A Brazilian Checked the Ingredients on a Japanese Sweet and Found Rice and Beans

What's going on

Someone in Brazil looked at a Japanese sweet, thought it looked delicious, turned it over to read the ingredients, and found arroz e feijão. Rice and beans. In Brazil that phrase does a lot of work: it is the plate that shows up at lunch every single day, the baseline of eating, the thing you say when you mean "nothing fancy." Discovering it inside a small pastel object sold in a gift box is a very particular kind of letdown.

The observation is also, unfortunately, correct. Traditional Japanese confectionery runs on two ingredients. One is mochi — glutinous rice steamed and pounded until it turns into a soft, stretchy paste. The other is anko — azuki beans simmered with a great deal of sugar and mashed into a paste. Almost every classic sweet in the country is those two things rearranged: bean paste wrapped in rice, rice wrapped in bean paste, bean paste with a wafer around it, bean paste in hot soup. Japanese readers went through their own snack cupboards trying to find a counterexample and could not.

The thread that follows is genuinely bilingual and only half-aware of itself. Brazil has the largest Japanese diaspora in the world, so a good number of the Portuguese speakers here first met these sweets as children, handed over the fence by a neighbor, and are still processing it. The Japanese speakers, meanwhile, are mostly conceding the point and then quietly checking what Brazilian food is made of.

Comments

this japanese sweet looks so good, let’s have a look at the ingredients.. rice and beans

que delicia esse doce japones vamos ver os ingredientes.. arroz e feijao

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Now that you mention it, Japanese sweets really are all rice and beans, but every one of them tastes different, and every one of them is guaranteed to be good. Recommend having Japanese green tea with them 🍵

言われてみれば、日本のお菓子はどれも米と豆ばかりですが、全て違った味で、全てが美味しいことが保証されています。日本の緑茶をセットで飲むことをおすすめします🍵

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ok fine i’ll try them all together, just because you said so ok!

tá bom eu vou experimentar tudo junto só pq vc falou ta!

Akafuku mochi → rice and beans
Mame senbei → rice and beans
Daifuku → rice and beans
Mame daifuku → rice and beans
Shio-mame daifuku → rice and beans
Ohagi (a.k.a. botamochi) → rice and beans
Ankoro mochi → rice and beans
Kashiwa mochi → rice and beans
Sakura mochi → rice and beans
Kusa mochi → rice and beans
Uguisu mochi → rice and beans
Kinako mochi → rice and beans
Abekawa mochi → rice and beans
Zunda mochi → rice and beans
Monaka → rice and beans
An dango → rice and beans
Murasame → rice and beans

赤福餅→米と豆豆せんべい→米と豆大福→米と豆豆大福→米と豆塩豆大福→米と豆おはぎ（ぼたもち）→米と豆あんころ餅→米と豆柏餅→米と豆桜餅→米と豆草餅→米と豆うぐいす餅→米と豆きなこ餅→米と豆安倍川餅→米と豆ずんだ餅→米と豆最中→米と豆あん団子→米と豆村雨→米と豆

Doyo mochi → rice and beans
Hanabira mochi → rice and beans
Sekihan → rice and beans
Mame gohan → rice and beans
Natto mochi → rice and beans
Zenzai → rice and beans
Oshiruko → rice and beans
Kuromame mochi → rice and beans
Mame mochi → rice and beans
Hagi no mochi → rice and beans (the list stops being about sweets around here — sekihan is the red rice steamed with azuki for celebrations, and mame gohan is simply rice with beans cooked into it)

土用餅→米と豆花びら餅→米と豆赤飯→米と豆豆ご飯→米と豆納豆餅→米と豆ぜんざい→米と豆おしるこ（汁粉）→米と豆黒豆餅→米と豆豆餅→米と豆萩の餅→米と豆

They all look completely different, though. Kind of amazing lol

全部、見た目は違うのよ。すごいよね笑

Rice and beans. Plus an unbelievable quantity of sugar.

ご飯と豆、それから信じられない量の砂糖

Th-th-that’s not true…! I thought, and went to check the snack box, and the situation in there was bean bean bean bean bean rice rice bean rice bean bean

そ、そそそんなことないし…！と思ってお菓子箱を見に行ったけど豆豆豆豆豆米米豆米豆豆みたいな有様だった

Yeah, it really is nothing but rice-and-bean illusions around here

確かにご飯と豆のイリュージョンだらけよな

my parents lived near some Japanese families and they were forever handing over bean sweets for them to eat, my mom told me it was really bad

meus pais moravam perto de japoneses e eles viviam dando doce de feijao pra eles comerem, minha mãe falou pra mim que era muito ruim

my mom is traumatized by a bean sweet because when she was a kid she thought it was chocolate and shoved the whole thing in her mouth at once and it was horrible

minha mae tem trauma de um doce de feijao pq qnd ela era criança achou q era de chocolate e enfiou tudo na boca de uma vez e tava horrível

You forgot the sugar

it’s in the fine print

esta nas letras miúdas

So bizarre, i love beans but i don’t associate them with a sweet taste… but then i go and have a look and bam, real sweet, you know?

