Picture this; you’re ten years old, orphaned and struggling in the miasmic system that is the Japanese federal child services. Eventually, you find yourself re-homed in a newly established orphanage down south in Okinawa, called “Morning Glory Orphanage”, and your new guardian is this … six foot tall, 250-pound brickhouse of a man approaching his forties, whose appearance just screams “I am involved in organized crime.”
But it’s not long before you get to know Uncle Kiryu, who’s kind, caring, protective, and supportive of all the children in his care. He may be stoic, quiet, slightly intimidating, and the permanent furrow in-between his eyebrows is deeper than the Mariana Trench, but he truly makes for a great guardian. Nothing makes him smile more readily than his kids.
Yakuza 3 introduces good ol’ Kiryu Kazama some years after the previous two games, happily running an orphanage after cutting all ties with the Tojo clan. Of course, the series being what it is, it doesn’t take long for Kiryu to be dragged right back into the drama that is the Japanese yakuza underworld.
But before that point, we see glimpses of how Kiryu takes care of his kids; he cooks meals, keeps an eye on their schoolwork, and gets heavily involved with whatever worries might plague a gradeschooler’s mind - like being bullied, struggling with a crush, and also kid troubles that are sometimes swept under the carpet like racism and poverty.
Today, we’re gonna be recreating one of the meals we see Kiryu preparing for the orphanage, while also getting deep into the minds of these gangsters through Yakuza’s food symbolism.
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Disclaimer; my Video Game Cooking series specializes in fantastical foods, like Fallout’s Deathclaw Omelette and Dark Souls’s Estus Flask. That’s what makes recipe recreation fun, ‘cause you have to rack your brain deciding how to translate fictional ingredients into something you can make at home.
Making video game foods that are, like … just real-life foods are boring to me. What’s the point of making a whole Lord Of The Rings-themed cookbook if all your recipes are just typical breads that are just given a fancy name like “Pippin’s Rye Loaf”?
Making your recipe LOOK like it jumped straight out of Breath Of The Wild, that I do get, but actually making the food isn’t especially fun 'cause you’re just cooking up a cream stew. It’s when you have to interpret what the heck 'razorgrain’ is, or 'moon sugar’, that’s what lends you room for creativity.
For this particular recipe, we’re not dealing with a fantasy setting, or a science-fiction universe. Yakuzatakes place in the real world of Japan, during specific periods of time (December 1988, January 2018, etc), and it all runs solely on (pseudo) realism. Barring the occasional crazy side-story, of course.
This recipe is especially banal 'cause it’s a curry dish. Modern Japanese home cooking has a special relationship with curry the same as Americans with mac and cheese. Much of the time, you’re not making it entirely from scratch, you’re buying jarred or boxed ingredients. It’s a meal popular not just for its convenience, but also because it’s well liked amongst kids.
(Yakuza 3 boasted tons of brand deals with real-life franchises (like every other Yakuza game), and in the Okinawa levels alone, you can count 13 separate brands like Quickly boba, Blue Seal ice cream, and Orion draft beer.)
Japanese curry is not Indian curry, or Thai curry, or Jamaican curry, and so on. Lots of countries have their own regional traditions when it comes to whatever they call curry. Japan’s curry history traces to the Meiji era, AKA the Victorian period, when British forces brought lots of new foods to feudal Japan - famous Japanese yoshoku (western food) favorites such as breaded pork chops, potato croquettes, and omelette rice all sprung from this influence.
Curry, of course, came to Japan from the British, 'cause Britain gained a love for curry through colonizing India. So Japan’s curry culture is built not off of Indian curry, but through British curry - which in turn is based off of Indian curry. You get it? It’s kinda roundabout, I know.
As far as Japanese curry cuisine goes, it definitely makes for the perfect family meal. You can make a big pot of it, using convenient ingredients, and the taste appeals to many. Japanese curry tends to run the mild, less spiced-up route, thickened with flour and fats, and stewed with water. With one single block of S&B-brand instant curry roux, you can make an entree for four, leaving the curry to casually stew while you start up the rice cooker.
