豚カツ

Tonkatsu (豚カツ) is a compound of ton (豚, pork, pig — the Sino-Japanese reading) and katsu (カツ), which is an abbreviation of katsuretsu (カツレツ), itself a phonetic transcription of the French word côtelette (cutlet). The name is therefore partly native Chinese-derived Japanese (ton), partly borrowed French phonetically transcribed into katakana (katsu). The dish was created in 1899 at Rengatei restaurant in Ginza, Tokyo, by chef Motojiro Kida, who adapted the French pork côtelette using panko breadcrumbs instead of fine breadcrumbs and deep-frying in oil rather than pan-frying in butter.

The innovation was not trivial. Japan had religious restrictions on eating meat — Buddhism's precepts against killing, reinforced by successive imperial edicts from the 7th century onward, had made beef and pork consumption rare or forbidden in Japan for over a thousand years. The Meiji period (1868–1912) deliberately reversed this: the government encouraged meat consumption as part of Westernization and modernization, arguing that Japanese people needed to be physically larger to compete with Westerners. Pork, beef, and chicken entered Japanese cuisine in the Meiji period with institutional encouragement.

Tonkatsu was yoshoku — the category of Western-influenced dishes adapted to Japanese taste. The Meiji and Taisho periods produced a range of yoshoku dishes: korokke (from croquette), hayashi raisu (hashed rice from 'hashed beef'), omuretsu (omelette), and tonkatsu. These dishes used Western techniques and often Western names, but in flavor, presentation, and cultural embedding, they became distinctly Japanese. Tonkatsu with shredded cabbage, tonkatsu sauce, and rice became a set meal (teishoku) served in thousands of restaurants across Japan.

The dish generated its own vocabulary: katsu (カツ) became a standalone word for any breaded and fried cutlet (chicken katsu, prawn katsu), and also a homophone of katsu (勝つ, to win, to overcome) — making tonkatsu a traditional food eaten before exams or important competitions as a linguistic good-luck charm. The same syllable that came from French côtelette has been reinterpreted through Japanese phonetic coincidence into a word for victory. The pork chop carries luck.