-hoc basis since the turn of the century, but really took off in 1946, when Japanese Americans, worried about the poor nutrition of Japanese children after the war, started a scheme to provide food aid for school lunches. Shichinosuke Asano started the group on January 22nd 1946 in San Francisco. Immigrants in North and South America contributed and sent food aid until the mid 1950s. You can read more information at the excellent yokosonews.com website.

In honour of their efforts, January 22nd was declared “curry day” in the early 1980s, and this most popular of school lunches is served on that day. It’s also traditional to have curry on Friday nights in the Japanese Marine Self Defence Force. 

This year, “Curry Day” was a Sunday, so sadly, schools didn’t serve a special curry lunch, but we had curry at home. Looking into the history of Japanese curry (which tastes quite different to the Indian style curries I grew up with), I found what we eat now in Japan as “curry rice”, was developed by the Japanese Navy. Curry first came to Japan as the country opened up after the Edo period, when it was considered a rather exotic, luxury food. The story goes that the Japanese navy, worried about sailors’ malnutrition on long voyages (since plain rice, miso and pickles was the standard fare), adopted British Navy style meals with meat and vegetables. They adapted curry to be served at sea, with navy cooks adding more vegetables and flour to thicken the sauce (so it didn’t spill easily) and beef tallow (fat), which keeps for a long time. Since it was easy to cook, tasty and long-lasting, it became popular at home too.

This is the “authentic” Japanese Navy Curry, based on the original 1908 recipe. It’s a popular souvenir for visitors to Yokosuka in Kanagawa, which was originally the Japanese Navy’s base and shipyards and is now home to the US Navy.

Curry is so popular that different regions of Japan have their own variations. In Sapporo, I tried the ‘soup curry’, which really fills you with warmth and good feelings on a snowy day. At Omiya station in Saitama, the supermarket has a kind of ‘curry library’ with hundreds of regional curries, stacked like books!

Start your own curry library!

Since curry sauce tastes even better the next day, it’s popular to serve it as curry udon. I add a little (just a little) water to thin the sauce slightly – especially if you use the commercial curry roux cubes, they tend to thicken up a lot. Boil some udon noodles according to the pack instructions, put them in a bowl and pour over the curry sauce. Easy! I sometimes see people add shredded cheese (best eaten alone; it’s a tasty, gooey mess). I like to make curry spaghetti. The easiest way is to use pre-made Keema Curry – just put it on top of spaghetti, instead of rice. Or you can make a normal bolognaise sauce with plenty of onion, ground beef, garlic and some chopped, peeled tomatoes, and then add curry powder to taste.

While I used to have mango chutney, cucumber raita or pickled lime with my curries in Australia, the popular sides here are pickled rakkyo – like a pickled onion crossed with a schallot bulb – and my favourite, fukujinzuke, a pickle which is a little sweet and crunchy, usually with daikon, eggplant and cucumber.

Rakkyo

So, make Friday curry day! If you’re down in Yokosuka, you can try the Yokosuka Kaigun Curry restaurant near Yokosuka-chuo station or a restaurant called Wood Island. Enjoy it the traditional way with pickles, a small salad and a glass of milk! Or you can make it at home with the rather militaristic looking “Yokosuka Kaigun Curry” package from choumi.jp, as seen above.