Food Studies Papers by James Farrer
Food, Culture & Society, 2023
The concept of social sustainability presents many questions for food studies, both about how com... more The concept of social sustainability presents many questions for food studies, both about how communities sustain foodways, and how foodways sustain communities. Based on an ethnographic study of restaurants in a single Tokyo neighborhood, this research focuses on how commercial restaurant scenes in a busy area of Tokyo serve as social infrastructure, supporting community life. First, they are an economic resource for employers, workers, and customers, an accessible, though risky, point of entry into business ownership for disadvantaged or resource-poor people. Secondly, eateries are a resource for social organization and networking, that is, spaces in which varieties of social capital can be created and deployed. Thirdly, neighborhood eateries are infrastructure for political mobilization both in the formal organization of local merchant associations but also for informal and oppositional social movements. Overall, the research shows how urban neighborhood restaurant scenes may serve as a “place framing” device through which a community defines and spatially locates what is worthwhile in community life.
For details: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/the-global-japanese-restaurant-mobilities-imaginari... more For details: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/the-global-japanese-restaurant-mobilities-imaginaries-and-politics/
Served in over 150,000 restaurants outside Japan—from simple eateries to fine dining temples—Japanese cuisine has become truly global. These restaurants have proliferated via the transnational mobilities of people, foods, ideas, and infrastructure, spreading out from culinary global cities to their hinterlands around the world. Through their menus, décors and performative service, these establishments purvey imaginaries of Japan continuously reinvented by restaurateurs, cooks, and servers of multiple ethnicities and races. In the contexts of colonial empire, world wars, and neoliberal capitalism, their spread has been entangled in politics of authenticity, race, nationalism, and immigration. The Global Japanese Restaurant narrates this process over one hundred and fifty years and six continents. Drawing on untapped primary sources and interviews in seventeen languages, it extends the story beyond Japanese cuisine’s reception in the “West” to illuminate the activities of Japanese and non-Japanese restaurateurs, chefs, and corporations in Asia, Africa, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas. The lucid account by Farrer, Wank, and their contributors, all affiliated with Sophia University in Tokyo, serves up everything from vivid sketches of fanciful Japanese dishes to a pioneering perspective on global cultural production in the modern world.
Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 2022
Neighbourhood gastronomy, the agglomeration of restaurants and smaller eateries in residential ur... more Neighbourhood gastronomy, the agglomeration of restaurants and smaller eateries in residential urban areas, contributes to the lives of residents and visitors economically, culturally, and socially. Since winter 2020, neighbourhood gastronomy in Asian cities has been severely disrupted by COVID, compounded by many other long-term stressors. In urban Japan these stresses include gentrification, the aging of proprietors, urban renewal, and corporatization of gastronomy. Empirically, this paper discusses how independent restaurants in Tokyo contribute to community life by supporting grassroots creative industries, small business opportunities, meaningful artisanal work, convivial social spaces, local cultural heritage, and a human-scale built environment. The study uses intensive single-site urban ethnography to discuss how restaurateurs face immediate and longterm crises at the community level. By using the "neighborhood as method," a concept of sustainable neighbourhood gastronomy is developed that should be applicable in other urban contexts.
Asian Anthropology, 2020
Culinary borrowings are so common as to seem trivial, and yet they are consequential for many of ... more Culinary borrowings are so common as to seem trivial, and yet they are consequential for many of the actors concerned. People’s livelihoods, professional status, and social identity may be tied to their stake in the defining boundaries of culinary cultures. When dominant groups or powerful actors such as multinational corporate chains adopt or reinvent the cuisine of weaker and marginal groups, it may be regarded as cultural appropriation. However, the definition of the situation becomes more complicated when multiple weak and marginal actors compete over ownership of a cuisine. This article discusses how Japanese and other Asian migrant actors participate in grassroots culinary politics surrounding definitions and uses of Japanese cuisine in the context of a Japanese food boom in Europe. It shows how the “borrowed power” of one migrant group may threaten the status and even livelihoods of the foundational stakeholders in a culinary field.
Free download link https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ABAQZUCZHUXDHEJANQDY/full?target=10.1080/1683478X.2020.1774960
Culinary Nationalism in Asia (edited by Michelle King), 2019
See: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/culinary-nationalism-in-asia-9781350078697/
James Farrer. 201... more See: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/culinary-nationalism-in-asia-9781350078697/
James Farrer. 2019. “Red (Michelin) Stars Over China: Seeking Recognition in a Transnational Culinary Field” in Michelle King edited Culinary Nationalism in Asia. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 193-213.
