Wagashi

Wagashi (和菓子) is the umbrella term for traditional Japanese confectionery: sweets built around rice, azuki beans, and plant-based gelling agents like agar (kanten) and kudzu starch, rather than the butter, eggs, and dairy common in Western baking. The word itself is newer than the sweets it describes. “Kashi” (菓子) originally meant fruit and nuts in the Nara period, broadened to cover processed sweets by the Heian period, and “wagashi” specifically was only coined in the Meiji era (1868 to 1912) to distinguish native confectionery from newly imported Western sweets, yogashi.

Wagashi’s oldest documented form is tsubaki mochi, sweetened rice wrapped in a camellia leaf, referenced in Heian-period literature including The Tale of Genji. Wagashi is further classified by moisture content into namagashi, han-namagashi, and higashi, and by production technique into eight official categories recognized by Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.