Anpan



Anpan (あんパン) is a Japanese sweet roll most commonly filled with red bean paste. Anpan can also be prepared with other fillings, including white beans (shiro-an), green beans (uguisu-an), sesame (goma-an), and chestnuts (kuri-an).

History
Anpan was first made in 1875, during the Meiji period, by Yasubei Kimura (木村安兵衛 Kimura Yasubei), a samurai who lost his job with the rise of the Imperial Japanese Army and the dissolution of the samurai as a social class. The Meiji era was a period in which Japan was becoming increasingly modernized, and many samurai who lost their jobs were given work that was totally new to them. The role of a baker was one such job.

One day, while wandering around the area where many employed in new jobs worked, Kimura found a young man making bread, and decided to start his own bakery, named Bun'eidō (文英堂). In 1874, he moved to Ginza and renamed the bakery Kimuraya (木村屋), now Kimuraya Sohonten (ja:木村屋總本店). At that time, however, the only recipe for bread known in Japan was for making a salty and sour-tasting bread, ill-suited to Japanese tastes at the time. Kimura thus figured out how to make bread akin to manjū, raising the dough with traditional sakadane liquid yeast. He then filled the bread with a bean paste wagashi and sold the resulting rolls as snacks. Anpan became popular not only because of its taste, but also because the Japanese were interested in anything new and foreign at this time.

Emperor Meiji and Empress Shōken later acquired a fondness for anpan after Kimura, via chamberlain Yamaoka Tesshū, prepared it for them to eat during hanami. Concerned with their appearance, he decorated them with a salt-pickled sakura in the middle of each bun. These anpan were presented to the emperor and empress on April 4, 1875, after which the emperor requested anpan from Kimura on a regular basis. Because of its newfound association with royalty, the popularity of anpan, and bread as a whole, increased throughout Japan.

In popular culture
"Anpan" is often used as slang for recreational inhalation of paint thinner.

The picture book and anime series Anpanman is about a superhero whose head is made of anpan.