In September 2016 the Shanghai edition of the Michelin guide was published. Restaurant world insiders immediately expressed disdain for its starred choices. Internet critics grumbled that foreigners did not understand Chinese cuisine and that Cantonese restaurants were unfairly favored. This is not a study of the Michelin guide per se, but of the ways in which such rankings (including the “Worlds 50 Best Restaurants”) are a site of culinary politics. Even before its publication, Michelin stars are already shining brightly on the city’s culinary firmament. Chinese culinary tourists “collect” Michelin stars abroad, and foreign and Chinese chefs in Shanghai competed to create the fine dining environments that Michelin awards, focusing on interior design, wine pairings, and complex presentation. This interactive process of culinary competition, mimicry and innovation influences how Chinese restaurateurs and customers talk about fine dining. It reveals the connection between culinary nationalism – for example, the competition to show that Chinese cuisine can be as great as French cuisine– and culinary cosmopolitan – including enthusiasm for foreign cuisines and foreign chefs in Shanghai. This study shows that culinary nationalism and culinary cosmopolitanism, rather than opposites are often two faces of an ongoing globalization of culinary fields in Shanghai and other Chinese cities.
The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 2020
Globally, independent restaurants have been dealt a double blow by COVID-19. Restaurant staff fac... more Globally, independent restaurants have been dealt a double blow by COVID-19. Restaurant staff face the risk of infection, and restaurants have been among the businesses hardest hit by urban lockdowns. With fewer resources than corporate chains, small independent restaurants are particularly vulnerable to an extended economic downturn. This paper looks at how independent restaurant owners in Tokyo have coped with the pandemic both individually and as members of larger communities. Both government and community support have been key to sustaining these small businesses and their employees during this crisis.
Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa (Ethnography and Qualitative Research), 2020
Around the world, independent restaurants are threatened both by COVID-19 and the social distanci... more Around the world, independent restaurants are threatened both by COVID-19 and the social distancing measures necessary to contain the pandemic. In one Tokyo community, restaurant patrons have organized to support local eateries during the “emergency” declared in early April. Based upon an ethnographic study of independent restaurants and drinking spots, this essay discusses the resilience of a local culinary community, comprised of restauranteurs and patrons, as well as the role played by community ethnography.
Keywords: culinary community, restaurants, social media, social capital
Asian Anthropology, 2020
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1683478X.2020.1779968 Culinary politics involves a c... more https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1683478X.2020.1779968 Culinary politics involves a contest over the social organization and cultural meanings of food by a variety of actors: both civil and state, the powerful and the grassroots. In particular, we consider food governance as a form of culinary politics entailing a two-way traffic, in which policies and regulations are set by state actors, while the responses of civil actors often reshape the foodscape and complicate the outcome of food policies. Food governance also points to the reshaping and contestation of collective and individual food identities, and how different power hierarchies can be challenged through acts of food-making. While food is an enduring cultural concern in human life, food governance and culinary politics should be two important concepts for researchers to engage with when examining individuals' soft skills of food-making and the exercise of soft power through food.
Asian Anthropology, 2020
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1683478X.2020.1774960 Culinary borrowings are so com... more https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1683478X.2020.1774960 Culinary borrowings are so common as to seem trivial, and yet they are consequential for many of the actors concerned. People’s livelihoods, professional status, and social identity may be tied to their stake in the defining boundaries of culinary cultures. When dominant groups or powerful actors such as multinational corporate chains adopt or reinvent the cuisine of weaker and marginal groups, it may be regarded as cultural appropriation. However, the definition of the situation becomes more complicated when multiple weak and marginal actors compete over ownership of a cuisine. This article discusses how Japanese and other Asian migrant actors participate in grassroots culinary politics surrounding definitions and uses of Japanese cuisine in the context of a Japanese food boom in Europe. It shows how the “borrowed power” of one migrant group may threaten the status and even livelihoods of the foundational stakeholders in a culinary field.
