sekiken Sken, Ry
ri mmoku chmish (Collected Writings on Cuisine and an Outline on Seasonings, 1730)Eating and drinking are the basis of human life, so everyone knows about them. Yet because these are commonplace, night-and-day things, people simply do not give them much thought. It is also commonly believed that people a long time ago were simple and did not pay much attention to methods of cooking. Then in the intervening years society was not at peace, and so it is thought that people’s attention did not turn to the preparation of food. Today society is at peace and people’s temperaments are tranquil. As far as the deepest mountain, people live in contentment with sufficient clothing, food, and shelter. But this contentment is also taken to an excess, and people become obsessed with various things for days and years. Among them many people have become feverish about learning about cuisine and writing about it in books, and these have become great resources for us today. Measured against all these writings, this book about flavorings may not contain much new information. However, as a response to someone’s recommendation, I have written a reference for cooking, a volume that even someone living by a distant seashore or a woodcutter in the deep mountains might accidentally lay their hands upon.
—Shsekiken Sken, Ryri mmoku chmish (Collected Writings on Cuisine and an Outline on Seasonings, 1730)
Although Shsekiken Sken lived almost three centuries ago, his ideas about food seem quite modern. He dismisses the false assumption that people in the distant past ignored the art of cooking. Yet he acknowledges that conditions in his own time allow greater attention to the pleasures of preparing and eating food, to the point that some people even write books on these subjects. His Collected Writings on Cuisine and an Outline on Seasonings (Ryri mmoku chmish) is encyclopedic in scope. In five volumes Shsekiken included definitions of technical terms for cooking, model menus, recipes, and serving suggestions for ingredients and gave miscellaneous comments about food preparation. Shsekiken’s goal, to make his book useful to a wide audience, is praiseworthy and speaks to the development of a market for published culinary texts that he imagined included people of different walks of life throughout the country.
However modern Shsekiken’s ideas about food might appear, there are many discrepancies between what Shsekiken wrote about in his book and what we will find in restaurants or homes in Japan today. Shsekiken’s model menus follow a format of dining called honzen, or main table dining, which is rarely seen today. His soup recipes call for ingredients like crane, goose, skylark, swan, and gray heron, which have become protected species in Japan and are, needless to say, not available in supermarkets and restaurants. Shsekiken’s recipe for sushi, which was standard in his time, takes several days to prepare, allowing whole fish to soak first in sake for a night and then to be filled with salted rice, wrapped in leaves, and placed in a barrel for two to four days to ferment.1 The result is a far cry from the sushi of today that uses small slices of fresh fish on top of vinegared rice—a dish best eaten just after it has been prepared.
These and other differences reveal a gap between the modern Japanese diet and the premodern equivalent as it is expressed in Shsekiken’s book; but according to scholars of Japanese food, there is a much wider conceptual gap between the meals eaten in Shsekiken’s time and today. That gap has more to do with larger historical changes in Japanese society than it does with particular ingredients and methods of cooking. According to this line of thinking, Shsekiken’s recipes, despite all the attention they give to food, do not qualify as “Japanese cuisine,” because Shsekiken was writing at a time when Japan had yet to be born as a modern nation. “Japanese cuisine as it is projected and valued today is a modern construct conceived in the midst of twentieth-century historical dynamics,” states culinary historian Katarzyna Cwiertka. Japanese cuisine, in other words, is as much about what modern Japanese people think about themselves as a group and as a nation as it is about food. In Cwiertka’s words, Japanese cuisine reflects “an imagined national identity” and a perceived “cultural homogeneity” that simply did not exist in Shsekiken’s time.2 Shsekiken might consider sushi to be a method to preserve fish, but today it is associated with the Japanese national character in a way that Shsekiken would not have been able to imagine. In Shsekiken’s lifetime in the eighteenth century, a central military government, the Tokugawa bakufu, controlled a large portion of the country and the major cities while approximately 270 regional warlords (daimyo) administered their own domains with relative autonomy, maintaining standing armies and their own legal and judicial systems. Moreover, in Shsekiken’s era Japan had yet to embark on the task of rapid industrialization and modernization that would occur after 1868 with the collapse of this system of rule. Japanese cuisine emerged from these changes after this collapse, when Japanese measured their country’s development against foreign powers and especially the West. Thus the words for “Japanese cuisine” that appeared in the late nineteenth century, washoku and Nihon ryri, reflected an effort to define native foodways against foreign ones.3
This conclusion raises an obvious question: if Japanese cuisine is a modern phenomenon, then what was Shsekiken referring to by the word cuisine (ryri), which is part of the modern term Japanese cuisine (Nihon ryri)? To rephrase this question more broadly, if cuisine is so closely linked with the rise of nationalism, industrialization, imperialism, and other factors associated with Japanese modernity, could there be a cuisine without those modern traits? Trying to answer these questions, which basically boil down to the single question of what came before modern Japanese cuisine, prompted me to write this book.
When I began this study, I thought that the people best qualified to answer this question would be Japanese chefs, since they have intimate knowledge of culinary traditions and work with them on a daily basis. Traveling to Japan in the summer of 2000, I put these questions to the chefs I thought would offer the most authoritative answers: chefs in Kyoto, a city famous throughout Japan for its culinary heritage. The chefs I spoke with came from families that had been in the restaurant business for centuries, operating traditional Japanese restaurants that were hundreds of years old. This meant that many of their establishments were older than the restaurant trade itself in Japan. For further insights, I consulted the large body of scholarship on the history of Japanese food. However, neither provided clear answers about cuisine in Japan before the modern era. I learned a great deal about the histories of Kyoto restaurants and about how chefs today incorporate references to history and local geography in their cooking, but I was frustrated to find that “cuisine”—modern, premodern, or otherwise—remained a more elusive topic to me the more I spoke with chefs. While scholars have supplied the definition for modern cuisine I noted earlier, I was surprised at the lack of consensus in academic writings regarding the meaning of cuisine in premodern Japan, reflecting the fact that the term ryri can have so many meanings, from style of cooking to dish to cuisine, that it seems difficult to come to some consensus about its definition.
This observation prompted me to put aside the native term ryri momentarily to see if a “cuisine” might be lurking in Japan’s past in another guise. It also seemed unwarranted and unfair to measure premodern food solely on the basis of what it lacked. Looking at the historical record of banquets, the writings of chefs, and other texts dating from the late medieval and early modern periods to learn more about how foods were prepared and consumed, I made an interesting discovery, namely, that food was often prepared in elaborate dishes, served to guests with great ceremony, and then not eaten. These odd uses of food receive only passing reference in academic discussions and are seldom seen in Japan today, but I thought they deserved greater attention. I began to make a mental note whenever I encountered mention of foods that were not eaten. Besides being a striking difference from modern customs in Japan, the fact that elaborate dishes were made and then not eaten suggested that these foods had other meanings beyond the basic need to satisfy hunger. I learned that sometimes uneaten food had magical properties or religious significance. In other instances it was used solely for artistic display. The prevalence of these customs indicated that there were some underlying rules for creating uneaten foods.
