Japanese Wagashi Sweets Names: Daifuku, Dango, Dorayaki and More

The names you will see first

Wagashi is written with wa (和), Japan, and kashi (菓子), confectionery. Its opposite is yōgashi (洋菓子), Western sweets such as sponge cake and cream puffs. A department store food floor keeps the two in separate zones, and the wagashi side is where these names appear.

Shops often write the harder names in hiragana: ようかん, もなか, まんじゅう. Learn the sound first and either spelling will make sense.

Anko: tsubuan or koshian

Almost every sweet above contains anko (あんこ), a paste of azuki beans boiled with sugar. The label will say, or the clerk will ask, which kind you want. Tsubuan (つぶあん) keeps the beans partly whole, so it has skins and texture. Koshian (こしあん) is pressed through a sieve until smooth. People have firm preferences, and asking which one someone likes is reliable small talk.

Kinako (きなこ) is the other flavour to know: roasted soybean flour, tan, nutty and dry. It coats warabimochi and some dango, and usually comes with kuromitsu, a dark sugar syrup, to pour over.

Dango, daifuku and other soft rice sweets

Dango (団子) are small balls of rice-flour dough, usually three or four on a bamboo skewer. Mitarashi dango are grilled and glazed with a sweet soy sauce syrup. Sanshoku dango, three-colour dango in pink, white and green, are linked with cherry blossom viewing. Because they come on a stick, dango are counted with hon: ippon, nihon, sanbon.

Daifuku (大福) is a soft round of mochi, pounded rice cake, wrapped around anko; ichigo daifuku hides a whole strawberry inside. Warabimochi (わらび餅) is not really mochi: it is a cool, wobbly sweet made from starch, eaten in summer under a heap of kinako.

Baked, steamed and set: five more shapes

Dorayaki is famous as the favourite food of Doraemon, the robot cat of manga and anime. The tai in taiyaki is sea bream, a fish linked with celebrations; the cake contains no fish at all.

Seasonal sweets: sakuramochi and kashiwamochi

Wagashi follow the calendar closely, and two sweets mark spring. Sakuramochi (桜餅) is pink rice cake around anko, wrapped in a salted cherry leaf, sold around the Doll Festival on 3 March and through blossom season. It comes in two styles: a thin crepe rolled around the filling, associated with Tokyo, and a ball of coarse, sticky rice, associated with Kansai. The leaf is edible, and whether to eat it is a matter of taste.

Kashiwamochi (柏餅) is white rice cake folded over anko and wrapped in an oak leaf, eaten for Children's Day on 5 May. This leaf is not eaten. Outside those weeks both sweets largely disappear, which is the point: a wagashi counter tells you the month.

With matcha: sweet first, then tea

Wagashi are made to be eaten with green tea, and above all with matcha (抹茶), powdered green tea whisked with hot water. In the tea ceremony the sweet is eaten first and the tea follows, so that the sweetness left in the mouth meets the bitterness of the tea. Tea rooms at temples and gardens sell the pair as a set, and one sentence orders it.

Buying at a wagashi shop

Shop sweets are sold by the piece from a glass counter, so pointing works, and hitotsu zutsu (一つずつ), one of each, saves you from repeating the number. The question that matters is how long the sweet lasts. Fresh sweets such as daifuku and sakuramochi often need to be eaten the same day, and the clerk will say honjitsu-chū, within today. Dry and baked sweets last longer. The date on the label is the shōmi kigen (賞味期限), the best-before date.