For details see the publisher's link: http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137522283
This volume ... more For details see the publisher's link: http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137522283
This volume is a collection of historical and ethnographic accounts of Asia's increasingly globalized cuisines. Using extensive empirical research, the authors describe the increasingly transnational organization of culinary fields, multicultural culinary contact zones, and state-led culinary politics. Chapters include studies of the pathways in which Asian cuisines cross borders and subsequently interact with local culinary systems. Authors also study how cuisines from abroad enter into Asian cities and are modified in transnational urban settings. Multi-sited and cross-border ethnographic fieldwork and comparative qualitative case studies uncover the culinary networks and the cultural politics of these traveling cuisines. This volume shows that cuisines in Asia are less and less produced locally but rather in networks of producers, suppliers, entrepreneurs and patrons moving across borders.
Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia, 2019
The globalization of the ]apanese restaurant as a tale of multiple mobilities Over the past decad... more The globalization of the ]apanese restaurant as a tale of multiple mobilities Over the past decade, Japanese restaurants have proliferated around the globe, increasing from 24,000 in 2006 to 117,568 in 2017 (MAIF 2017), Drawing on original multi+ite fieldwork by our group based at Sophia University in Tokyo (see wwwglobal-japanese-cuisine.org) and a review of existing research, this chapter is a global overview of the expansion of Japanese restaurant cuisine in Asia, North America, Europe, and Latin America, the regions where the vast majority of the world's Japanese restaurants outside Japan are located.
James Farrer, Christian Hess, Mônica R. de Carvalho, Chuanfei Wang, David Wank. 2019. “Japanese Culinary Mobilities: The Multiple Globalizations of Japanese Cuisine” Cecilia Leong-Salobir ed. Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 39-57.
A new global culinary geography of high cuisine has developed centered on global cities. This ess... more A new global culinary geography of high cuisine has developed centered on global cities. This essay traces this development by focusing on the interaction between transnational flows of people and resources and local cultural politics in two of Asia's global cities, Shanghai and Tokyo. Although investments and increased wealth create the conditions for development of international restaurant scenes in cities, the advent of a cosmopolitan and lively urban food culture is not an inevitable outcome of economic globalization. Global city culinary culture is shown to be influenced both by local urban histories and by transnational cultural politics, as Asian global cities compete in terms of their attractiveness for investors, or their "urban soft power." "Culinary soft power," or the culinary reputation of a city, has become an important element of this "urban soft power." To understand the similarities and considerable differences in the restaurant scenes of Shanghai and Tokyo, we must also consider historical contexts. In both Shanghai and Tokyo recently booming international restaurant scenes are shaped by decades of colonial and postcolonial encounters. Cosmopolitan foodscapes build upon colonial spatial legacies and postcolonial imaginaries. Despite the increasing diversities of urban foodways, "culinary Occidentalism" as well as "culinary nationalism" still strongly influence the meanings of consuming foreign foods in Asia's global cities.
The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness: Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life (Becky Hsu and Richard Madsen eds), 2019
See more at: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520306325/the-chinese-pursuit-of-happiness
Food is... more See more at: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520306325/the-chinese-pursuit-of-happiness
Food is both a material need and a medium of social communication. Foodways are thus a unique lens to explore the expression of ideas of well-being in society. This chapter looks at how people talk about food in urban China. Answers to open-ended interview questions about memories of happy meals show that many people describe their happiest meals as special occasions in which they ate outside the home with friends. Eating out is in contemporary China is thus seen as a way in which friendship ties are cultivated and expressed. Asking about unhappy eating, however, reveals both tensions and social exclusions in contemporary ideas of happiness in China. Urban Chinese are concerned about food safety, often associating risks with food vendors and producers operating on the fringes of urban society, indicating how notions of happiness exclude the urban and rural poor. Other concepts of unhappy meals, however, point to the tensions that arise when people pursue material benefits through “face consumption” in expensive banquets meant to cultivate relationships but instead experience a sense of boredom or emptiness that belies the social purposes of eating together. Good eating is thus a window onto both the ideals and anxieties of a rising urban middle class in China.
Destination China: Immigration to China in the Post-Reform Era (Lehmann, Angela, Leonard, Pauline, eds.), 2019
Research on migrants in Asian cities has emphasized their separation from local society, with pri... more Research on migrants in Asian cities has emphasized their separation from local society, with privileged migrants insulating themselves in “expatriate bubbles” that often retrace the geographies of colonial white settlements while less privileged migrants find themselves isolated in ethnic enclaves, such as that occupied by African traders in Guangzhou. Fewer studies have focused on how migrants actually transform the larger urban environments of globalizing Asian cities. Based on ethnographic data about the international restaurant sector in Shanghai, this chapter examines how cross-border migrants active in the food service industry – or culinary migrants – have shaped Shanghai’s cityscape through entrepreneurship, management, and their daily artisanal work.
