The Japanese have a strange tradition of eating croquettes during typhoon season

It is the typhoon season, with a strong and deadly one hitting Japan earlier this month, leaving as many as 17,000 stranded at Tokyo Airport. However, gloominess aside, did you know the croquette, or “korokke”, is a must-eat for the Japanese when there is a typhoon?

Japan has a weird tradition of eating croquettes whenever typhoon season comes around. Supermarkets market this scrumptious potato snack as “typhoon croquettes”, in hopes of generating more sales.

In the manga comic below, one girl is saying, “It is a tradition in Japan to eat croquette on typhoon days!” The other girl says, “Is it really…?”

Strange as it may be, this so-called tradition actually originated 18 years ago, in the summer of 2001. In a typhoon report thread on 2channel, one of the posts read, “Just in case, I bought 16 croquettes. I’ve already had 3.”

Unintentionally, this led to an ever-increasing spiral of people who had the craving for croquettes. From then on, people associated typhoons with croquettes, resulting in the materialisation of this culture in supermarkets.

These “typhoon croquettes” even get sold out at supermarkets:

Even though we have no typhoons here in Singapore, are you drooling to get your hands on one of these typhoon croquettes? (I’m hungry already, looking at all these delicious-looking croquettes!)