A coloring page of anmitsu, the bowl of cubed agar jelly served in Japanese sweet shops with a jug of dark sugar syrup to pour over at the table. The drawing shows a scalloped glass bowl on a saucer, filled with cubes of kanten and holding a mound of sweet red bean paste, segments of mandarin drawn with the juice sacs showing, a cluster of shiratama rice dumplings and a scatter of dark boiled peas. There is no ice cream in this bowl: this is plain anmitsu, not the cream anmitsu described in the questions below.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
Do you like anmitsu? Which toppings do you look for?
Do you have memories of a sweet shop or a teahouse?
Japanese sweets or Western ones — which do you prefer?
Where did anmitsu come from?
Wakamatsu, a sweet shop in Ginza, Tokyo, is usually credited with putting bean paste on top of mitsumame around 1930 and calling the result anmitsu. As with most Japanese dish origins this is the account that gets repeated rather than a documented invention, but the timing fits: anmitsu spread with the tea-and-coffee shop culture of the decades that followed, and it is still what an older customer in Japan pictures when a sweet shop is mentioned.
What is the difference between anmitsu and mitsumame?
Mitsumame is the older and plainer dish: cubes of kanten with boiled red peas and a little fruit, with syrup poured over. Add a mound of sweet bean paste — an — and it becomes anmitsu, which is what this page shows. Add a scoop of ice cream on top of that and it becomes cream anmitsu; there is none here. The dark round things low in the bowl are those peas, and they are worth a moment’s thought before you reach for a pencil: akaendo are a dull purple-brown rather than true black, so a deep plum or a warm dark brown will look far more like the real thing than a flat black.
What is kanten made from?
Seaweed — tengusa and ogonori are the usual species — boiled down and set. The origin story is a Kyoto one: an innkeeper is said to have put leftover tokoroten jelly outside on a winter night, found it frozen in the morning, and found that what remained once it thawed and dried was a light, keepable, odourless version of the same thing. That is the traditional account, told of the mid-1600s, and it is repeated more confidently than the records support. Agar is mostly carbohydrate the body does not digest, so it contributes very little energy and passes through as fibre — a fact about the ingredient rather than a health claim, and the syrup and bean paste that come with it are another matter entirely.
