How Like a Dragon Remembers Korea's Flavors: From Yakiniku to Kimchi, Scenes of Korean Food in Games

1. Why Does Like a Dragon Have So Many Korean Restaurants?: Identity Revealed Through Food and Place

The Like a Dragon series tells stories of yakuza and criminal organizations, but at its center there always lies human desire. The desires to make money, gain power, win love, and dream of a better life are the principal engines running through both the main story and the substories. The player is led to grow characters, expand businesses, romance, indulge in entertainment, and desire something without end. What is interesting is that this desire is often translated, within the game's systems, into a matter of "hunger" and "fullness."

A game's character usually has a bar-shaped health gauge at the top of the screen, and collapses when the gauge hits zero. But in Like a Dragon, it is not only the enemy's fist that whittles down health. Eating a spoiled lunchbox or spending a night with an unwanted woman also reduces health, and there exist digestive aids and skills that let you keep eating your fill even when full. The desires of power, appetite, and lust are, in effect, made visible as figures of hunger and fullness.

Lost health can be recovered through restorative items bought at the drugstore or through eating. What is interesting here is the scale of the eateries that appear in the Like a Dragon series. It varies by title, but the restaurants a player can use range from around twenty at the low end to more than forty, and conquering every menu item at all these eateries is one of the representative collection tasks the game encourages. In other words, in Like a Dragon food is at once an item that aids the character's survival and a medium for experiencing the city and its places.

The Like a Dragon series is characterized by rendering contemporary Japanese society "realistically," with almost no fantasy elements. Toshihiro Nagoshi—the chief director who produced and oversaw most of the series and is called "the father of Like a Dragon"—has expressed pride in this, saying that while the map is not vast like those of other games, in terms of spatial density he believes it is the most tightly composed map in the world. The "high-density space" built from bustling alleys and densely packed shops is a device, a kind of grammar, applied consistently across the entire series. And to transform abstract space into a place of fact and experience, the Like a Dragon series makes active use of eateries.

Korean food, too, is re-enacted in the game both as the menu item called "food" and in the form of the space called the "restaurant." Eateries—among the play spots a player can freely enter and leave—are places that replenish the player's health and also form the spatial backdrop against which the story unfolds.

Functionally, in-game food has handled the health boosts needed for a game figure's survival. But unlike a potion that exists only as a function, the food sold in the space of a restaurant is given a kind of narrative. The spread is presented visually in the form of a photograph, and the game's protagonist "tastes" the food and offers a "remark." Food is presented not as a mere means of recovery but as an object of savoring and appreciation.

The menu items sold in-game are carefully selected. Menus that reveal a region's locality are chosen—Nagoya's hitsumabushi, Hokkaido's Genghis Khan, and the like—or actual famous local establishments representative of a region appear. Examples include Zuboraya, a pufferfish specialty restaurant founded in 1920 with its head store in Osaka, and Kani Doraku, a crab-cuisine specialist born in 1960. From skewered fritters sold at around 200 yen apiece to kaiseki set courses fetching upward of 20,000 yen per person, the game's eateries form a range of habitus, realized three-dimensionally and actively through the signboard and storefront, the interior, the menu, and the in-store music. In some cases, in partnership with the restaurant in question, the founder or proprietor appears directly as a game character in a substory designed to promote the food menu or the management philosophy. And through the mandatory quest Tatsuya's Training—modeled on the popular cheftainer Tatsuya Kawagoe—the player is led to experience, firsthand, eateries serving the specialty menus of new regions. As visiting an eatery becomes a condition for advancing the quest, the player comes to have an experience that endows the in-game space with a sense of place. In this way, food and eateries blur the boundary between virtual space and the real world, creating an occasion for the game's influence to extend beyond the screen.

The act of the game's Japanese protagonist visiting a Korean restaurant and eating Korean food can be understood as a kind of food tourism. Culinary tourism—gastronomic travel—is a concept devised by the geographer Wilbur Zelinsky, referring to cases where experiencing distinctive food becomes the chief motive of a journey.[1] Amid the cityscapes of metropolises that grow alike through globalization, tourists come to want new and varied experiences, and here food becomes a medium for expressing the singularity of a particular region. Moreover, in today's travel trends—which aim to fuse vacation with daily life, using Airbnb, which shares local "homes" instead of "businesses" like hotels in order to "live" like a "local," and actively deploying naming like "a month living in such-and-such place"—seeking out good restaurants is an event not to be missed.[2]

Above all, (foreign) food appears in games sharing in national and ethnic identity. Korean food is the food of that foreign land called Korea, and in many cases it is sold in Korean restaurants run or patronized by Koreans (in Japan) and functions in-game as a stronghold of Koreans (in Japan). The same holds for Chinese food, which exists as another "foreign food" alongside Korean food in the series. The Chinese mafia make their Chinese nationality visible through shaved heads evoking the queue and clothing with Mandarin collars, and their hideout is disguised as a Chinese restaurant. This is a space for eating and at the same time a fighting space lined with exotic weapons—Chinese cleavers, green-dragon crescent blades, pig heads—and weapon-props derived from food. In food tourism, otherness is an important concept; food tourism is also the most direct and bodily way of experiencing a culture different from one's own.[3]

2. A Tour of the Korean Restaurants in Like a Dragon

The Korean restaurants[4] that appear in the Like a Dragon series include "Hanrai (韓來)" and "Gyuen (牛遊宴)" in Tokyo's Kamurocho, the "Tripe-Grill Specialist (元祖 ホルモン焼き)" in Osaka's Sotenbori, and "Omoni's Vow," "Yun Foods," "Legendary Kimchi Merchant," "Harborlight," and "Survivor" in and around Yokohama's Koreatown.

The Korean restaurant first appeared in 2006's Yakuza 2, beginning together with the entry of the Korean criminal organization, the Jingweon family, into the series. As the game's stage expanded from Tokyo to Osaka, Koreans were set up as the overseas organization (members) opposing the Tojo Clan, the game's core faction. The correlation between Korean characters and Korean restaurants is also a case showing just how firmly nationality and food are bound together. Allow me to introduce the Korean restaurants that appear in Like a Dragon.