The significance of uneaten foods brought to my attention the related phenomenon of foods that were described but not prepared. It became clear as I read early modern cookbooks that many of the menus within them would have been practically impossible to prepare in real life. Many of the recipes could be enjoyed as literature or appreciated for their humorous names and odd juxtaposition of ingredients without being actually prepared. This has provoked the consternation of modern scholars, who complain about the sloppiness in a book of confectionery by the novelist Jippensha Ikku (1765–1831), Collection of Quick Recipes for Rice Cakes and Sweets (Mochigashi sokuseki teseish
, 1805), because many of its recipes are worthless as guides to cooking. But that conclusion misses an important point. Jippensha Ikku was a comic novelist, not a sweet maker; though some readers may have bought his work to learn how to cook certain dishes, others might have been interested in what the author of Shank’s Mare (Hizakurige, 1802–9) and other humorous travel stories had to say about cooking. In the same way that readers of his travel literature did not actually have to retrace his characters’ journeys to enjoy reading about them, readers of his confectionery book did not actually have to make the recipes—nor could they, given the way these recipes were written. Both works had to be enjoyed vicariously. This taught me that cookbooks, like guidebooks, present an ideal version of reality, not an exact reflection of what people actually eat or where they go.
Viewed collectively, these practices—for preparing foods but not eating them and consuming dishes by reading about them—suggest underlying rules for working with food meant to enhance its potential to signify imaginary things. It is the argument of this book that these practices qualify as a cuisine. In other words, before Japanese thought about their food as a cuisine defined as a reflection of ethnic and national identity, they enjoyed a fantasy with food, following commonly held assumptions that associated food with religious, political, and artistic qualities to suit a variety of contexts. In this book I describe the development of this fantasy with food and how it culminated, in the early modern era, with the publication of cookbooks, which disseminated earlier customs and made new fantasies possible.
Before I visited Kyoto in 2000 to begin this study by interviewing chefs on the history of Japanese cuisine, my previous research on the masked Noh drama had attuned me to the value of speaking with a traditional art’s modern interpreters, namely, its performers.4 Noh actors and musicians have deeply ingrained knowledge of the traditions of their art, gained from years of training that begins in childhood. And they are responsible for enacting and preserving these traditions today, which provides them with a firsthand perspective different from that of modern Noh scholars—several of whom have admitted to me in private that they do not even regularly watch Noh plays. I surmised that, just as I gained an insider’s viewpoint from speaking to Noh actors and musicians, I could learn an inside perspective on culinary history by speaking to chefs, whose ideas are usually (and surprisingly) ignored in academic discussions of Japanese cuisine. I chose Kyoto as the site for this study because of its concentration of old restaurants, its long history as Japan’s capital—from 794 to 1868—and its renown today for its cuisine. Several restaurants I visited in Kyoto date from before the origins of the restaurant trade in Japan, in the late seventeenth century, when shops in major cities started selling prepared dishes. Establishments did not offer full-course meals until the mid-eighteenth century.5 Speaking to chefs in Kyoto, I gained insights into how establishments that once offered only snacks and prepared meals became full-service restaurants, but I had to rely on their testimonies without the benefit of confirming the particulars in written sources, as materials like old menus have either not survived or are not available for scholars to scrutinize.6 Despite the limitations of oral history, no one can fault the authority of my informants, who are fifth- to twentieth-generation descendants of the founders of their establishments, allowing them an intimate knowledge of the history of their restaurants, the restaurant trade, and cuisine in Japan. This intimacy with their profession and family history led the chefs I interviewed to intertwine the history of cuisine with the stories of their own restaurants. Consequently, it is important to first introduce these establishments before examining what their chefs report about the origin of Japanese cuisine.
The oldest restaurant I visited was Yamabana Heihachijaya, which traces its history to 1575, seven years after the warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534–82) marched his army into Kyoto ostensibly to restore the last head of the Ashikaga family, Yoshiaki (1537–97), to power as shogun, but actually to stake his own claim to the capital and thereby strengthen his efforts to unify a country disrupted by more than a century of warfare in the aptly named Warring States period. According to Heihachijaya’s current family head, Sonobe Heihachi, named after his ancestor nineteen generations removed, the first Heihachi began a teahouse in the village of Yamabana, northeast of the capital, not far from the Shugakuin Detached Palace. The establishment served travelers on the road to Wakasa (Wakasa kaid), which meandered into Kyoto at that point. Wakasa (in modern Fukui prefecture) was an important port town and an entry point for supplies destined for the capital. Heihachijaya thrived on this trade route into Kyoto. It sold goods to travelers, such as umbrellas, sandals, and raincoats, and it offered them refreshments for sale. The teahouse appears in an illustrated guidebook authored by Akisato Rit (fl. 1780–1814), Selection of Illustrated Sites in Kyoto (Shi miyako meisho zue), published in 1787.7 An illustration of Yamabana reveals several small grass huts resting between the road and nearby Takano River, which flows south into the Kamo River and passes along the eastern part of Kyoto. A notation reads, “Barley and rice teahouse” (mugimeshi chaya), indicating what visitors could expect to eat with their tea. Another caption notes that this barley and rice dish is a famous dish of the area.
Other roads into Kyoto had similar teahouses. The present-day Hy-tei restaurant began as a teahouse on the eastern edge of Kyoto where two major roads, the Tkaid and the Nakasend, merged at the village of Awataguchi. Many teahouses lined the road to the capital at this point, but Hytei was located off the main thoroughfare on a side street. According to its present-generation owner-chef, Takahashi Eiichi, Hytei catered to travelers who wanted to begin seeing the sights of the capital by first visiting the famous Zen temple Nanzenji nearby. Giant straw sandals (waraji) still hang outside of Hytei as an invitation to the weary traveler to sit, and large containers of water for tea stand ready to quench the traveler’s thirst.
At the same time that teahouses began to offer snacks to travelers, other entrepreneurs realized the potential profits to be made in the home delivery of prepared foods. The founder of Uosabur came from Sanuki province (modern Kagawa prefecture) to the Kyoto area in 1764, and he opened a catering business (shidashiya). Uosabur began its business by catering banquets for samurai officials and wealthy merchants who hired the establishment to cook for parties and other occasions that necessitated the preparation of complex dishes in greater amounts than usual. When called, Uosabur’s employees prepared and served meals within their customers’ homes, explained the current owner, Araki Shigeo, who is the ninth generation of his family to run Uosabur, which now operates as a restaurant in Fushimi.