Jahrbuch für Kulinaristik – The German Journal of Food Studies and Hospitality,, 2018
James Farrer. 2018. “The Decline of the Neighborhood Chinese Restaurant in Urban Japan” Jahrbuch ... more James Farrer. 2018. “The Decline of the Neighborhood Chinese Restaurant in Urban Japan” Jahrbuch für Kulinaristik – The German Journal of Food Studies and Hospitality, Vol. 2, pp. 197-222.
The most popular form of everyday restaurant in Japan may not be the sushi shop, but rather the small, casual Chinese restaurant. Chinese restaurants in Japan share some features with those found in countries around the world, but also some differences, including a high rate of ownership by Japanese proprietor-chefs. Sometimes called the “machi chūka” (neighborhood Chinese) these small individually owned restaurants serving simple fare are become a focus of nostalgia and interest of the “B-level gourmets” in Japan. And yet, this type of inconspicuous eatery is in decline. This paper examines the background of Chinese restaurants in Japan, the reasons for the boom in Chinese food in the postwar period, and the causes of their relative decline more recently. These reasons include an aging society, changing tastes, and labor migration patterns and policies. Using ethnographic data, the paper described how these restaurants sustain themselves, the dishes they offer, and types of community ties they support. Still, given larger socio-economic factors, the decline in small owner-operated Chinese restaurants in Japan seems unstoppable.
Culinary migration, culinary globalization, Chinese cuisine, Japanese foodways, ethnic restaurants in Japan, ethnic entrepreneurship
A Research Agenda for Cities, 2017
James Farrer. 2017. “Urban Foodways: A Research Agenda” John Rennie Short ed. A Research Agenda f... more James Farrer. 2017. “Urban Foodways: A Research Agenda” John Rennie Short ed. A Research Agenda for Cities Northhampton MA: Edward Elgar, pp. 98-110.
The term foodways encompasses the economic, cultural, and social organization of food production and consumption. This chapter explores existing research on urban foodways and aims to show how food studies may uniquely contribute to urban studies. It introduces concepts connecting food to the city, including taste and urban nostalgia, the urban metabolism, culinary cosmopolitanism, and culinary place making. Examples come from the author’s research on foodways in East Asian global cities, particularly Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo.
Foods & Food Ingredients Journal Japan, 2017
Japanese restaurant cuisine is now prevalent in markets around the world, from large cities to sm... more Japanese restaurant cuisine is now prevalent in markets around the world, from large cities to small towns. Our research project develops a mobilities perspective to represent the transnational spread of Japanese cuisine. We emphasize that the organization of the Japanese culinary field is centered in global cities which are the hubs of the local networks through which ideas, producers and products flow. Non-Japanese ethnic networks are especially important in spreading Japanese cuisine in low-cost forms away from urban centers. Migrant Japanese entrepreneurs remain significant innovators, especially in global food cities such as New York.
James Farrer, Chuanfei Wang, David Wank, Mônica R. de Carvalho, Christian Hess, Lenka Vyletalova. 2017. “Japanese Culinary Mobilities Research: The Globalization of the
Japanese Restaurant.” Foods & Food Ingredients Journal Japan, Vol. 222, No. 3, 257-66.
Feeding Japan, 2017
After the March 11, 2011 earthquake which triggered a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Chinese cons... more After the March 11, 2011 earthquake which triggered a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Chinese consumers began avoiding Japanese food products, and the PRC banned all agricultural imports from 10 prefectures near the disaster area. However, rather than a meltdown of the market for Japanese cuisine in China, we see a subsequent boom. The focus of this chapter is on this culinary boom, but the story of the burgeoning Japanese culinary field must also include a consideration of how food safety – along with culinary politics and questions of culinary authenticity – has been framed by domestic narratives and narrators within China. A culinary field comprises a social field of tasters, things tasted, producers of tastes, and other actors with a stake in determining these tastes. While a Japanese culinary field has indeed developed in China, it is one now dominated by Chinese actors, who increasingly determine the direction of its development. In other words, the argument in this chapter will focus on the indigenization of this culinary field, which partly insulates it from geopolitical frictions, serving to frame issues such as food safety within Chinese narratives. These narratives will be discussed more generally in the concluding discussion. The main body of this chapter traces the development of this transnational Japanese culinary field. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Shanghai over the past five years, part of a larger project on international cuisine in that city.
