The Okazuya

The okazuya is the Japanese-Hawaiian takeaway counter, a small shop selling cooked dishes by the piece or by the plate, and it belongs to the local table the sugar plantations made. It rests on the Japanese presence in Hawaiʻi, which began with the Gannenmono of 1868 and the government contract workers from 1885, and on the household kitchens of those families, from which the trade grew. Okazu, in Japanese, is the dish eaten with rice, and the okazuya is the shop that sells it.

The okazuya takes the Japanese home meal and makes it portable. Behind a glass case stand trays of dishes that a household would put beside rice: fried chicken, often seasoned with shoyu and ginger, fried fish, tempura, nishime of simmered root vegetables and konbu, kinpira of burdock, aburaage stuffed with vinegared rice as inari, and rolled omelette. The customer points, and the counter packs the choice into a box or a paper-wrapped bundle with rice, so that a working family could carry a full meal home or to the field without a kitchen of its own. The form grew from the way plantation families fed themselves. Women cooked for the household and for neighbours, and selling surplus dishes from a front room or a small counter was a natural extension of that work. Alana Kysar, in Aloha Kitchen, places such food within the wider local table, where Japanese, Okinawan, Portuguese, Chinese and Filipino cooking met on the same plate. The okazuya is one of the clearest places where that exchange is visible, since a case may hold Japanese simmered dishes beside macaroni salad and fried noodles, and no one in the queue finds the company strange. The repertoire is fixed by habit more than by rule. Dishes are cooked in quantity early in the day and sold until they are gone, and the best-known items sell out first. Fried chicken and the sweet-savoury simmered dishes are the usual measure of a counter. Hand-held rice forms sit with them: musubi, rice pressed and wrapped in nori, and the fuller rolled sushi of festival and funeral trays. The okazuya sits near the plate lunch and the lunch wagon in the island habit of eating well from a box, yet it keeps its own character. Where the plate lunch is built on two scoops of rice, macaroni salad and a hot main, the okazuya favours variety, small portions and dishes that eat well at room temperature. Many counters keep short hours, often closing in the early afternoon once the cases are empty, and they remain a working-day institution more than a place to linger. That discipline of making a limited number of dishes each morning and selling them out is where the okazuya lives or dies.

The taste of the okazuya is the taste of shoyu, sugar, ginger and frying oil held in balance, with rice to carry it. Fried chicken is crisp and savoury, simmered vegetables are sweet and soft, and vinegared rice in inari adds a sharp note against them. The food is eaten from the box or the paper, warm or at room temperature, often with the hand, and with tea or a cold bottled drink bought at the same counter.