Growing up in a Japanese household, my first introduction to curry was, of course, Japanese curry.

It was my mom’s go-to meal when she wanted to whip up a fast, nutritious, and delicious meal for the family. Sometimes she would make it from scratch, sometimes she would use the S&B curry cubes. Either way, I always got excited for curry night because I found it delicious and extremely comforting. If I could describe Japanese curry, I think I would say it’s a big, warm hug.

It wasn’t until I got into my teen years that I started to eat different kinds of curry. I tried everything from Thai Green Curry to Vindaloo. Each variation was so different but shared this curry label, which made me question, what even is curry?

Being raised in Hawaiʻi, I was surrounded by a huge diaspora of East Asians, and if you have ever been to Hawaiʻi, you know that there isn’t much of a South Asian community. So, beyond eating at an Indian or Nepalese restaurant, I wasn’t very knowledgeable about South Asian cuisine or culture.

When I got to college, I made a friend, Rahul, and his family was from Tamil Nadu in South India. He taught me a lot about South Indian cuisine and also about the Tamil word kari (கறி).

He taught me that people in India don’t call curries, curry. Each dish has its own name and is distinctly different. The word curry is thought to have derived from the Tamil word kari (கறி), which means a sauce, relish for rice, or a dish cooked with spices, often specifically referring to meat or vegetables. For those of you who don’t know, Tamil is widely considered the oldest living language in the world.

When the colonial British arrived in South India, they heard the Tamil word kari. Over time, the Brits started using “curry” as a catch-all word for almost any spiced dish they encountered.

So if curry is a British word and Japanese people call it curry, does that mean… Japanese curry came from Britain?