On a previous trip to Japan, I visited a shop called Curry Land, which is dedicated to selling pre-packaged instant curry from all over the country. The plan is to eat and review every single one, and this time it’s WHALING SHIP CURRY.

What that means is the curry is the kind served on a particular whaling ship. It contains no actual whale meat. 

However, what it does have as its first ingredient is actually thresher shark meat. I looked that up, and apparently it’s sustainable and not one of the ones that are over-fished. The meat had a chewy texture that’s different from something like tuna, and felt somewhere in the vein of fried dace or salmon jerky.

As soon as it touched my tongue, I could feel the hit of saltiness and spice. I would call it barely spicy at best, with maybe a slight lingering of peppery heat at the very end. Overall, it was nice and savory and didn’t have the overwhelming artificial taste of some instant curry.

Overall, the only really unusual thing about it is maybe the thresher shark, which gave a pretty decent curry a different texture than what I’m used to. I would probably eat it again, but would prioritize trying different curry styles.