Anglers curse it, and it devours kelp forests. Now a patent-pending method to kill the rabbitfish's notorious stench has Japan talking. A look at turning a nuisance fish into food, and how the world is doing the same.
Pepperoni pizza and parmesan are loaded with umami. Everyone tastes it, yet a Japanese chemist named it in 1908. The story of Kikunae Ikeda, the century the West shrugged, and the receptor that finally proved him right.
Kobe Beef and Miyazaki are on menus worldwide, yet Mishima and Iga beef never leave Japan. As wagyu exports hit record highs, here is why some brands cross the ocean and others stay home, from breeds and slaughterhouses to the stalled China resumption.
A Chiba startup has rebuilt yokan into an energy bar now test-selling in Japan and Australia. Here is why this centuries-old confection is one of the smartest survival foods ever made.
Why did Yamasa, a soy sauce maker founded in 1645, end up in pharmaceuticals? The story of how umami research led to nucleotides, and to pseudouridine, a key ingredient in mRNA vaccines.
Corn and mayonnaise on pizza, bread and salad is everyday food in Japan but baffles the world. A look at Hokkaido's corn history and what makes Japanese mayo so different.
Kagawa, Japan's self-styled udon prefecture, throws away thousands of tons of noodles a year. Two teams found wildly different uses for the waste: a small factory that turns it into electricity, and a professor who turns it into surprisingly tough paper grown by microbes, now made at a welfare facility for Marugame's traditional fans.
Tourists are buying Japanese knives in record numbers, and makers are posting all-time-high profits. But there's a tier money can't fast-track—where top chefs wait years. Meet three masters: Sakashita, Nenohi, and Yu Kurosaki.
In Japan's science city of Tsukuba, a coffee roaster and the KEK physics lab created five drip-bag blends named after subatomic particles, each tuned to the particle's real character. Why visiting researchers love them as souvenirs.
While matcha sells out worldwide, the kyusu, the side-handled teapot once found in every Japanese home, is quietly disappearing. What a kyusu is, where its odd shape came from, why it fell out of use, and why you should try a cup brewed in one when you visit Japan.
Japanese izakaya group Watami has acquired a 51% stake in Onigilly, a San Francisco onigiri chain, a bet on America's rice-ball boom. But the buyer is also a company long known in Japan as a symbol of 'black company' overwork culture. We unpack the deal, why onigiri became a healthy, photogenic US lunch, and who Watami really is.
In the American South, kudzu is a notorious invasive weed. In Japan, its flower yields tectorigenin, a supplement compound. A RIKEN team has now decoded how the flower makes it and brewed it in yeast, with no kudzu required.
Tokai University is chasing a world-first: land-based, full-cycle aquaculture of the common octopus, long considered one of the hardest animals to farm. We unpack the cannibalism and escape problems, the clever 'octopus apartment,' the global octopus shortage behind it, and the ethical fight that has already produced farming bans abroad.
Warabi mochi is a Japanese sweet famous for its jiggly, melt-in-your-mouth texture. We dig into its surprising origin (it is not made from rice), its thousand-year history, the rise of matcha warabi mochi, and why it keeps going viral on TikTok.
Kumamoto University has built a world-first device that kills anisakis parasites in raw fish using a 30,000-volt pulse lasting one-millionth of a second, without freezing or cooking. A look at the food-safety tech behind Japan's sashimi culture.
Akita Prefectural University students nicknamed the 'Avocado Squad' published a method that predicts avocado ripeness from skin reflectance and storage temperature, with no slicing required. The work is patent pending and the team is seeking commercial partners.
Yamada Suisan and Japan's fisheries research agency put fully farmed eel on public sale for the first time on May 29. After cutting glass-eel production cost from 40,000 to 1,800 yen, the country aims to end wild-juvenile dependence by 2050.
Caviar's definition of 'best' has shifted from geography to aquaculture technology. As China supplies 60% of the world's farmed caviar and Russian product disappears under sanctions, a landlocked Japanese prefecture is challenging the global hierarchy with a hybrid land-based farming system that combines patented closed-loop tech with rare ultra-soft spring water.
Hokkaido Hamanasu Foods, a natto maker in Ebetsu, has grown its exports 60-fold in eight years, almost entirely to China, where Beijing supermarkets stock Japanese-labeled four-pack sets that take 80% of shelf sales. Prefecture-wide natto exports hit 640 million yen in 2025, five times the level seven years earlier. Back home, Mizkan suspended four natto products in May 2026 as Middle East tensions disrupted packaging supplies. Plus: the science of Bacillus subtilis and where to buy natto abroad.
Calbee is switching 14 of its flagship snacks (including Potato Chips Lightly Salted, Consomme Punch, and Kappa Ebisen shrimp chips) to monochrome 'petroleum-saving packages' from May 25. The cause: ink shortages triggered by the Hormuz Strait crisis. A symbolic case of geopolitical risk reaching Japan's shelves, compared with parallel moves at Lindt, Lamb Weston and Smithfield Foods.