The Oxford English Dictionary’s March 2024 update included a delectable 23 words of Japanese origin. More than half are food-related, including donburi, karaage, katsu, okonomiyaki, onigiri, takoyaki, tonkatsu, tonkotsu, yakiniku.
This is unsurprising, given the continuing impact globally of Japan’s soft power through cuisine (and popular culture), with the rise in Japanese restaurants and availability of Japanese ingredients.
As a dish, katsu (カツ•) is a piece of meat, seafood or vegetable, coated with flour, egg and panko breadcrumbs, and (double) deep-fried and served cut into strips. Its origins – in the Meiji period’s adoption of foreign ideas, including adapting Western dishes to create yōshoku “Western food” – lie in the Japanese execution, in the 1890s, of a European meat cutlet dish.
As a word, katsu charmingly illustrates language contact dynamics.
It is clipped from katsuretsu, which is a borrowing of the English “cutlet” (itself coming from the French côtelette). Its pronunciation was modified to the phonotactics – rules governing permissible combinations of speech sounds – of the adopting language.
Japanese syllables comprise a vowel and a possible preceding consonant; and the only consonant occurring after the vowel is /n/. A single syllable like “cut-” – with a coda consonant that flouts Japanese syllable structure rules – becomes restructured to two syllables “ka” and “tsu”, with a vowel added for the second syllable.
Similarly, “-let” becomes “re” (Japanese phonology does not distinguish between /r/ and /l/) and “tsu”.
Early documentation in English includes tonkatsu – ton (豚) being the Sino-Japanese word for “pig, pork” – in a 1954 restaurant advertisement in a Hawaiian newspaper, and the compound katsu curry in a 1976 article in California.
Japanese katsu entering English – after the original adoption of the English “cutlet” into Japanese – makes it an interesting reborrowing or “boomerang word”.
In the Kanto area, which includes Greater Tokyo, “katsu” is often taken to mean tonkatsu. Meanwhile, in the south-central Kansai region, which includes Kyoto, where beef is more popular (and original for the dish), there is gyukatsu – gyuniku is Japanese for “beef”.
However, bifukatsu – restructured from “beef katsu” – is widely used. Similarly, chicken katsu is torikatsu or chikin katsu, and meat with cheese is chīzukatsu.
However you like your katsu, you’ll love how tradition calls for students and athletes to eat tonkatsu or katsudon on the eve of an important exam or game for good luck – katsu (カツ) is homophonous with the verb katsu (勝つ) “to win, to be victorious”.