Why that round red bean cake has four names

You bought it from a counter in a shopping centre, or from a stall on a cold street in Japan. A thick round disc, warm, about the width of your palm, crisp at the rim and soft in the middle, with something dark and sweet sealed inside it. Afterwards you went looking for the name and came back with four of them, and one of the four wasn't Japanese at all.

The name you probably want is imagawayaki. Japan has never settled on one, which is why you found four, and the fourth, the one on Australian food-court signs, is Taiwanese. Where to buy one in Australia is at the end, and it's easier here than for anything else in its family.

Find yours

• 

  Imagawayaki (今川焼き)

  A thick round disc off a hotplate, crisp at the rim, the filling sealed inside

  also sold as ōbanyaki and kaitenyaki, and about a hundred more names around Japan

• 

  Taiwanese wheel cake (車輪餅)

  The same disc, smaller and paler, off a big round griddle that turns

  also called hongdou bing, red bean cake; often taro inside, and the one Australians have eaten

• 

  Hōraku manjū (蜂楽饅頭)

  Smaller and domed rather than straight-sided, the top finely pitted all over

  manjū means a filled bun; a Kumamoto chain, in Japan's south-west, with honey in the batter

• 

  Higiriyaki (日切焼)

  Not round at all — an oblong, with a seam down its length

  from Matsuyama, on Shikoku in Japan's south-west

• 

  Taiyaki (たい焼き)

  The same batter and the same filling, moulded in the shape of a fish

  no fish in it — our guide to taiyaki covers it

• 

  Dorayaki (どら焼き)

  Two flat pancakes sandwiched around the filling, sold cold in a wrapper

  not griddled to order — see the Japanese red bean pancake

• 

  Monaka (最中)

  A dry, pale, papery shell that snaps when you bite it

  rice-flour shell, no batter, never cooked in front of you

The dark filling in nearly all of these is anko, azuki beans simmered with sugar. It's thick and only mildly sweet, and there's no cocoa in it, which catches people out the first time. As for the cake around it, think of a thick pancake with the filling sealed inside. It's lightly crisp at the rim for the first few minutes off the griddle, soft and dense within, and only faintly sweet until you reach the filling.

Why it has so many names

Most foods have one name and some dialect around the edges. This one doesn't. A linguist called Kishie Shinsuke has been counting them since 2009, across about 1,800 questionnaires. His careful figure is more than a hundred names nationwide.

Three of them carry most of the traffic. Imagawayaki belongs to the region around Tokyo. Ōbanyaki is the one you hear across much of the rest of the country. Kaitenyaki, literally "rotation-grilled", belongs to Osaka and Kobe, and to Japan's south-west.

After that it fragments. Hiroshima says nijūyaki, "double-grilled". Across western Japan it's taikomanjū, the drum bun, after the shape. In Himeji, west of Osaka, people ask for gozasōrō. That word isn't a description at all. It's the name of the shop that made them, and customers said it so often that it became the cake.

The surveys that try to rank these don't agree. One run in 2025 put imagawayaki first at 35%, ōbanyaki at 27% and kaitenyaki at 24%. Older and larger studies put ōbanyaki ahead instead. What every count does agree on is the useful part: no name for this is used by even half the country. So if you asked in Japan and got a different word from the one on your receipt, nobody was wrong.

Where "ōbanyaki" actually comes from

An ōban was a large gold coin in old Japan, and the cake is round like one. The name arrived by a different road.

In 1956 a novel called Ōban began appearing in instalments and became very popular. A confectionery-equipment maker in Matsuyama was selling griddles at the time, together with a bag of ready-made batter mix, so that somebody with no training could open a stall at a festival. They borrowed the novel's title, swapped one character to the ōban that means the coin, and sold the whole kit under that name. It spread from western Japan outwards. The coin came into the name sideways, as a joke about size, roughly two hundred years after the cake itself.

How one is actually made

It looks like one cake poured into one mould. It's two.

The griddle is a plate of round wells. Batter goes into one well and fills it about a third deep, the filling is spooned on, and it cooks for five or six minutes. Meanwhile a second well gets a thinner layer of batter, with no filling, and that one becomes the lid. The two are then lifted together and pressed while both are still soft, and they fuse into a single disc. Makers who rent this equipment out warn that if the lid is too thin, or is left to set before you join it, the halves won't bond and the cake comes apart.