Yakiniku Hanrai: The Korean restaurant that represents Like a Dragon—"a famous meat house visited even by notable figures"

Hanrai handles grilled meat and Korean food, as its signboard "Yakiniku Hanrai (焼肉 韓來)" suggests, and ever since it first appeared in Yakuza 2, released in 2006, it has appeared without a single omission in every subsequent title and spin-off—the eatery that represents the series. Hanrai is also a place actively used as a site where substories and events occur; in particular, it was staged as the place where Lee Ru-jeon—modeled on the Korean Wave star Bae Yong-joon—meets Han Jun-gi, the boss of the Jingweon family.

* The clean, upscale-looking exterior of Yakiniku Hanrai.

Kamurocho, the fictional space that styles itself Tokyo's finest pleasure district, was realized using Kabukicho, the entertainment quarter in Shinjuku, as its real model. Map the northwest of Kamurocho, where Hanrai sits, onto the actual Kabukicho, and it corresponds to the area bordering Shin-Okubo, Japan's largest Koreatown of Koreans in Japan. In terms of location, too, Hanrai is not a mere eatery but a place set upon a point of contact with the cultural sphere of Koreans in Japan.

What is interesting is that the in-game Hanrai has, along with the series' development, continually updated its identity and foreignness as a K-eatery to match the changing times. The restaurant's name, read "Kanrai" in early titles, was changed to "Hanrai," dovetailing with the first-generation "Korean Wave" fervor epitomized by Bae Yong-joon—a shift that can be read as a move to profess a Korean image more actively. Also, compared with the somewhat shabby early series, the later titles grow larger in scale and tidier inside, with the addition of interior elements related to traditional Korean culture: wall decorations using the lattice patterns of hanok doors, and hangings using traditional knot craft. These changes show that Hanrai functions as a space that, beyond merely reproducing a "Korean-style grilled-meat restaurant," actively reflects the image and cultural influence of K-culture consumed in the Japanese society of the day.

Tripe-Grill Specialist: The original horumonyaki in Osaka's old downtown

Food is one of the important representations that reveal the history and culture of a particular place and the identity of the people who live there. Osaka's "Tripe-Grill Specialist (元祖 ホルモン焼き)" is a place appearing only in Yakuza 2; it vanished when the entire Shinseicho map where it sat was deleted in the course of the Yakuza Kiwami 2 remake. Shinseicho is an area modeled on Shinsekai, Osaka's representative old downtown, and in reality too it is well known as a center of working-class food culture such as horumonyaki and kushikatsu. The in-game restaurant is presented enigmatically, without a separate shop name, through the keyword "intestine,"[5] and this word for innards becomes the clue to finding the restaurant's location.

Although the work does not directly specify it as a restaurant run by Koreans, this space functions within the main narrative as a midway point in the journey of Kaoru, a detective of Korean descent in Japan, toward his roots. At the same time, it is a place that mediates the hideout of Murai, a Korean who has thoroughly concealed his identity to survive. Considering in particular that the food horumonyaki has itself been historically and closely tied to the culture of Koreans in Japan within Japanese society, this restaurant can be read as a place that, beyond a mere backdrop, evokes the memory and identity of the community of Koreans in Japan. That is, here food functions not as a mere object of consumption but as a cultural sign symbolizing a particular sense of place and ethnic memory.

Gyuen: A Korean-run meat house "boasting outstanding value for money"

In the late 2010s, the Like a Dragon series began to show its problems: the period limits of a narrative that had unfolded around yakuza power struggles, and the narrative of Kiryu, grown bloated and old along with the titles accumulated over the years. To break through this, it remade earlier works as in Yakuza Kiwami 1 and Kiwami 2, created a new past narrative as in Yakuza 0, and sought various outlets by releasing spin-offs such as Judgment and Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise—and finally, in Yakuza 6, it staged protagonist Kiryu's death and wrote him into retirement, then, with the 2020 release of Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Yakuza 7) as its turning point, attempted a sweeping transformation of the series. It created a new protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga, introduced a turn-based battle system, and newly introduced the vast Yokohama map. The protagonists shifted direction from struggles over the succession of power to struggles for the dissolution of organizations and for peace, and subaltern subjects—women, foreigners, the homeless, hosts, and others—appeared in numbers as playable party characters, lending diverse colors to the dark "underworld" the series had sought to realize. It is also from this point that the English-language title "Yakuza" was replaced with "Like a Dragon." And amid these changes, content related to Korea, Koreans (in Japan), and Korean food likewise increases greatly from Yakuza 7 on.

Gyuen (牛遊宴), the yakiniku place of the Judgment series—which shares the spaces of Kamurocho and Isezaki Ijincho and links some characters and worldbuilding—appears in the Like a Dragon series too from Yakuza 7. Unlike Hanrai, which professes to be an upscale Korean restaurant, Gyuen is reproduced as a more popular yakiniku specialist. Gyuen is especially noteworthy in that it is an eatery run by a character who is Korean (in Japan).

* Gyuen's exterior: the giant cattle sculpture placed in front of the shop reinforces the image of the "raw."

Gyuen's owner Kim Won-seung appears repeatedly in Judgment as a figure who builds a rapport with protagonist Yagami through a friend event and presides over street-fighting events. He reappears in the sequel Lost Judgment as a former member of a bōsōzoku biker gang, continuing his bond with Yagami. In this way Kim Won-seung can be called a Korean (in Japan) character who, beyond a mere supporting role, is continually given narrative across the series. His story is summoned again through the meal-talk in Yakuza 8, forming a worldbuilding continuity between the Judgment and Like a Dragon series. In short, Gyuen, beyond a place that merely sells Korean food, clearly shows a "Korean-run" Korean restaurant. In other words, here the eatery is at once a space for consuming Korean food and a space that links the existence of Koreans (in Japan) into the narrative.

