by Neil Ellard
Table of Contents
Introduction: I Wanna Eat Osaka Street Food with Anime Characters
I enjoyed a lot of different street foods during my visit to Osaka about a millennium ago, including two of them I had never experienced but heard a lot about. They were okonomiyaki—a savory pancake with cabbage and a choice of proteins inside, plus sauce, mayo and bonito topping—and takoyaki—fried balls of batter with bits of octopus inside, covered in various toppings and usually eaten with toothpicks. Where did I hear about these in the first place? Where else? Anime. Since this is an art form that reflects Japanese culture, of course, this will occasionally include food. Here are some examples where one, the other or sometimes both show up with at least some significance. No, I’m not going to list a couple of hundred examples where a stall offering them for sale shows up at a festival. I have to finish writing this sometime.
Ranma ½ (original – 1989-1996; remake – 2024-present)
らんま1/2
It was almost tempting to not mention this series and see the reaction, but I don’t do rage bait (at least, not consciously), I’m not an idiot (but being human, I have my moments) and the good people here would have some words with me if I tried anyway. In Rumiko Takahashi’s martial arts/screwball/love comedy, Ranma Saotome’s twisted life and terrible father Genma has resulted in having a curse that turns him into a girl when he’s splashed with cold water, which reverses when she’s hit with hot water. Genma and other cast members have similar curses that temporarily change them into pandas, piglets, cats and ducks. The Tendo family are surprised when a young woman and a panda turn up at their dojo, when they were expecting a father and his betrothed son. Now, both of Ranma’s different forms have a lot of people who want to inflict violence on or date/marry him/her.
One of the spurned fiancées is Ukyo Kuonji, the daughter of an okonomiyaki chef who has taken on the business herself. Ten years earlier, Ukyo’s dad proposed an arranged marriage between their children, offering the okonomiyaki cart as a dowry. When Genma asked six-year-old Ranma what he liked more, Ukyo or okonomiyaki, he (who was oblivious to the fact that Ukyo was a girl) replied with the food he was happily eating then. Genma steals the cart, running off with Ranma and leaving Ukyo behind (told you he was awful), and she vows revenge on the two of them. This leads her to discard her femininity and throw herself into developing various martial arts skills based on making okonomiyaki, including exploding batter and an enormous spatula she uses for hand-to-hand combat. She shows up in Nerima, calls out and (rightly) beats down Genma, transfers to Ranma’s high school and another absurd battle ensues, in a boxing ring where the outer perimeter is a hot teppan (flat-top) grill. When Ranma manages to get through her anger long enough to tell her that she’s cute, she ends up rejoining the marry/date side, adding to the web of rivalries. Of course, she opens an okonomiyaki restaurant to support herself. The English adaptation comically refers to this food as “Japanese pizza.” I can tell you that Japanese pizza is the same that we know in the west, at about double our price for a delivered pie.
I have a story about my visit to Osaka regarding all this (except the pizza – couldn’t afford it). I dropped into an okonomiyaki restaurant a few blocks from the guest house where I was staying to try it for the first time in my life. I was the only customer there, so the two staffers there tried to hold a conversation with me, and we all did our best, despite the language barrier. I told them about Ranma ½ (which they said they weren’t familiar with, but the woman knew one of Takahashi’s later titles, Maison Ikkoku, where takoyaki makes a short appearance), Ukyo and the huge spatula. The man kept going around the back and pulling out different sizes of spatulas to show me, and I kept saying, “Bigger.” I enjoyed the okonomiyaki, paid up, was given a couple of souvenir mini-spatulas and knew what I had to do next time I was in the area. I returned to a nearby used manga store (who gave me my first order because the guy there was surprised that the gaijin knew enough to ask for mangaka by name), looked for and bought the tankouban where Ukyo was introduced (Vol. 9), and took it straight to the restaurant. They told me they were closing for the day, but I went, “Hai. Presento,” and gave them the book after showing them both covers. They were very happy to receive it.
Oh, yeah, takoyaki turns up in the first series. Since it and the original manga were pretty much running side by side, the anime developed recurring Terminal Filleritis™. Season 5, Ep. 111 was one of those episodes, “The Case of the Missing Takoyaki.” Tendo Nabiki is offered some by a street vendor, so she buys a container of six and the vendor gives here a seventh one free. At home, she goes to another room to answer the phone, returns to the kitchen—and screams. All the takoyaki are gone, and both families gather around the table to try to figure out who dunnit. Sillier than a bagful of elbows and not as funny.
