Tonkatsu Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Tonkatsu is built on pork. Meat-eating had long been avoided in Japan, but after the Meiji government lifted the ban on eating meat in 1872, pork began to reach the market and became something a cook could buy and fry.

The cutlet, a dish of French origin, had already been introduced to Japan by then: it appears among the dishes of Seiyō ryōri tsū, a guide to Western cooking published that same year. Tonkatsu remade that cutlet as a thick piece of pork, deep-fried in plenty of oil and sliced before it reached the table.

The dish was served in the Western-style restaurants of Tokyo's busy districts, which bought their pork through the ordinary markets and sold to a broad city clientele. The present form—a thick piece of pork, fried, sliced and eaten with chopsticks—seems to have settled around 1929 (Showa 4), the year Shimada Shinjiro is said to have begun selling tonkatsu at Ponchiken in Ueno, Tokyo. According to Okada Tetsu's book The Birth of Tonkatsu (2000), Shimada, who had cooked Western food in the kitchens of the Imperial Household Ministry, cut the pork 2.5 to 3 centimetres thick and had it sliced with a kitchen knife beforehand, so that it could be eaten with chopsticks like Japanese food instead of with a knife and fork. He served it with shredded raw cabbage.

Around 1932 (Showa 7) a restaurant in Ueno and another in Asakusa began selling tonkatsu in quick succession, and tonkatsu shops sprang up one after another in both districts. This sequence and its dates rest mainly on Okada's book. A tonkatsu set meal today nearly always comes with miso soup made with freshwater clams or with a pork-and-vegetable soup, but the same book says it is not known when that custom began. Which shop sold tonkatsu first also remains unsettled.

The most widely told story of tonkatsu's origin says that Rengatei, a Western-style restaurant in Ginza, was the first to sell the deep-fried "pork cutlet." The year it gives varies from one telling to another. Hioki Shōichi's Monoshiri jiten: Inshoku-hen, a popular reference book on food and drink published in 1953, names Rengatei, opened in 1894 (Meiji 27), as the originator of the cutlet. Okada Tetsu's The Birth of Tonkatsu puts it in 1895 (Meiji 28), the year it gives for the restaurant's opening, but that date is taken from Tomita Hitoshi's 1987 dictionary of the origins of imported things, and elsewhere the same book says only that Rengatei "is said to have" been the first to sell it. An online encyclopedia gives 1899 (Meiji 32) as the restaurant's own claim, and the Modern Food Culture Research Group (Kindai Shokubunka Kenkyūkai) places it after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. No record from any of those years has been found. And followed back through the sources, the story does not hold.

The cutlet was on Tokyo menus earlier than that. In a 1989 paper on Tokyo's early Western-style restaurants, Maebō Hiroshi read the May 4, 1890 (Meiji 23) installment of "Tōkyō annai" (A Guide to Tokyo), a series in the newspaper Jiji Shinpō, and reported that it lists a pork cutlet, spelled pōku katoretsuto, among the dishes found at most restaurants. That issue is dated earlier than any of the years given for Rengatei. Earlier still, Tōkyō ryūkō saikenki, a guide to the city's fashions published in 1885 (Meiji 18), names "katsuretsu" among the dishes of its Western restaurants, though it does not say which restaurant served it or what meat it was made from.

Where did the invention story come from, then? The 1953 reference book says only that Rengatei "is said to be" the originator of the cutlet, and it describes the first one as a veal cutlet fried like tempura, with no mention of pork. According to the research group, that book is the first to put the invention story in print, the prewar guides to eating out in Tokyo say nothing of an invention, and the story rests on the word of the restaurant's successive owners alone. Rengatei is one of the old houses that served the pork cutlet, but it is not where tonkatsu began.

Which shop did come first? No contemporary record settles that either. One name often put forward is Ōroji, which opened in Kagurazaka, Tokyo, in 1921 (Taisho 10) and moved to Shinjuku in 1946. An online encyclopedia entry says it was the first to sell "tonkatsu" made from a thick loin, fried and sliced for easy eating. Yet the current owner, in a 2022 profile of the shop, describes pounding the loin thin before frying it. A 2012 article that the encyclopedia cites as a source does not call the cutlet thick either; it describes its shape as a fat cylinder. The shop also passes down that an earlier owner gave the dish the name "tonkatsu," but the word already appears ten years before Ōroji opened, in Nagai Kafū's 1911 (Meiji 44) essay "Ginza," as something eaten standing at a street stall. The claim for Ōroji is carried by the encyclopedia entry and the shop's own tradition; no menu or article from the years when it opened, showing what it served and in what form, has yet come to light.

The other candidate is Ponchiken in Ueno, Tokyo, where in 1929 (Showa 4) Shimada Shinjiro is said to have begun selling "tonkatsu" made by frying a thick piece of pork. Okada Tetsu's The Birth of Tonkatsu takes up this story too, but it also tells it as something that is said to have happened. No contemporary record has yet been found showing that Ponchiken was the first shop.

What can be said is this: by the middle of the Meiji era the cutlet was already a dish of Tokyo's Western restaurants, and by the early Showa years the present form, a thick piece of pork fried and then sliced, had settled. Where along that stretch, and by whom, tonkatsu was first served is something the records have yet to show.