Yes, there are.
Hachijo islands and Ogasawara islands are famous for spicy food.
Islanders put their chilli peppers literally anywhere and they are REALLY hot. I am not sure, but could be a variation of Thai Birds’ Eye Chili peppers.
Islanders make spicy vinegar-based sauces similar to Tabasco sauce (just few times hotter), use peppers instead of wasabi to eat sushi, put peppers into soba noodles, make “tare” sauce of soy sauce and peppers and these are just most common uses.
However: normally food shops on these islands although feature some local dishes they are apparently “normalised” for an average visitor, so it’s not that easy to find local spicy excesses being a tourist. Some pepper would be passed as an option in soba shops and that’s all.
Sapporo, in Hokkaido, is famous for soup curry — this is a unique Japanese-style curry soup with vegetables (lotus root, potatoes, etc.) and chicken, served with rice on the side. Soup curry places typically have a system where you can pick how hot you want it (from 1-40 or similar) — the higher levels are really spicy.
You can find pictures on the Japanese Wikipedia article.
For a particular restaurant, you might try Crazy Spice, which is very good.
In short, no, there’s no Japanese region known for spicy food in the same way that (say) Sichuan or Thailand is. Japanese doesn’t really even have a word for “spicy”, 辛い karai originally meant “salty” and is still used in that sense as well. However, there are a couple of spicy local specialities, mostly in the south of the country where they had the most Chinese/Korean influence.
(courtesy Babi Hijau, Wikimedia Commons)
(courtesy Kanko, Flickr)
(courtesy me)
And that’s about it, really, for main dishes or even main ingredients. In addition to wasabi and shichimi, Japanese cuisine uses some “spicy” spices:
There’s also a whole slew of spicy nibbles designed to accompany alcohol, eg. takowasabi (minced octopus with wasabi) and shiokara (fermented squid guts, absolutely horrible stuff), but none of these are particularly regional as far as I’m aware.
Last but not least, don’t forget more recent culinary imports:
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
4 Mar, 2024
4 Mar, 2024
4 Mar, 2024