When a Japanese person buys bread, they ask for pan. When it rains, they grab a kappa. They fasten a botan, drink from a koppu, and treat themselves to kasutera or a handful of konpeitō.
Every one of those words is Portuguese. Not borrowed last century through English — carried directly on Portuguese ships in the 1500s, absorbed into Japanese, and spoken continuously for nearly five hundred years. Japan expelled the Portuguese in 1639 and sealed its borders for over two hundred years, but you can’t expel a vocabulary.
The Everyday Words
- パン pan — bread, from pão. The single most-spoken Portuguese word on Earth outside the Lusophone world. Every bakery in Japan is quietly bilingual.
- コップ koppu — cup or glass, from copo.
- ボタン botan — button, from botão. Both the clothing kind and, by extension, the push kind.
- カッパ kappa — raincoat, from capa (cape/cloak). The Portuguese arrived in dramatic capes; Japan kept the word for anything that keeps rain off.
- タバコ tabako — tobacco, from tabaco. The Portuguese introduced both the plant and the habit.
- シャボン shabon — soap, from sabão. Survives mainly in shabon-dama, “soap bubbles”, one of the loveliest words in Japanese.
- ビロード birōdo — velvet, from veludo.
- カルタ karuta — traditional playing cards, from carta. Japan’s beloved New Year card game carries a Portuguese name.
The Food Words
- テンプラ tempura — from the Latin tempora or Portuguese têmpero. The full story is here, and it’s the reason this site exists.
- カステラ kasutera — castella cake, from pão de Castela. Its own 400-year story.
- コンペイトー konpeitō — the tiny star-shaped sugar candies, from confeito. Portuguese missionaries famously presented them to the warlord Oda Nobunaga, who was reportedly delighted. You’ve seen them in Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away — the soot sprites eat them.
- カボチャ kabocha — Japanese pumpkin. Named after Cambodia (Camboja), because Portuguese traders brought the squash to Japan via Southeast Asia. The vegetable is named after its shipping route.
- ザボン zabon — pomelo, from zamboa.
- マルメロ marumero — quince, from marmelo. Yes — the fruit behind Portugal’s marmelada kept its Portuguese name in Japanese.
The History Words
Some loanwords carry the heavier part of the story. キリシタン kirishitan, from cristão, means the Christians of Japan’s missionary century — and later, the “hidden Christians” who kept the faith in secret for 250 years after it was banned, a history recognised by UNESCO in Nagasaki’s churches. バテレン bateren, from padre, meant the missionary fathers themselves. These words mark the reason the Portuguese were ultimately expelled: the shogunate feared the religion more than it valued the trade.
Why This Matters (Beyond Being a Great Party Fact)
Languages keep what cultures value. Japan kept the Portuguese words for bread, cake, sweets, buttons, playing cards and soap bubbles — the small, warm, domestic things. Whatever went wrong between the two countries politically, what survived in the language is a record of everyday delight: new foods, new games, new comforts.
As a Portuguese speaker, hearing pan in a Tokyo bakery vlog gives me a strange, wonderful vertigo — a 16th-century echo of my own language, alive on the other side of the world. That feeling is what Momo Ikigai is built on.
Next in the Portugal–Japan series: the Nanban trade — the century that changed Japanese food forever. Start here if you’re new.