The restaurant Harisei, located near the eastern part of Kyoto just south of Fifth Avenue (Goj), began as a teahouse, but its operator also became a caterer. Morimoto Ry
z, current owner of Harisei, explained that his family’s restaurant opened as a teahouse in 1659 and started serving meals in 1764. Its original clientele came from the ranks of city craftspeople who lived nearby, according to Chef Morimoto, including master carpenters, fan makers, and potters, who are famous in that area. When requested, Harisei either sent members of the cooking staff to private homes to cook or the staff prepared the meals in Harisei’s kitchen for delivery. By the late nineteenth century, Harisei served full-course meals to diners, and the restaurant is mentioned several times in the well-known diary of the merchant-class homemaker Nakano Makiko (1890–1970), Makiko’s Diary: A Merchant Wife in 1910 Kyoto. Nakano records that Harisei catered a New Year’s party on January 3, 1910, and sent along a professional server. Four days later, Makiko’s husband ate at Harisei for a meeting with the neighborhood association. She writes, “He said that they served lots of good food and sake.”8
The early founders of Nakamura, like the founders of Harisei, began their careers as providers of delivered meals before opening a restaurant for diners. The current owner, Nakamura Fumiharu, explained that his family started their business as fishmongers catering to Kyoto nobility in the Edo period. These nobles enjoyed highly refined tastes beyond what their incomes afforded and, consequently, proved more generous with their advice about food preparation than with their money, according to Nakamura. Using the information derived from his family’s noble clientele, Nakamura Fumiharu’s grandfather transformed the family business, switching from provisioning to catering, making and delivering meals to nearby inns and homes. The business became a restaurant after the Second World War under the family name Nakamura.
In the Edo period, Nakamurar (no relation to the restaurant Nakamura) was described as one of the “two teahouses” (nikenjaya) located near Yasaka shrine, then called Gionsha since the shrine compound also housed a Buddhist temple.9 The two teahouses outside the main gates of this religious institution specialized in sweetened tofu on a stick (tfu dengaku), an early carryout food named after the medieval performing art that featured performers on wooden stilts. What can be called an expanded bible of tofu dishes, A Hundred More Tricks with Tofu (Tfu hyakuchin zokuhen), published in 1783, describes this “specialty of the two Gion teahouses” as grilled, miso-glazed tofu sandwiched between two rice cakes: “Spear a round rice cake, approximately nine centimeters, with a bamboo stick and roast it. Place two of these together with grilled tofu covered in miso in the middle.” Later recipes apparently omitted the rice cakes to serve the grilled tofu glazed with miso on a stick by itself, calling that dish dengaku.10 The popularity of this recipe for sweetened tofu on a stick, also called Gion tofu, grew to such an extent that it became a subject of popular songs in the Edo period.11 A reason for its popularity was its focal role in a performing art intended to draw customers. According to Tsuji Masamitsu, the current owner of Nakamurar, “Young girls sat in front of the teahouse, where they cut the tofu, making the noise ton, ton, ton to attract customers. Then they grilled the tofu in front of the customers and coated it with sweet, white miso.” This performance continued until the early 1920s, Tsuji said, when Nakamurar first experimented briefly with serving Western food before becoming a restaurant featuring kaiseki, the multicourse selection of delicately prepared dishes . The four-century-old Nakamurar still takes pride in its recipe for tfu dengaku, to the point that its preparation is a family secret.
A Hundred Tricks with Tofu (Tfu hyakuchin) published in 1782, the predecessor to A Hundred More Tricks with Tofu, mentions, besides the tofu of Gion, Kyoto’s famous Nanzenji tofu, the boiled tofu (yudfu) served in restaurants near Nanzenji, one of Kyoto’s most famous Zen temples, located in the eastern edge of the city.12 One of the oldest of these tofu establishments is Okutan, said to have been founded in 1635. According to Ishii Yasuie, who is the fifteenth-generation owner of Okutan, there were once three tofu shops in a row all with the same name, Tangoya. One of these three establishments appears alongside the restaurant Hytei in the guidebook Illustrated Sites around the Flowery Capital (Karaku meisho zue), published in 1864.
FIGURE 1. Tangoya and Hytei, teahouses outside the gates of Nanzenji temple, from Illustrated Sites around the Flowery Capital (Karaku meisho zue). Courtesy of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies.
Since all three shops shared the same name and specialty, boiled tofu, the only way to distinguish them was by location: they were designated as “the closer,”“the middle,” and “the farther” Tangoya. The travel guide Illustrated Guide to Environs in Kyoto (Miyako rinsen meisho zue), authored by Akisato Rit and others and published in 1799, includes a large woodblock print of one of the three Tangoya establishments, revealing a restaurant with an expansive garden. In one corner, waitresses cajole customers to enter, and in another three diners sit eating. The caption reads, “Famous boiled-tofu establishment near Nanzenji.”13 The closer and middle Tangoya restaurants went out of business in the late nineteenth century, leaving only the “farther Tango shop” (Okutan), which still serves its signature boiled tofu. In 1894 Okutan was forced to move to a new location closer to Nanzenji temple when Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922), the founder of Japan’s modern army, desired to build a residence in the restaurant’s location.
The restaurant Dai’ichi became famous for a specialty much rarer than tofu: terrapin (suppon) soup, which it still serves in its late-seventeenth-century building. Founders of Dai’ichi, located to the west of Senbondri avenue in the western part of the city, began their family business as caterers in 1688, carrying pots of hot terrapin soup to customers’ homes. Horii Masayumi, the seventeenth-generation owner, reported to me that, a century later, the family opened a restaurant where customers could enjoy this specialty. Daiichi’s signature soup consists of terrapin cooked at high temperature in a stock of soy sauce and sake. After cooking, the soup is brought to the table in a ceramic pot for customers to serve themselves. “We serve only terrapin soup here,” stated Horii. This has proven a successful recipe for Dai’ichi, which draws customers from all over Japan and markets a canned version of its soup bearing its brand name.
Although their histories go back centuries, most of these eating establishments did not become restaurants until the nineteenth century, well after most of the culinary developments described in this book occurred. While more research is needed to understand the historical transformation of teahouses offering only light snacks into restaurants that served full-course meals, Hytei provides an anecdotal example of this development. When it opened, Hytei served light snacks, probably sweets and its trademark “half-boiled eggs” (han’yude tamago), to accompany its tea. Later in the Edo period, Hytei became a destination for wealthy merchants (odannash), who called on the restaurant early in the morning after a summer night spent in the pleasure quarter of Gion. “They would knock on the door,” reported Chef Takahashi, “and ask for something simple to eat.” So the chefs would add leftovers to rice porridge, flavor this with sweet kudzu starch (kuzu), and serve this dish to customers. “This was a filling meal, so not much else was needed.” In 1837, Hytei began to offer light meals, and these developed into more elaborate ones over time. It still offers a rice porridge breakfast in July and August.
