Color photograph of three bakery items in clear plastic packaging printed with Japanese-language text in black font arranged in a row from left to right across the lower half of the image. An enlarged blurry image of a pastry in the background.

Bite Test: Melon Pan

Is it sakufuwa or fuwasaku?

Melon pan (meron pan メロンパン) is a sweet Japanese bun with a cookie-like crust on the outside and a soft, fluffy interior. Despite the name, it does not usually taste like melon; the name comes from its melon-like outer grid pattern. Now, two major Japanese convenience store chains are competing over what it feels like to bite into a melon pan bun. 7-Eleven melon pan has sakufuwa サクふわ on the packaging, while Lawson's features fuwasaku ふわサク (Fig. 1).

Each word plays on an alternative combination of two traditional ideophones, sakusaku サクサク (light but crisp and pleasantly crunchy, used for cookies and tempura) and fuwafuwa ふわふわ (soft, light, and fluffy, used for sponge cake and bread). Fuwasaku and sakufuwa recombine the ideophones but do away with the characteristic reduplication of the same syllables. Why the discrepancy? It is, inevitably, a question of marketing. But is there more to it that a different approach could reveal?

Color photograph of two melon pan in plastic packaging printed with Japanese-language text. The packaging and items inside appear slightly different from one another.
Fig. 1. Two packs of melon pan sold by competing convenience stores. Photo: Andrea Giolai.

Linguists Akita Kimi and Murasugi Keiko have conducted research on a new class of adjectives called "innovative binomials" (that is, adjectives consisting of two parts) that describe the experience of eating food. They claim that new words like torofuwa トロふわ (creamy-fluffy) and urutsuya うるつや (moist and glossy) respond to specific "constraints on their constituent ordering." In particular, "innovative binomial adjectives iconically reflect the order of experiences" such that "when we eat bread described as karimofu カリモフ (crunchy-fluffy), we feel crispness first and fluffiness next." The order in which (a portion of) an ideophone appears in a binomial combination would seem to express the order in which we experience the corresponding sensation–in this case, a mouthfeel. Does the case of melon pan confirm or challenge this finding? If Akita and Murasugi are right, the only viable option should be sakufuwa, describing first the perception of something crispy, followed by something soft and fluffy. Is fuwasaku just a wordplay then, or does it describe an alternative way of perceiving the product? This can be tested out.

What follows is a short report documenting an experiment that was devised and carried out at least in part in jest, functioning on the one hand as an amusing joke and on the other as a rigorous investigation. Accordingly, I present the hypothesis both academically and with the language of everyday life.

Color photograph of a fully opened carry-on suitcase seen from above, containing clear plastic packages of melon pan on the left side, with items wrapped in green giftwrapping, a black pouch, a two orange-colored rectangular packages on the right.
Fig. 2. The author's experiment kit. Photo: Andrea Giolai.

I asked: "In eating melon pan, do people first perceive crunchiness and then fluffiness, first perceive said textures the other way around, or first perceive both at the same time?" And through this question, I intended to answer the underlying question: "Do innovative binomial adjectives really reflect the order of experiences iconically as Akita and Murasugi suggest?" Orchestrating the experiment, I was mindful of the lesson of ethnomethodology and actor-network theory, that everyday life is constructed and painstakingly orchestrated. If a cultural anthropologist can learn a lot from observing a laboratory as if it were comprised of an exotic tribe, what could be learned from testing what people have to say about the crunchiness and fluffiness of melon pan?

Infrastructure:


On July 15, 2025, in sweltering Kyoto, I had the opportunity to test twenty-six university students. I carried out the experiment, which was hosted at a public university, as an unannounced special event ("guerilla style," as one of my colleagues put it) during the last session of the course "History of Japanese Music." The large course is split into three groups of approximately twenty students. Two of the instructors agreed to devote about 15 minutes of the class to the experiment.