Our goal today is to guess what kind of curry Kiryu would make. Technically, you can throw anything into a Japanese curry base, but there are some typical, preferred ingredients; onions, carrots, potatoes, sometimes peas, and cubes of meat. The only ingredient we see Kiryu preparing is white onions - he cuts them like he’s defusing a bomb, and when one of the kids runs into the kitchen asking when dinner is, he tells him to leave. Nothing says 'I’m a home cook’ like 'get the fuck out of my kitchen when I’m cooking’.
Yeah, the ingredients in this recipe all kinda falls down to how good a cook Kiryu is. Let’s think about this - he grew up in an orphanage back in the 70’s and 80’s, and probably relied on convenience stores and restaurants from then onwards (in Yakuza 0 you can see 20-year-old Kiryu’s shitty apartment littered with instant ramen tubs). There wasn’t really a point in his life prior to Morning Glory Orphanage that would prompt him to refine his home cooking skills. Plus, something about his 'seinen protagonist attitude’ makes me think he’s the type of manly man dude guy who’d eat anything. So we might be dealing with uncle Kiyru making mediocre dad meals.
On the flip side, Kiryu is a very dedicated man. When given just a slight push, he’s willing to learn new things that are completely unfamiliar to him, such as how to use modern laptops and internet, or be a shirtless model for performance photography. It’s not hard to see Kiryu reading up on cooking magazines in preparation for being a good uncle to his kids. Maybe in the beginning, one or two meals of his bland cooking spurred him to give the children better food, and a popup appeared on screen called “Substory 05: Learn To Cook”.
The very first meal we see him make in-game is what looks like steamed fish. It’s probably a bluefin tuna, which are plentiful around Okinawa (and he apparently caught it himself using a goddamn trident?? With no scuba gear or anything). When he serves it to the kids, it’s whole on the plate with some juices underneath, and garnished with green onions and cilantro, possibly cooked onion slices. Steaming an entire fish is typical in Asian cooking, you put the entire thing into a bamboo steamer atop boiling water in what’s likely to be a wok, especially if its a bigger fish. Easy to cook, and easy to spice and sauce.
It looks good. Not only are there multiple garnishes, but it’s plated with two extra leaves on the side to make it especially pretty. This was prepared not just with efficiency, but also with an eye for beauty and delicious cuisine. If Kiryu did indeed catch it right out of the ocean, he’d also have to dress the fish by descaling, gutting, and cleaning it, which is harder than it sounds. If we’re looking at a properly-prepared 2-foot bluefin tuna, steamed and seasoned, then we can conclude that Kiryu is at least capable of Cooking with a capital C.
(in every cooking scene, Kiryu is always accompanied by Haruka. She’s either helping set the table, or gathering the rest of the kids. It’s possible that she’s having a hand in the actual cooking, too. In the beginning of Yakuza 2, Haruka outright states that she’s been cooking for the both of them, and that her cooking has gotten better. Haruka’s 12 in Yakuza 3, and raise your hand if you were cooking for your family at that age, 'cause I certainly wasn’t. She’s taken up a 'big sister’ role in the orphanage, being the eldest kid there, and shoulders a lot of responsibility for the other kids without prompting.)
On the flip side, what little we see in the actual curry cooking scene doesn’t quite scream 'skilled cook’ to me. He’s cutting the white onions correctly; using the 'kitten paw’ technique to slice the blades lengthwise along the ridges. But then he throws them raw into the stockpot without sweating or caramelizing them. It’s possible that he’s using the same pot to cook everything in succession, AKA browning the onions first and then later throwing in ingredients that take less time to cook, that’s definitely something a lot of home cooks do to minimize dishwashing. But if he’s not, then he’s just tossing raw onions into a stewing curry and calling it a day.