The Kyoto restaurant with the most distinct historical heritage is Mankamer, located in the central part of the city. Chef Konishi Shigeyoshi, owner of Mankamer, holds the title of “family head” (iemoto), meaning chief instructor, of the Ikama school of cuisine. Though the Ikama school has a long heritage of food preparation for the imperial and military elite in premodern Japan, today it is also known for preserving the art of the knife ceremony (shikibch), the ritual dismemberment of a fish or fowl for artistic display, an art I describe in further detail in the next chapter. According to Chef Konishi, this art dates to the Heian period (794–1185), while the Ikama school can be traced to the Kamakura period (1185–1333). He explained that the Ikama served the Ashikaga shoguns until Oda Nobunaga forced the last Ashikaga shogun, Yoshiaki, out of Kyoto in 1573. Thereafter, the Ikama served Nobunaga and his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–98). In the Edo period, the leaders of the Ikama gained employment with aristocratic families in Kyoto, and the family name appears under the heading of cuisine (ryri) in the massive list of places and people in Kyoto, Ky habutae, published in 1685.14 After the death of his last patron, Princess Katsura no Miya Sumiko Naishin’n in 1881, the leader of the Ikama school, Ikama Masahaya, started teaching restaurateurs the art of the knife ceremony. One of his top disciples was the owner of Mankamer, a restaurant that opened at the end of the Edo period, but which had a longer history as a sake purveyor. The restaurateur inherited the Ikama school’s traditions and was allowed to take the Ikama family name—along with the family’s collection of knives, specialized writings, and other ephemera for the cutting ceremony.15 The current owner of Mankamer, Konishi Shigeyoshi, also known as Ikama Masayasu, is the twenty-ninth head of the Ikama school.
Though I was unable, on my modest research budget, to enter these restaurants as a diner, the owner-chefs generously made time to meet with me to answer my questions. But when I brought up the topic of the origin and meaning of Japanese cuisine, they deflected my questions to discourse on the qualities of Kyoto cuisine. Study the history of Kyoto cuisine, they told me, explaining that Kyoto cuisine (Ky ryri) was not only the prototype for all of Japanese cuisine but also the most refined cuisine in Japan today—an assertion I wish I could verify by taking an eating tour of all the country’s top restaurants.16
So I took the hint and asked about the origins of Kyoto cuisine, and the chefs’ responses were surprisingly uniform. They noted three main historical sources for Kyoto cuisine:
jin ryri)17ri (which, they indicated, referred both to the multicourse meals served at restaurants today and the simpler fare of the tea ceremony)zai) prepared by commoners and the cuisine of the imperial court (ysoku ryri)When I started to read the scholarly literature on the history of Kyoto cuisine, I discovered that these same three styles of food preparation were similar to the ones that historian Murai Yasuhiko identifies in his 1979 book on Kyoto cuisine. Either Murai had it right or my informants had all read the same book!
Beyond references to earlier types of cuisine (and scholarship about it), one of the most distinguishing features of the chefs’ views about Kyoto cuisine was the connection they made between ingredients and location. Chef Araki Shigeo of the restaurant Uosaburo made the general observation that the Japanese word for dining (gochis) contains the Chinese character meaning “run” (hashiru). He extrapolated from this that “evidently chefs once had to run around looking for delicacies.” I discovered later that this keen observation also appears in culinary scholarship, albeit in an early modern text, written by Ise Sadatake (also known as Ise Teij, 1717–84), Teij’s Miscellany (Teij zakki).18 Chef Sonobe Heihachi of Heihachijaya said something similar, that Kyoto chefs “devised methods of preparation that brought out the most flavor in the ingredients that were available to them,” and that “these techniques led to the development of cooking methods that gradually evolved into the Kyoto cuisine of today.” Nakamura Fumiharu put it this way: “Kyoto cuisine has always paid special attention to ingredients, and for that reason it has been often misunderstood.” He continued: “Kyoto cuisine is often criticized for being watery and bland, but actually that’s not because the taste is too light, but rather because superfluous flavors are not added that might ruin the flavor of the natural ingredients.”
According to these statements, a chef had to rely on ingredients gathered locally to create an authentic cuisine, but Kyoto cuisine, they contended, developed in large part due to the absence of certain local ingredients, namely, fresh seafood. I was told that this lack differentiated Kyoto cooking from its counterparts in other parts of the country. In the early modern period, it took a day and a night to transport seafood the thirty-mile distance over mountains from Wakasa Bay to Kyoto.19 Modern chefs continue to recall Kyoto’s isolation from the coast as a formative element in the local cuisine. Chef Tsuji Masamitsu of Nakamurar, commented, “A long time ago, transportation methods were poor and Kyoto was far from the coast. Consequently, it was extremely difficult to import good, fresh fish.” The distance from the coast meant that seafood had to be preserved before it was brought to the city. Mackerel from Wakasa Bay arrived preserved in salt. Cod from as far away as Hokkaido was dried before shipping. Sushi was another method devised originally to preserve fish—as we have seen in Shsekiken’s recipe—by pressing it with rice laced with salt and, later, vinegar. “Pressed mackerel sushi” (sabazushi) wrapped in bamboo leaves—said to be the method originally used to transport the fish from Wakasa Bay—remains a local specialty in Kyoto. The dish serves as a reminder that the Wakasa Road was nicknamed the “Mackerel Highway” (saba kaid).
In the absence of fresh fish, Kyoto cuisine prominently featured vegetables, according to the chefs I interviewed, and this provided them a segue to explain the historical importance of Buddhist vegetarian cooking in Kyoto cuisine. The large number of temples in the city served vegetarian meals exclusively, providing a rationale for creating methods to cook vegetables in appealing ways. The focus on vegetables in Kyoto cuisine has seen even more interest in the last two decades with the revival of “traditional Kyoto vegetables” (Ky dent yasai). These have become increasingly popular thanks in part to their promotion by local chefs.20 The term traditional Kyoto vegetables is a neologism coined in 1987 to designate local heirloom varieties grown in Kyoto prefecture—not just Kyoto city—before 1868. The Kyoto area is home to forty-seven of these traditional vegetables, more than in any other region in Japan. Chef Takahashi Eiichi of Hytei, in collaboration with other restaurateurs, area farmers, and the Society for the Fostering of Kyoto Cuisine (Ky ryri mebokai), a professional organization for chefs, has worked for several decades to preserve and promote the traditional vegetables of Kyoto by writing cookbooks, hosting public demonstrations, and sponsoring scholarly forums. One reason for the appeal of Kyoto vegetables is their perceived intimate connection with the city’s landscape and cultural legacy. Many are named for sites in the city where they were once grown—for example, Shgoin daikon, Kuj green onion, and Kamo eggplant. This makes the vegetables ideal, because any dish they are used in can be designated as a local product, despite the fact that many Kyoto vegetables are now grown outside the city, if not also outside Kyoto prefecture. Yet the association of these vegetables with the city endures.
Takahashi gave the example of Horikawa burdock (gob), named after an area where warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi built his Jurakudai Palace. “This palace was destroyed after his death, and the moat surrounding it became a dump,” explained Takahashi.21 “Burdock found growing there was discovered to be delicious and large. The burdock had grown wild there, and the distinct local conditions made it bigger than others in Japan.” Many other Kyoto vegetables were not native to Kyoto, but grew into distinct varieties after they were transplanted in Kyoto’s soils, according to Chef Takahashi. “Seeds for Shishigatani pumpkin were originally brought by farmers from the northern region of Japan’s main island. But the distinct soil of Kyoto transformed the original variety of pumpkin, called kikuza kabucha, into a new form.” Such accounts reveal how vegetables enter into local culinary lore, which alleges an almost magical transformation when the seeds touch Kyoto’s fertile soil.
