Japanese food culture

Minimising the linguistic challenge and the demands of international travel, Japanese restaurants in the UK perform culture in bite-sized chunks, drawing on readings not only of food and its preparation and presentation, but decor, deportment and ritual. Presenting models that seemingly adhere to tradition, others that subordinate the experience to the expectations of the UK diner and yet more that demonstrate a complex interplay between the two, this paper will consider the theatrical space of the restaurant as a fertile site for the performance of culture.
Writing on sushi as an exemplar of globalization, Sasha Issenberg notes that the mantle of lone, knife-wielding guardian of honour and order passes from samurai to sushi chef and, elsewhere, other tropes can be seen to have taken their place at the dining table. As one Birmingham restaurant announces, “eating Japanese is not only a gastronomic experience, it is pure theatre”, a claim that invites consideration of how theatre in this sense might be understood and the extent to which the adoption/adaptation of Japanese culinary traditions warrant such a reading rather than those from other cultures.

As more scholars enter the field of Japanese food history, we are all becoming aware of how much more there is to learn. Our progress rests on the availability of primary sources which are plentiful for some topics but nonexistent for others, especially for premodern Japan (before1868). This essay explores several “known unknowns,” instances when my own research on sake, recipes, and restaurants faced unanswered questions due to a lack of sources. I also touch briefly on meat eating in premodern Japan, which is another longstanding issue of debate in food history.

Sushi and sashimi are by now global sensations and have become perhaps the best-known of Japanese foods, but they are also the most widely misunderstood. Oishii: The History of Sushi reveals that sushi began as a fermented food with a sour taste, used as a means to preserve fish. This book, the first history of sushi in English, traces sushi’s development from China to Japan and then internationally, and its evolution from street food to high-class cuisine. Included are historical and original recipes that display the diversity of sushi and how to prepare it. An expert on Japanese food history, Eric C. Rath has written a must-read for understanding sushi’s past and how it became one of the world’s greatest cuisines.


‘Without a doubt the most definitive book I have ever read on what is now one of the world’s most popular foods. Eric Rath’s Oishii is not only well written and packed with fascinating delicious information, but easy to read as well. It belongs on the bookshelf of any lover of good food.’ — Ken Hom, OBE, author, chef & TV presenter

‘Deploying gorgeous visual material and exquisite detail from over a millennia of Chinese and Japanese written sources, Eric Rath historicizes, regionalizes and denationalizes the contested story of the birth and transformation of various kinds of sushi. He also shows how this modest dish went global as it acquired substantial cultural capital in the late twentieth century. A lucid and beautifully produced book.’ — Krishnendu Ray, Chair, Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, NYU Steinhardt

‘Oishii means “delicious” in Japanese, and this impressive book both nourishes and delights. Through prodigious research and recipes, Oishii carries us along sushi’s path from fermented fish to fresh. Rath’s narrative is revelatory as he traces sushi’s history in relation to culinary methodologies, nationalism, wartime rationing, global innovations, and more.’ — Darra Goldstein, founding editor of "Gastronomica" and author of "Beyond the North Wind"

‘Eric C. Rath’s smart, historically riveting, contemporarily grounded deconstruction of sushi kept me turning each page in anticipation of yet another fascinating fact on one of my most deeply loved foods. For chefs and food geeks, Oishii reveals a number of sushi methods heretofore not found in English and thus serves as an extremely valuable contribution to the landscape of Japanese food writing.’ — Nancy Singleton Hachisu, author of 'Japan: The Cookbook'

In this paper, I examine images of sweets—cakes, cookies, and parfaits—in texts by artists Hagio Moto (b. 1949) and Yoshinaga Fumi (b. 1971) in order to trace an unremarkable history of shōjo manga. My analysis suggests that feminist scholars of Japanese girls’ culture have largely avoided emphasizing conventional femininities circulated through many shōjo manga; instead, they focus on a narrative concerning the subversive qualities of the genre due to its rejection of gender and sexual norms. Describing representations of sweetness in terms of desire and disgust, I reflect upon possibilities for feminist perspectives that simultaneously allow for both pleasure and critique with the everyday consumption of shōjo manga.

