Ever wonder what your favorite Japanese restaurant does to make its chicken Katsu so crisp, or to add that little bit of crunch to spicy tuna sushi rolls? If you peeked into the kitchen, chances are you'd see a bag of panko breadcrumbs.

Panko breadcrumbs are as different from regular breadcrumbs as snowflakes are from sand. Made of specially baked wheat bread that's been crumbled into big flakes and then toasted, they are and have a lighter texture than your typical can of Progresso Bread Crumbs. When used in fried or baked foods, they are crisp and light, reminiscent of another Japanese favorite, tempura.

Leave it to the Japanese to squeeze blood from a turnip—or, in this case, a daikon radish.

Anthropomorphizing Asians see a fable of perseverance in the plucky radish that pushed its way up through the pavement in the little town of Aioi (which, by the way, is one “l” short of being a delicious, garlicky Proven硬 sauce).

The rugged radish first popped up back in July. Instead of uprooting the deracinated root vegetable, the locals named it “Dokonjo Daikon,” which reportedly means “the radish with balls,” and put up a sign that read “observe with affection.”

But last week someone pulled a Sweeney Todd on poor “Little Dai,” as the radish came to be known nationwide, and severed its leafy green head off. Was the perpetrator planning to cook up a batch of oden, a traditional Japanese stew with fish cakes, boiled eggs and daikon?

Stranger still, Little Dai’s head reappeared soon thereafter a short distance from the crime scene. Aioi’s town council salvaged the tuber’s top and placed it in a dish of water, hoping to revive it. But as the TimesUK’s Richard Lloyd Parry so brilliantly observed, Little Dai is doomed to remain in a vegetative state for the rest of its life.