Dorayaki is a Japanese sweet made of two small, round sponge cakes sandwiching a layer of sweetened azuki (red bean) paste, usually the chunky kind called tsubuan. The sponges belong to the castella family — egg, sugar, and flour — so the taste is cakey rather than like a Western pancake. The name means "gong-bake," after the bronze gong its round shape resembles.

Is dorayaki a pancake?

No. "Red bean pancake" is a convenient label but a misleading one. A pancake is a single open cake; dorayaki is a closed sandwich of two lens-shaped sponge discs with bean paste sealed inside. And the sponge isn't pancake batter — it's leavened castella-family sponge, the same egg-and-sugar lineage as the cake Japan adopted from Portugal.

Why does Doraemon love dorayaki?

Doraemon, the blue robot cat from the manga first serialized in 1969, is written as obsessed with dorayaki — it's his defining trait and a recurring gag. In the story his love begins when another robot cat gives him his first one. That single pop-culture detail is why dorayaki is the wagashi with the widest name recognition abroad. (His name, though, comes from nora, "stray cat," plus a name suffix — not from the sweet.)

What is the filling in dorayaki?

Sweetened azuki bean paste, called anko. The usual choice is tsubuan, the chunky paste that keeps some of the bean skins; smooth koshian is also used. Modern shops also sell nama-dorayaki, which folds fresh whipped cream in with (or in place of) the anko.

Dorayaki, Explained: Doraemon's Favorite Sweet Is a Sandwich, Not a Pancake

You have almost certainly met dorayaki without eating it — as the food a blue robot cat inhales by the boxful. Doraemon, one of Japan's most famous cartoon exports, is defined by his appetite for it, which makes dorayaki the wagashi more Westerners can name than any other. Yet naming it and knowing it are different things. Meet it in the wild — on a café menu translated as "Japanese red bean pancake," or wrapped in a convenience-store package — and the obvious questions surface. What is that brown stuff inside, and why does everyone call a sandwich a pancake?

A sandwich, not a pancake

Here is the decode worth carrying to the counter. Dorayaki is two small, round sponge cakes with sweet azuki paste sealed between them. The word "pancake" mis-frames it twice over. First, structurally: a pancake is one flat cake you eat open-faced, but dorayaki is a closed sandwich — two lens-shaped discs pressed around a filling, browned on the outside, soft within. Second, by lineage: those discs aren't pancake batter. They're castella-family sponge — egg, sugar, and wheat flour — which is why the bite reads as cakey and faintly bready rather than like a rubbery griddle cake.

The filling is anko, sweetened azuki-bean paste, and it's usually tsubuan — the chunky version that keeps some of the bean skins for texture — though smoother koshian turns up too. So the honest one-line translation isn't "red bean pancake." It's closer to "a red-bean sponge sandwich."

There is one telling difference from castella proper. Castella gets its rise entirely from whipped egg foam, with no chemical leavener at all. Dorayaki batter, by contrast, is leavened with baking soda — a typical recipe runs egg, sugar, cake flour, baking soda, mirin, and water, often with a spoon of honey for moisture. Same egg-sponge family, one deliberate addition. That's the difference between a cake meant to be sliced in a long loaf and two little cakes meant to be flipped on a griddle and clapped together.

Why "gong-bake"

The name is the next clue. Dora (銅鑼) is a bronze gong — the kind struck when a ship leaves port — and yaki means grilled or baked. So dorayaki is, literally, "gong-bake." Two folk explanations circulate, and they point at the same object: either the round, browned disc simply looks like a gong, or the batter was once cooked on a heated gong instead of an iron plate.

That second story blossoms into the legend most often told about the sweet. It stars Saitō Musashibō Benkei (1155–1189), the giant warrior-monk who served the tragic general Minamoto no Yoshitsune and is remembered for dying on his feet, riddled with arrows, still guarding a bridge. As the tale goes, Benkei — wounded and hiding at a farmer's house — left his gong behind when he moved on, and the farmer used it as a griddle to fry sweet batter: hence "dora-yaki." A variant has Benkei himself spilling bean paste onto a cake and inventing the thing by accident. Neither is documented; the historical Benkei is real, but the dorayaki story is folklore. Still, there's a pleasure in it — a mass-market snack anchored to one of Japan's most legendary swordsmen.

The sandwich is barely a century old

Here is the part that surprises even people in Japan: the dorayaki you know is a modern invention. The Edo-period version had no egg at all — bean paste wrapped in a single wheat-flour skin, folded into a square with the filling showing at the edges. Sources note it probably looked less like today's plump round sandwich and more like kintsuba, another old paste-and-skin sweet.

The round, two-sheet egg-castella form we picture only emerged around the turn of the twentieth century. The most-repeated attribution credits Usagiya, a shop in Tokyo's Ueno district, in 1914. Treat that as the standard line rather than the last word — who first made the round form is genuinely contested, with the Nihonbashi shop Baikatei claiming an earlier Meiji-era round dorayaki, and Kyoto's Sasaya Iori claiming to have invented dorayaki at the request of a temple. What the sources agree on is the shape of the story: the two-sheet sandwich is an early-1900s thing, not an ancient one.

Mikasa, and the moon over the homeland

Order the same sweet in the Kansai region around Osaka and Kyoto and you may see a different name: mikasa (三笠). The round golden disc is read there as the full moon — and behind that reading sits one of the oldest homesick poems in Japanese. Abe no Nakamaro, an eighth-century scholar stranded studying in Tang China, gazed at the moon and wrote of longing for the moon "over Mt. Mikasa" back home near Nara. So in one region a gong-shaped snack; in another, the moon over the homeland. (Some sources give the plainer version — that "mikasa" simply nods to the gentle slope of Nara's Mt. Mikasa, which the cake's curve resembles.) Both readings point at the same mountain, so you can hold them together.

The cat that made it famous

Which brings us back to the robot cat. Doraemon — first serialized in 1969 by Fujiko F. Fujio — is written as helplessly devoted to dorayaki; in the lore, his passion begins when a dancing robot cat gives him his very first one. That running gag, broadcast across decades and dozens of countries, is the single reason "dorayaki" is the wagashi the world can name. (A common assumption to correct: Doraemon's name doesn't come from the sweet — it's nora, "stray cat," plus an old name suffix. The dorayaki is affection, not etymology.)

The everyday reality is humbler and part of the charm: dorayaki is genuinely easy to make at home with griddle batter and a can of anko, which is exactly why it feels so familiar. Good specialty shops differentiate on the sponge and the paste — a moister batter here, a fluffier one there, brown-sugar sponge somewhere else. And if you find a chilled, cream-filled one labeled nama-dorayaki, that's the modern hybrid: whipped cream folded in with the bean paste, the variant that carried dorayaki beyond its all-anko past.

So the next time a menu offers you a "red bean pancake," you'll know what's really on the plate — a gong-shaped sponge sandwich, about a century old, filled with the sweet bean paste at the heart of nearly every Japanese sweet. Doraemon was onto something.