In 2013, UNESCO added “traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese” (washoku) to its list of intangible cultural heritage. Washoku enshrines the dietary lifestyle of the 1960s, and so fails to acknowledge the challenges of our times in which the world has been so
fundamentally changed by global warming, pollution, and other man-made effects on the environment that some scientists argue we have left the comfortable Holocene era for the Anthropocene age. This article critiques the UNESCO definition of washoku and then draws on precedents in the Japanese food history and in the author’s personal
experience at a Zen temple to imagine how a traditional cuisine might be defined to be more sustainable, environmentally friendly, and inclusive.
Keywords: Japan, washoku, traditional cuisine, Anthropocene, sustainability

Wie empfehlenswert ist die japanische Küche (Washoku)? – Überlegungen zur “traditionellen japanischen Esskultur”, wie die UNESCO sie zertifiziert hat Im Jahre 2013 nahm die UNESCO washoku, die “traditionellen Küchen der Japaner”, in ihre Liste des immateriellen Weltkulturerbes auf. Washoku wird auf die Ernährungskultur der 1960er Jahre festgelegt und verfehlt damit die enormen Herausforderungen unserer Zeit, welche durch globale Erwärmung, Umweltverschmutzung und andere durch den Menschen verursachte, nicht rückgängig zu machende Veränderungen dazu führen, dass man bereits von einem Übergang vom Holozän zum Anthropozän spricht. Der Artikel setzt sich kritisch mit der UNESCODefinition von washoku auseinander und greift sodann auf frühere Phasen der japanischen Ernährungsgeschichte sowie eigene Erfahrungen des Autors, der in einem Zen-Tempel lebt, zurück, um zu erkunden, wie eine traditionelle japanische Küche konzipiert werden könnte, die auf mehr Nachhaltigkeit, Umweltfreundlichkeit
und Zugänglichkeit baut.
Schlagwörter: Japan, washoku, traditionelle Küche, Anthropozän, Nachhaltigkeit

Food represents an unalienable component of everyday life, encompassing different spheres and moments. What is more, in contemporary societies, migration, travel, and communication incessantly expose local food identities to global food alterities, activating interesting processes of transformation that continuously reshape and redefine such identities and alterities. Ethnic restaurants fill up the streets we walk, while in many city markets and supermarkets local products are increasingly complemented with spices, vegetables, and other foods required for the preparation of exotic dishes. Mass and new media constantly provide exposure to previously unknown foods, while “fusion cuisines” have become increasingly popular all over the world. But what happens to food and food-related habits, practices, and meanings when they are carried from one foodsphere to another? What are the main elements involved in such dynamics? And which theoretical and methodological approaches can help in understanding such processes? These are the main issues addressed by this book, which explores both the functioning logics and the tangible effects of one of the most important characteristics of present-day societies: eating the Other.

The main topic of this article is traditional Japanese cuisine called washoku, deeply embedded in the history and culture of this country. The concept of washoku itself is relatively young, because it came into use at the end of the 19th century, in order to distinguish between native and European cuisine (called yōshoku), and nowadays refers to the broadly understood culinary tradition which is also the cultural heritage of the Japanese. Its forms of expression can be found in the ways of preparing dishes, eating habits and in the approach to the culinary culture itself, which is under the influence of tradition, ritual calendar and social patterns of the Japanese.

In this course we seek to co-explore the cultural byways of food, and situate food at center of many core aspects of being human. Thus we will consider food in light of practicing things such as gender, class, labour, nation, state, and industry.

In 2013 ‘traditional Japanese dietary culture’ (washoku) was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Washoku’s predecessor was ‘national people’s cuisine’, an attempt during the Second World War to create a uniform diet for all citizens. Japan’s Cuisines reveals the diversity of Japanese cuisine and explains how Japan’s modern food culture arose through the direction of private and public institutions. Readers will discover how tea came to be portrayed as the origin of Japanese cuisine, how lunch became a gourmet meal and how regions on Japan’s periphery are reasserting their distinct food cultures.