Preparation:


I spent the morning of July 15 gathering fourteen specimens of melon pan, seven for each of the two brands: 7-Eleven and Lawson. In consultation with my colleagues, I decided to present each student with a pre-sliced portion of each brand. Anticipating a maximum of twenty-eight students, that would mean fifty-six slices in total. For hygienic reasons, I placed the portioned slices in special plastic bags for food. I then put them into two empty carton boxes (Fig. 4), marked as "Type A" and "Type B." Type A corresponded to the Lawson melon pan, Type B to the 7-Eleven melon pan. Of course, which sample was which was not communicated to the students. The first group of students scheduled to perform the test was much smaller than anticipated due to an upcoming examination the following day, with only six students present. Therefore, after conducting the experiment with the first group, I quickly moved to another classroom in order to do the same with a bigger group, in this case of twenty students.

Prompt:


After a short summary of the Japan Past & Present project, I decided to give the students the following prompt: "Two convenience store brands advertise melon pan using either the expression fuwasaku or the expression sakufuwa on the packaging. We are interested in finding out which mouthfeel is perceived first [here, I used the term shokkan 食感]. Please raise your hand if: a. You feel fuwa first; b. You feel saku first; or c. You feel both fuwa and saku at the same time." The students responded accordingly.

Results:


Group 1 (Total = 6)

  • A type (Lawson) = Fuwa: 4; Saku: 0; Both: 1; No response: 1.

  • B type (7-Eleven) = Fuwa: 6; Saku: 0; Both: 0.

Group 2 (Total = 20)

  • A type (Lawson) = Fuwa: 17; Saku: 3; Both: 0.

  • B type (7-Eleven) = Fuwa: 19; Saku: 0; Both: 0; No response: 1.

Conclusion:


An overwhelming majority of students from both groups agreed that for both brands, the texture they feel first is fuwa(fuwa). Interestingly, the 7-Eleven melon pan, which has sakufuwa on the packaging, seems to be perceived as more fuwafuwa than the Lawson, which has fuwasaku on the packaging. Anecdotally, this suggests that Akita and Murusugi's innovative binomial adjectives don't in fact need to iconically reflect the order in which taste (or mouthfeel) is experienced.

Reflection:


The relatively unserious way in which the experiment was conducted shouldn't detract from what is suggested by its result. The young university students I sampled were very amused by the situation; after all, it is not every day that they are fed melon pan by a researcher from abroad. Still, they took the experiment rather seriously, and there is no reason to doubt their responses.

Color photograph taken from the rear of a classroom, with rows of students seen from behind, many with hands raised. A whiteboard is in the background, with a male figure in dark clothing standing to the left-hand side.
Fig. 8. The melon pan experiment in action. Photo: Andrea Giolai.

Both in the preparation phases and immediately after the experiment, two points of criticism emerged in conversations with my colleagues. The first concerned the exact phrasing of the prompt. Is it possible that fuwa and saku are supposed to be perceived simultaneously, and that the prompt itself suggested what amounts to an artificial split in the way melon pan is ordinarily appreciated? A suggested alternative for the prompt was offered: "When you first bite into the melon pan, how would you describe its mouthfeel [shokkan] with an onomatopoeia [onomatope オノマトペ]?" While stronger, this prompt was rejected because the objective of the experiment was to contrast specifically fuwafuwa and sakusaku. Secondly, it was suggested that such an experiment should be conducted in drier weather. The humidity of the weather in July in Kyoto means that in the time between preparing the slices of melon pan and the experiment itself, the texture of the slices might have changed significantly, to the point of rendering the crispiness of melon pan less perceivable. This cannot be ruled out completely. I hope that other scholars will replicate the experiment in different weather conditions.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to my Japanese colleagues, whose names I have retained for privacy reasons. I am also grateful to the students who agreed to take part in the experiment, and to the members of the JPP Project, Food for the Senses.


References


Akita, Kimi, and Keiko Murasugi. "Innovative Binomial Adjectives in Japanese Food Descriptions and Beyond.” In The Language of Food in Japanese: Cognitive Perspectives and Beyond, edited by Kiyoko Toratani, 111–32. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2022.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar.Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

To cite this page:


Giolai, Andrea. "Bite Test: Melon Pan." Food for the Senses: Eating Language in Contemporary Japan. Japan Past & Present. 2026. https://japanpastandpresent.org/en/projects/food-for-the-senses-eating-language-in-contemporary-japan/ideophones-in-flux/bite-test-melon-pan


Header image: Photo by GM.