When I first got to Japan and started ordering from restaurant menus with items in katakana (a syllabary that is used to write western words in Japanese). The menu item was called Spaghetti Naporitan. Which I thought would mean some sort of spaghetti served with a nice thick S. Italian salsa or perhaps a sauce with chunks of tomato and carrot. Instead, what I got was something like this:

It tasted like spaghetti, ketchup and pieces of ham or Canadian bacon. Which is more or less what it was. Even worse versions will have slices of hot dog instead of the ham.

Now the Japanese can’t really be blamed for this one, as the Yokohama chef who originated it really didn’t. He copied it from some Army mess during the occupation where spaghetti slathered in ketchup was served.

Trust me, this is not one of the better Japanese adaptations of American cuisine (which is much of the problem anyway—this atrocity has nothing to do with Napoli or Italy other than the shape of the pasta).