ONE PIECE (1999-present)
ワンピース
That is not a typo. This anime about the young Monkey D. Luffy and his misfit group the Straw Hat Pirates searching for the titular ultimate treasure has been going for nearly 27 years now, has over 1,100 episodes and 15 movies and is showing no sign of slowing down. Of course, one of the things you can count on in stories like these is a whole lot of added characters as they go on. Early on (ep. 31, to be precise), at the beginning of the Arlong Park Arc, we meet the fishmen of the Arlong Pirates, including the six-armed octopus-type named Hatchan, or Hatchi as he is later nicknamed. After the Arlong Pirates’ defeat, Hatchan manages to escape, and works his way up to fulfilling his dream – a mini-ship/takoyaki stand called Takoyaki 8. He becomes an ally to the Straw Hat Pirates, and his many arms allow him to whip up enough of his wares to tackle Luffy’s enormous appetite. If you’re wondering about what an octopus being is doing serving up his own kind in fried batter, it should be noted that the common type of these animals (Octopus vulgaris) are cannibalistic, most notably females attacking males after and even during mating to get enough energy to lay and guard her eggs. Take as long as you need to recover from that information before reading on.
That’s not all you get to eat here. The sixth movie, 2005’s Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island, was the first movie directed by Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars and Belle, among others). While it’s not held in very high regard due to its overall darker tone than usual, they still throw in a little bit of levity, in a scene where the Baron holds a dinner party. One of the Baron’s men, Kotetsu, starts frying up a massive amount of fish on a skating-rink-sized flat top grill, skating across it on two bricks of grease strapped to his feet. This spectacle angers the Straw Hats’ resident chef Sanji so much that he jumps up and challenges Kotetsu to a cooking battle. By the end of it, Sanji has created an enormous modern-yaki, a cross between classic Kansai okonomiyaki (all ingredients mixed into the batter) and Hiroshima style (batter and ingredients layered, set on top of fried yakisoba noodles). The party-goers each get to enjoy a serving the size of their head.
Tamon’s B-Side (2026)
多聞くん今どっち!? / Tamon-kun Ima Docchi!?, AKA Which Face Does Tamon Have Now?
Takoyaki figures in here twice. An origin story shows popular boy band F/ACE’s future “cute” member Ishibashi Natsuki getting ready to fall asleep on a pedestrian bridge over the Dotonbori canal until a young tomboyish woman named Inoue Asuka brings him some takoyaki to eat instead of money for busking. It turns out that her family runs a takoyaki place, and she gets him hired there after it turned out he had the skills for it. Due to unfortunate circumstances, they wind up parting on bad terms, but they still can’t forget about each other. Several years later, F/ACE turns up (in various masks) at lead character Kinoshita Utage’s high school for their cultural festival, where her class is…wait for it…serving takoyaki, as suggested by their new teacher Asuka. She also mentions cheese yaki as a second choice, which was inspired by a young student who couldn’t afford the standard octopus variety. Three guesses who, and the first two don’t count. Asuka and Natsuki get to patch things up that night on the roof of the school over a container of it, albeit cold (they were leftovers, after all).
Tune in to the Midnight Heart (2026)
真夜中ハートチューン / Mayonaka Hato Chuun
High school sophomore Yamabaki Arisu once took solace in the streaming radio show he listened to religiously, hosted by a girl who operated under the personality name Apollo. He is now determined to try to find the real Apollo, and he’s narrowed her location down to the high school to which he transferred. After getting a clue that she’s a member of the school’s broadcasting club, he pops around—and wonders which one of their four beautiful members she might be. He finagles his way in and promises to help them all find jobs related to using their voices. At one point, Arisa suggests that the four hang out together to bolster their relationship, so they meet up at the mall…where they go their separate ways. The best laid plans and all that.
Arisu is beckoned over to a Kindako (a take on the real takoyaki joint Tsukiji Gindako) by Himekawa Nene, who has bought two orders of eight takoyaki each – one covered with salt and minced green onion, the other topped with mentai mayo. The latter reminds him of Apollo once saying on her show that she always ordered takoyaki that way, and the others give him similar lines that trigger these flashbacks. She offers him the former, but he wonders where the toothpick is, and she winds him up a bit by feeding him one of her mentai mayo order before he runs off to find the last club member.
In a later episode, the girls are dispensing love advice during one of their school lunch broadcasts. When asked in a follow-up message about what to order for their first dinner date, Kirino Iko imagines having okonomiyaki during an intimate dinner date with Arisu before suggesting it. She wears a hoodie with cat ears on it, and during comical moments, she’s portrayed as a human-sized cat sock puppet, such as in this frame.