Omoni's Vow: The opening of a full-fledged Korean restaurant—"Korean cuisine made with a mother's touch"

By Yakuza 7, Korean-descended playable characters appear: Seonhui and Han Jun-gi (Kim Yong-su). Based in the Koreatown area, they run the organization "Geomijul" (コミジュル) and form a central axis of the narrative. This area is a space modeled on the actual Fukutomicho Koreatown in Yokohama; signboards in Hangul and shop names transliterating Korean are lined up throughout the streets, and in battles waged against Korean (in Japan) thugs, Korean-language voice lines like "Who are you?" and "You wanna get beaten to death?" are used, revealing a Korean feel more directly.

What is especially worth noting is that, in the process of reproducing Koreatown, Korean food functions as a key cultural representation. In the nighttime scenery the game reproduces, a large neon sign reading "Hometown Taste, Bulgogi" stands out like a landmark, and around it a landscape forms, dense with Korean eateries. Moreover, it is significant that the term "bulgogi" is brought to the fore instead of "yakiniku (焼肉)," which was generally used in past Japanese society to refer to Korean-style grilled meat. This shows that Korean food is no longer consumed in a form assimilated into Japanese food culture but is securing its own identity and recognition as a distinctly Korean food culture.

* The majesty of "Bulgogi," lighting the night view of Koreatown red.

The in-game Korean restaurant located here, "Omoni's Vow (オモニの誓い)," is special. The "Omoni (オモニ)" written in the shop name is a transliteration of the Korean word for "mother," left untranslated into Japanese, which immediately reveals a Korean identity. This is a place harboring a secret passage connected to the stronghold of a Korean (in Japan) organization, set up as the full-fledged Korean restaurant representing Koreatown. The interior actively places some traditional crafts and film and advertising posters exposing the Korean language, evoking the cultural backdrop of Korea.

* Omoni's Vow: a yakiniku specialist with no yakiniku.

The food lineup, too, differs from the yakiniku-centered Korean restaurants that appeared in earlier series. By offering a variety of menus representative of Korea—samgyetang, dakgalbi, bulgogi, samgyeopsal—it presents a more comprehensive Korean food culture, going beyond the earlier mode of reproduction that stayed within the Korean-style grilled-meat specialist. That is, the Korean restaurant Omoni's Vow is a place that reveals the traces of Korean culture three-dimensionally, from shop name and spatial design to menu composition, and can be seen as functioning as the cultural axis of the Koreatown that Yakuza 7 reproduces.

Yun Foods, Legendary Kimchi Merchant: Korean Food = Kimchi

Besides these, there exist in the Korea area a stall-type[6] "Yun Foods" and a peddler marked as the "Legendary Kimchi Merchant." Both stalls handle no other food and sell only kimchi, showing that kimchi passes as practically a synonym for Korean food.

* Korean Sundries Yun Foods: the signboard advertising that it handles Korean dramas in addition to kimchi and Korean-grown vegetables is striking. In reality, only "premium kimchi" is sold from the stall.

Harborlight, Survivor: Korean-food-serving pubs around Koreatown

Harborlight is a small pub run by a middle-aged madam. It sells yukgaejang gukbap, and even the meal combo name explicitly carries the expression "Korean rice." Located in a snack alley near Koreatown, it is set up as one of the shops paying electricity tribute to the Korean organization Geomijul, revealing its connection to the community of Koreans in Japan. Survivor, located in the same snack alley, likewise sells naengmyeon and shares a relationship with Koreatown. These places can be understood less as Korean restaurants in the narrow sense than as shops handling K-food in the broad sense.

These differ in their forms of business—peddler, stall, pub—but share the common trait of all being located around Koreatown. That is, we can see that Korean food is not confined to particular restaurants but has spread into the living spaces across all of Koreatown, forming a kind of cultural landscape that makes visible the existence of Korea and of Koreans in Japan.

3. Yakiniku, the Oldest Korean Food in Japan

The Origins of Yakiniku

The Korean food menu appearing in the Like a Dragon series can be broadly divided into two: yakiniku and spicy Korean food. First, the term "yakiniku (焼肉)" needs a brief explanation. Originally "bulgogi" means food made by grilling animal meat over fire, but in the process of taking root in Japan through Koreans (in Japan), the name "yakiniku"—a literal translation into Japanese—came into wide use. This can be seen as a case similar to how, in the West, bulgogi is collectively called "Korean BBQ." Of course, to reveal the identity of Korean food more directly, one could use the expression "bulgogi." But while today "bulgogi" has settled into meaning a particular dish using a soy-sauce-based marinade, "yakiniku" is used as a term referring to the whole of the Korean-derived food culture formed within Japanese society. Furthermore, this term holds significance in that it compactly shows the conflict between ethnic and national identity, and the history of cultural fusion, that emerged as Koreans in Japan and Korean food took root in Japanese society. For these reasons, this essay will use the name "yakiniku."

Yakiniku is also the very first Korean food to appear in the Like a Dragon series, and it is closely related to a representative line of work that Koreans (in Japan) have actually engaged in. In Japan, with the spread of Buddhism, Emperor Tenmu issued a ban on meat-eating in 675, and until Emperor Meiji declared the lifting of that ban in 1871, meat-eating culture was greatly restricted for about 1,200 years. Even after meat was permitted, the Japanese mainly consumed lean meat and did not use innards as an ingredient. Against this backdrop, after the 1945 defeat, Koreans (in Japan) began to cook the innards of cattle and pigs and sell them under the name "horumonyaki," and so the culture of eating innards spread in earnest into Japanese society as well.

Meanwhile, Koreans in Japan at the time often had their employment opportunities limited by institutional constraints such as nationality clauses. Under these conditions, opening an eatery—which had a relatively low barrier to entry—became an important means of livelihood, and in that process "bulgogi," that is, yakiniku, which had not existed in Japanese food culture, took root in Japanese society.[7] Yakiniku, therefore, can be called a food that, beyond a mere name for a dish, holds within it the labor and survival of Koreans in Japan and the process of cultural negotiation with Japanese society.[8]

Korean-style yakiniku is a spicy meal; Japanese-style yakiniku is a sweet snack

That yakiniku is recognized as the menu representing Korean food and Korean restaurants can be confirmed throughout the Like a Dragon series. To begin with, Hanrai—the Korean restaurant that appeared earliest in the game and the one appearing most frequently across the series—is set up as a yakiniku specialist, and the fact that two of the seven Korean-food-related shops to have appeared across the entire series are yakiniku specialists shows this.