James Farrer. 2015. “Introduction: Travelling Cuisines in and out of Asia: Towards a Framework fo... more James Farrer. 2015. “Introduction: Travelling Cuisines in and out of Asia: Towards a Framework for Studying Culinary Globalization” Globalization and Asian Cuisines: Transnational Networks and Contact Zones. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Pp. 1-20.
This chapterprovides a framework for understanding the globalization of cuisines in terms of simultaneous processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The essay identifies three mechanisms of culinary globalization: the production of transnational culinary fields, interactions within culinary contact zones, and state-led culinary politics.
This 2010 collection of readable scholarly papers on the globalization of culinary cultures in th... more This 2010 collection of readable scholarly papers on the globalization of culinary cultures in the Asian Pacific region has been reissued by the Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture in a convenient new one-volume format.
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Food Studies Papers by James Farrer
Served in over 150,000 restaurants outside Japan—from simple eateries to fine dining temples—Japanese cuisine has become truly global. These restaurants have proliferated via the transnational mobilities of people, foods, ideas, and infrastructure, spreading out from culinary global cities to their hinterlands around the world. Through their menus, décors and performative service, these establishments purvey imaginaries of Japan continuously reinvented by restaurateurs, cooks, and servers of multiple ethnicities and races. In the contexts of colonial empire, world wars, and neoliberal capitalism, their spread has been entangled in politics of authenticity, race, nationalism, and immigration. The Global Japanese Restaurant narrates this process over one hundred and fifty years and six continents. Drawing on untapped primary sources and interviews in seventeen languages, it extends the story beyond Japanese cuisine’s reception in the “West” to illuminate the activities of Japanese and non-Japanese restaurateurs, chefs, and corporations in Asia, Africa, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas. The lucid account by Farrer, Wank, and their contributors, all affiliated with Sophia University in Tokyo, serves up everything from vivid sketches of fanciful Japanese dishes to a pioneering perspective on global cultural production in the modern world.
Free download link https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ABAQZUCZHUXDHEJANQDY/full?target=10.1080/1683478X.2020.1774960
James Farrer. 2019. “Red (Michelin) Stars Over China: Seeking Recognition in a Transnational Culinary Field” in Michelle King edited Culinary Nationalism in Asia. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 193-213.
In September 2016 the Shanghai edition of the Michelin guide was published. Restaurant world insiders immediately expressed disdain for its starred choices. Internet critics grumbled that foreigners did not understand Chinese cuisine and that Cantonese restaurants were unfairly favored. This is not a study of the Michelin guide per se, but of the ways in which such rankings (including the “Worlds 50 Best Restaurants”) are a site of culinary politics. Even before its publication, Michelin stars are already shining brightly on the city’s culinary firmament. Chinese culinary tourists “collect” Michelin stars abroad, and foreign and Chinese chefs in Shanghai competed to create the fine dining environments that Michelin awards, focusing on interior design, wine pairings, and complex presentation. This interactive process of culinary competition, mimicry and innovation influences how Chinese restaurateurs and customers talk about fine dining. It reveals the connection between culinary nationalism – for example, the competition to show that Chinese cuisine can be as great as French cuisine– and culinary cosmopolitan – including enthusiasm for foreign cuisines and foreign chefs in Shanghai. This study shows that culinary nationalism and culinary cosmopolitanism, rather than opposites are often two faces of an ongoing globalization of culinary fields in Shanghai and other Chinese cities.
Keywords: culinary community, restaurants, social media, social capital
This volume is a collection of historical and ethnographic accounts of Asia's increasingly globalized cuisines. Using extensive empirical research, the authors describe the increasingly transnational organization of culinary fields, multicultural culinary contact zones, and state-led culinary politics. Chapters include studies of the pathways in which Asian cuisines cross borders and subsequently interact with local culinary systems. Authors also study how cuisines from abroad enter into Asian cities and are modified in transnational urban settings. Multi-sited and cross-border ethnographic fieldwork and comparative qualitative case studies uncover the culinary networks and the cultural politics of these traveling cuisines. This volume shows that cuisines in Asia are less and less produced locally but rather in networks of producers, suppliers, entrepreneurs and patrons moving across borders.
James Farrer, Christian Hess, Mônica R. de Carvalho, Chuanfei Wang, David Wank. 2019. “Japanese Culinary Mobilities: The Multiple Globalizations of Japanese Cuisine” Cecilia Leong-Salobir ed. Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 39-57.
