Shrimp Sauce?

In reading The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, an entertaining quick read by Jennifer 8. Lee that humorously sheds light on the Americanization of Chinese food, I gained a new-found respect (and craving) for Chinese-American food, a cuisine I didn't particularly love in the past.

What I found most interesting is how Chinese food gets adapted to the preferences of each country, and even the regions within a country. Some of these adaptations are so far from the original Chinese dishes that they are wholly unrecognizable. And some dishes just flat-out aren't Chinese.

The plate above is from a Japanese restaurant (not Chinese, but the Americanization and regionalization of ethnic food still applies here) in a tee-tiny town in the far southwestern corner of North Carolina. What is on the plate blew me away in the department of weirdness and things I've never eaten (together) before.

On the plate is rice and stir fried vegetables. Nothing strange, yet.

Then there are glazed carrots. Like the kind boiled in sugar water. This has never happened to me an any Japanese restaurant. Or Chinese. Or any other Asian restaurant.

But the thing that really blew my mind is the shrimp sauce. We figured shrimp sauce would mean some sort of sauce made with shrimp paste (note: this wasn't my dish), but what came out was essentially a spiced mayo and ketchup sauce sort of like Thousand Island dressing, but with different spices. And...you're supposed to pour this over the rice and stir fried vegetables!

Never before in my life.

In doing a little internet research, I found that, yes, there are recipes for shrimp sauce, and the sauce seems to be a specialty of Japanese steakhouses. The sauce also goes by these names: white sauce, yum yum sauce, yummy sauce, and sakura sauce.

Most people on the nets yammering about their love of shrimp sauce were from North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia, and Ohio. (Funny, I lived in South Carolina for 27 years and never ran into Shrimp Sauce, but in thinking back, I've only eaten at Japanese restaurants that weren't steakhouses.)

What an interesting Americanization of Japanese food. This is an Americanization, right? Surely, the Japanese don't pour this stuff on rice?

But I'm dying to know if Shrimp Sauce is common across the entire United States (and possibly other countries), so here's the question:

Have you ever eaten Shrimp Sauce, and where did you eat it?