What is especially interesting is that this recognition can be confirmed even in a kind of unconscious representation that emerged in the production process. Omoni's Vow, appearing in Yakuza 7, is set up as a full-fledged Korean restaurant offering a variety of menus—samgyetang, dakgalbi, bulgogi—and there is in fact no yakiniku-related item on its actual menu. Nonetheless, the shop signboard carries the phrase "yakiniku specialist," an open-flame brazier is installed inside, and on the wall a meat-cut chart commonly seen at yakiniku shops is rendered in Japanese. This can be seen as a simple production oversight, but on the other hand it can be read as a case showing that, in Japanese society, Korean restaurants and yakiniku shops are recognized as strongly overlapping.

* Inside Omoni's Vow: visible are Hangul posters and the yakiniku menu and grill plate that are not actually handled there.

This tendency recurs in other elements of the game as well. A butcher shop appears in a Yakuza 7 substory set against Yokohama's Koreatown, and in Yakuza 2 a horumonyaki shop functions as an important clue in the process of finding a Korean's (in Japan) hideout. In this way, the Like a Dragon series repeatedly summons meat-eating and yakiniku in the process of reproducing Korea and Koreans (in Japan), and as a result we can confirm that it inscribes yakiniku as the food culture that most vividly reveals the historical experience of Koreans in Japan.

Of course, not every yakiniku shop can be classified as a Korean restaurant. Yakiniku is a line of work begun by Koreans in Japan, but as it became popular and took deep root in Japanese food culture, yakiniku shops run by Japanese also increased greatly. This change is reflected in the Like a Dragon series too. The yakiniku restaurant Gyukaku (牛角), realized in both the Tokyo and Osaka regions, is a representative case. Gyukaku is a yakiniku chain that started in Tokyo in 1996; professing itself "The World's Best Japanese YAKINIKU Restaurant" and "Japanese BBQ," it is one of the brands operating the most stores at home and abroad.

Comparing the Japanese-style yakiniku restaurant Gyukaku with Korean-style yakiniku shops reveals similarities alongside several important differences. First, all these shops share the basic compositional method of centering on yakiniku with meal menus and desserts on the side. They also distinguish rare or high-quality cuts as separate premium menus, centered on main meat items such as galbi, ox tongue, sirloin, and skirt steak. The presence and proportion of premium menus marked with names like "extra-fine," "emperor," and "top-grade" become a code revealing the standing each shop aims for. Through this, the in-game yakiniku shops are subdivided into Hanrai, the upscale eatery professing the "top grade," and the popular eateries Gyuen and Gyukaku, which emphasize "value" or "low prices."

By contrast, two clear differences exist between Korean-line and Japanese-line yakiniku shops. The first is the presence or absence of an innards menu. Hanrai, Gyuen, and the horumonyaki specialist include innards-grill menus such as grilled large intestine and grilled small intestine, but these do not appear at Gyukaku. This relates to the historical background that the culture of eating innards in Japan was spread by Koreans (in Japan). In Japan innards were long not used as an ingredient, and only after the defeat, when Koreans (in Japan) cooked and sold them, did they become popular at last. In fact, the theory that the etymology of "horumon (ホルモン)," referring to grilled innards, derives from the Osaka dialect "horumono (things to throw away)" is widely known.[9] Therefore, whether or not an innards menu is present can be understood, beyond a mere difference in menu composition, as an indicator showing the Korean-line lineage of food culture that yakiniku carries.

* In the scenery of Yokohama's Koreatown, too, tripe is not to be left out.

The second is the composition of the side-meal menu. At Korean-line establishments such as Hanrai and Gyuen, spicy Korean menus centered on kimchi are actively offered. "Assorted kimchi," "kimchi fried rice," "yukgaejang gukbap," "sundubu jjigae," and "dolsot bibimbap" are representative. These menus reveal the characteristics of Korean food culture through a spiciness based on gochujang and gochugaru. By contrast, at the Japanese-line yakiniku shop Gyukaku, most such menus are excluded, and desserts like fondue and ice cream are placed with prominence. Naengmyeon is offered as an exception, but it is reconstructed in the form of Japanese-style naengmyeon, with the spiciness almost entirely removed.

The naengmyeon appearing in the series seems close to "Morioka naengmyeon," which developed independently in Japan. Using toppings such as tomato (watermelon), plum, and shiso, and with sweetness intensified, this dish is regarded as a representative case of Korean naengmyeon adapted within Japanese society. Just as with the relationship between bulgogi and yakiniku, naengmyeon and Morioka naengmyeon can likewise be called a case showing the relationship between Korean food and Korean food in Japan. Translated literally it should be "plum-shiso naengmyeon (梅しそ冷麺)," but the game translates it as "plum-kkaennip naengmyeon." Although Japan uses shiso (しそ), it has been replaced with kkaennip (perilla leaf), which is familiar to Korean users. This can be called a process of re-localizing, for Korean-language users, a Korean food that was adapted within Japanese society, and it shows that Korean food is undergoing a multilayered process of cultural translation.

Yukgaejang is marked in-game as "yukgaejang gukbap (ユッケジャンクッパ)." In Korea it generally passes simply as "yukgaejang," but the Japanese edition adds the explanatory word "gukbap" to convey the dish's character more intuitively. This can be seen as a case of the cultural translation that occurs as Korean food is received within Japanese society. The choice of yukgaejang as a Korean-restaurant menu, together with the kimchi discussed below, is also a marker showing that the essence of Korean food is placed in spiciness.

3. And Yet, Korean Food = Kimchi

Along with yakiniku, kimchi sits as the most important keyword in the game's Korean-food-related content. At the full-fledged Korean restaurant Omoni's Vow, kimchi is subdivided and realized in various kinds—"Omoni's kimchi (オモニのキムチ)," "oi-sobagi (オイキムチ)," "kkakdugi (カクテキ)"—and even when written in Japanese, the Korean phonetic values are exposed as is; the in-game restaurant description, too, directly ties kimchi to the shop's identity, saying "the taste of the kimchi the mother pickles is exquisite."

