Day: October 16, 2003

Web link of note: Song Fight: Green
(At http://www.songfight.org/green/)

When I was in Tokyo a while ago with my friends, we bought a bag of little grilled cakes with sweet beans inside. I had always called these things “manju,” but I was corrected and told they were “baby kasutera.” I have since done a little more investigation.

The general phrase wagashi refers to the whole class of Japanese sweets.

Kasutera is the Japanese rendering of “castella,” apparently a type of sponge cake. They are in a subclass of wagashi called yakigashi, “grilled sweets.”

The type of wagashi I am used to is called namagashi – “fresh sweets.”

• Most of what I make and consume at home are various kinds of dango (simple sweetened pounded rice), or
• daifuku-mochi (the kind with the anko inside).
• I already knew “yokan,” solid bars of bean jelly.

• Toraya’s Namagashi of the month
• Jo-namagashi page made by Japanese students, hosted in Taiwan (?!?)
• Japan Wagashi Association
• Kitchoan’s wagashi page
• Daimatsu World has some links- apparently this guy makes wagashi for a living.
  winter
  spring
  summer
  fall
  other

Web link of note: Wagashi: Toraya
(At http://www.toraya-america.com/wagashi.html)

Japan Wagashi Association. “Wagashi” is “sweets”

This site is pretty intense- now you can link to hundreds of sweets stores all over Japan.

There is also a section with an index of all their members, indexed in several ways:

1. every shop in Tokyo, sorted by district
2. by the shop name in a giant list
3. by sweet variety name, sorted by first letter

I think I need to make a big printout of the “shops by sweet name” list and make it a checklist, working my way through the alphabet until I’ve eaten every variety or I drop dead.
Web link of note: Japan Wagashi Association
(At http://www.wagashi.or.jp/)