Muito bizarro, amo feijão mas não associo com gosto doce... Mas vô lá ver bam, mo docinho, tá ligado

i used to think that about guacamole, i’d be sitting there like, ew, savory avocado… but it’s really good and ever since then i have no prejudice left about savory-sweet or sweet-savory things (in Brazil avocado is normally eaten as a dessert, blended with sugar and milk, so guacamole is this exact shock running the other way)

eu pensava isso sobre guacamole ficava pensando Eca abacate salgado... mas é mto bom e desde entao nao tenho mais preconceito com coisas salgadas doces e doces salgadas

the block one that looks like expired jelly is horrible but anko mochi is delicious, top 5 best little things to eat, i love it

o de bloco que parece gelatina passada é horrível mas moti de anko delícia top 5 melhores coisinhas de comer i love it

Wait, is that possibly yokan you’re talking about? (yokan: azuki paste sweetened and set firm with agar, sold as a dense block and sliced into bars)

それってもしかして羊羹のこと？

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what a delicious Brazilian dish. ingredients: salt, meat, and beans

なんて美味しいブラジルの料理材料は塩と、肉と、豆

AND RICE

E ARROZ

so what you’re telling me is Japanese food and Brazilian food are extremely similar ,,,huh?

つまり日本料理とブラジル料理はとても似ている、、、ん？

i was so sad when i bit into a real mochi for the first time omg

fiquei muito triste quando mordi um mochi de vdd pela primeira vez mds

i had one last week and i kinda expected more, it was okay actually, but idk why there’s beans in there

Eu comi um semana passada e eu meio q esperava mais mas era até que bom mas não sei pq tem feijao ali dentro

only the rice one is decent but it barely tastes of anything

so o de arroz é bonzinho mas mal tem gosto

that’s why the only one i like is the fake ice cream one (mochi ice cream — a ball of ice cream with a thin mochi skin around it)

por isso só gosto do falso de sorvete

i can’t stand rice, i can’t even explain the sadness i felt when i found out mochi wasn’t good

Eu n suporto arroz eu n consegui explicar a tristeza q eu senti quando eu descobri q mochi n era bom

i could have sworn it was sweet but the rice tastes like dough and the bean is horrible

eu jurava q era docinho mas o arroz tem gosto de massa e o feijão eh horrivel

the day i gave my sister mochi and she was eating away perfectly happy and then i said: “this is made of beans” — she came about that close to spitting out what was in her mouth

o dia que eu dei mochi pra minha irmã e ela comendo bem feliz aí eu falei: 「isso é feito de feijão」 só faltou ela cuspir oque tava comendo

i loved eating manju as a kid, my parents always said it was a bean sweet but for some reason i thought that was a lie (?) imagine my head when i “discovered” it REALLY was beans (manju: a small steamed bun with bean paste inside)

eu amava comer manju quando criança, meus pais sempre falavam que era doce de feijão mas por algum motivo eu achava que era mentira (?) imagina minha cabeça quando 「descobri」 que era REALMENTE de feijão

Well, rice and beans (feijão) is the national dish in Brazil, so of course the this-is-not-the-thing feeling would be enormous.

ブラジルは豆ごはん（feijão）が国民食だからなあ。そりゃコレジャナイ感も凄かろう。

if you lot don’t like azuki bean sweets, you can hand them right over here 🤲 mochi, anpan, manju, dorayaki, taiyaki — the greatest inventions of the century 😋

se não gostam de doces com feijão azuki, podem estar me dando aqui 🤲 mochi, anpan, manju, dorayaki, taiyaki, as melhores invenções do século 😋

manju is the best thing in the world, anyone talking trash about it is wrong

manju eh a melhor coisa do mundo quem fala mal ta errado

manju and mochi, i love you 💕

manju e mochi amo vcs 💕

anko is the most delicious bean i have tasted in my life, holy crap i’ll eat all of it, if they let me go to Japan i’ll clear out the entire supply and the country goes bankrupt

anko é o feijão mais delicioso que provei na minha vida pqp eu como tudo, se deixarem eu ir pro Japão eu acabo com o estoque e o país vai a falência

My take

Saying that Japanese people are made of rice and beans might not be entirely a joke.

#Funny #Food #Culture

Source & translation note

Comments loosely translated for tone. Reactions collected from Togetter and X threads.

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