Taimeiken, a Tokyo restaurant, is famous for its yoshoku cuisine, based on Western food. Popular dishes include an omelet with ketchup.

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

TOKYO - Even outside Japan, fans of the country¡¯s cuisine can order uni and o-toro with confidence, or urbanely express a preference for soba over udon. But what about ¡°Napolitan,¡± cooked spaghetti that is rinsed in cold water, then stir-fried with vegetables in ketchup- Or ¡°menchi katsu,¡± hamburger covered in bread crumbs and deep-fried- Or ¡°omu rice,¡± an omelet lying over a mound of ketchup-flavored rice?
All are standards of a style of Japanese cuisine known as yoshoku, or ¡°Western food,¡± in which European or American dishes were imported and reshaped to fit local tastes.
Today yoshoku is thoroughly Japanese. It is regularly featured on television cooking shows and mainstream magazines. The lines outside venerable upscale yoshoku restaurants here in Tokyo are as long as ever, mostly with older Japanese for whom yoshoku provided a first taste of a Western world they had not seen.
And yet it is virtually unknown to foreigners. The first Michelin guide to Tokyo, published in the fall of 2007, listed 150 restaurants; not one was a yoshoku establishment. Indeed, visitors to Japan seldom enter the places where yoshoku is served: homes, chain diners, family-owned neighborhood restaurants or upscale yoshoku establishments of long standing.
Yoshoku was born during Japan¡¯s Meiji Restoration, the period that followed this isolationist country¡¯s forced opening by America¡¯s so-called Black Ships in 1854. Japanese were dispatched to Europe and America to learn about Western laws, weapons and industry. They also brought back the cuisine.
Shocked to discover how much shorter they were than Westerners, Japanese determined that they would catch up not only economically and militarily but also physically, by eating their food.
All yoshoku dishes have their roots in Western counterparts, but a key ingredient or a step in the cooking has been altered, or violated outright, with surprisingly delicious results. Instead of being served as soon as it is cooked, Napolitan spaghetti is allowed to sit, then reheated and stir-fried with vegetables.
Yoshoku¡¯s popularity reached its peak in the decades following World War II. For mothers, it was easier to prepare than traditional Japanese food.
In the decades before most Japanese could afford to fly overseas, upscale yoshoku restaurants grew into symbols of the longed-for, glamorous Western world. Until the economic boom of the 1970s and 1980s, yoshoku was the only version of Western food known to many Japanese.
The yoshoku menu has changed little over the decades, said Hiroshi Modegi, 40, whose grandfather founded Taimeiken, a famous yoshoku restaurant in Tokyo¡¯s Nihonbashi district, in 1931.
¡°Our customers want the old favorites,¡± said Mr. Modegi.

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