“FOOD.” IN CONTRAST to raw material or “foodstuffs” that are the basis of prepared dishes, consists of any given unit of edibles that is accepted in a particular culture. An apple, a bowl of soup, or a steak are equally “foods.” “Cooking” refers to ways in which foods are prepared, whether by the mechanical processing of a foodstuff (peeling an apple), or the chemical process of applying one material or another to a foodstuff (extracting nutriments from vegetable and protein into hot water to produce soup). Cooking methods are varied, but fall into several well-defined classes that most cultures use to one degree or another. Cutting, pickling, drying, simmering or boiling, baking, roasting, etc. are ways of cooking foodstuffs either to make them palatable or nutritious, or to make them more attractive or interesting. When cooking particular foods becomes elaborated into a set of fixed requirements, that are also associated with rules regarding” presentation and participation or exclusion from particular food events, we have a cuisine. The choice of foodstuffs, their preparation, the rules of the cuisine, aesthetic rules regarding food appreciation, and ancillary issues such as food loci, are a “food culture” which generally differ in line with overall cultural and sometimes national differences.
To look at it in another way, particular foodstuffs are the domain of a species: all those things the species can physiologically ingest. The domain of cooking is that of the human species, which alone (with some very minor exceptions) actually prepares its food artificially. Cuisines can be found in those human cultures in which surpluses are great enough to permit the emergence of differentiated social classes, and their consequent attempts to separate themselves from others, as well as to benefit from the new and exotic. A “food event” is any occasion in which food or drink are ingested. Many such involve imposed rules and processes which are culturally valued. A “meal” is a major food event, usually one that is scheduled on a daily basis, and which, in any society, forces the eater or “diner” to engage in a complex of such culturally valued behaviours. The food culture of a society encompasses all those issues relating to food: not only its consumption, but its production, trade, effects, and sources as well.
Food is thus at one and the same time an intensely personal activity and one of the most highly socialised activities humans engage in (Clark 1975). It is, ultimately, a cultural product which must be examined using tools that are applied to other aspects of culture. Before we enter the world of Japanese food, therefore, it is necessary to provide a framework for the discussion. This framework is heavily based on the works of others: the theoretical discussion of food has been ongoing for close to three thousand years.
Necessarily, we cannot, nor should we, provide complete details of the ins and outs of the discussion, some of which is highly abstruse and contentious. Nonetheless, in order to frame what will be said subsequently, we will briefly describe some of the ideas linking human culture and human food.
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, A number of thinkers have devoted some of their attention to the humble issue of food. Some of these considerations have been focused on issues relating either to nutrition (which we touch on here only lightly) or as an element in human morality, relationship with the gods, or propriety.
Philosophical thinking about food in the West can be traced at least to Epicurus, in whose philosophical system food played a major part as a source of satisfaction and pleasure. In contrast, for gloomy St. Augustine, food was a distraction, and gluttony a positive sin. It was not until the rise of the Enlightenment that food began to be viewed (at least among philosophers) as more than a distraction: Brillat-Savarin, a former aristocrat of the ancièn regime in France, exile, and cook, emerged as a major proponent of considering food in its cultural and aesthetic dimensions, something taken up by later luminaries, among them Alexander Dumas.
In the philosophical and theoretical thinking of East Asia, food was discussed both as an example of the points the philosopher was trying to make, such as Chuang-Tzu’s description of proper butchery, and was the object of regulations and rules to curb gluttony and pleasure, which emerged from Buddhist writings. For Dōgen, who introduced Japan to Zen, food and its preparation were an element in the attainment of enlightenment through meditation. At a later date, Motoori Norinaga, one of the major Shintō and nationalist thinkers of Japan, claimed a mystical connection between Japan and the deities as evident by the aesthetic quality of Japanese rice.
Examination of the main thrust of these ideas displays three prominent themes: food and its social aspects, and food and health, and, much later thoughts about food and individual experience.
Brillat-Savarin, in Europe, placed great importance not only on the pleasure of food, but also on its healthfulness. In this of course he was following common beliefs that held certain foods to be good and healthful, others to be less so, even dangerous: sets of belief that varied from one European culture to another.
In Chinese folk beliefs, a shadow of which has come down to Japanese popular practice, foods are hot, cold, or neutral, and a proper balancing of them is necessary for longevity and health. This relates directly to ideas of balance between the opposite polarities of yin and yang that permeate Chinese society (and to an extent, Japanese as well). These concepts were at the foundation of much of East Asian philosophical thinking, and ultimately underlie people’s beliefs about the healthfulness of the foods they eat.
Some of the earliest writing in Japan on the subject of food emerged from what was to become a major cooking tradition in Japan: that of the Zen monasteries. Dōgen (1200–1253), the founder of the Sōtō Zen school, and the man who introduced Zen to Japan, was also the writer of a manual on cookery, the Tenzō Kyōkun. His objective, however, was not so much cookery in the modern sense, as a manual on the spiritual relationship between food and religious practice. Later, cookbooks and monographs on the appreciation of food emerged, particularly during the period of urban expansion in the Edo era.