The authenticity of hand-pickled kimchi

A characteristic to note regarding kimchi is the fact that it is repeatedly reproduced not as a mere food but as a "food one pickles oneself." In-game menu descriptions use expressions like "hand-pickled by the shop owner" (Gyuen), "pickled by the restaurant's 'mother' herself" (Omoni's Vow), and "made by the old man who sells kimchi" (Legendary Kimchi). That is, kimchi is emphasized not as a food simply consumed but as a food made by passing through someone's hands.

This mode of reproduction relates to the authenticity of Korean food. Analyzing the immigrant food culture of New York's Catskills region, Rachelle Saltzman pointed out that traditional food is used as a means of conveying ethnic identity while, at the same time, the question of authenticity rises as an important issue as recipes and meanings are transformed.[10] The way of repeatedly depicting kimchi as a "hand-pickled food" can likewise be understood as a strategy to secure authenticity as Korean food by emphasizing the food's origin and process of production.

In fact, in Korean society kimchi has long been recognized as a food made and eaten at home. Recently, with the rise in single-person households and changes in family structure, the proportion purchased has grown, but whether one buys kimchi or pickles it oneself remains one of the important indicators for gauging change in Korean food culture. Also, when the kimchi cultures of South and North Korea were each inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, it was not simply kimchi itself but, under the name "Kimjang, making and sharing kimchi," the culture of making and sharing kimchi that was inscribed together. Japanese textbooks, too, introduce kimchi and kimjang as a food culture representative of Korea, which shows that Japanese society is also fully aware of this cultural meaning.

Korea's Spiciness

Kimchi is not a mere side dish or ingredient but a representative cultural sign revealing Korea and Koreans (in Japan), and it functions as a key sign embodying the authenticity of Korean food. The process by which kimchi rose to become a national food resembles the process of Korean culture's formation, in that it broke free from the symbolic dominance of foreign food, specified a popular domestic food to declare an independence of taste, mobilized large-scale promotion praising the excellence of the national food, and is undergoing conflict in standardization and international trade.[11] Beneath the sign of kimchi lies a web of meanings: preservability through fermentation, the spiciness created by garlic and chili, and so on.

The reason kimchi works as a cultural code for Korea and the Korean people is, in particular, deeply related to the latter. With the 1988 Seoul Olympics as a turning point, kimchi established itself as a food representing ethnicity, and through the 2002 World Cup, "spiciness" expanded into a cultural representation symbolizing the character and temperament of Koreans. In this process, the chili pepper began to be recognized as an ingredient representing Koreans' cultural DNA.[12] Furthermore, the proverb "small peppers are spicy" combined with Korea's self-perception as a small country that nonetheless must by no means be taken lightly, and today it has developed even into a form of pride in a spiciness only Koreans can endure—so-called "spice pride." An article reporting that Denmark's import ban on Buldak fried noodles became, if anything, free publicity,[13] or community posts saying that the No. 1 thing Koreans say that Japanese people absolutely never believe is "it's not spicy,"[14] are enjoyed as laughter mixed with a few drops of superiority.

This recognition is reflected in the Like a Dragon series too. In the meal-talk of Yakuza 8, Nanba, saying he likes spicy food but can't really handle it, asks, "Seonhui would be fine, wouldn't she? She'd have been toughened up by kimchi, right?" Here kimchi is understood not as a mere food but as a cultural resource forming the bodies and temperament of Koreans. That is, the cultural stereotype that Koreans are strong against spiciness because they eat kimchi is naturally projected into the narrative.

Meanwhile, the way the game reproduces kimchi divides broadly into two strands. One is kimchi as a representative Korean menu, as examined above; the other is kimchi as the source of a special power that makes the impossible possible. The representative case is the Yakuza 7 substory "Kimchi Is Best When It's Really Spicy." The figures who eat the "Legendary Kimchi" hand-pickled by an old man of Koreatown carry out something they had been hesitating over, recover athletic ability that had stalled, or overcome physical limits suffered through aging. A student who could not confess to the one he loved gains courage; a track athlete craving to break records obtains new propulsion; an old man who could not cross the crosswalk before the light changed regains his vitality.

* The peddler old man who sells "Legendary Kimchi."

In this way, in the Like a Dragon series kimchi is re-enacted not as a mere food but as a synecdoche for K-culture and as a source of symbolic energy that, through spiciness, confers vitality and a spirit of challenge.

Is the best kimchi made with Japanese chili?

KIMCHI-SELLING OLD MAN: Oh! Young man, you get it—how splendid this kimchi is. Yes. This very kimchi is the finest piece, made with the legendary chili that combines overwhelming spiciness and outstanding umami... "Oni-no-tsume." (...) It's wonderful for health and for beauty, too, but I just can't get this charm across. (...) Young and old, men and women, can all eat it with peace of mind! (...)

KASUGA: I-I see. Even so, who knew a single chili could change the taste of kimchi this much.

KIMCHI-SELLING OLD MAN: Of course. Chili isn't just spicy. Some are sweeter than tomatoes. I believe this kimchi made with Oni-no-tsume is the world's best kimchi.[15]

This exchange between Kasuga and the old man who sells legendary kimchi in Yakuza 7 emphasizes that kimchi's appeal lies not simply in spiciness but in the harmony of spiciness and umami, and in its efficacy for health and beauty. It also explains that all these characteristics of kimchi derive from the raw ingredient, the chili. In fact, Korean restaurants and cafeterias are required by law to indicate the place of origin of both the napa cabbage and the gochugaru that are the raw ingredients of cabbage kimchi. This shows that one of the key elements composing kimchi's identity is the chili.

The problem, though, is that the game sets kimchi's secret ingredient as a variety called "Oni-no-tsume (鬼の爪)." "Oni-no-tsume" literally means "demon's claw," a fictional variety evoking "Taka-no-tsume (鷹の爪, hawk's talon)," a representative Japanese chili variety. Taka-no-tsume is known today as the representative traditional Japanese chili variety, protected and cultivated as a traditional vegetable designated by Osaka Prefecture. That is, the game sets the core ingredient of kimchi—a food representing Korea—as a chili evoking a traditional Japanese variety, and through this it narrates that the "world's best kimchi" is made.

