There’s a surprising amount of depth to the question of how to say “chicken” in Japanese. The indigenous word is niwatori , but that’s primarily used to talk about the animal, not its meat. For chicken meat, niwatori usually gets trimmed down to tori , which literally means just “bird,” but is generally understood to mean “chicken” if you’re talking about food, as in yakitori, roasted chicken skewers.
However, tori is mainly used to talk about chicken in the context of Japanese, or at least other Asian, cuisines. When talking about Western-style dishes, the word to use is chikin , the Japanese corrupted pronunciation of the English “chicken.” For example, Western-style fried chicken in Japanese is furaido chikin , not furaido tori .
In recent years, though, there’s been a further linguistic evolution of sorts, in which chikin gets shortened to chiki . This isn’t an official Japanese vocabulary word, but chiki is what Japan’s big three convenience store chains, 7-Eleven, Family Mart, and Lawson, all call their store-brand boneless fried chicken filets. ▼ Left to right: Lawson’s L Chiki, 7-Eleven’s Nana Chiki, and Family Mart’s Fami Chiki All three are delicious big sellers, but we recently caught word of a new challenger in the chiki world, and so we sent our reporter Ikuna Kamezawa off to supermarket Lopia to procure some of their Lopi Chiki for a four-way taste test with Japan’s big three convenience store fried chicken stars.
Lopia some.