Japanese Western dishes deserve their own post here, not only because they are tasty, but also because they are weird on several levels. It's a real antropological study to go into a Japanese Western restaurant like we did today. This is not western food in the sense that local people are trying to bake pizza or preparing a hamburger. We're talking about a long list of dishes which by now became a traditional part of the Japanese culinary landscape.
Yōshoku is the name for this category of dishes.
Let's start with the names of the food items. In Japanese every foreign origin word is written in the Katakana alphabet. Katakana has the same set of sounds expressed in written form as Hiragana, but is only used to transliterate foreign words. As such these items are still following the traditional Japanese phonetical rules of what sounds exist and what sounds can follow what. So spaghetti is written and pronounced as "supagettei" or hamburger as "hambaaga". [This is also true for non-food items: smartphone becomes "sumatohon", or "sumaho" on short, life becomes "raifu", etc.]
Hambaagaa (ハンバーガー)is the traditional hamburger we know from the west: patty and other stuff in a bun. Hambaagu (ハンバーグ) is the patty-only version without bun included. Then we write it back to Engrish and we get Hamburg! So hamburg is the no-bun version of the good old hamburger.
In our Japanese Western restaurant today we also ate a spaghetti with nori and tarako sauce, things that are typical only to the Japanese kitchen.
It's not clear how the ground daikon got on top of this hamburg, but whatever, tastes good:
Bretzel appears here in local traditional flavors:
The German Baumkuchen is here individually packed to bite-size pieces and of course it's called baumukuuhen:
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