The other stream of thinking about food had to do with the relationship between food and society. Feasts and proper sacrifices of foods underlie much of China’s Confucian thinking about social relations with humans as well as with the divine. Food was recognised as a social force par excellence, both for its production – particularly, in East Asia, of the rice, which was the preferred staple and for its consumption.
Modern writing about food and society has followed two paths. On the one hand have been the numerous writers who have documented changes and the historical development of food patterns such as Tannahil and Mennel, writing on European food history, and Yanagita, in Japan, who, among his other writings on traditional folk customs, also collected data on disappearing food usages and history. More recently, also in Japan, at the National Ethnology Museum, scholars led by Ishige have been tracing the evolution of Japanese and other foods in recent centuries.
Looking at food in broader, world perspective, anthropologists such as Mintz have traced the historical effects of the European addiction to sugar, and Farb and Armelagos, among others, have tried to make sense of the vast material on food customs world-wide.
The social sciences – roughly sociology and anthropology – entered the food arena somewhat late. Moreover, less concerned with food itself, and more with using data from food studies to make points in (rather esoteric) intellectual and theoretical arguments raging in these disciplines, analyses of food have tended to verge on personal vendettas.
One of the first social scientists to seriously consider the issue of food in this century, and certainly the most famous such discussant, was Claude Levi-Strauss. In Le cm cru et le cuit Levi-Strauss combined two perennial French intellectual concerns – how people think, and what people eat – into an argument that reinforced his “structuralist’ view of human society. The structuralist view (put briefly, and possibly inaccurately) is that human mental life is based on a binary inclusion/exclusion principle. All human behaviour and culture is a reflection of that dichotomy. That is, human groups, religions, architecture and all other artefacts and sociofacts, reflect that fundamental opposition. Based on this initial (and still unproved, at least to the cold–hearted and empiricism–prone non–French intellectual world) assumption, Levi–Strauss has argued forcefully that food preferences have much to do with a set of principles – the culinary triangle – that derives from his structuralist theory. Put as simply as we can, the “culinary triangle” theory argues that people’s foods all fall into roughly three criteria: fresh/natural/wild, cooked/artefactual/civilised, and rotted/dead/uncivilised. Food choices, the use of cooking utensils, and choices of whom to eat with (and whom to eat!) are all based on this simple structure, within which oppositions can be constructed on structured binary lines. Satisfying intellectually as such an approach might be to some, it does little to help understand the empirical and theoretical questions we raise throughout this book.
British and North American social science came on the scene of food studies slightly later. At first, with the exception of nutrition studies which took off in the fifties, much of the work was anecdotal and unfocussed, a minor part of overall social and cultural studies. Such is the case with Farb and Armelagos’s attempt to lay the foundations for a discussion in their Anthropology of Food, which is less an analysis than a compendium of strange culinary practices, nonetheless at least introduced the issue to these disciplines, steering the study of food away from the study of nutritional practices, which had predominated until then.
Two major views emerged in social science, theoretical corollaries of ongoing debates that initially had nothing to do with food. In one corner, the symbolists, largely headed by Mary Douglas, with which others such as Fischler and Moulin can be included, argue that much of human food culture can be viewed (and, to a degree, explained) by the ways in which individuals and groups organised and elaborated on their intellectual and symbolic worlds. The need for psychic and intellectual order, the desire for separating types of behaviour one from another, all of these made the issue of food an ongoing intellectual concern in all societies. This intellectual concern expressed itself in using food in complex and elaborate symbolic ways, to represent, refine, project social realities on the field of social experience.
Douglas’s approach, and that of the many who have followed in her footsteps, leads to more complex analysis than would seem at first sight. Within the realm of all food systems (regularised ways of preparing and serving food characteristic of a specific culture), people assign psychological and emotional values – they think of their food symbolically – to their food. This is obvious from the most elementary observation. As Douglas (1982) notes, some food events tend to be highly structured by close and necessary (at least for the people involved) association between particular foodstuffs: consider the intimate and necessary relationship between meat and potatoes in North American and British cultures, or the implications of the term “fish-and-chips” or “Christmas dinner.” This association between foods in a food event can be extended to the relationship – necessary, permitted, or forbidden – between food events or parts of them, and other aspects of life. For example, food has an important temporal dimension in most cultures. We eat morning, midday, and evening meals, and in some societies such as the Chinese (dim-sum), Philippine (merienda) and British (“elevenses”), “in-between meals”: a temporal cycle that is rarely modified, and which has emerged as a function of economic and social processes. There are also cycles of lower frequency, such as weekly (Sunday dinner in the UK), or yearly (Christmas dinner). This relationship between food and other social events must also be explored in terms of autonomy and unity: how dependent are foods and food events on other social and cultural features, such as seasons or places? Is it proper to eat a dinner in a public place such as a bank, and (at the level of discrete food events) is it a social solecism to drink green tea with red meat? And for the foodstuffs themselves as Douglas notes, we must take account of textures, tastes, how they interrelate, whether they can be prepared in public or must be dealt with in private, and whether these decisions are left open to individuals, whether they have sanctions attached to them, or whether they are socially confined to a class or group.