The actual in-game model of the finished curry is kinda nondescript, no thanks to Yakuza 3’s outdated engine. But we can make out red bits, brown lumps, and small green dots. It’s also plated with a serving of bright red sticks on the side. To me, it’s clearly meant to represent peas, meat, and what’s possibly tomatoes or yams. The red garnish I’m not sure, it could be a traditional Japanese side dish like burdock, daikon, or ginger that’s been dyed red using umezu vinegar - the leftover brine from making umeboshi.
The actual curry meal we’re recreating is from a particularly heartwarming scene. Haruka helps plate the dinner table with a generous serving of curry for everyone. But one child is missing, so Kiryu hunts down a depressed Izumi with comforting words about her parentless status. They walk back hand-in-hand, and find that none of the kids have started eating yet. They were patiently waiting for the both of them all this time, despite their hungry bellies.
English-speaking audiences might not be familiar with Japan’s unique stigma surrounding orphans. In Japanese culture, adopted people (kids in particular) struggle with the idea of being 'not actually part of the family’. Even on a government level, orphans are given less options when it comes to lineage, which affects their ownage rights. The stigma is so tied with the system, no matter how supportive the public might be of orphans, their lives are oppressed nonetheless.
So there’s a reason why Yakuza 3 is so themed around orphans. Kiryu himself is an orphan. The main villain is also an orphan. A huge chunk of the game surrounds Morning Glory orphanage. Most of the plot gravitates around money that orphan Yoshitaka Mine can afford, but the young Morning Glory orphans can’t. The only other Yakuza game with such a prominent theme would probably be Yakuza 6, which is blatantly about parents and their kids - adopted or otherwise.
(Kiryu is 38-40 years old in Yakuza 3, 44 in Yakuza 5, and 50 in Like A Dragon. If you want a quick laugh, take a look at his face at his oldest, and compare it to his 20-year-old self of Yakuza 0. How many of you looked like a middle-aged man when you were 20?)
And the whole orphan theme stretches across the entire franchise, for reasons everyone, not just the Japanese audience, can understand. Who’s more likely to get sucked into a crime culture with a heavy emphasis on found family? What’s a charity cause a moral yakuza boss might be interested in, and what’s a completely unprofitable venture a business-minded yakuza would discredit? Who gets left behind when crime ends up killing? How many of the major characters are orphans, and how many of the villains have blood families that they don’t appreciate?
Yoshitaka Mine, the main villain of Yakuza 3, is a fitting endboss for such an orphan-heavy game. He was a poor orphan child the same as Kiryu and the Morning Glory kids. He rose to the top of the corporate chain even before getting involved with the Tojo Clan. It’s a very similar story that all orphan yakuza share, whether their rise to success is through crime, or business, or both.
Throughout the game, the player is led to believe that Mine wants to off Daigo to take his place as chairman, but when Kiryu faces him, Mine drops the bomb that he, in fact, is completely infatuated by Daigo because he treated him like an equal. Something Mine, the orphan, is completely starved of. Why does he want to kill a comatose Daigo? 'Cause he can’t bear to see his love so weak and on the brink of death. That’s not his Daigo.
There’s even that mid-game scene where Mine goes to bulldoze Morning Glory Orphanage for (insert plot reason here), but it’s obvious that Mine’s also doing it because he resents these kids for having something he didn’t. Kiryu takes good care of his children, whereas Mine suffered through a childhood that hardened him.
So when we see Kiryu cook for his kids, we’re also seeing a life that would have saved the villain, we’re seeing the victims of a country’s government, we’re seeing mirrors of previous beloved characters like Nishikiyama and Yumi, as well as current protagonists like Kiryu and even Ichiban. That curry scene of a huge dinner table with all those kids, they not only break bread as a family, but they also make it a point to wait until everyone’s here before eating.