Of course, controversies over the origin and transmission route of the chili have long existed. In Korea-Japan relations in particular, the theory that it came in from Japan with the Imjin War as the occasion has stood opposed to the theory that it spread to Japan by way of Joseon. But as Joo Young-ha points out, such origin controversies risk falling into the trap of a diffusionist mode of thought that presupposes a relation of superiority and inferiority, rather than a simple inquiry into historical fact. In reality, the history of food is closer to a history of assimilation and adaptation formed in the process of various communities contacting and exchanging, than to a result unilaterally created by a particular people.[16]

Nonetheless, today food functions, beyond mere edibles, as a cultural asset and a representation of identity. As Long points out, food has become a key resource of tourism and regional identity, and place of origin, ingredients, and recipes have become important objects of contention over authenticity and ownership.[17] Geographical indications such as France's appellation-of-origin system for wine are a case symbolically showing this tendency. The fact that, even using the same Cabernet Sauvignon variety, wine from Bordeaux, France trades at a far higher price than wine from Australia shows that origin labeling operates as an indicator of quality and authenticity.

Seen in this context, the "Legendary Kimchi" narrative of Yakuza 7 demands attention. A case to compare it with is the "America-sauce sundubu jjigae" appearing in Yakuza 5. Combining an America sauce using fish, shellfish, and crustaceans with fresh cream and coconut powder, this menu is a fusion food grafting a new recipe and taste onto the Korean dish sundubu jjigae; it was actually sold offline as well and drew attention. This can be understood as a gastronomic experiment expanding the scope of Korean food.

Of course, food culture moves and adapts across borders and develops into new forms. But not all transformations carry the same meaning. Adding America sauce to sundubu jjigae may be an attempt to expand the scope of an existing food, but attributing the core grounds explaining kimchi's excellence and identity to a Japanese variety is a matter of an entirely different order. Considering in particular that kimchi functions as the ethnic food representing Korea and Koreans, this setup, beyond the category of mere fusion or localization, comes to raise questions about kimchi's authenticity and cultural ownership.

Moreover, in Korean society kimchi has established itself not as a mere food but as a key cultural sign by which Korean society explains itself. In this situation, a narrative that, against the backdrop of Koreatown—a space of Koreans in Japan—and through the mouth of a figure presumed to be Korean, attributes the secret of the "world's best kimchi" to a chili evoking a Japanese variety, harbors the possibility of sensitive interpretation. It is necessary to consider in particular that, between Korea and Japan, issues over the history of colonial rule and the memory, responsibility, and interpretation of it remain to this day not entirely resolved. Within such a many-layered context, a narrative that attributes a core element composing a food bound so closely to ethnic and national identity, like kimchi, to a traditional Japanese variety—quite apart from the overall favorable reproduction of Korean food—calls for contemporary discussion over food's place of origin, authenticity, and cultural ownership. In other words, the Like a Dragon series, while actively using Korean food as a cultural representation of Korea and Koreans (in Japan), at the same time also reveals the process of complex tension and negotiation over that identity and its boundaries.

4. The Raw, the Cooked, the Rotted

In Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss explained the relationship between nature and culture through the opposition of "the raw (le cru)" and "the cooked (le cuit)." The raw is food close to the natural state; the cooked is food transformed through human cultural intervention. With the addition of "the rotted (le pourri)," produced through fermentation, food functions as a symbolic system revealing the boundary between nature and culture. Classifying, by way of Lévi-Strauss, the representative Korean-food menus reproduced in the Like a Dragon series—yakiniku, tripe, naengmyeon, yukgaejang, kimchi—would yield the following.

The left of the table means the food group close to "the raw," the center "the cooked" that has passed through boiling and simmering, the right "the rotted" made through fermentation. Yakiniku is food consumed through grilling, but in that the state of raw meat is emphasized, it occupies a position close to "the raw." Naengmyeon and yukgaejang, by contrast, are foods that have passed through the process of boiling and so belong to the category of "the cooked." (At the full-fledged Korean restaurant "Omoni's Vow," the samgyeopsal sold can be understood as yakiniku, the bulgogi and dakgalbi as intensifying the "grilling" preparation upon it, and the samgyetang as the domain of "boiling.") Kimchi, in comparison, sits in the domain of the representative "rotted," produced through fermentation.

Meanwhile, in addition to Lévi-Strauss's classification, I have set the degree of spiciness as a supplementary axis. Interestingly, the Korean food appearing in Like a Dragon tends to grow spicier as one moves from left to right. Yakiniku and samgyeopsal are relatively mild, while yukgaejang and sundubu jjigae carry a stronger spiciness, and kimchi has a fierce spiciness. That is, we can confirm that the Korean food of Like a Dragon forms a certain distribution according not only to cooking method but also to the intensity of spiciness.

In the Like a Dragon series, food does not stay a mere consumable item for recovering health or a backdrop material for the narrative. In the recent titles Yakuza 7 and Yakuza 8 in particular, food is used as a key material for staging combat, through the regular characters' signature moves and ultimate skills and through guest characters' "Delivery Help." If ordinary food content stops at presenting completed food through image or text, Delivery Help differs in that it reproduces the cooking process as video. This can be understood as a device that more actively visualizes the cultural implications food carries.

Yakiniku is food eaten cooked, but it is served to the customer in the state of raw meat, and beef in particular is often recognized as fresher and of better quality the closer it is to raw. The yakiniku of Like a Dragon reflects this characteristic too. For example, Hanrai's menu descriptions are organized around the cut and biological information of the ingredient rather than the recipe—"skirt: the meat corresponding to the cow's diaphragm," "ox tongue: the cow's tongue thinly sliced." That is, in that the food is presented less as a completed dish than as a part of a dismembered animal's body, the characteristic of "the raw" is emphasized.