    ‘This wise and richly documented study provides an important corrective to the many misconceptions about Japanese food culture. Rath moves skillfully between high cuisine and the great diversity of local foodways to reveal how class cultures, national institutions, and economic change have shaped what Japanese eat and what most people think of as typical Japanese cuisine.’ – Professor Jordan Sand, Professor of Japanese History, Georgetown University

Before sushi there was sukiyaki. The globalization of Japanese food culture during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly sushi, has long captured the attention of scholars interested in Japanese soft power and global food culture. However, during the 1930s sukiyaki, a Japanese beef hot-pot dish, was the first Japanese dish to gain the attention of western diners. Through the lens of sukiyaki’s growing popularity in the 1930s New York restaurant scene, my paper attempts to re-examine prewar US-Japan cultural exchange at the grass-roots level as well as Japanese governmental efforts to repair their national image by promoting travel to Japan and Japanese food culture.
My story here centers on the life of first-generation emigrant Kuwayama Senzō, the owner of a lucrative Japanese food import business and Miyako, the first Japanese restaurant to gain a sizable clientele of white Americans. Miyako’s success was due in large part to the popularity of sukiyaki, which was first introduced to American travelers on the decks of Japanese ocean liners since at least the 1920s and popularized as a Japanese national dish in the pages of Good Housekeeping. Kuwayama’s story reveals the multiple layers by which Americans came to know Japanese food culture, through travel boosterism, home economics magazines, and most importantly through the agency of Japanese American restauranteurs.

Japanese cuisine is an established world cuisine which has majorly influenced the global restaurant industry today. In Europe, Japanese restaurants have their own distinct features and is their cuisine often adapted to the tastes of the local consumer pool. This bachelor's thesis presents a qualitative case study focusing on restaurant professionals in Helsinki, Finland, and their perceptions of Japanese cuisine. By examining these perceptions, the researcher attempts to analyze Japanese cuisine in the context of culinary globalization and the uniqueness and homogeneity discourse regarding Japanese culture. By placing the topic in a professional restaurant framework, the researcher’s personal work experience as a chef and familiarity with the local restaurant industry offers a unique point of view. Besides characterizing the professionals’ attitudes towards Japanese cuisine, the thesis also asks questions about culinary appropriation and attempts to construct an overall picture of the Japanese restaurant scene in Helsinki.

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.

It is seen that anime, which is a Japanese animation type, with the food scenes in it, cause the curiosity and interest of the anime viewers from different cultures towards Japanese cuisine. It is thought to contribute to Japan in terms of gastronomy. Accordingly, although there are many promotional and marketing tools to spread the products of Japanese cuisine culture to the world, the idea that anime with a large global viewers also have a share in this promotion is the starting point of this study. Within this context, in this study, it was aimed to research how animes affect the perception of Japanese cuisine culture in individuals. At the same time, informations about the foods they prefer belonging to this culture have been obtained. Interview technique which is one of the qualitative research methods was used for data collection. The interview questions were sent to 31 anime viewers by selecting the snowball sample method, through Google Forms, and the answers were collected ...

In this paper, we will explore the political construction of washoku by analyzing Japan's recent strategy of gastronationalism and gastrodiplomacy. We will argue that the definition of washoku, as inscribed in the UNESCO's International Cultural Heritage List in 2013, is the result of a process of invention of tradition whose aim is to homogenize and preserve national identity and project this identity abroad. While emphasizing the role of food as an essential element of national identity, we will also show that the promotion of washoku is also motivated by the need to address several issues of broader domestic politics. Starting from the assumption that Japan's low food self-sufficiency rate could be improved only by increasing the demand for Japanese food, the government implemented a strategy of promotion of washoku at home (gastronationalism) and abroad (gastrodiplomacy) in order to increase both the domestic consumption of traditional food and the export of agrifood products.