Food is both a material need and a medium of social communication. Foodways are thus a unique lens to explore the expression of ideas of well-being in society. This chapter looks at how people talk about food in urban China. Answers to open-ended interview questions about memories of happy meals show that many people describe their happiest meals as special occasions in which they ate outside the home with friends. Eating out is in contemporary China is thus seen as a way in which friendship ties are cultivated and expressed. Asking about unhappy eating, however, reveals both tensions and social exclusions in contemporary ideas of happiness in China. Urban Chinese are concerned about food safety, often associating risks with food vendors and producers operating on the fringes of urban society, indicating how notions of happiness exclude the urban and rural poor. Other concepts of unhappy meals, however, point to the tensions that arise when people pursue material benefits through “face consumption” in expensive banquets meant to cultivate relationships but instead experience a sense of boredom or emptiness that belies the social purposes of eating together. Good eating is thus a window onto both the ideals and anxieties of a rising urban middle class in China.
The most popular form of everyday restaurant in Japan may not be the sushi shop, but rather the small, casual Chinese restaurant. Chinese restaurants in Japan share some features with those found in countries around the world, but also some differences, including a high rate of ownership by Japanese proprietor-chefs. Sometimes called the “machi chūka” (neighborhood Chinese) these small individually owned restaurants serving simple fare are become a focus of nostalgia and interest of the “B-level gourmets” in Japan. And yet, this type of inconspicuous eatery is in decline. This paper examines the background of Chinese restaurants in Japan, the reasons for the boom in Chinese food in the postwar period, and the causes of their relative decline more recently. These reasons include an aging society, changing tastes, and labor migration patterns and policies. Using ethnographic data, the paper described how these restaurants sustain themselves, the dishes they offer, and types of community ties they support. Still, given larger socio-economic factors, the decline in small owner-operated Chinese restaurants in Japan seems unstoppable.
Culinary migration, culinary globalization, Chinese cuisine, Japanese foodways, ethnic restaurants in Japan, ethnic entrepreneurship
The term foodways encompasses the economic, cultural, and social organization of food production and consumption. This chapter explores existing research on urban foodways and aims to show how food studies may uniquely contribute to urban studies. It introduces concepts connecting food to the city, including taste and urban nostalgia, the urban metabolism, culinary cosmopolitanism, and culinary place making. Examples come from the author’s research on foodways in East Asian global cities, particularly Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo.
James Farrer, Chuanfei Wang, David Wank, Mônica R. de Carvalho, Christian Hess, Lenka Vyletalova. 2017. “Japanese Culinary Mobilities Research: The Globalization of the
Japanese Restaurant.” Foods & Food Ingredients Journal Japan, Vol. 222, No. 3, 257-66.
This chapterprovides a framework for understanding the globalization of cuisines in terms of simultaneous processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The essay identifies three mechanisms of culinary globalization: the production of transnational culinary fields, interactions within culinary contact zones, and state-led culinary politics.
Served in over 150,000 restaurants outside Japan—from simple eateries to fine dining temples—Japanese cuisine has become truly global. These restaurants have proliferated via the transnational mobilities of people, foods, ideas, and infrastructure, spreading out from culinary global cities to their hinterlands around the world. Through their menus, décors and performative service, these establishments purvey imaginaries of Japan continuously reinvented by restaurateurs, cooks, and servers of multiple ethnicities and races. In the contexts of colonial empire, world wars, and neoliberal capitalism, their spread has been entangled in politics of authenticity, race, nationalism, and immigration. The Global Japanese Restaurant narrates this process over one hundred and fifty years and six continents. Drawing on untapped primary sources and interviews in seventeen languages, it extends the story beyond Japanese cuisine’s reception in the “West” to illuminate the activities of Japanese and non-Japanese restaurateurs, chefs, and corporations in Asia, Africa, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas. The lucid account by Farrer, Wank, and their contributors, all affiliated with Sophia University in Tokyo, serves up everything from vivid sketches of fanciful Japanese dishes to a pioneering perspective on global cultural production in the modern world.
Free download link https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ABAQZUCZHUXDHEJANQDY/full?target=10.1080/1683478X.2020.1774960
James Farrer. 2019. “Red (Michelin) Stars Over China: Seeking Recognition in a Transnational Culinary Field” in Michelle King edited Culinary Nationalism in Asia. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 193-213.