Think about curry - like soups, it’s cooked in a big pot before being served in individual servings. It’s a communal food. And in Japan, it’s something of a 'peasant dish’ because you’re using cheap ingredients, stretching out the meat using flour and water. There’s a lot behind the food of Yakuza 3 beyond 'hehe Kiryu cook curry’.
First up, let’s nail down the exact ingredients Kiyru would have used, down to the brand. So head to the supermarket to pick up a box of S&B Golden Curry sauce mix. There’s powder forms and mix-in block forms, and either will do. They come in three levels of spiciness - mild, medium, and hot - and since Kiryu’s making it for children he’d likely choose the mild version just to be safe - they do all have glasses of water, but that’s a very common given whenever you’re served Japanese curry and it’s more likely that kids are given mild curries. We’re using this brand in particular because they’re by and large the top distributor of cheap curry roux in Japan. When Kiryu goes grocery shopping in downtown Ryukyu, which is a small town, that is most definitely what he’d find stocked.
Now onto the other ingredients - let’s aim for a very typical Japanese home curry dish, and we’re gonna buy bone-in skin-on chicken thighs, yellow potatoes, orange carrots, white onions, and frozen peas. You can vaguely make out some beige/light brown lumps in the cutscene, which to me looks very much like curry-fied diced chicken, and not the dark brown of beef. Pork is another option, but it’s a much less commonly used ingredient in Japanese curry.
(Some balk at the inclusions of LGBT content spread amongst the Yakuza series, but the majority of the gay/queer/trans characters prompt the overarching moral of 'be true to yourself, don’t judge based off of appearances.’ Kiryu - and his orphans - struggle with fitting into larger society, and they in turn relate to fellow marginalized people.)
And it might have been a vegetarian curry, but it’d beg to ask what those beige lumps were, then, if not meat. And Kiryu seems like the type of orphanage handler to insist on kids eating meat rather than going without. Morning Glory would have received a regular government pension that’d be their sole income, and it’s true that 2008 Ryukyu would certainly up the market price of meat by virtue of it being located on a Japanese island, but chicken (and other bird meats you can find in Asia’s traditional markets like duck, turkey, pigeon sometimes) wouldn’t be as pricey as beef and pork, which are livestock animals that require a lot of land - something Japan lacks.
If Kiryu’s orphanage funds were really low, he’d stick to the local seafood to feed the kids. And not shrimp or albacore, but cheap meats like loaches, small crabs, sardines, and saury. He’d go late in the day when the fishmongers are wanting to get rid of the day’s catch, and maybe even dig in the 'free’ buckets for barnacle fish and random tiny squids. None of those are typical Japanese curry ingredients, and I very much doubt the in-game curry scene features any of them.
Feeding 9 kids (plus yourself and a dog) is expensive. That’s not even getting into their clothes, medical needs, school supplies, toys, tickets to the movies, and the utility bills. But they never seem to want for anything, which tells me that either Kiryu/Haruko is a beast at budgeting, and/or the Japanese government isn’t stingy when it comes to monetary aid. You can think of it as a parallel to main villain Mine’s super affluent but sad life as someone unloved, but not wanting for money - and by extent, food.
So without further ado, let’s make Uncle Kiyru’s Morning Glory Curry!
We’re following (what little we can see of) Kiryu’s cooking expertise, and making a batch that’d serve two-three people - not 10, I doubt any of you are cooking for that many and we don’t want to waste food. But before the curry, we need to figure out the red garnish on the side. You’re either buying a pickled red side dish from a Japanese ethnic store, or you’re making some yourself using ume plum vinegar.
The in-game model features them as thick, almost cube-like slices, which to me rules them out as ginger, which is almost always served as thin peels. And if they’re pickled, then they’re most likely daikon, which is a very popular Japanese side dish that’s often made at home, but also commonly bought jarred. Maybe you can find some store-bought daikon that’s been pickled with specifically ume plum vinegar, but if you can’t, then you can make some ahead of time.
