A coloring page of taiyaki — the fish-shaped Japanese cake filled with sweet red bean paste — with a round imagawayaki resting beside it. The scales and fins give the hand something to follow, and the golden-brown crust rewards anyone who likes to build up a shade in layers. Free material for adults, seniors and care settings; download the PDF and print it, no registration needed.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
Do you like taiyaki and imagawayaki? Are you a sweet-bean person or a custard person?
Do you remember buying taiyaki at a festival stall or in a shopping street?
Have you ever had one where the filling ran all the way into the tail?
What is it like to hold a warm one on a cold winter day?
When was taiyaki first made?
It is usually credited to Naniwaya Sohonten in Azabu-Juban, Tokyo, around 1909, at the very end of the Meiji period. The shop is said to have sold it as an imagawayaki in the shape of a sea bream, and the shape did the rest: tai, the sea bream, is a fish associated with good fortune in Japan through its place in the word medetai, meaning auspicious. It is the story everyone repeats, though the finer details are hard to verify.
What is the difference between the crisp kind and the soft kind?
The names are shop slang borrowed from fishing. Cakes baked one at a time in a single hinged iron mould are called tennen, ‘wild-caught’, and come out thin with crisp edges. Those baked several at a time in a large linked plate are yoshoku, ‘farmed’, and are softer and fluffier. Which one people prefer varies from place to place, and both are filled with sweet bean paste, custard or chocolate.
Is imagawayaki the same thing as taiyaki?
Near enough. Imagawayaki, obanyaki and kaitenyaki are the same round cake under different regional names, and the batter and filling are much the same as taiyaki’s — the shape is the main difference. The round version is traditionally traced to a street stall near Imagawa Bridge in Edo in the second half of the eighteenth century, with the fish-shaped one appearing more than a century later.