In September 2016 the Shanghai edition of the Michelin guide was published. Restaurant world insiders immediately expressed disdain for its starred choices. Internet critics grumbled that foreigners did not understand Chinese cuisine and that Cantonese restaurants were unfairly favored. This is not a study of the Michelin guide per se, but of the ways in which such rankings (including the “Worlds 50 Best Restaurants”) are a site of culinary politics. Even before its publication, Michelin stars are already shining brightly on the city’s culinary firmament. Chinese culinary tourists “collect” Michelin stars abroad, and foreign and Chinese chefs in Shanghai competed to create the fine dining environments that Michelin awards, focusing on interior design, wine pairings, and complex presentation. This interactive process of culinary competition, mimicry and innovation influences how Chinese restaurateurs and customers talk about fine dining. It reveals the connection between culinary nationalism – for example, the competition to show that Chinese cuisine can be as great as French cuisine– and culinary cosmopolitan – including enthusiasm for foreign cuisines and foreign chefs in Shanghai. This study shows that culinary nationalism and culinary cosmopolitanism, rather than opposites are often two faces of an ongoing globalization of culinary fields in Shanghai and other Chinese cities.
Keywords: culinary community, restaurants, social media, social capital
This volume is a collection of historical and ethnographic accounts of Asia's increasingly globalized cuisines. Using extensive empirical research, the authors describe the increasingly transnational organization of culinary fields, multicultural culinary contact zones, and state-led culinary politics. Chapters include studies of the pathways in which Asian cuisines cross borders and subsequently interact with local culinary systems. Authors also study how cuisines from abroad enter into Asian cities and are modified in transnational urban settings. Multi-sited and cross-border ethnographic fieldwork and comparative qualitative case studies uncover the culinary networks and the cultural politics of these traveling cuisines. This volume shows that cuisines in Asia are less and less produced locally but rather in networks of producers, suppliers, entrepreneurs and patrons moving across borders.
James Farrer, Christian Hess, Mônica R. de Carvalho, Chuanfei Wang, David Wank. 2019. “Japanese Culinary Mobilities: The Multiple Globalizations of Japanese Cuisine” Cecilia Leong-Salobir ed. Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 39-57.
Food is both a material need and a medium of social communication. Foodways are thus a unique lens to explore the expression of ideas of well-being in society. This chapter looks at how people talk about food in urban China. Answers to open-ended interview questions about memories of happy meals show that many people describe their happiest meals as special occasions in which they ate outside the home with friends. Eating out is in contemporary China is thus seen as a way in which friendship ties are cultivated and expressed. Asking about unhappy eating, however, reveals both tensions and social exclusions in contemporary ideas of happiness in China. Urban Chinese are concerned about food safety, often associating risks with food vendors and producers operating on the fringes of urban society, indicating how notions of happiness exclude the urban and rural poor. Other concepts of unhappy meals, however, point to the tensions that arise when people pursue material benefits through “face consumption” in expensive banquets meant to cultivate relationships but instead experience a sense of boredom or emptiness that belies the social purposes of eating together. Good eating is thus a window onto both the ideals and anxieties of a rising urban middle class in China.
The most popular form of everyday restaurant in Japan may not be the sushi shop, but rather the small, casual Chinese restaurant. Chinese restaurants in Japan share some features with those found in countries around the world, but also some differences, including a high rate of ownership by Japanese proprietor-chefs. Sometimes called the “machi chūka” (neighborhood Chinese) these small individually owned restaurants serving simple fare are become a focus of nostalgia and interest of the “B-level gourmets” in Japan. And yet, this type of inconspicuous eatery is in decline. This paper examines the background of Chinese restaurants in Japan, the reasons for the boom in Chinese food in the postwar period, and the causes of their relative decline more recently. These reasons include an aging society, changing tastes, and labor migration patterns and policies. Using ethnographic data, the paper described how these restaurants sustain themselves, the dishes they offer, and types of community ties they support. Still, given larger socio-economic factors, the decline in small owner-operated Chinese restaurants in Japan seems unstoppable.
Culinary migration, culinary globalization, Chinese cuisine, Japanese foodways, ethnic restaurants in Japan, ethnic entrepreneurship
The term foodways encompasses the economic, cultural, and social organization of food production and consumption. This chapter explores existing research on urban foodways and aims to show how food studies may uniquely contribute to urban studies. It introduces concepts connecting food to the city, including taste and urban nostalgia, the urban metabolism, culinary cosmopolitanism, and culinary place making. Examples come from the author’s research on foodways in East Asian global cities, particularly Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo.
