Christmas cake Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Christmas cake is a decorated cake eaten at Christmas, on 25 December. In Japan today the best-known kind is a sponge baked from flour, eggs and sugar and finished with fresh cream.

A decorated cake in Meiji confectionery manuals

The name "Christmas cake," together with a method for making it, appears in a Japanese book at the end of the Meiji era. In June 1905 Umeda Kyōka published a confectionery manual, Jikken wayōgashi seizōhō (Tested Methods for Japanese and Western Confectionery), with a section headed "How to make the Christmas cake confection." A few pages earlier, in its entry on the wedding cake, the same book explains that this cake is the base for the confections used in the West at Christmas and at weddings. The Christmas cake section then sets out how to decorate that base, and ends by noting that the wedding version is made in the same way. In 1906 Umeda brought out a second manual, Ōbei shinshiki kashi seizōhō (New Methods of European and American Confectionery), which gives the English name "CHRISTMAS CAKES" beside the Japanese kurisumasu kazari kēki, "Christmas decorated cake," and describes baking the batter in round tins, in about two layers, and decorating it.

Not every book meant the same thing by the name. Another cookery book, published at the end of 1905, mentions it as another name for the British plum pudding.

In the Taishō era the name turns up in cookbooks for the household as well. A 1917 cookbook by Nakazawa Miyo gives examples of how to decorate: for a celebration, write banzai on the sweet; for a Christmas cake, put on a Christmas tree. Christmas cake also appears in the book's list of dishes. A recipe in print, though, says nothing about how many households actually made one.

In the shops of Yokohama and Tokyo

Before the war, the cake was sold by Western-style confectioners and imported-food shops in Yokohama and Tokyo. The confectioner Fujiya opened in November 1910, and the company's timeline records that it put a Christmas cake on sale in December of that year. Fujiya's own company history, compiled in 1959, is said to recall that before the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 nearly all the customers at its Yokohama shop were foreigners, and that in the run-up to Christmas the shop took orders and made decorated cakes. The Christmas cakes of those days are also said to have been built on a fruit-filled cake, something like a plum cake. A 1999 study by Klaus Kracht and Katsumi Tateno-Kracht, Kurisumasu: dōyatte Nihon ni teichaku shita ka (Christmas: How It Took Root in Japan), is said to describe what Fujiya sold in its early years as a plain cake, a base coated with icing and scattered with silver balls, and to say that the company stopped making it during the war.

In Tokyo, Meidi-ya, which had a shop in Ginza, also sold Christmas goods. Meidi-ya's 1958 company history is said to record the "Christmas decorations" that had been a yearly custom since the company's founding and the crowds at the Ginza shop's Christmas sale, and to include a photograph of a Christmas cake sold at its Tokyo branch in 1921.

December, after the controls came off

On 9 December 1950, speaking in the Budget Committee of the House of Councillors, Hanyū Sanshichi gave an example of the gap between rich and poor: in the shop windows of Tokyo, he said, one could see "Christmas cakes costing tens of yen, even tens of thousands of yen," while many people without work wandered about, shivering in the cold. It is contemporary testimony that, as the controls on sugar and flour were being lifted, expensive Christmas cakes were on show in the shops.

According to the Krachts' study, once the controls on sugar and flour were lifted between 1949 and 1952, Fujiya made decorated cakes in large numbers and sold them with great success. The same book is said to describe how, in the first half of the 1950s, fathers began to come home on Christmas Eve with a cake in hand, at a price of around 350 to 500 yen, and to point as background to two things arriving together: the economic boom brought by special procurement for the Korean War, and the baby boom, when the number of children rose sharply. In the decade from 1955, it says, the food industry had advanced to the point where sponge cake could be frozen and stored in quantity, and Western-style confectioners all over Japan began selling Christmas decorated cakes.

Buying the cake from a shop and baking it at home spread as separate habits. A 2022 study that followed the texts of the television cooking programme Three-Minute Cooking from 1974 to 2020 finds that making Christmas cake at home became gradually more common from the 1970s onward.

There is a story that Japan's Christmas cake began in 1910, when Fujiya put one on sale. Fujiya's timeline records that it launched a Christmas cake in December 1910, and articles presenting this as the first example in Japan are in circulation. The timeline itself, however, gives only the year and month of the launch. It does not say that this was the first in Japan.

Fujiya opened its doors in November 1910. Five years earlier, in June 1905, Umeda Kyōka's Jikken wayōgashi seizōhō had already printed a method under the name "Christmas cake," and his Ōbei shinshiki kashi seizōhō of the following year presented the same confection with its English name attached. Both books are by the same author, so they are not two independent witnesses. Even so, the name and the method were in Japanese print before Fujiya opened its shop.

What these manuals teach is how to make the cake. They do not tell us whether Christmas cakes were being sold in shops in 1905, and whether any shop sold one before 1910 is not known either. The account of Fujiya's 1910 launch, for its part, comes from the company's timeline and a later study; no document from the time, such as a newspaper advertisement or a shop record from that year, has been put forward. Nor does that make 1905 the year the cake began in Japan; it is the year the name appears in a Japanese book.

Another story gives the credit to Meidi-ya: around 1900, it goes, Meidi-ya began holding Christmas sales, and these set the Christmas cake on its way. Meidi-ya's company history is said to describe its annual Christmas decorations and to include a photograph of a Christmas cake sold at its Tokyo branch in 1921, which suggests that Meidi-ya was selling Christmas goods before the war and carried cakes too. But no source has been put forward for the year 1900, or for the chain running from those sales to the spread of the habit of eating the cake.

There is also the view that Fujiya, after the war, created the form of Japan's Christmas cake and made it popular. The Krachts' study is said to date Fujiya's creation of the prototype of Japan's distinctive Christmas decorated cake to around 1950. Fujiya's company history is also said to record that after the war its Christmas decorated cakes were selling ten times as many as before the war. These accounts fit with Fujiya having played a large part in the postwar spread. Yet the same study is also said to write that in the decade from 1955 Western-style confectioners all over Japan joined this market, and Meidi-ya's company history is said to show a Christmas cake sold in a Tokyo shop in 1921. At the end of 1950, the expensive Christmas cakes lined up in Tokyo shop windows were being talked about in the Diet. No source has been put forward showing what kind of cakes other shops were selling at the time, and it cannot be said that a single company created the form and spread it.

Nor can the spread be put down to shop promotions and sales alone. Fujiya's company history is said to explain the postwar jump in sales not as the fruit of its own promotions, but tentatively, as perhaps the influence of the American servicemen and their families who had come to live in Japan after the war. The Krachts' study, too, is said to set beside the mass sales that followed the lifting of controls the overlap of the procurement boom with the baby boom, and the new ability to store sponge cake frozen. Neither book names the shops' promotions as the only reason.

The name "Christmas cake" and a method for making it were in Japanese books by 1905 at the latest. That the cake moved from the shop counter into homes after the war, once the controls came off, also fits the 1950 remarks in the Diet and the accounts in the studies. What remains undecided is which shop sold one first, and the name of the company that spread it.