Notable Sandwiches #145: Yakisoba-Pan • Buttondown

The Sword And the Sandwich

August 7, 2026

Notable Sandwiches #145: Yakisoba-Pan

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where my editor David Swanson and I slip messily through Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches. This week, a carb-loaded Japanese treat: yakisoba-pan.

For most of Japan’s very long history, it was a nation of pescatarians and vegetarians. According to Yo-ichiro Sato, Director General, Museum of Natural and Environmental History in Shizuoka, large land mammals on the archipelago were hunted nearly to extinction during the Jomon period (ca. 14000-2400 B.C.), while domestic herds of sheep and cattle were scarce. The majority of the population took advantage of the island nation’s proliferation of river fish, mollusks, and marine life to supplement their diets. By the time rice-paddy cultivation became widespread in the fourth and fifth centuries, the foundation of Japanese cuisine—rice and fish—was laid.

Japan’s meatless diet was further reinforced by wide adherence to Buddhism, which spread throughout the nation in the seventh century; Japanese Buddhists—beginning with Emperor Tenmu, who issued a prohibition against meat-eating in 675—considered it unnecessary killing. Native Shintoism, meanwhile, considered meat-eating an impure defilement. In subsequent centuries, monks adapted fully vegetarian cuisine to an art, the exquisite—and fully plant-based—shōjin ryōri, which combined religious austerity with aesthetic refinement to create plates that were both minimal and beautiful. Among the non-elite, fish-eating remained widespread, and included the development of fermentation, salting, and other preservation efforts, such as wrapping fresh fish in astringent persimmon leaves.

Meat-eating features in premodern Japanese texts as primarily medicinal: wild boar, for example, was believed to be a cure for organ diseases, while fox meat had the potential to cure boils. Falconry was a popular, if expensive, pastime for the samurai nobility, particularly during the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1808), when the sport of hunting geese, ducks, and swans with tamed birds of prey was permitted on specifically designated lands. Outside these limited contexts, for more than a millennium, Japanese cuisine both high and low focused on seafood, vegetables and grains, utilizing every part of the fish or shellfish in everything from fermented fish sauce to delicate sashimi.

The arrival of Commodore Perry’s fleet in Japan<br>This long culinary history changed abruptly and dramatically during the Meiji Restoration—a complex period in Japanese history which began in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was kicked off by an American commodore named Matthew Perry who showed up circa 1854 with a fleet of warships and decreed that an isolationist and socially stagnant Japan open up for trade—or else. This led to a series of agreements with western countries so lopsided their literal historical name is the Unequal Treaties; the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate and the restoration of imperial rule and emperor worship, beginning under Emperor Meiji; and a stunningly rapid blitz of industrialization, urbanization, Westernization, technological advancement, and the eventual expansion that led to the Japanese Empire and, ultimately, its downfall in a cloud of nuclear fallout.

Included amongst the Meiji-era reforms was a lifting of a ban on consuming red meat. Meiji, in fact, announced that he had eaten beef in 1872, effectively imploding a twelve-hundred-year taboo. This opened the floodgates for dishes from meat-obsessed Europe and America, in addition to dishes from China and Korea. Emperor Meiji linked meat-eating to Japan’s rising militarism, insisting that the animal products featured so heavily in Western cuisine would create a stronger and more militarily capable populace.

Scrambling to keep up with imperial policy and adapt to radical changes in diet, native chefs invented yōshoku, Japanified Western cuisine (the word yōshoku first appeared in print in 1872.) Veal cotelettes, a mainstay of French cuisine, became Japanese katsuretsu, which in turn became the panko-battered katsu served at elegant restaurants and street-corner diners in rapidly expanding Japanese cities at the fin-de-siecle. Western cuisine was served in railway dining cars, promoted in cookbooks aimed at middle-class women, and served as a status symbol for national elites; while the poet Kyoshi Takahama emphasized the alienness of “dark-colored, hard meat” served atop a white plate in 1897, other cultural elites embraced the new and thrilling aspects of Western cuisine. At the same time, a newly porous Japan began admitting more and more immigrants from a politically unstable China, and some of the expanded population of immigrants served as street vendors, providing meat-based meals to a Japanese urban populace at cheaper price points.

Allegory of the New fighting the Old...