Find ume plum vinegar in ethnic grocery stores - if you can’t, then you can fake it for the purposes of this recipe with some extra ingredients - and slice up peeled, raw daikon into sticks that are 2-inches long, and around the width of a pencil, totalling perhaps half a cup of radish.
Into a medium, sealable container, toss in the vinegar, kosher salt, sugar, and mirin/cooking sake to make into a liquid mixture. Put the sliced daikon in, cover, and refrigerate for at least half a day. If you couldn’t find ume plum vinegar, use rice vinegar and toss in deep red fruits like cherries, raspberries, or maybe even just red food coloring if you’re really lacking in options. After half a day, the daikon should be crisp, and ruby-red all the way through.
Now for the curry! Get out a big ol’ stockpot, the typical 'anime curry cooking scene’ sort of pot, and coat it with vegetable oil on low-medium heat. We’re using this pot to cook everything sequentially, starting with what takes the longest to cook and ending with the shortest.
White onions are first. Slice them the way Kiryu does; peel the skin off of one entire onion, then you’re slicing it in half parallel to the natural ridges. Continue to slice along those ridges to make 'U’-shaped pieces, and then you’re throwing it all into the hot oil to sizzle.
Next is carrot. Find a large one, peel off the thick outer skin, then chop it diagonally into half-an-inch-thick slices. It gets tossed into the pot right after the onions.
Stir, saute, and then cover the pot so the two ingredients can cook and soften for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, you can peel and dice two large yellow potatoes into hefty cubes, and de-bone/de-skin a chicken thigh.
At the 10 minute mark, the onions should be pretty translucent (but not totally), and the carrots should be much softer (but not all the way through). Throw in the meat, and you’re browning the chicken on all sides for a couple minutes. The aim isn’t to cook them all the way through.
Now comes the actual curry roux! Raise the heat to medium-high, then follow the instructions on the box - power packets and curry blocks require different amounts of water. Either way, you add the required water first, wait until it boils, and then stir in the roux. For two-three people, add at least two cubes and start with 1.5 cups of water first.
After you add the roux, throw in the peeled and diced potatoes. Cover, lower the heat once more to low-medium, then you’re allowing the entire thing to simmer for 10 minutes.
Finally, throw in 1/8 cup of frozen peas, and then allow it to further simmer for 5 more minutes.
And in-between cooking the curry, you can make the rice. They’re almost certainly eating typical Japanese white rice - short-grain, on the moist side. If you’re not sure what to buy, go to an Asian ethnic grocery and look for Nishiki or Kohuko short-grain brands. Measure out two cups, rinse thoroughly with water to wash off the cloudy starch, drain, and put it into your rice cooker/saucepan with a bit more water than other rice varieties might require. Essentially, a 1:1.25 ratio of rice to water, so in this case you’re adding 2.5 cups of water.
If you’re making rice on the stovetop, put the raw rice and water into the pot and cover. Bring it to a boil on medium heat, and turn it to low when it does. Let it continue to cook, covered, for 10-12 minutes. After that, remove from heat entirely and let it stand, covered, for 10 minutes more, to steam itself. When it’s done, there should be no water left, and all the rice should be completely soft and sticking together in globs.
Now we can plate our curry - one half will be the rice, the other a hefty serving of curry. Don’t skimp, cover the entire plate sans rim with food. On the side, pick out some of the pickled daikon and place it next to the rice. Not too much, perhaps a tablespoon’s worth. Serve with a glass of water and a spoon - both items rarely used by the Japanese unless it’s curry time.
Enjoy! To me, it tastes exactly just like the S&B-brand curry I ate once or twice as a child, mellow and sweet. To people not used to Japanese curry, it’s probably gonna taste pretty different from other varieties you’ve had. You might find it delicious, or weird, or bland. To my mom, who grew up on this stuff, she loved it and considered it a big throwback to the comfort meals of her day, which was a ringing endorsement on the authenticity of this recipe. Mmm, 2008 Japan!