Sweetness & Lightning (2016)
甘々と稲妻 / Amaama to Inazuma
Recently-widowed high school teacher Inuzuka Kouhei notices that his young daughter Tsumugi has been starting to go off of the premade meals he picks up for her, given that he doesn’t normally eat much himself (even when his wife was still alive). When he sees her enjoying a home-cooked meal, he becomes determined to learn how to cook so that his daughter can eat well. With the help of a young woman who turns out to be one of his students, Iida Kotori, and her mother Megumi, who owns a restaurant but isn’t spending much time there lately since taking a TV celebrity chef gig, he gains the knowledge and experience he seeks, and bonds more with Tsugumi in the process. In the last episode of the anime, Kouhei is tired, so he suggests the two of them eat out tonight. Her nose leads her to an okonomiyaki restaurant, and he explains to her how it’s made. When the waiter brings out their order, made by the staff as it normally is in these places, the normally well-behaved Tsumugi gets upset and starts crying. She was looking forward to the two of them making it together like they’ve been doing lately, and they wind up leaving without eating much.
The next day, he’s talking with Kotori about what happened, and she proposes holding an okonomiyaki party at her mom’s restaurant to erase Tsumugi’s initial bad impression. The preparation, plus a little talk about scolding after Tsumugi misbehaves again, brings them and their friends closer together, including one who they weren’t expecting to see, but were very happy to finally meet.
Magical Taruruuto-kun (1990-1992)
まじかる★タルるートくん
Based on an early manga by Tatsuya Egawa (Golden Boy). The wizard of the title was inadvertently conjured by town outcast Edojo Hanmaru, and Taruruuto-kun helps him as best as he can, despite his magic only lasting about 10 minutes. Taruruuto loves eating takoyaki more than anything else, and so, he and other members of the cast visit Osaka transplant Naniwa Matsugoro’s food stand a lot, much to the chagrin of fellow wizard Mimora. She loves Taruruuto, but hates his favorite food. In the third movie, Suki Suki Takoyaki (only 30 minutes long, but still), evil dark wizard Rivar tries to win Mimora over by stealing Matsugoro’s “takoyaki soul,” sending Taruruuto and crew on a
miniaturized wild goose chase through the sewers trying to get it back.
Takoyaki Mantoman (1998-1999)
たこやきマントマン
Now, I said that the anime I talk about here would feature these two foods…but as the lead characters? Yes. In this series (based on a series of children’s books which sold over 10 million copies), a cartoon sentai team of five takoyaki people battle cartoon villains. The production team managed to get 77 half-hour episodes out of this simple premise.
Quick Bites
Sometimes dinner is just dinner. While both these foods appear in these titles, they don’t figure significantly enough to get entries like the above. In Western alphabetical order:
- Case Closed AKA Detective Conan: The series that battles it out with ONE PIECE for number of episodes (over 1,200 since 1996, plus 29 movies and various OVAs/specials). Edogawa Conan often needs to collaborate with hot-headed teenage detective Hattori Heiji, which sometimes results in his family/crew visiting him in Osaka. When this happens, Heiji makes it a mission to drag them to the best no-frills takoyaki and okonomiyaki joints in the city.
- Dragon Ball Super (2015-2018; coming back in 2026): Vegeta and the crew serve takoyaki to Lord Beerus during a festival on Earth in an attempt to convince him to not destroy the planet. However, it turns out that they’re “Russian roulette” style—one of them actually has a bit of extra-hot wasabi in the center instead of octopus.
- Non Non Biyori (2013-2021): In season 2 (Repeat), in the course of two days in the fictional countryside town of Asahigaoka, the small multi-grade class cleans the pool in preparation for the school’s anniversary, the girls go out to have some fun on their school holiday, get caught out in the rain, take shelter at the candy store, and the woman who runs it gives them dry clothes to wear and makes okonomiyaki for them, with a recipe that includes adding broth while it’s cooking. The eyecatch after this scene has the letters from the logo fall into a flat pile on the white screen and start “frying.”
- Osomatsu-san: The Soul’s Takoyaki Party and the Legendary Sleepover (2023): In this movie (based on the 2015 re-imagining of the 1960’s series Osomatsu-kun), the Matsuno sextuplets decide to spark up a dull day by making takoyaki. This becomes a party in short order, which brings uninvited guests, plenty of alcohol and the queen of party hangovers stretching things out into several chaotic days.
