A pufferfish coloring page — fugu, as it is called in Japan — drawn fully puffed up into a ball, with the speckling across its back and the little fan-shaped fins picked out one by one. It is a free printable made with older adults and care settings in mind: no registration, just download the PDF and print it. Any coloring materials will do.
PDF (line art) and PNG (line art and color sample)
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
Have you ever eaten fugu? What did you make of it?
Would you like to try fugu sashimi, or the soft roe that is prized in winter?
Have you ever watched a pufferfish blow itself up into a ball?
Shimonoseki and Osaka are the famous places for fugu. Have you ever been to either?
How poisonous is a pufferfish?
The poison is tetrodotoxin, a powerful nerve toxin concentrated in organs such as the liver and the ovaries. Eating it causes paralysis and difficulty breathing. In Japan, fugu may only be prepared by cooks who hold a specific license, and the exact rules are set prefecture by prefecture.
Why does a pufferfish puff up?
It is a defense. The fish rapidly takes in water — or air, if it has been pulled out of the sea — and swells into a ball, which makes it far harder for a predator to swallow. In Japanese the fish is written 河豚, literally “river pig”, a way of writing it borrowed from Chinese; the name is often linked to fukureru, “to swell”, but that connection is folk etymology rather than settled fact.
How is fugu usually served?
The two classic dishes are tecchiri, a hot pot, and tessa, sashimi sliced so thin that the pattern of the plate shows through the fish. Osaka and Shimonoseki are the best-known homes of fugu cooking; Shimonoseki, in Yamaguchi Prefecture, handles a large share of the tiger pufferfish catch, and there the fish is called fuku — a homophone of the word for good fortune.
