No one knows how they were able to enter Japan during the depths of its isolation. Perhaps Dutch traders, but they were scarcely better-acquainted with it than the Japanese. A British invention through and through, and one which hadn’t spread worldwide before the 1830s at the earliest, its presence in the Home Islands remains a mystery.

Neveertheless, by 1800 the cupcake had gained so many adherents in Japan that a grand Cupcake Pagoda was already under construction.

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