shabu

In 1952, the Suehiro restaurant in Osaka introduced a new dish to its menu. Thin slices of beef were briefly swished through simmering broth by the diner, then dipped in sesame or ponzu sauce. The restaurant named the cooking method shabu-shabu after the swishing, sloshing sound the meat made as it moved through the liquid.

The full name shabu-shabu is a reduplicated onomatopoeia, a common form in Japanese where a sound is doubled to suggest repetition or continuity. The root shabu existed in Japanese as a verb meaning to rinse or swish, but as a standalone noun it also acquired a second meaning in post-war Japanese underworld slang: methamphetamine, named for the same motion of washing or rinsing. The two meanings coexisted in Japanese without friction, separated entirely by context.

When Japanese cuisine spread internationally through the 1970s and 1980s, shabu-shabu traveled with it. American and European diners encountered it on menus in Japanese neighborhoods in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. The hyphenated full form was common in formal writing, while shabu alone appeared on casual menus and in food journalism. By the 1990s, the shortened form appeared in mainstream English cookbooks without translation.

In Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, the criminal meaning arrived through entirely separate channels, carried by drug trafficking networks in the 1980s and 1990s. Shabu became the dominant Filipino slang for crystal methamphetamine, entirely independent of the culinary usage. English now carries both registers, and a single four-letter word routes to different histories depending entirely on where it is spoken.