One region named the cake after exactly that. Around Okayama, along the coast east of Hiroshima, people call it fūfu manjū, the married-couple bun, because an upper and a lower piece of batter are stuck together to make one.

Not the fish one (taiyaki), and not the flat one (dorayaki)

Three sweets get mistaken for this one, and only one of them is a different recipe.

Taiyaki, the fish, is the same batter and filling in a different mould, and it's the younger one by well over a century. Tokyo was selling the round cake in the 1770s. In 1909 a shopkeeper took that batter and filling, tried a turtle mould, failed to sell any, and tried a sea bream instead. So taiyaki is a version of imagawayaki, though most people meet the two the other way round, because the fish is the famous one.

Dorayaki, the flat one, is two pancakes cooked separately, cooled and sandwiched around the filling, which is why it's sold wrapped on a supermarket shelf and this one isn't.

Monaka is the only real outsider: no batter and no griddle, just a baked rice-flour shell that snaps.

The one you ate here was probably Taiwanese

Here's the part that surprises people. If you ate one of these in Australia rather than in Japan, the shop you bought it from was very likely Taiwanese.

Taiwan was under Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945, and the cake went across in that period and stayed. It's called chēlún bǐng there, wheel cake, or hóngdòu bǐng, red bean cake. It's built the same way, from two halves joined in a mould. It also drifted: the Taiwanese version is smaller, softer and fluffier, and it took on fillings that are uncommon in Japan, including taro, and savoury ones.

That drift is what you meet in an Australian shopping centre. Four shops griddle these fresh in Australia, one of them from two Melbourne kiosks, and the Taiwanese line runs right through them. The Melbourne kiosks put Taiwan in their name, the Brisbane one had its griddle built in Tainan, and the menus follow: corn cheese and pork floss beside the custard. Not one of them writes obanyaki on its sign. The addresses are below.

None of that makes it a different cake. What you ate was a Japanese sweet that has lived in Taiwan for a century and picked things up there, and both halves of that are true at once. It also means the useful word at an Australian counter is wheel cake. The Melbourne kiosks put it in their name and the Perth counter calls it red bean cake, so searching the Japanese name is what hid them from you.

Where to find imagawayaki in Australia

This is the one sweet in its family you can reliably get made in front of you here. Its relatives are harder: taiyaki reaches Australia mostly frozen, and dorayaki mostly as a wrapped supermarket item. Every shop and seller below was checked in September 2026. Prices are a rough guide, not a quote.

Over a counter

Four shops griddle them fresh here, and every address opens the shop on Google Maps, where its hours are current.

• Melbourne

  Disc Taiwan Wheel Cake

  Two city kiosks. Custard and oreo sit alongside corn cheese and pork floss.

  La Trobe Street, Melbourne

  QV food court, Melbourne

• Brisbane

  Hot Cake House

  Its owners trained under a dessert chef in Tainan, in southern Taiwan, had their griddle built there and shipped over, and have been going about fourteen years.

  Sunnybank

• Brisbane

  Papa's Pancakes

  A few doors along from Hot Cake House, on the same Sunnybank strip.

  Sunnybank

• Perth

  Eat Lun Cake

  Sold here under the name red bean cake.

  Equus Arcade, Perth

No counter in Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra or the Gold Coast lists it on its own menu. If you know of one still trading, tell us and we'll add it.

In the freezer

The importer to look at is JFC Online, whose Sydney, Perth and Queensland stores each list imagawayaki with red bean in a five-piece frozen pack, and whose Melbourne store carries a matcha version. Mumu Zakka in Nunawading, Victoria, lists a ten-piece box for collection at the shop. A five-pack usually runs around $9 to $11, and a ten-piece box around $13. None of Jun Direct, Genki Mart, Asian Pantry, Umall, Snack Affair or Coles lists it, so JFC is the one to check first.

Common questions

Where this leaves you

Four names, one cake, two halves pressed together, and a shopping-centre counter closer to you than the internet suggested. If it was the red bean itself you came for, that's a much bigger subject. Our shelf of Japanese wagashi, the traditional sweets, holds the ones built around it. That includes yokan, the one member of this family we stock ourselves. It's the opposite of a hot griddle cake: a firm block of set red bean jelly that keeps at room temperature, which is precisely why it travels and this one doesn't.

Our guide to naming Japanese sweets does for the rest of that shelf what this page did for one cake: description in, name out. If you're earlier in the journey than that, start here is the short version of what we carry.