October 10th Is Okonomiyaki Day Because 10-10 Is the Sound It Makes

Ten in Japanese is jū. So October 10th is jū-jū.

Jūjū is also the sound of something cooking on a hot steel plate. The sizzle.

That is the entire reason October 10th is Okonomiyaki Day in Japan, and it is not folklore. Otafuku Sauce registered the day in 2006 on exactly that pun. Their own explanation adds a second layer I like even more: the two zeros in 10/10 look like the circle of people sitting around a hotplate.

One date, doing two jokes at once.

Japanese Builds Words Out of Noises, Constantly

English has onomatopoeia, but we keep it in a corner. Bang, crash, buzz. Mostly it is for comics and children's books, and an adult who describes their dinner as going crunch crunch sounds like they are doing a bit.

Japanese has thousands of these and they are ordinary adult vocabulary. They come in two kinds, and the second one is the interesting one.

Giongo are actual sounds. Real noises something makes. Jūjū is one.

Gitaigo are not sounds at all. They describe a texture, a state, a way of being, using a word shaped exactly like a sound word. Nothing in the world goes mochi mochi. It is silent. But every Japanese speaker knows precisely what it feels like in your mouth.

That second category has no equivalent in English, and it is why Japanese menus can do something ours cannot.

The Ones You Will Meet on a Menu

Here is the part that is genuinely useful rather than trivia.

サクサク sakusaku: light, dry, shattering crisp. Good tempura. A fresh-fried cutlet.

パリパリ paripari: a thinner, sharper crisp. Gyoza skirt, roast duck skin, a seaweed sheet that has not gone soft yet.

カリカリ karikari: a harder, tighter crunch. Fried garlic chips. Well-done bacon.

English has one word for all three of those and it is "crispy." Japanese has separate words and everyone agrees which is which.

モチモチ mochimochi: springy, dense, gives back when you bite. Good udon. Fresh mochi, obviously.

プリプリ puripuri: bouncy and taut. Shrimp. Scallop.

トロトロ torotoro: melting, thick, collapsing. A slow-braised pork belly. A soft-yolk egg.

ホクホク hokuhoku: dry, fluffy, starchy, and hot. Sweet potato. A chestnut. There is no English word for this and it is a genuine gap.

シャキシャキ shakishaki: the clean snap of a raw vegetable.

フワフワ fuwafuwa: airy, soft, cloud-like.

ネバネバ nebaneba: sticky and stringy. Natto, okra, grated yam. Not a compliment in English. Very much one in Japanese.

プチプチ puchipuchi: tiny things bursting. Salmon roe. Tobiko.

ズルズル zuruzuru: the slurp. Which is not rude, and is in fact the correct way to eat noodles, because it drags air across the broth and you taste more.

The One Everybody Gets Wrong

Since we are here: a bicycle in Japanese slang is a charinko.

The story everyone tells, including me for years, is that it comes from charin charin, the sound of the bell. It is a great story.

It might not be true. There are at least three competing explanations. One is the bell. One is that it came from the Korean word for bicycle, jajeongeo. One is that charinko was postwar slang for a child pickpocket and got transferred sideways. Nobody has settled it, and the honest answer is that it is unclear.

I like this as a caution. Japanese really does build words out of sounds so often that it becomes the automatic assumption, and the automatic assumption is where wrong etymologies come from. Jūjū on the griddle is verifiable. The bicycle is a story.

Back to October

Our okonomiyaki fries exist because people kept asking for okonomiyaki and we have no room for a griddle, so I put the whole treatment on fries instead as a joke and it worked.

We are doing something with Otafuku around October 10th. I do not have the details yet, and when I do they will be on the events page.

In the meantime you have a new vocabulary. Next time something arrives at your table, try to work out whether it is sakusaku or paripari. They are not the same, and once you can hear the difference you cannot stop.