daifuku

In the late eighteenth century, during the Edo period, a confectioner began selling a mochi stuffed with sweetened azuki paste and called it harabuto mochi, meaning fat-belly rice cake. The name was descriptive: the filling made the mochi round and distended. At some point before 1800 the name shifted to daifuku (大福), written with the characters for great (大) and luck or fortune (福). The two words sound similar in Japanese, and the lucky version was better for business.

Daifuku is a subset of mochi, itself one of Japan's oldest foods. Mochi is made by pounding glutinous rice (Oryza sativa var. glutinosa) until it becomes a dense, elastic paste. This process, called mochitsuki, was documented in the Nara period (710-794) and was associated with the New Year. The innovation of daifuku was to stuff the mochi with filling, creating a two-layer confection: a chewy, slightly salty outer shell surrounding a sweet interior.

The azuki paste inside daifuku is called anko, and it comes in two forms: tsubu-an (chunky, with whole bean skins) and koshi-an (smooth, strained). Most daifuku use koshi-an for a cleaner eating experience. Strawberry daifuku (ichigo daifuku), placing a whole strawberry inside alongside the anko, was invented in the 1980s in Tokyo and became a national phenomenon almost immediately. It is now the most photographed wagashi in Japan.

The name daifuku spread beyond confectionery into Japanese commercial culture. Daifuku Co., Ltd., a logistics automation company founded in 1937, took the name for its auspicious meaning. In the sweets world, daifuku remains the most affordable luxury in wagashi: a single piece costs less than a cup of coffee but carries the weight of the word fortune in its name.