By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
There is a craft that still survives in two or three workshops in Kyoto, practiced by perhaps half a dozen artisans in all of Japan, whose product is sold in small quantities to tea ceremony practitioners, confectionery enthusiasts, and tourists who have stumbled upon it and been unable to resist. The craft is konpeitō making — the production of the multi-pointed sugar candy whose distinctive star-like shape is achieved through a process of rotating small sugar nuclei in a heated copper pan while drizzling sugar syrup over them, over a period of days to weeks, allowing each drizzle to build up in irregular protrusions that grow more elaborate with each revolution of the pan.
A single batch of konpeitō takes approximately two weeks to produce from the initial sugar nuclei to the finished candy. The artisan must be present through most of this period, adjusting the temperature, the rotation speed, and the timing of the syrup additions in response to how the candy is developing — responding to the product rather than executing a fixed formula. No two batches are identical. The konpeitō of one workshop differs perceptibly from that of another.
This is a useful starting point for understanding Japanese sugar confectionery culture: a tradition that runs simultaneously from this extreme of artisanal precision and patience to the mass-market dagashi that I described in the snack culture article, encompassing along the way some of the most technically demanding and most historically interesting sugar work in any food culture.
The History of Sugar in Japan: A Late Arrival That Changed Everything
Sugar arrived in Japan as a medicine before it arrived as a food. The earliest documented sugar in Japan — brought by Buddhist missionaries from China during the Nara period (710–794 CE) — was classified as a medicinal substance and stored alongside other imported medicines in the imperial storehouses. The Shōsōin (正倉院), the eighth-century imperial storehouse at Nara that has maintained its contents under controlled conditions for over twelve centuries, contains among its treasures what may be the oldest surviving sugar in the world — a mass of hardened sugar documented as having been present since at least 756 CE.
Domestic sugar production did not begin in Japan until the eighteenth century, when the Tokugawa shogunate, troubled by the large outflow of silver required to import sugar from China, actively promoted domestic sugarcane cultivation in the southern islands and the Ryukyu Kingdom. The specific wasanbon (和三盆 — Japanese triple-refined sugar) that is the premier Japanese confectionery sugar was developed in Shikoku during this period — a refined sugar of exceptional fineness, produced through a specific triple-washing and kneading process that removes most of the molasses and produces the distinctive pale colour and the extraordinarily smooth, melt-on-the-tongue quality that distinguishes wasanbon from any other sugar.
The opening of Japan in the Meiji period introduced refined cane sugar in industrial quantities for the first time, and the subsequent development of the modern Japanese confectionery industry — Meiji, Morinaga, Glico — was built on the new abundance of affordable sugar. The traditional wagashi forms had developed in an era of sugar scarcity; they achieved their effect with relatively modest amounts of high-quality sugar. The modern confectionery industry worked with different constraints and produced different results.
Wasanbon and the Tea Ceremony Confectionery Tradition
Wasanbon (和三盆) — the triple-refined domestic Japanese sugar produced in the specific growing areas of Kagawa and Tokushima prefectures on Shikoku, from the specific chikusha sugarcane variety developed for the purpose — is the foundation of the most refined Japanese sugar confectionery tradition and one of the most extraordinary agricultural products in Japan.
The production process: the harvested sugarcane is pressed, the juice clarified and concentrated through evaporation, and the resulting raw sugar subjected to the specific togi (研ぎ — grinding) process in which the sugar is kneaded on a wooden board, washing out the molasses through repeated additions of water and kneading, then pressed dry in cloth bags under heavy weights. This process is repeated three times — hence the name sanbon (三盆 — three trays, referring to the three grinding operations). The resulting wasanbon is almost white, extraordinarily fine-grained, and possesses a sweetness that is clean and immediate without the caramel undertone of less refined sugars or the flatness of industrial white sugar.
The confectionery application of wasanbon: the most celebrated use is in the higashi (干菓子 — dry sweets) of the tea ceremony — the pressed wasanbon cakes formed in hand-carved wooden moulds that produce the seasonal shapes (plum blossoms, maple leaves, mountain peaks, chrysanthemums) whose refined beauty serves as the visual counterpart to the rough aesthetic of the ceramic tea bowl. A small wasanbon higashi, pressed into the shape of a cherry blossom and tinted pink with natural colouring, placed on the edge of a tea bowl before the tea is whisked — this is the wasanbon tradition at its most fully realised.