Japanese television has turned cooking into a competition, as exemplified by the show Iron Chef and its imitators. Readers in the early modern period could enjoy similar contests between famous restaurants and popular dishes as presented on one-page broadsheets called ‘topical fight cards’ (mitate banzuke). Tracing the history of mitate banzuke as they developed from kabuki and
sumo banzuke, this article offers a close reading of one culinary banzuke published in the 1830s, examining how it borrowed the format and graphic presentation of sumo banzuke to turn a listing
of ordinary seafood and vegetable side dishes into an entertaining culinary contest. Sushi, sashimi, and tempura, which are the modern hallmarks of traditional Japanese cuisine, scarcely appear on the culinary banzuke examined here, which spotlights the more frugal fare and dietary preferences of urban commoners and illuminates the ways that popular print culture made fun with food.

Visual and cultural analysis of Maekawa Senpan's Shitōchō  偲糖帖 (Remembered Sweets, 1945), a woodblock-printed compendium of sweets that was conceived of and executed during a period of severe wartime food shortage. The book is in the Pulverer Collection of Japanese illustrated books of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and is featured on The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book website. My commentary, along with a complete set of readable images of the book,  may be found here: http://pulverer.si.edu/node/455/title/1.

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka’s and Yasuhara Miho’s book, Branding Japanese Food, is meant as both a critique and a genealogy of washoku. The authors trace washoku as a brand to centuries-old practices of marketing food products in Japan for the fact that these make similar casual references to history and culture. Their book is an expanded translation of their earlier Japanese work, Himerareta washokushi (The hidden history of washoku, 2016).

Rice, Agriculture, and the Food Supply in Premodern Japan demonstrates that rice’s significance as a foodstuff and as a cultural symbol has been vastly overestimated in the history of premodern Japan. Due to its presumed importance to Japanese civilization, rice and the irrigated agriculture that produced it dominated the attention of historians and archaeologists up to the 1990s.  Scholars since the 1990s have looked to linguistic, archaeological, textual and ethnographic evidence, and Rice, Agriculture, and the Food Supply in Premodern Japan refers to these sources and the secondary literature based on them to contextualize rice in the larger subsistence economy.

Food may not be the first word that comes to mind at mention of early modern Japan’s largest district of licensed prostitution, but Hishikawa Moronobu’s (d. 1694) Visit to Yoshiwara reveals how fine dining was one of the pleasures available for the area’s patrons.  Visit to Yoshiwara provides an important record of the new ways that foods were being commodified in the 1680s as restaurants, confectioners, and other meal purveyors began to be established in major cities, and it also serves as a commentary on the lives of the women engaged in the oldest profession who likewise arrived from the countryside to Yoshiwara, were transformed, priced, and objectified for male consumption.

The California Roll was only the beginning. Or at least, the beginning of global domination. Back in the mid 1980s, when I made a documentary for BBC TV about disgust and learned food habits, we chose sushi as our exemplar of the Westerner’s idea of hard-to-understand foods. Raw fish. Cold rice. Seaweed. What’s to like? If I had known then of the rich history of sushi, I’m sure we could have made even more of its strange 1980s incarnation. 
    Eric Rath’s history of sushi traces the word back to its origins as a method of preserving fish through many twists and turns to today, when sushi means almost anything you want it to mean.
  https://www.eatthispodcast.com/

This paper explores some of the dimensions of a popular Japanese phenomenon: the purchase, presentation, and use of omiyage. Omiyage is a general term for gifts brought by travellers to their stay-at-home neighbours and relatives. These items are most often gifts of food. As a consequence of the demand for these items, a series of industries, both cottage and industrial have emerged in Japan. Here I want to explore the nature of these gifts, and the agents that bring them about and popularise them. In particular, I am interested in exploring the sorts of 'reconstructed memories' that these foods evoke, and how they do so. Omiyage, traditionally, had been composed of long-lasting foodstuffs: pickled, dried, and salted foods. With the advent of modern forms of communication, the foods in omiyage have turned to fresh produce, fruit, and even raw fish. This in turn, has spawned an industry worth millions of pounds. Moreover, because this is an industry, much of the 'uniqueness' elements, both for the producer and for the consumer have vanished. Travellers, notwithstanding the decline of uniqueness, are recreating and reaffirming their unique relationship to the stay-at-homes, as well as to the places they have travelled, by sharing in the consumption of the local items. The sharing of these special foods by those who receives them connects the consumers via the donor to the wider world, and also reaffirms and strengthens the wholeness of Japanese taste, culture, and cuisine. What is, in effect, being memorialised is an imagined Japan which people insist existed in their memories: either their personal memories, or the collective memories of their families, group, or Japan as a whole. Ashkenazi / Omiyage 1

