Q7:HORUMON

HORUMON stands for HORUMON-YAKI. HORUMON means "offal" and YAKI means "burned" or "grilled", so the word HORUMON-YAKI means a grilled offal. It's a kind of YAKINIKU, a grilled meat, and it's popular in the Kansai district, especially in Osaka.

There are various kinds of offal served as HORUMON-YAKI such as a liver, a tongue, a intestine, a stomach, a heart and a uterus. And both a cattle's offal and a pig's offal are served in the same way. HORUMON-YAKI is a very cheap and nutritious food, so it's popular among men. Recently, some young women also eat it because they think it has a positive effect on their health and beauty.

Link to a Japanese site:"JONETSU HORUMON"

The Japanese hadn't eaten offal for ages. In other words, they hadn't considered it as a food because they didn't know how to eat it, and didn't have a good way of transportation. However, Japan had suffered from the serious food shortage after the World War II, so they had to eat everything they had whether they like it or not. Fortunately, there were some Korean people in Osaka who knew how to cook offal and they taught it to the Japanese. The Japanese people called the cooked offal HORUMON, it means "garbage" in Kansai dialect. It had become popular soon. At that time, HORUMON-YAKI was just a vulgar food, but it has been improved for years and become popular also among young people.

Thus, the custom of eating offal became common after WWII. And now, there are various kinds of offal dishes in Japan. MOTSU-NABE, a offal stew, is more popular than HORUMON-YAKI in Tokyo and Kyushu. DOTE-NI, a offal dish stewed in miso, is popular in Nagoya and Osaka. The people in Okinawa has a unique cuisine culture, the Okinawan cuisine, which includes many kinds of offal dishes.

There are thousands of restaurants serving offal dishes now in Japan. I think a reason why that custom had become very popular in such a short period of time is that the Japanese have no taboo foods. They can eat almost all kinds of foods. In fact, most of them eat cattles, pigs, birds, fishes, shellfishes and some of them eat even sharks, snakes and insects. Styles of cooking is also various. There are many kinds of restaurants in Japan such as, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, German, Mexican, Hawaiian, Korean, Indian, Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish, and so on. You may think that they have no policy or belief or their own culture because they accept everything, but I think that accepting everything regardless of its origin is their culture and belief.





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