The importance of ingredients in designating local place is also seen in disagreements I noted over the use of foreign foodstuffs in Kyoto cuisine. Some owner-chefs in Kyoto, including Sonobe Heihachi and Nakamura Fumiharu, stated their preference for native ingredients. Sonobe, for instance, has experimented with using the liver of Japanese anglerfish (ank) as a substitute for foie gras to ensure the native character of his cuisine. Others, such as Takahashi Eiichi and Tsuji Masamitsu, incorporate foreign delicacies, including foie gras. Tsuji, for one, found parallels in the adoption of Western ingredients and the eagerness with which generations of earlier chefs used foodstuffs brought to Kyoto from other parts of Japan. But foreign foods, cautioned Chef Takahashi, must harmonize with Japanese foods, otherwise cuisine loses its identity and becomes “country-less” (mukokuseki).
In one instance, the connection between place and cuisine reached an extreme when the conversation shifted to the importance of water in Kyoto cuisine. Chef Takahashi stated that good water was critical to serving good tea, which was a mainstay of the earliest eating establishments, like his restaurant, which began as a teahouse before offering full meals. (Recall that large urns still sit in front of Hytei, just as they once awaited thirsty travelers in the Edo period). Chef Sonobe Heihachi went further and attributed the mild taste of Kyoto cooking to the water.
Water above all else is the foundation of Japanese cuisine, and the water in the Kyoto area is soft, while the water in the Tokyo area is hard. Soft water brings out the most flavor in konbu seaweed and bonito flakes [(katsuo) used for making soup stock], but hard water doesn’t as easily. . . . Precisely because Kyoto’s water is soft, it is best suited for bringing out the taste of the konbu and bonito, and these are the basis for the flavor of the stock used in Kyoto cuisine.
Sonobe confided that chefs in Tokyo had to enhance the flavor of their soup stock with more bonito and soy sauce, producing a stronger taste than the lighter flavors allowed Kyoto.
Statements about the purity of Kyoto’s waters and the traditions of its vegetables are well suited to differentiate Kyoto cuisine as something special and authentic; however, such claims are hard to substantiate, as Chef Morimoto Ryz of Harisei intimated. He affirmed the importance of water to Japanese cuisine but simultaneously undermined talk about the purity of Kyoto’s water supply, stating that chefs in Kyoto stopped using the city’s well water long ago, after the wells became contaminated when the city built a subway system. He did not mention any of the chefs I had spoken with, but he did criticize the showmanship of another unnamed restaurateur with an establishment near Yasaka shrine, who bragged about his cooking because the water he used came from “Pure-Water” (Kiyomizu) temple, which he hand carried to his establishment every day. And although the stories about Kyoto vegetables are part of their attraction and help to distinguish a Kyoto green onion from one grown in a different part of Japan, the particular shapes of Kyoto vegetables result from farming techniques rather than the magic of Kyoto’s soils. The distinct elongated shape of Horikawa burdock, for example, results from the practice of unearthing and then reburying the root vegetable sideways so that it grows long. Most of the modern “traditional Kyoto vegetables” are, like Horikawa burdock, named after places in the city that once produced these varieties but no longer have farms, so these vegetables represent a tradition of urban farming that has largely disappeared in Kyoto city. Despite that fact, the inclusion of Kyoto vegetables marks a dish as “local” and a product of a distinct culinary tradition. Some chefs, such as the late Murata Yoshihiro of the restaurant Kikunoi, have gone so far as to write that vegetables grown in Kyoto city are essential to produce authentic Kyoto cuisine: “By definition the recipe for sweet miso on grilled eggplants [nasu dengaku] absolutely requires the use of Kamo eggplants.”22 While some might call this clever marketing, displacement is another term scholars have used to describe the process of turning foreign ingredients into local ones.23 As the previous debate about whether French foie gras could be included in Kyoto cuisine demonstrates, Kyoto chefs can now use ingredients from around the world in their cooking, despite the history of deprivation and abundance that may have shaped the diet in the past. As a consequence, cynics might wonder the degree to which “Kyoto cuisine” rests on the language used to describe it rather than on any particular ingredient or cooking technique.
The understanding of cuisine that can be extrapolated from the comments of Kyoto chefs hinges on a connection between prepared foods and local geography and culture. In place of a single standard definition of cuisine, chefs access a repertoire of landscape and historical references as needed. “Every restaurant in Kyoto interprets Kyoto cuisine differently,” explained Konishi Shigeyoshi of Mankamer. In an ongoing process of linking foods to local place and culture through the use of symbolically rich ingredients like traditional vegetables, chefs continually redefine rather than reproduce culinary traditions. Horii Masayumi owner of Dai’ichi quipped, “People might write about a dish that it is the same today as it was three hundred years ago, but that’s a lie; and no one would eat it, because in all likelihood something like that would taste awful . . . If someone maintained a ‘traditional’ taste like that, their business would end.” Besides acknowledging that prepared foods must change with the times, Horii corrects the assumption that cuisine cannot be viewed as an unchanging museum piece, and he challenges restaurateurs who purport to offer customers centuries-old recipes. Horii reminds us that Kyoto chefs put forth their claims of creating authentic cuisine within a competitive environment in which vague cultural references are easier to substantiate than more specific claims about what these culinary traditions really are. Accordingly, the ways Kyoto chefs talk about their culinary traditions are creative and fill the need to satisfy the desires of their customers—who are predominantly tourists—for something local and authentic. But their claims are also consciously vague. As a result, their definition of cuisine suggests how a cuisine is imagined, but this definition is less satisfying if one desires a more precise use of the term cuisine and its history. Kyoto cuisine, for one, has a much shorter history than one might at first think.
Chefs in Kyoto proclaim the long history of their local cuisine, but Kyoto cuisine (Ky ryri), like its counterpart Japanese cuisine, is a modern category: the word for Kyoto cuisine was coined at the same time in the late nineteenth century as the word for Japanese cuisine.24 To the extent that Japanese cuisine marked a nationalist reaction to foreign foodways, Kyoto cuisine was a measure of local food culture against a modern nation. This is not to say that writers in the early modern period did not associate different styles of eating with different places. They did. The vitamin-poor diet of polished rice in cities often gave rise to beriberi, which the Japanese called “Edo-sickness” (Edo wazurai). Shsekiken had a few observations of his own about different regional preferences in the early eighteenth century.
It is said that dining customs in Edo are usually extravagant: there is a special delight taken in filling bowls with pretty items, and somewhat rare tastes are sought out. The flavorings are light, but a little salty. Sake is not used often [for cooking]. It is also interesting that white miso is disliked, and that only red miso is used.
In Osaka, fish is often used, perhaps due to the location. Above all, there is disinclination toward anything simple.
Kyoto is far from the ocean, and depending on the season, fish and birds are rare. Usually, a lot of salted foods are used. There are many [chefs] there who are skillful in preparing [food] and clever in arranging it. Generally speaking, the most important element [in Kyoto] is the proper blending of tastes.
