A Plethora of Pan in the Modern Japanese Bakery

Text and Photos by Viola Gaskell

Shokupan, which literally translates to “eating bread,” has become the king of loaves in Japan.

If the phrase “Japanese food” doesn’t conjure images of soft, gooey loaves of white bread, or crusty baguettes with perfectly pinched tips, perhaps it should.

Cities like Kyoto, Tokyo and Kobe teem with popular artisanal and chain bakeries that draw lines around the block on Sunday mornings. Bread has been a part of the Japanese diet since the early 1800s, when European merchants, navies and missionaries came ashore in droves. In modern-day Japan, bread is at once a mainstay and a novelty.

The country’s ubiquitous convenience stores sell a range of breads, from 7-Eleven’s “Premium gold” white bread to Family Mart’s famous melon pan, a bun with a layer of cookie dough baked onto its surface.

Artisanal bakeries carry European breads like baguettes and pain de campagne, as well as softer, sweeter Japanese breads that were created to suit the local palate, including shokupan, a pillowy adaptation of pan-baked white bread, and kashipan, a category of snack breads filled with various pastes and sweet creams.

Shokupan, which literally translates to “eating bread,” has become the king of loaves in Japan. Slices of varying thickness are used for fruit sandos, sandwiches filled with colorful diced fruit arranged in artful geometric patterns held together with cream; tomago sandos piled high with velvety scrambled eggs; and thick toasts topped with pooling butter, cheese or anko (sweet adzuki bean paste).

***

When bread first arrived in Japan with the Portuguese in the 1500s, it was unpopular with local people who found the loaves hard and bland, but pan, the Japanese rendition of påo, Portuguese for bread, remained. English and French breads were soon met with familiar distaste. In 1874, Yasubei Kimura, an ex-samurai who opened a bakery, Kimuraya, in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza district, tried his hand at adapting bread to pre-existing Japanese tastes.

Kimura created anpan, a soft, chewy wheat flour bun filled with anko. It was inspired by manju, a popular Japanese confection made with rice flour and adzuki bean that dates back to the 1300s and was originally a variation of Chinese mantou. Anpan was a hit. Even Emperor Meiji (1867-1912), the forefather of modern Japan, endorsed the deliciousness of Kimura’s new baked good.

In the years that followed, other bakers adapted bread to Japanese tastes, creating iconic breads like shokupan, kashipan, and oblong sweet rolls known as koppepan, which became a favorite for sandwiches.

Maruki Seipanjo is a popular Kyoto bakery specializing in koppepan sandos and other snack breads since 1947.

While the use of sakadane (rice starter) contributes to the soft chewiness of anpan and kashipan, shokupan gets its pillowiness from a water-roux technique called yukone: A mixture of hot water and flour sets before it’s added to the remaining flour, milk, sugar, egg, salt and yeast to gelatinize the starches in the dough, making for an exceptionally fluffy texture.

Keisuke Nakagawa, owner of Nakagawa Komugiten, a sought-after bakery in Kyoto, says he set out to make shokupan his specialty because “it is the bread people eat every day.”

“I wanted to do something that was ishokuju, a saying that means clothing, food and housing—the three things you really need for living. I wanted to be useful,” he says.

While breads like shokupan and kashipan are firmly implanted in the Japanese food psyche, authentic European breads are finally finding their audience in 21st century Japan. Long undesired, hard-crusted sourdough loaves and baguettes are the last frontier of foreign allure of bread in Japan.

Masamichi’s sourdough loaves are prepped for the oven.

Third-generation Kyoto baker Masamichi Nakagawa dually pursues shokupan and levain as his specialties. After growing up around his grandfather’s anpan, karepan (fried curry rolls) and kashipan, like many Japanese bakers of his generation, Masamichi was interested in pursuing the crust and crumb of more traditional European breads.

Masamichi trained at a French bakery in Osaka before returning to his hometown to open Kurs, a quaint bakery in Kyoto’s upscale Nakagyo ward. Despite opening just three months before Japan closed its borders to foreigners to prevent the spread of Covid-19, Kurs has been such a hit with locals that Masamichi’s fluffy shokupan, hearty levain loaves and flakey croissants completely sell out most days.

His grandfather's koppepan sandos and anpan were soft all the way through and generously sweetened, But at Kurs, Masamichi and his wife Sachiko assemble sandwiches on oblong rolls with a crunchy crust and make anpan with dough that more closely resembles French country bread.

Kurs makes this beloved anpan with anko, butter and walnuts.

***

Author and Japanese bread expert Mari Ako says that though domestic inventions like shokupan and anpan still reign supreme in Japan, appetites for European breads have steadily grown since the early 2000s, when a handful of bakeries making authentic French bread, including Kyoto’s famous Le Petit Mec, made their way into media like ultra-popular women’s magazine Hanako.

Media has a long-standing acute influence on the popularity of foods throughout Japan. Shokupan frequents the pages of Japanese pop-culture lifestyle magazines like Casa Brutus and Premium, with rankings, critiques and unexpected finds, while more niche enthusiast books like the Kyoto Bread Guide reveal the science behind the art with diagrams of slice thickness, filling to bread ratios, and cutting and assembling techniques.

Ako says that a number of media campaigns by major domestic bakeries like Pasco and Andersen, along with post-World War II American flour imports, catapulted bread consumption in Japan. National household expenditures on bread have overtaken that of rice since 2013 according to surveys by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication.

However, Ako says that though Japanese consumers are willing to splurge on bread, “it is a supplement to rice, not a replacement—you cannot have Japanese food without rice.”

Keisuke Nakagawa delivers baguettes and shokupan hot from the oven at Nakagawa Komugiten.

Japan is an ever-changing foodscape where new trends work their way into a rich history of culinary traditions. Fusion is not a trendy word grab, it is at the core of Japanese food, starting with the introduction of rice from China in 300BC, all the way down to more recent favorites like uni spaghetti.

 If there is space at the Japanese table for both rice and bread, growing affinity for the baguette does not likely mean French breads will replace shokupan and koppepan in Japan’s culinary heart anytime soon. But today, the phenomenally flaky, buttery croissants at Kurs and Nakagawa Komugiten might be giving anpan a run for its money.