What is Nikkei Cuisine?

Nikkei is derived from the Japanese word ‘nikkeijin’, which refers to Japanese people who migrated overseas and their descendants, including me and my family. Nikkei cuisine, therefore, is the cooking of the Japanese diaspora. Japanese migrants have found themselves in a variety of cultures and contexts but have often maintained a loyalty to their native cuisine. This has required local adaptation: the so-called Nikkei community has embraced a new country’s ingredients and assimilated these into their own cooking using Japanese techniques. So, Nikkei cooking is found wherever in the world Japanese immigrants and their descendants are. But, for historical reasons, two countries have had substantially more Japanese immigrants than most of the rest of the world – Brazil and Peru. And it is these South American countries that are particularly noted for their Nikkei cooking.