Shsekiken stops short of creating a clearer picture of these different foodways, noting, “Since there are many differences in customs in all of the provinces, it is difficult to write about them all.”25 Modern chefs may remember his claim that deprivation was critical in shaping the character of Kyoto’s foodways. But in Shsekiken’s usage, Kyoto seems to be at a disadvantage to Osaka and Edo, something Kyoto chefs have to compensate for by using clever arrangements and skillful preparations.
Shsekiken’s generalizations, such as a preference for salty foods in Edo (Tokyo), appear to ring true today when we recall the accounts of Kyoto chefs, but the geographic boundaries of Shsekiken’s places are far different from their modern equivalents. “Modern Kyoto,” for example, can refer today to Kyoto city or Kyoto prefecture, and the boundaries of both of these regions are far different now than in Shsekiken’s time. Kyoto city expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to engulf neighboring villages such as the hamlets of Awataguchi and Yamabana, mentioned earlier. Kyoto prefecture did not exist until 1871, when it was formed as an amalgamation of parts of three ancient provinces—Yamashiro, Tanba, and Tango—each with its own geography, local customs, and history.26 Local and countrywide spaces have changed so drastically over time that is problematic to view their respective foodways as static categories.
Because modern nations and regions do not have premodern equivalents, neither do the cuisines associated with these areas. Concerning Japanese cuisine, Katarzyna Cwiertka writes, “Like the concept of the Japanese nation itself, Japanese cuisine was built on two pillars—(1) a variety of local consumption practices, customs, and attitudes; and (2) elements imported from abroad.”27 Likewise, Kyoto cuisine represented an evolving affinity for local foodways in a city that was no longer Japan’s capital but part of a new nation, whose seat of government had been transferred to Tokyo. Or, to adapt Arjun Appadurai’s perspective on local and national foodways in postcolonial India, Kyoto cuisine represents an expression of “ethnocentricity” involving a “set of generalized gastro-ethnic images” juxtaposed against an evolving national cuisine, which was itself a conglomeration of different regional and foreign cuisines.28 The appearance of regional and national cuisines in tandem in the modern period is something Appadurai has noted about India, and Julia Csergo about France.29 This suggests that the rise of Japanese and Kyoto cuisine is far from unique and somehow symptomatic of the rise of nationalism. However, if we associate cuisine with modernity, this does not answer our initial questions about what, if any, cuisine(s) existed before modern times and how cuisine can be conceptualized in the absence of a modern state or industrialized society. Indeed, its assumptions do not even allow much room for these questions. Accordingly, scholars of Japanese cuisine have studied its history in other ways.
One approach that bypasses the identification of cuisine with modernity is to examine the evolution of different styles of cooking (ryri) to see how these gave rise to Japanese cuisine (Nihon ryri). Cultural historian Kumakura Isao, for example, has documented how the “main table cuisine” (honzen ryri) that developed in the 1400s among elite members of the warrior class influenced the kaiseki ryri of the tea ceremony in the late 1500s, and how that in turn gave rise to a style of restaurant dining in the early modern period.30 Kumakura, who avoids an explicit definition of cuisine, traces the relationship between different styles of cooking and food presentation the way a theater historian might chart the development of genres of performing arts. The complicated style of honzen ryri used for banquets, in which many different dishes were served simultaneously on multiple trays of food for each guest, became refined into a simpler style of one or two shallow trays of delicacies for each guest at a tea ceremony. This in turn developed into the multiple courses of small dishes served at restaurants, which is also called kaiseki today. Consequently, his use of the term ryri might best be understood and translated as “style of cooking and presentation.” In an edited volume, historian Murai Yasuhiko takes a similar approach to Kyoto cuisine, addressing its historical antecedents in different chapters dedicated to Buddhist vegetarian shjin ryri, honzen ryri, and kaiseki ryri.31 And this is also how Kyoto chefs trace their city’s culinary roots, as we saw earlier.
However, the Japanese word ryri has a wider range of meanings beyond “style of cooking.” A list of definitions of ryri from an authoritative multivolume Japanese dictionary includes:
Surprisingly, the now familiar definition of the word ryri as “cuisine” is missing from this list. This suggests a transformation in meaning for ryri when it is prefaced by the word Japanese or Kyoto: only when used in reference to a location does ryri seem to warrant translation as “cuisine.” Lacking this designation, ryri remains a slippery term. Used as a verb, it can mean that someone is going to cook for you, arrange something nice, or give you a beating. In English the range of culinary translations for ryri range from “cookery” to “style of cooking” to “a dish” to “a kind of food.”33
Kumakura’s approach in viewing ryri as a style of cooking and presentation has merit in a discussion of premodern Japan, since it is a narrower, and therefore less problematic, category than “cuisine.” Yet this approach also limits ryri to only one nuance, which may not be the correct one. An expert in warrior ritual, Ise Sadatake, remarked on this fact as early as the eighteenth century in his notations about food and ritual, Teij zakki.
The two Chinese characters ry-ri mean “measuring and managing” [hakari osameru]. Consequently ryri means a lot more than simply “preparing food.” One has to manage and prepare any number of things. Yet the heart of creating ryri is preparing foods. In actuality, preparing foods involves cutting and flavoring. The two characters for salt [an] and plum [bai], used in the word for seasoning [anbai], reflect the fact that a long time ago there was no miso, soy sauce, and vinegar, and seasoning meant to prepare a flavor using salt and plums.34
Preparing foods is the heart of the meaning of ryri, but Ise also reports that, to understand the full definition of the term, we have to look beyond “styles of food preparation” to consider broader meanings. Writing three centuries ago, he observed that, if we focus solely on ryri as food preparation, we will—even if we agree this is central to the term—miss something else that is critical.
Other scholars of the history of Japanese cuisine, notably Harada Nobuo, have attempted to broaden the study of cuisine by examining it within changes in the historical context.35 In his most famous work, Culinary History of the Edo Period: Culinary Books and Culinary Culture (Edo no ryrishi: Ryribon to ryri bunka, 1989), Harada established the importance of published cookbooks in helping to disseminate elite practices of cooking and food presentation during the long era of peace and prosperity in the Edo period, thereby linking changes in Japanese foodways to the development of the publishing business, the spread of literacy, and political stability.36 In a later work, he offered some ideas about the definition of cuisine in a premodern context. Harada distinguishes between foodways (shoku seikatsu), food culture (shoku bunka), and culinary culture (ryri bunka). The first term, foodways, is the broadest for Harada, and it includes everything from eating at a subsistence level just to survive to the most elaborate banquets of the elite. Culinary culture represents the most refined type of foodways, involving etiquette, rituals, and the intellectual enjoyment of food. Food culture lies in between these two terms.37 Harada saw that a culinary culture flourished in the Edo period among wealthy townspeople and samurai, and that it was shaped by published food writings. He offers a point of departure for understanding different nuances of the term culinary (ryri) in premodern Japan; unfortunately the relationship between his culinary culture (ryri bunka) and the modern category of “Japanese cuisine” (Nihon ryri), which he postulates as actually beginning in the Muromachi period, is unclear.38 “Japanese cuisine” would appear to be a category broader than “culinary culture,” but precisely what distinguishes its culinary elements is uncertain according to this model.
