Over on my Just Bento site we've just opened a forum. One question that came up was about teriyaki sauce. On my food blogs I often get asked about this 'teriyaki sauce', and each time I am a bit stumped. Because you see, bottled teriyaki sauce as such does not really exist in Japan - although plenty of other bottled sauces do.
I was actually reading up on 'teriyaki sauce' on some Japanese food site recently, and they said that bottled teriyaki sauce was actually an invention by Kikkoman, who developed it specifically for the U.S. / overseas market, to compete with other 'barbeque' sauces. There is or was no teriyaki sauce per se (though there are plenty of similar bottled sauces) in Japan, where teriyaki means a method of cooking with the 'sauce' being made in the pan with soy sauce, mirin, sugar, etc and coating the food. In fact, while the teriyaki method is written 照り焼き (てりやき teriyaki), teriyaki sauce and food made from it is considered so 'western' that it's written in katakana, as all imported words are, like so: テリヤキ.
This is not the only way in which different words are applied though. In Japanese, many things are called differently depending on their state. A good example is rice, the main staple. When it's raw, or when referred to as a commodity, it's 米 (こめ kome). When it's cooked and eaten in Japanese style, it's ご飯 (ごはん gohan). But when it's used in a western-style dish like curry rice, it is called ライス (raisu). Paper is 紙 (read かみ kami or し shi), except when it's in a 'foreign' context, like トイレットペーパー (toiletto peh-paa), toilet paper. This does mean that you need to know the context in which a word is used to know which term is correct!