The flavour of wasanbon in the mouth: it dissolves almost immediately on the tongue, releasing its sweetness in a clean rush without granularity or resistance. The experience is as close to pure sweetness as any food produces — not cloying, not prolonged, simply sweet and then gone, leaving the palate clean for the bitter matcha that follows.
Konpeitō: The Star Candy with Portuguese Origins
Konpeitō (金平糖) derives from the Portuguese confeito — the sugar-coated candy that the Portuguese traders introduced to Japan in the mid-sixteenth century, reportedly as a gift from the Portuguese trader Luís de Almeida to the warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1569. The Japanese received the Portuguese candy, were charmed by it, learned to make it, and then proceeded to make it with the same obsessive refinement that they apply to every adopted technique.
The specific challenge of konpeitō production: the pointed protrusions that give konpeitō its distinctive star shape are not formed by any mould — they develop organically through the interaction of the sugar syrup drizzle, the rotating pan, and the specific temperature and humidity conditions of the production environment. A slightly different temperature on a different day will produce slightly different protrusion patterns. The artisan cannot specify exactly what the finished konpeitō will look like; they can only create the conditions under which the characteristic form tends to emerge and adjust those conditions in response to what is actually happening.
This productive uncertainty — the work of creating conditions rather than specifying outcomes — is one of the most interesting aspects of konpeitō making from a craft philosophy perspective. The konpeitō artisan is in a collaborative relationship with the material, not a controlling relationship. The candy develops according to its own logic within the framework the artisan provides.
Contemporary konpeitō is made with various natural flavourings and colourings — a single production batch typically produces candy in three or four colours, which are mixed in the finished product for visual variety. The traditional flavour was simply sweet; modern konpeitō often adds a mild citrus or floral note from natural extracts.
Bekko Ame and Traditional Pulled Sugar
Bekko ame (べっこう飴 — tortoiseshell candy) is the traditional amber-coloured hard candy of Japanese street festivals — the caramelised sugar confection poured thin and allowed to set into translucent sheets whose amber colour resembles the tortoiseshell that gives it its name. The festival context: bekko ame is produced at festival stalls by pouring the molten sugar onto a flat surface and quickly pressing moulds into it to create shapes — goldfish, crabs, frogs, various animals — before it sets. Children watching the production, then eating the result, is one of the most persistently Japanese of all festival childhood memories.
Related to bekko ame is the amezaiku (飴細工 — candy craft) tradition — the art of shaping pulled sugar into elaborate three-dimensional figures while the sugar is still warm and workable. The amezaiku artisan begins with a ball of warm sugar on a bamboo stick and, using scissors and fingers, pulls, cuts, stretches, and shapes the sugar into goldfish, roosters, rabbits, horses — intricate figures whose transparent amber surfaces and fine details require both technical skill and significant speed, since the sugar cools and hardens rapidly.
Amezaiku is one of the most dramatic of all Japanese edible crafts to watch — the artisan working with what appears to be nothing but a blob of warm sugar and a pair of scissors, producing in the space of a few minutes a recognisable animal of considerable detail. The figures are genuinely edible but are typically purchased as objects rather than food — too beautiful to eat, the Japanese phrase goes, though this hesitation usually lasts only as long as the sugar remains admirable and hunger makes its own argument.
Karinto: The Traditional Fried Sugar Confection
Karinto (かりんとう) — the deep-fried wheat dough confection coated in dark sugar — is one of the oldest and most distinctly Japanese of all sugar confections, with documented production dating to the Nara period in temple records. The production: a simple wheat flour dough is extruded into small cylinders or twisted shapes, deep-fried until crisp, then coated in a syrup of brown sugar or kokutō (黒糖 — Okinawan black sugar) that is allowed to crystallise on the surface as it cools. The result is dense, crunchy, and deeply sweet with the molasses notes of the dark sugar.
Karinto occupies an interesting position in Japanese confectionery culture — it is simultaneously extremely old (one of the few confections with a documented Nara period history), extremely unfashionable (its appearance is unpretentious to the point of looking humble beside the elaborate contemporary wagashi), and extremely delicious in the specific and honest way of foods that achieve their effect without artifice. The karinto revival movement of the past decade — premium karinto shops producing small-batch versions with high-quality kokutō and various flavour additions — has reconnected younger Japanese consumers with a confection that their grandparents ate without giving it particular thought.
— Yoshi 🍬 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Wagashi Making: The Craft of Japanese Confectionery” and “Japanese Chocolate and Confectionery Culture” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