One tack that places “culinary culture” at the center of a definition of cuisine in a premodern context is found in Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. Combining a historical approach to food in early modern France with a structuralist view, Ferguson defines cuisine as a “cultural code that enables societies to think with and about the food they consume.” Cuisine, in other words, turns an “act of nourishment into an object fit for intellectual consumption and aesthetic appreciation.” Like Harada, Ferguson upholds the importance of published culinary writings in defining cuisine. Printed texts and images, she explains, turn “culinary practices into a cultural phenomenon” by disseminating ideas about the proper enjoyment and appreciation of cooking and dining.39 Though her focus is on early modern France, Ferguson’s method can be useful for understanding early modern Japan.
Ferguson’s structuralism is her reference to cuisine as a code, and it is reminiscent of the work of Mary Douglas on the structure of meals. Douglas rejected Claude Lévi-Strauss’s even more structural “culinary triangle”—his diagram of the raw, cooked, and the rotten that he used to distinguish “primitive” raw foods from the cooked meals of civilized societies. Criticizing Lévi-Strauss as too abstract, Douglas nevertheless affirmed that “food is a language that encodes,” and she undertook a lexical analysis of the structure of meals.40 Borrowing from the semiotic approach of Roland Barthes, Douglas compared the rules for meals with the rules for poetry to study how foods are combined into the “language” of a meal. This allowed her to consider what designated a proper “meal” as opposed to a “snack” and what was (and was not) suitable to be consumed. However, Douglas stopped short of defining cuisine.
The strength of Ferguson’s study is that, not only does she tackle the problem of cuisine structurally as a code, but she also relies on a historical approach, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of a universal model of cuisine that would be too broad, and so would have no meaning, or too specific, limited to traits found only in early modern France. In contrast to the other approaches to a definition of cuisine that pin the word to a modern context or limit it to cooking and serving food, Ferguson identifies cuisine as a schema that guides the intellectual and artistic appreciation of food production and consumption, with the caution that such culinary codes are products of specific geographic and historical settings. We can test the applicability of such an approach to early modern Japan, beginning with the story of Kawabata Dki.
Every morning in the early modern period, following a custom that began before the mid-sixteenth century and lasted until 1868, a man named Kawabata Dki brought the emperor a breakfast that the emperor would not eat. Dki was the hereditary name given to the owner of the oldest confectionery business in Kyoto—one that is still in operation and famous for its chimaki, a jelly of kudzu starch (kuzu) wrapped in bamboo grass (sasa), and for other sweets, particularly the “flower petal rice cakes” (hanabira mochi) sold at the new year in limited amounts and coveted by practitioners of the tea ceremony.
In the centuries that they served the emperor his breakfast, the various successors in the Dki line worked as imperial purveyors, supplying the imperial court with rice cakes (mochi) and other foodstuffs for ceremonies and banquets.41 However, Dki delivered the emperor’s breakfast free of charge. This is not to say that Dki was not rewarded in other ways. The gate he used every morning to enter the imperial compound, which remains just to the east of the main southern gate (kenreimon) of the palace in Kyoto, was dubbed the Dki Gate (Dki mon). His daily visits caught the attention of chroniclers in the capital, including the bakufu official Kanzawa Teikan (1710–95), who in 1791 mentions Dki in his jottings on local society called Pasqueflower (Okinagusa). Centuries later, school texts up to the end of World War II cited Dki as an example of popular loyalty to the emperor.42
The history of the Kawabata household is told in more than a hundred documents in the family’s possession, which are themselves recognized as “important tangible cultural artifacts” (ykei bunkazai) by the Kyoto city government. The Kawabata family descended from a samurai named Watanabe Susumu (n.d.).43 According to the family’s 1805 chronicle, Mirror to our Household (Ie no kagami), Watanabe moved from the village of Toba south of Kyoto to the capital around 1500 and established a shop to the west of the imperial court compound; this was the site of the family’s residence until the twentieth century.44 Learning of the hardship of the emperor and court, whose finances had suffered during the Warring States period, when warfare disrupted or ended the flow of income from provincial landholdings, Watanabe Susumu and his son-in-law, Dki I (d. 1592), began taking food to the emperor in the era of Gokashiwabara (r. 1500–26).45 One painting in Mirror to Our Household depicts Dki taking food to the emperor, who is living in a building with a hole in the roof. Another shows the dire need of the emperor for this breakfast, as samurai steal into the imperial compound and make off with chimaki (see plate 1).
By 1568, the year that warlord Oda Nobunaga entered Kyoto, the custom of these food offerings crystallized as a breakfast called “morning things” (oasa or oasanomono) in the language of the court. The oasa consisted of six spheres the size of baseballs made from small rice cakes covered in unsweetened, salted adzuki bean paste (shio an). Dki placed the oasa into three “Chinese chests” (tbitsu) that fitted one inside the other, and he carried this into the imperial palace every day around 10 A.M. These rice cakes would have been hearty to eat, if largely tasteless, but the emperor was not in a financial position to ignore this largesse in the Warring States period.
FIGURE 2. Chimaki. Courtesy of Kawabata Dki.
The first Dki was a scholar, poet, and student of the tea ceremony under Takeno J’ (1502–55) and later Sen no Riky (1522–91), masters who today are associated with the founding of “rustic tea” (wabicha), the tea ceremony in its simplest form.46 Dki II (d. 1608) also studied the tea ceremony.47 Thereafter, every head of the family took the Dki name as a business name, but it was not until the fourth head of the family (d. 1686) that the family name changed from Watanabe to “Riverbank” (Kawabata), a reference to the small stream near the family’s home. The family made its livelihood as imperial purveyors, selling rice cakes, chimaki, rice and beans (sekihan), and other prepared foods used for ceremonies in the inner court.48 It cultivated relations with the warrior ruling elite and continued its cultural activities. The second Dki sent chimaki to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the warlord who would later unify Japan, when he was encamped at Yamazaki in 1582, and Hideyoshi later invited Dki to a tea ceremony presided over by Sen no Riky.49 Dki is mentioned as a participant in Record of Riky’s One Hundred Teas (Riky hyakkaiki).50
Besides daily breakfast, the Dki household and other commoners living near the imperial compound supplied the court with various essentials.51 Dki’s neighborhood provided charcoal and tatami mats when needed, and Dki led a coalition of six neighboring wards charged by Oda Nobunaga in 1577 to rebuild the court buildings. In his capacity as “sake supplier” (sake yaku), Dki supplied sake, apparently a necessity at such building projects. A pronouncement from Maeda Gen’i (1539–1602), retainer to Nobunaga and then Hideyoshi, recognized in 1584 the loyalty and service of Dki father and son in reconstructing imperial buildings.52 Included in the construction project was the special entranceway that came to be called the “Dki Gate.” Dki first used this gate to bring building supplies into the imperial compound and later to bring the emperor’s breakfast. The Kawabata household also changed the ash in the imperial family’s kitchen hearth when there was a death in the imperial family and replaced the hearth fire when a new child was born.53 This required the Dki household to maintain a “purified fire” (kiyobi) for such a purpose.
