It is said that the production of pasta has started in Japan from around 1880. At that time, as it was still a rare ingredient, it was only available at hotels or high-class restaurants. Around 1950, pasta became known, and because there was an Italian cuisine boom in 1980's, it became one of the popular standard meals for Japanese.

When it comes to pasta, most Japanese will imagine long and thin spaghetti. You can say that spaghetti is a popular pasta in Japan as some people use the words pasta and spaghetti in the same meaning. The standard recipes are meat sauce, peperoncino and carbonara. Also there are many other recipes created originally in Japan, the Japanese style spaghetti.

The most popular Japanese style spaghetti is tarako (salted cod roe) spaghetti and mentaiko (spiced cod roe) spaghetti, both are made by mixing spaghetti with tarako or mentaiko. Also another Japanese style spaghetti is the one cooked with full of mushrooms, tuna, grated daikon radish and natto (fermented soybeans). Most of Japanese style recipes are flavored with soy sauce.

In Japan, there are a huge number of Italian restaurants and spaghetti specialty shops, so you don't need to try hard to find them wherever you are. You can often find some pasta menu at non-Italian restaurants. If you go to a supermarket, they usually have pasta and several kinds of pouch pasta sauces, so you can easily cook and enjoy them at home.