Furthermore, as Lucy Long pointed out, foreign food is located between the familiar and the strange, and that strangeness connects, beyond the question of taste, to the domain of taboo—"can it be eaten or not."[18] The Korean food (of Koreans in Japan) reproduced in the Like a Dragon series likewise sits upon this boundary.

The Masked Killer's Butcher's Show: Korean food still left raw, uncooked

Even in Yakuza 7, where Koreans (in Japan) and Korean food appear in numbers in a positive direction under the influence of K-culture, the tendency to reproduce Korean food by linking it to the image of "the raw" remains in force. The representative case is Ji-ei, heir to a Koreatown butcher shop. Because of how he swings a knife while wearing a hockey mask in a Koreatown vacant lot, he is mistaken by people for a "masked killer." The misunderstanding is cleared up as practice for taking over the family business, but in Delivery Help he still appears under the name "masked killer" (Substory 26, The Masked Killer). It can be called a result formed by the combination of butchery, dismemberment, and the image of raw meat.

This tendency emerges even more clearly in the skill staging called "The Masked Killer's Butcher's Show." In this scene Ji-ei does not cook or prepare the meat. Instead, the process of cutting and dismembering ingredients with a knife is presented front and center, and the screen is filled all over with red fresh blood. It is presented not as a completed plate of food (civilization) but in the form of raw meat placed on a palm (the wild). The skill description, too, emphasizes not a recipe but "the spine-chilling work of dismemberment" (from the "Skill help" description within Delivery Help). That is, food is presented less as a completed dish than as a dismembered animal body, and the image of "the raw" is foregrounded over "the cooked."

* Masked killer Ji-ei's Butcher's Show: revealed through images of red, carnivory, and the raw.

This staging becomes clearer when compared with the Japanese Kiyoe Shirakawa's "Madonna's Free Meal" or the Chinese Chou's "Ultimate Human Stir-Fry." First, Shirakawa's "Madonna's Free Meal" is composed of a process in which a figure—wearing a soft white knit, as the name Shirakawa (白川, white river) evokes—prepares white ingredients such as radish and tofu and completes the food by boiling them in water. The completed food, too, is a "meat soup that warms body and heart" served in a white bowl, which Shirakawa offers courteously with both hands. Both the cooking process and the result are composed around images of warmth, stability, and "cooking."

* Kiyoe Shirakawa's Madonna's Free Meal: revealed through images of white, vegetarianism, and cooking with fire.

What is interesting is that this color composition also touches on the images symbolized by the representative foods of Korea and Japan. If the ethnic food representing Korea(ns) is red kimchi, white rice stands in for it in Japan. In fact, the Korean food reproduced in the Like a Dragon series is likewise visualized around the color red. Ji-ei's Butcher's Show puts forth red juices and raw meat evoking fresh blood, and major Korean menus such as kimchi and yukgaejang likewise share a red coloring—this shows it. That is, the game contrasts Japanese food with images of white, warmth, and the cooked, and the Korean food (of Koreans in Japan) with images of red, intensity, and the raw.

In the comparison with Chinese food, the difference becomes even clearer. The "Ultimate Human Stir-Fry" that Chou employs presents front and center the process of stir-frying and heating ingredients using a Chinese range and wok, emphasizing the act of cooking itself through lines like "Chinese cuisine lives by firepower" and "salt in the right amount." Of course, the exaggerated staging of stir-frying an enemy in a wok may look aggressive and violent. But such exaggeration functions, given the nature of a mature-rated game with yakuza as protagonists, as a staging device conveying power and laughter. The important point is that Chou's technique clearly shows the "cooking" process of heating and preparing ingredients.

By contrast, Korean food (of Koreans in Japan) is reproduced in a way that emphasizes cutting and dismemberment, and the state of raw meat, rather than the result of cooking. That is, if Japanese food emphasizes the image of "the cooked" through white and warmth, and Chinese food the process of "the cooked" through firepower and cooking, then Korean food (of Koreans in Japan) still remains in a position close to "the raw" through the image of cutting and raw meat.

In the works after Yakuza 7, however, a change begins to appear in this tendency. The representative case is the Korean-food composition and mode of delivery of the full-fledged Korean restaurant "Omoni's Vow." The menu item samgyeopsal, despite being food made by grilling raw meat, is not explained centering on the beast's biological information like the yakiniku of the past. Together with a photo of the completed food garnished with lettuce and red chili, the cooking method and the way of eating are presented together: "thinly sliced pork belly grilled crisp and eaten wrapped with various ingredients." Bulgogi and dakgalbi likewise emphasize the marinade and cooking process, reproducing Korean food as "the cooked" rather than "the raw." This change is likely not unrelated to the recent shift in the standing of Korean culture, together with the series' orientation, which has shone a light on various social minorities and peripheral figures. Faint though it is, the Korean food in Like a Dragon is gradually moving from "the raw" to "the cooked," acquiring an image of cultural processing and cooking.

5. Tripe and Kimchi: The Resurrection of the Discarded

Meanwhile, tripe—the menu that was directly tied to Koreans (in Japan) all along in the game—occupies an exceptional position even within Lévi-Strauss's schema. For it is not simply "the cooked" but closer to "the burnt."

SAEJIMA: It's just like that tripe. Me and you both. Meat, if you grill it too hard, goes tough and you can't eat it. But tripe's different. It's only worth something once it's charred. You burn it and burn it, burn it till it's pitch-black and the fat's all rendered out—that's when it's good. No matter how sharp you dress or how good a life you live, in the end you're yakuza—by birth, you're different from good meat.

MAJIMA: So we're garbage, like tripe, is that it?

SAEJIMA: That's right. So we've got to burn a bit more. Half-burnt tripe is just garbage. Garbage only takes on meaning once you burn it and burn it till it's pitch-black.[19]

* Majima and Saejima's conversation: the resurrection of the discarded, figured through tripe.

