Quick Reference

Meaning & Definition

チーズ (chiizu) is simply the Japanese word for cheese, a loanword lifted straight from English. But say it out loud in front of a camera and it becomes something else entirely: the cue every photographer in Japan shouts right before the shutter clicks — hai, chiizu! (say cheese!).

As a food word, チーズ covers cheese in the general sense, and it shows up constantly in compounds: chiizu keeki (cheesecake), torokeru chiizu (melting cheese, the shredded kind used on gratin or toast), and the wildly popular chiizu takkarubi (a Korean-style cheese-smothered chicken dish that became a huge trend in Japan). You will also see chiizu gyuudon (cheese-topped beef bowl) on fast-food menus, and casually, young people online use the slang term chii-gyuu (a shortening built from chiizu-gyuudon) to poke fun at a certain nerdy stereotype — a piece of internet slang worth knowing about rather than using carelessly. As a photo word, hai, chiizu functions exactly like the English (say cheese): the shape your mouth makes on zu produces a smile, so the phrase is said right as the picture is taken. One pronunciation trap: チーズ has a long vowel on the first syllable (chii-zu), which makes it a completely different word from chizu (地図, map), spelled with a short vowel. Stretch that first sound and you are talking about cheese; clip it and you are talking about a map.

How to Use It

Hold the long vowel: チーズ is chii-zu, not chi-zu. Say it too short and it sounds like chizu (地図, map) instead of cheese. For photos, the whole phrase is hai, chiizu — dropping the hai still works, but native speakers almost always include it. In the supermarket, look for compounds like piza-you chiizu (pizza cheese) or kona chiizu (grated/powdered cheese, like parmesan) on packaging — the modifier tells you what the cheese is meant for.

Example Sentences

Cultural Context

Cheese was never part of the traditional Japanese diet — dairy farming only became widespread after the Meiji era, and cheese itself remained a mostly Western, imported taste for much of the 20th century. That history is exactly why チーズ is still written in katakana rather than with a native word: it entered the language as a foreign food. What followed was decades of enthusiastic adoption, from the rise of chiizu keeki (cheesecake) as a beloved convenience-store dessert to periodic nationwide cheese booms, the biggest recent one being chiizu takkarubi, the stretchy, cheese-blanketed chicken dish that spread from Korean pop culture into Japanese restaurant menus and food media.

The custom of saying hai, chiizu before a photo is its own small piece of cultural history, imported alongside the camera itself in the postwar decades. Just as English speakers say cheese because the vowel forces a smile, Japanese adopted the same trick using the borrowed word rather than translating it — proof of how thoroughly チーズ became part of everyday Japanese life, far beyond the dinner table.

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