The “morning things” became a ritual in the first decades of the seventeenth century, during the reign of Emperor Gomizuno’o (r. 1611–29).54 By this period, the imperial finances had improved to the point that the emperor no longer had to rely on his “morning things” for sustenance and could enjoy other, tastier dishes and a more varied diet.55 That might have been a relief, because the oasanomono would have been difficult to eat given their size, equal to that of a baseball, and the taste of their unsweetened-bean-paste coating. However, this daily “rite of the morning rice cake” (asa mochi no gi) continued until the emperor moved to the new capital of Tokyo after the fall of the Tokugawa regime, in 1868.56
Understanding why the daily meals continued centuries after the emperor stopped eating them requires probing the symbolic meanings of the oasa for Dki and the court. The rite of the morning rice cake fits the category of rituals described by historian Lee Butler, which depicted the emperor as a divinity (kami). Like a deity, the emperor was offered food with the expectation that he would not eat it (in a conventional manner). The court maintained such rites in the Edo period, according to Butler, in order to signify the emperor’s well-being and to provide evidence of the court’s adherence to precedent.57 Historian Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi has asserted that court rituals were one of the principal reasons for the preservation of the emperor system, and that “many early modern Japanese commoners, especially in or near the Kyoto region, held the emperor in religious awe as a’manifest divinity’ (genzai no kami).”58 From this perspective, Dki’s daily visit to the court exemplified an intimate relationship with the emperor cum deity. In offering the emperor a meal he did not eat, Dki acted more like a priest offering foods to the deities than a purveyor preparing food for a human meal. Yet perspective on the custom has changed, even in the Dki household. In 1990, the fifteenth head of the Dki family complained that the cost of providing a free breakfast to the emperor every day for more than three hundred years amounted to ¥12 million (more than a hundred thousand dollars).59 Nevertheless, for this largesse the Kawabata household received imperial patronage, and the prestige of their close connections with the court has enabled the Kawabata to thrive to this day as a leading confectionery business in Kyoto.
At first glance the emperor’s uneaten breakfast might appear to be a quaint custom, but it was an important exercise that confirmed perceptions of the emperor’s sacred place on earth and of Kawabata Dki’s special relationship with him. The six baseball-size, bean-paste-covered rice-cakes would have been difficult to swallow, but in a form of gastronomic ritual, the emperor and Dki turned cooking and eating into acts of devotion and mystery. The uneaten breakfast had such meanings because it supported popular views of the emperor and conformed to the rules of a culinary code “that enables societies to think with and about the food they consume,” to recall Ferguson’s definition.
There are other examples of what we might call conspicuous non-consumption. One of these is found among commoners in the Edo period, in the celebration of “first eating solid foods” (kuizome), a custom still practiced in parts of Japan. Kuizome occurs about a hundred days after a child’s birth, when the family presents the baby with boiled vegetables, grilled sea bream, rice and red beans (sekihan), and other dishes that the infant cannot possibly eat, but which have important symbolic meanings. Parents pretend to feed the child, using chopsticks to convey morsels near the child’s mouth without actually offering the food. Although the child cannot eat these foods at this point in life, this ceremony is to ensure that the child will be able to consume them later in life and grow up healthy.60 Sometimes the tray bearing these foods also has a small rock on it meant “to strengthen the child’s skull” (atama ga kataku naru), which is a prayer for health for the child, not for stubbornness.61
In a much earlier and more elevated example (described in chapter 3), Annual Rites of the Kemmu Period (Kemmu nenj gyji, 1330), a guide to courtly rituals, provides directions to the emperor on how to handle prepared foods in a ritual manner. Rather than eat foods served at certain ceremonies, the emperor should, according to this guide, simply tap his tray to indicate that he has eaten: “Remove the chopsticks from the tray, or pretend to remove them, and signify that you have eaten by making a noise with the chopsticks.”62 Such an act further distinguished the emperor from normal human beings, who must, or would deign to, eat in front of others. The ritual would have served the efforts of Emperor Godaigo (1288–1339), who reigned in the Kemmu period, to present himself on a par with gods and enlightened beings, a connection also made in several posthumous portraits of the sovereign.63
One or two examples of the importance of uneaten foods are insufficient to substantiate a culinary code in premodern Japan based on creating meanings by conspicuous nonconsumption. But, in a book-length treatment of the subject, practices that seem at first to be counterintuitive to the definition of cuisine might actually be understood as central to it. In the medieval and early modern periods, not eating certain foods in specific contexts marked these foods as special, highlighting their aesthetic or mystical properties and making these qualities available to the diner. It can be said that not eating these dishes allowed the food to be consumed in other ways. Thus, to adapt Ferguson’s definition of cuisine, uneaten foods were the quintessential “object[s] fit for intellectual consumption and aesthetic appreciation.”
The importance of uneaten food in Japan’s culinary code remained a constant in the period surveyed in this book, from approximately 1400 to 1868, but there were also important developments catalyzed by the dissemination of specialized knowledge in the early modern period, and these brought this culinary code to a culmination, warranting the “early modern” focus of my book’s title. This culinary code based on nonconsumption began with medieval chefs. The introduction of new foods and the creation of new genres of gastronomic writings in the early modern period—culinary books published for a general audience—enabled medieval customs of conspicuous nonconsumption to become a discursive technique. That is to say, instead of offering advice about preparing foods that would not be eaten, early modern culinary books focused on descriptions of food that would not, or could not, be prepared, as authors gave readers a chance to read about elaborate banquets and fantastic dishes that they could never eat in real life. In the rigidly controlled society of early modern Japan, these culinary fantasies offered vicarious pleasures otherwise denied readers due to their social status and economic level; and this was possible precisely because cuisine provided guidelines for creating and enjoying these fantasies.
Japanese cuisine has hitherto been synonymous with the modern nation-state, but my study challenges such an assertion. Cuisine in early modern Japan may have lacked a referent such as the nation, but it was still a powerful means to draw out the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual qualities of food. Consequently, rather than assume an artificial starting point for cuisine sometime after 1868, or narrow the discussion of cuisine to the history of styles of food preparation, my approach to cuisine as a fantasy with food reveals how chefs, food writers, and their audiences of diners and readers were dreaming with food centuries before they took it to represent “an imagined national identity and cultural homogeneity,” to recall Cwiertka’s definition of modern Japanese cuisine. Indeed, the existence of a sophisticated and widely understood culinary code in early modern Japan helps explain why new categories for signifying with food, such as “Japanese cuisine” and “Kyoto cuisine,” could be so quickly formulated and assimilated in the Meiji period. Despite any excitement these innovations might stir in us, we should not forget that they also mark a circumscription in the imaginative potential for foods to signify things other than country and race. This book, then, is as much about documenting what was lost before the creation of modern Japanese cuisine as about what has remained.