James Farrer, Chuanfei Wang, David Wank, Mônica R. de Carvalho, Christian Hess, Lenka Vyletalova. 2017. “Japanese Culinary Mobilities Research: The Globalization of the
Japanese Restaurant.” Foods & Food Ingredients Journal Japan, Vol. 222, No. 3, 257-66.
This chapterprovides a framework for understanding the globalization of cuisines in terms of simultaneous processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The essay identifies three mechanisms of culinary globalization: the production of transnational culinary fields, interactions within culinary contact zones, and state-led culinary politics.
Long a source of migrants, China has now become a migrant destination. This book analyzes the development of Shanghai’s expatriate communities, from their role in the opening up of Shanghai to foreign investment in the early 1980s through to the explosive growth after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2000. Based on over 400 interviews and 20 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, it argues that international migrants play an important qualitative role in urban life. It explains the lifestyles of Shanghai’s skilled migrants; their positions in economic, social, sexual and cultural fields; their strategies for integration into Chinese society; their contributions to a cosmopolitan urban geography; and their changing symbolic and social significance for Shanghai as a global city. In so doing, it seeks to deal with the following questions: how have a generation of migrants made Shanghai into a cosmopolitan hometown, what role have they played in making Shanghai a global city, and how do foreign residents now fit into the nationalistic narrative of the China Dream?
James Farrer. 2018. “Critical Expatriate Studies: Changing expatriate communities in Asia and the blurring boundaries of expatriate identity” in Gracia Liu-Farrer and Brenda Yeoh eds. Handbook of Asian Migration. Routledge, 196-208.
Chapter keywords: China, youth, marriage, love, sexuality, dating, sexual scripts, commitment, intimacy
In postwar Japan vast black market districts surrounded urban commuter train stations with warrens of small-scale retail, food and alcohol vendors. Most were bulldozed during the period of high economic growth and replaced with modern shopping centers. Only a few of these dense, lively pedestrian alleyways survived into the 21st century, including the one called “Willow Alley” described in this paper. Recently there has been a widespread revival of these vintage yokochō. Still as spaces for drinking and eating, the forced intimacy in these cramped interstitial spaces fosters sociability and association among strangers, but with changes in recent years. One trend is the opening up of windowless doors and walls and the use of the alleyway itself as a space of eating and drinking. Another is their transformation from semi-private male-oriented bars to more welcoming mixed-gender venues. In general, the case study shows how both historical legacies and the spatial organization and scale of public drinking streets influence the forms of sociability and community that are sustained there.
James Farrer. 2019. “Grimy Heritage: Organic Bar Streets in Shanghai and Tokyo” Built Heritage Vol. 3, Issue 3, pp. pp. 73-85.
Andrew Field and James Farrer. 2021. “From Jazz Men to Jasmine: Transnational Nightlife Cultures in Shanghai from the 1920s to the 2010s” Frank Pieke and Koichi Iwabuchi (eds) Global East Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 31-40. ISBN: 9780520299870
The study focuses on the reasons individuals travel to Japan, the reasons they intend to stay, and the reasons they intend to leave. According to the respondents, Japan's excellent educational system, interest in both traditional and popular culture, job opportunities for foreigners, and a safe and urban environment are all enticing factors that draw foreign workers to the country in search of employment. The favorable work-related experiences that foreign workers have, such as a pleasant workplace atmosphere, an un-stressful work-life balance, and forming and preserving strong bonds with coworkers, have a major impact on their decisions to settle in Japan. In addition, positive experiences they had outside of work, such as feeling safe in Japan, having hobbies, and establishing a sense of belonging, also influenced their choices. In contrast, foreign workers’ decisions to leave Japan are influenced by their negative work experiences, which include little opportunity for promotion, low pay, and the hardship of integrating into Japanese social norms. The decline of the Japanese yen, family ties, concerns about immigration laws, and the challenge of settling down long-term because of mobile occupations are additional unfavorable experiences that impact the decisions made by foreign workers outside of the workplace. These findings demonstrate the close relationship between foreign workers’ work experience and personal life satisfaction, which significantly influences their decisions to remain or relocate.
References
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of Japanese food.
"Japan Up Close," a webpage funded by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, introduces our research project on the global izakaya. This report is based on a presentation on Nov. 20, 2019, at the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University in
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/04/05/472259316/shanghai-nightscapes-dancing-drinking-and-all-that-jazz