Fish Cake With Swirl Emoji

A slice of *narutomaki*, the Japanese fish cake with a pink spiral, shown as a white disc with a coiled red-pink center. Approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 as U+1F365.

The fish cake is named after the Naruto whirlpools in Japan's Tokushima Prefecture, one of the world's three largest tidal currents, where rushing water between Naruto city and Awaji Island creates vortices up to 20 meters wide and moving at 20 km/h. The coil on a slice of narutomaki is designed to mimic those whirlpools.

Outside Japan, almost everyone knows this emoji because of *Naruto*, the Masashi Kishimoto manga series that ran from 1999 to 2014 and has sold over 250 million copies, making it the #4 best-selling manga of all time. The protagonist Naruto Uzumaki is literally named after the fish cake because he loves ramen; Uzumaki means "spiral." The emoji has become a quiet fandom signal.

Funny historical twist: in Japan, narutomaki is actively disappearing from modern ramen. Ramen chefs shifted from shoyu (soy-sauce) broth to tonkotsu (pork-bone) broth around thirty years ago, and the fish cake doesn't pair well with rich pork broth. The emoji, immortalized in Unicode in 2010, is essentially a snapshot of a ramen topping in decline.

🍥 lives a double life online. On Japanese food content, it's a ramen-topping marker: ramen photography, soup-noodle TikToks, Japanese restaurant menus, onsen travel posts. On anime content, it's a Naruto fandom flag, often paired with 🦊 (nine-tailed fox), 🍜 (ramen), or 🌀 (spiral/uzumaki) to signal "this is a Naruto reference."

Anime Twitter uses 🍥 in bio handles and tweet signatures the way football fans use a club crest. Emojipedia's own X post about the emoji racked up anime-fan replies spotting the connection. On TikTok, videos tagged with the emoji fall cleanly into two buckets: ramen recipes and Naruto edits, with almost nothing in between.

Outside those two tribes, 🍥 is a visual curiosity. The pink-and-white swirl shows up in kawaii aesthetic moodboards, Japanese travel grids, and graphic design inspired by Japanese motifs. It works as pure decoration even when the viewer doesn't know it's a food.

Narutomaki's ancestor kamaboko goes back at least 900 years. The oldest written record is a document called Ruiju-zoyosho describing a celebratory feast on July 21, 1115 held by Fujiwara no Tadazane, a high-ranking Heian-era minister. Kamaboko was served at the banquet. Japan liked it so much that in 1983, November 15 was officially designated National Kamaboko Day, chosen in reference to the 1115 feast.

The spiral version specifically, narutomaki, was invented in 1823, named after the Naruto whirlpools in Tokushima Prefecture. The Naruto Strait sits between Naruto city and Awaji Island, and at full tide the water races through at up to 20 km/h, creating vortices up to 20 meters across. It's one of the world's three largest tidal currents alongside the Strait of Messina in Italy and Seymour Narrows in Canada. A 450-meter glass-floored walkway called Uzu-no-Michi, built under the 1985 Onaruto Bridge, lets tourists stand 45 meters above the rushing water and look straight down.

Production of narutomaki centered on Yaizu in Shizuoka Prefecture at the end of the Taisho era (early 1920s). Yaizu now produces 90% of all narutomaki in Japan. The town was originally a bonito-fishing port and needed a winter side product, so local fish-cake makers mechanized production and cornered the market.

The emoji arrived in 2010 (Unicode 6.0), at roughly the same time the real-world topping was falling out of fashion. Modern ramen shifted toward tonkotsu (pork-bone) broth, which doesn't pair well with fish cakes, and chefs swapped narutomaki for chashu (braised pork) and marinated eggs. The emoji is now more popular than the topping.

1. 1115[Ruiju-zoyosho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamaboko) records kamaboko served at Fujiwara no Tadazane's banquet. The oldest written evidence of the fish cake.
2. 1823Narutomaki (the spiral version) invented, named after the Naruto whirlpools in Tokushima.
3. 1920Commercial production of narutomaki begins in earnest in Yaizu, Shizuoka.
4. 1983November 15 officially declared National Kamaboko Day in Japan, referencing the 1115 feast date.
5. 1985The Onaruto suspension bridge opens over the Naruto Strait; tourists can now see the whirlpools up close.
6. 1999Masashi Kishimoto's [*Naruto*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naruto) manga debuts. The protagonist is named after the ramen topping.
7. 2010Fish Cake with Swirl emoji approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F365.
8. 2014*Naruto* manga ends after 15 years, with over 250 million copies sold. The series cements 🍥's anime-reference usage online.

• •The protagonist of Naruto is named Naruto Uzumaki because of his love for ramen, specifically the narutomaki topping. Uzumaki (渦巻き) means "spiral," matching the fish cake's pattern and the real Naruto whirlpools his name traces back to.
• •*Naruto* has sold over 250 million copies worldwide, making it the #4 best-selling manga of all time (behind One Piece, Golgo 13, and Dragon Ball). The series has generated over $10 billion in total revenue across manga, anime, and merchandise.
• •Yaizu in Shizuoka Prefecture produces approximately 90% of all narutomaki sold in Japan. The town was originally a bonito-fishing port that needed a winter side-product in the 1920s.
• •Kamaboko (the parent category of narutomaki) is recorded in Japanese literature as far back as 1115, when it was served at a banquet hosted by Heian-era minister Fujiwara no Tadazane. Japan designated November 15 as National Kamaboko Day in 1983 to commemorate that date.
• •The Naruto whirlpools reach 20 km/h during spring tides and can be 20 meters in diameter, ranking with the Strait of Messina and Seymour Narrows as one of the world's three biggest tidal currents.
• •The Uzu-no-Michi Walkway, built in 2000 into the 1985 Onaruto Bridge, has glass floor panels 45 meters above the sea so visitors can watch the whirlpools form directly below them.
• •Narutomaki's popularity as a ramen topping has dropped sharply in the last 30 years as tonkotsu (pork-bone) broth replaced shoyu (soy-sauce) broth in modern ramen. The fish-based narutomaki doesn't pair well with pork broth.
• •Surimi and surimi-based products consume 2 to 3 percent of the world's total fisheries supply, between 2 and 3 million tons of white fish per year, and narutomaki is part of that industry.
• •The pink spiral is not natural: it's made by pressing a strip of food-dyed surimi against a white block before steaming, then rolling them together so the coloring sets in a spiral cross-section.

• •Naruto (1999-2014) by Masashi Kishimoto: the protagonist Naruto Uzumaki is literally named after narutomaki because he loves ramen. The manga has sold over 250 million copies, making it the #4 best-selling manga of all time, and put narutomaki on the global cultural map.
• •The Uzu-no-Michi Walkway, a 450-meter glass-floored observation deck under the Onaruto Bridge, draws over a million tourists a year. Visitors stand 45 meters above the whirlpools the fish cake is named after.
• •Japanese kawaii pop art and merch use the narutomaki spiral as a stylized graphic motif, separate from its food meaning: bags, phone cases, enamel pins sold at anime conventions worldwide.