Published from 1905-1907, Culinary Magazine (Kuidōraku) was Japan's first gourmet monthly. The publication professed balanced coverage between home cooking and dining out, but its innovative practice of restaurant reviews soon came to define the magazine. The focus on elite restaurants and the publication's monthly gourmet club, not only contributed to a break between the monthly and the person who had originally inspired it, but also limited the monthly’s potential wider appeal by excluding female and less wealthy male readers.

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.

It is seen that anime, which is a Japanese animation type, with the food scenes in it, cause the curiosity and interest of the anime viewers from different cultures towards Japanese cuisine. It is thought to contribute to Japan in terms of gastronomy. Accordingly, although there are many promotional and marketing tools to spread the products of Japanese cuisine culture to the world, the idea that anime with a large global viewers also have a share in this promotion is the starting point of this study. Within this context, in this study, it was aimed to research how animes affect the perception of Japanese cuisine culture in individuals. At the same time, informations about the foods they prefer belonging to this culture have been obtained. Interview technique which is one of the qualitative research methods was used for data collection. The interview questions were sent to 31 anime viewers by selecting the snowball sample method, through Google Forms, and the answers were collected between 2 February 2021 and 16 February 2021. Descriptive and content analysis was applied to the obtained data. According to the results of the research, it is seen that animes have a serious contribution to the reflection of the Japanese cuisine culture. While the interesting scenes in the food-themed animes enable the viewers to try Japanese food, it has been determined that they encourage to buy Japanese cuisine products and use them at home. In general, it was observed that animes made nearly half of the participants curious about Japanese cuisine and animes directed them to experience it.

This research aims to study the representations of food in the novel Nihonjin (2011) by Oscar Nakasato (Maringá, 1963). I argue that culinary practices establish boundaries, that I call isogastrias, between ethnic communities in Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century. In Nihonjin, whose background is the life of the first Japanese immigrants arrived in the coffee plantations of São Paulo in 1908, food, its preparation and consumption, is depicted as a marker of Japanese ethnicity in the diaspora. The representations of food are also an indicator of the process of transculturation of this community in Brazil. The nostalgia that Japanese in the diaspora feel for Japan finds in food a foothold for memories and remembrances.

This chapter describes how and why wine became incorporated into the Japanese culinary system. It is a study in culinary globalization and also a study in culinary politics, that is, how tastes and notions of taste pairing are used by culinary producers consciously to reframe elements of Japanese cuisine which is now a globalized context of culinary discourse. This analysis of wine and Japanese foods (washoku) thus provides some insights into a type of non-state culinary politics while also telling the story of how wine is paired with Japanese foods.

In December 2013 UNESCO added “traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese” (washoku) to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.  Integral to the definition of washoku is the use of “locally sourced ingredients,” and regional cuisines are often cited as prime examples of washoku, suggesting the diversity of Japan’s dietary cultures.  Efforts to describe national food preferences by incorporating provincial examples are neither new nor unique to Japan, but the Japanese case as demonstrated by major ethnographic studies undertaken before, during, and after the Second World War have left local dietary culture surprisingly undefined except in the ways that it can be mobilized to support the policy aims of the central government.  The regional diets represented in these ethnographic studies reveal more about how culinary boundaries have been superimposed by the central government rather than how variations in eating habits stem from local geography and culture. Consequently, the conspicuous role of the central government in the process of defining local food in Japan offers a counter example to the cases of India and Italy, where Arjun and Appadurai and Massimo Montanari contend that premodern regional cuisines contributed to the rise of a national cuisine. The opposite situation occurred in modern Japan where dominant definitions of national cuisine shaped the meaning of local food.