In Yakuza 5, Saejima, having a last meal with Majima at Hanrai before his imprisonment, says, "tripe is only worth something once it's burnt to a crisp." Whereas ordinary meat becomes inedible if overcooked, tripe, on the contrary, acquires flavor the more it is burned over fire. Here tripe functions not as a mere food but as a symbol figuring the protagonists' lives. The protagonists, on the underside of society expressed as the "underworld," live by "burning" themselves through endless trials and tempering. The burnt is generally discarded like garbage, but it passes through the extinction of having its form burned by fire and regenerates with a power of immortality and purification. Protagonists like Kiryu, Saejima, and Kasuga are figures from criminal organizations shunned by society, yet paradoxically they resist injustice more than anyone and do not hesitate to throw themselves in to help the weak. Just as tripe, which had meant "the discarded," acquires new value through fire, they too prove the meaning of their existence only by passing through hardship.

This characteristic connects with kimchi as well. By Lévi-Strauss's classification, kimchi corresponds to "the rotted." Of course, the rot here means not simple decay but a state that has acquired new value through the cultural technique of fermentation. Kimchi originally developed as a stored food for preserving vegetables over long periods, but today it has established itself as a food representing Korea. That is, kimchi is at once the result of natural transformation and a product made by human cultural intervention. If tripe is "food regenerated through burning," kimchi can be called "food regenerated through fermentation."

In this way, the Korean food reproduced in the Like a Dragon series can be understood through Lévi-Strauss's schema of "the raw—the cooked—the rotted." Yakiniku is placed as food close to the raw, naengmyeon and yukgaejang as cooked food, kimchi as rotted food. To this, tripe forms the exceptional category of "the burnt" and acquires its own meaning. Tripe and kimchi in particular share the commonality that each is reborn into new value through burning and fermentation respectively. This can be read, beyond a mere difference in cooking method, as a device symbolically revealing the historical experience of Korea and Koreans in Japan, who have converted experiences of the periphery and exclusion into new identity and value.

6. Conclusion

The Korean food re-enacted in Like a Dragon functioned not as a mere food but as a cultural representation holding the history and memory of Korea and Koreans (in Japan). Yakiniku held the history of the labor and survival of Koreans in Japan, kimchi the cultural imagination Korean society shares, and tripe and kimchi the narrative of the regeneration of the discarded. Examined in particular through Lévi-Strauss's schema, the in-game Korean food was confirmed to operate as a symbolic system that produces cultural meaning beyond mere edibles, moving between the raw and the cooked, the burnt and the rotted.

In the end, the scenery of Korean food that Like a Dragon reproduces is a story about food and, at the same time, a scenery of memory and cultural translation surrounding Korea and Koreans in Japan. The moment the player grills meat at Hanrai, buys kimchi in Koreatown, and eats samgyetang at Omoni's Vow, those foods no longer stay items for recovering health. They become a way of imagining Korea, and a scenery of the life and memory that Koreans in Japan have built within Japanese society.

[1] Lucy M. Long, "Culinary Tourism," in The Oxford Handbook of Food History, trans. Kim Byeong-sun (Seoul: Tabi, 2020), 631.

[2] Priscilla Boniface, Tasting Tourism: Travelling for Food and Drink (Routledge, 2003).

[3] Lucy M. Long, "Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspective on Eating and Otherness," Southern Folklore 55, no. 3 (University Press of Kentucky, 1998): 181–204.

[4] In this essay, "Korean restaurant" is used as a term encompassing everything from full-fledged Korean specialty establishments to places that handle Korean food among their menu items.

[5] From Yakuza 2, Chapter 11, "The Iron Rule."

[6] There is a shop behind, but in-game purchases are made at a shabby stall.

[7] Shin Jae-gyeong, "Who Are the Korean-Japanese?: How Korean Bulgogi Became Japan's Popular Dish 'Yakiniku,'" Jeju Sori, June 7, 2011.

[8] Lee Si-jae, "Cultural Transformation in the Formation of 'Wayō-setchū' Cuisine in Modern Japan," Asia Review 5, no. 1 (Seoul National University Asia Center, 2015): 47.

[9] Lee Bung-eon, Korean-Japanese First Generation, Beyond Memory, trans. Yoon Sang-in (Seoul: Dongasia, 2009); requoted from Lee Gi-won, "[A History Trip into a Book 38] The Sad History in Japanese 'Horumonyaki,'" OhmyNews, April 24, 2009.

[10] Rachelle H. Saltzman, "Rites of Intensification: Eating and Ethnicity in the Catskills," Southern Folklore 55, no. 3 (1998): 205–223.

[11] Hong Sik Cho, "Food and Nationalism: Kimchi and Korean National Identity," The Korean Journal of International Studies 4, no. 1 (2006): 207–229.

[12] Han Kyung-koo, "Some Foods Are Good to Think: Kimchi and the Epitome of Korean National Character," Korean Cultural Anthropology 26 (Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology, 1994): 51–68; Han Kyung-koo, "The Anthropology of the Discourse on the Koreanness of Koreans," Korea Journal 43, no. 1 (Academy of Korean Studies, 2003).

[13] Lee Mi-na, "'Just How Spicy Is It...' Foreign Correspondents' Buldak Noodle Tasting, a Real Promotional Effect," Hankyung, June 24, 2024, https://www.hankyung.com/article/2024062473417.

[14] "The No. 1 Thing Koreans Say That Japanese People Shouldn't Believe," Ruliweb, February 21, 2022; "'You Handle Spice Well... You Drink Well': Things Japanese People Shouldn't Say in Korea," Segye Ilbo, January 3, 2018.

[15] From the Yakuza 7 substory "Kimchi Is Best When It's Really Spicy (そのキムチ、激辛につき)."

[16] Diffusion is a concept used to justify the evolutionism of nineteenth-century racism and imperialism and has already been discarded in anthropology. Rather, in human migration and the history of food, the cultural "assimilation and adaptation" of food that occurs in the process of contact between different communities is more significant. — From Joo Young-ha, "Supervisor's Note," in The Oxford Handbook of Food History, ed. Jeffrey M. Pilcher, trans. Kim Byeong-sun (Seoul: Tabi, 2020).

[17] Lucy M. Long, "Culinary Tourism," in The Oxford Handbook of Food History, trans. Kim Byeong-sun (Seoul: Tabi, 2020), 652.

[18] Long, "Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspective" (1998).

[19] From Yakuza 5, Part 2.