Ask John: Where’s the Pizza in Anime?

Question:
What anime are there with characters eating pizza?

Answer:
I hope I can be forgiven for my failure to recollect very many anime that include scenes of characters eating pizza. I’ve watched tens of thousands of anime episodes, so remembering small details about specific episodes is especially difficult for me. The most well known example is C.C.’s affection for Pizza Hut in the Code Geass anime series. It’s also difficult to forget the role pizza plays in the 1990 Cat Ninden Teyande television series because it was titled “Samurai Pizza Cats” during its American broadcast. Actually, in recent years the Pizza Hut restaurant chain has been noticeably prominent in sponsoring anime. Pizza Hut features in Maria-sama ga Miteru season four episode 5. Pizza Hut logos appear periodically throughout the early episodes of Sora no Kakeru Shoujo. Pizza Hut has also sponsored promotional campaigns associated with the Kannagi, Macross Frontier, and Bakemonogatari TV series and Renewal of Evangelion & Sky Crawlers movies, although I don’t recall any of those anime actually depicting characters eating pizza. Kana eats pizza in Minami-ke Okawari episode 8. Ban Midou eats a slice of pizza during the opening of Getbackers episode 1. A pizza dinner figures prominently into Aria the Animation episode 7. Athena eats a slice of pizza in Aria the Origination episode 6. Italy snacks on a slice of Pizza in Hetalia ~Axis Powers~ episode 23. I don’t recall Keichi of Ah! My Goddess eating pizza, but he does try to order pizza, instead mis-dialing the goddess hotline. Dante in the Devil May Cry anime mentions his fondness for pizza, but I can’t remember if the anime ever shows him actually eating pizza. A segment of the second Kounai Shasei OVA from 1990 stars a pizza delivery boy, but I don’t recall the short involving any pizza eating.

This highly specific and rather odd question focuses attention of a broader topic that many anime fans may have never consciously noticed. Pizza just isn’t especially common in anime. More specifically, foods with a heavy cheese content like pizza, fondue, and lasagna appear infrequently in anime because cheese is much less a staple food in Asia than it is in Europe and America. Cheese primarily comes from cows. Cows are not native to Japan, nor are they especially common in Japan because they require a lot of grazing land and Japan is a relatively small nation without a lot of unused open fields. While not nearly as common in Japan as it is in America, pizza is still more popular in Japan than it is in many other Asian countries. Pizza Hut launched in Japan in 1973. Other American and native Japanese specialty chains including Shakeys, Dominos, Pizza-la, Pizza California, and Pizza Station provide uniquely Japanese pies topped with onions, peppers, pepperoni, shrimp, scallops, eel, squid, corn, mayonnaise, tuna, salmon, eggplant, broccoli, raisins, cabbage, and a variety of other stranger ingredients. Pizza certainly isn’t unknown in Japan, but it’s just far enough away from being a routine food that it doesn’t appear in anime especially often.