Douglas and her followers’ major intellectual critics were Harris and his students. In a series of essays they argue that human food practices, even those that seemed highly illogical, such as the Hindu ban on meat, the American preference for beef (which some such as Sahlins argued was symbolic) could better be understood from a material viewpoint. That is, Harris and his students argue convincingly, Hindus do not eat their cows not because cows have symbolic value: they do not eat them because the products of living cows – milk, and particularly dung – are of greater value to the poor Indian farmer, than the small amount of meat the cows would yield if slaughtered. Similarly, Americans eat more beef than pork (by a large factor), not because beef is associated with the frontier and the wild days of the West, but because the rise of the railways, on the one hand, and the use of arable land for corn (maize) on the other, made the use of the West’s prairies for cattle more profitable, and cheaper, than would have been the case with pigs.
These two viewpoints, which we have presented in rather stark contrast, are in our view not necessarily antithetical. As we shall see subsequently from the Japanese material, people very clearly use their foods in symbolic ways, Yet, at the same time there are often very good identifiable material reasons for food choices and food usages. Both the “materialist” and the “symbolist” views, therefore, can contribute to our understanding of Japanese food culture.
Jack Goody has approached the issue of food from another angle. In Cooking, Cuisine, and Class, he argued convincingly that the elaboration of food we call cooking is universal to all human societies. But this universal practice is directly related, and receives an additional twist, by the introduction of social features which essentially divide human societies into two types. On the one hand are those many societies (or parts thereof) in which the energy and other resources in supply are sufficient, or barely more than that, to subsist on. Though a smattering of individuals may have more resources at their command, these are generally dissipated in striving after political gain, the acquisition of force, raising more offspring, or whatever. Such societies are generally labelled “subsistence societies” and most societies in human history have been of this sort. On the other hand, some societies produce surpluses which go well above that needed for the subsistence of its members. As is usual in human societies, someone –having more strength, greater organisational abilities, more force, more brains, or is better situated – comes along and skims off the surplus. These societies tend to be able to afford specialists, individuals who do not provide food for themselves or their immediate families, but subsist, as it were, at one remove from subsistence. Rulers (of all stripes and political persuasions) and tax officials are of this kidney. So are professional artists – painters, sculptors, musicians, and cooks – and their assorted hangers on – critics, publishers, cookbook writers, anthropologists. Such societies are differentiated societies, and they tend, with time and the multiplication of specialist roles, to become complex: roles multiply, become dependent on one another, resources are transmuted into various material and symbolic goods.
Simple societies, says Goody, practice “cooking” – preparing food for consumption usually by heating. Materials are simple, and most are of local derivation, rates of food change are low, and dependent, ultimately, on local climatic and environmental conditions. There is no or little specialisation, no or little differences between members of the society in terms of foods eaten, preparation methods, and so on, even if a section of the populace benefits from greater qualities of food. Complex societies, on the other hand, have a “cuisine” – a complex, rule-bound social systems of food preparation and consumption related inextricably to complex social matrixes in those societies. Among their specialists are some who deal in supplying foods from afar, foods that are rare, or foods that need special costly preparation. There are specialists in food preparation, and others who specialise in food presentation.
There are tensions associated with such class distinctions. Such is the case in both European society (modern or early) as in the dominant East Asian societies, as K.C. Chang (1977) points out. In the modern context, one needs to add that societies which practice a cuisine also have extensive and intensive contacts with other cultures which supply them both with raw materials and with new ideas for their cuisine (among other things).
The relationship between cuisine and its social matrix is complex and derives from the complexity of the internal relationships of such “differentiated” societies. Several of these issues are particularly relevant to the Japanese case. First, there is an increased range of ingredients and menus resulting from contacts with other societies, and from the continuous interplay between food habits of different classes. Second, cuisines which otherwise might become locally specialised, or, as in the case of the Japanese, have become so, become universalised with universal literary access. Simply put, among things people read are cookbooks and cooking magazines. And there is often a link between eating and health, and a public assessment of consumables as bad or good (Goody 1982: 192). Our focus here is therefore on a cuisine and how it develops, and not on the rather more restricted realm of “cooking.”
NOTWITHSTANDING THE (SOMETIMES thunderous) disagreements, some of which have been briefly addressed above, there are some points which, all social scientists interested in food agree, are worth pursuing intellectually.
One point of agreement is that the understanding of any particular food culture must take into account the historical and environmental factors that have brought the elements of that culture into being. This does not imply historical determinism. There is no argument that particular historical or geographical features necessarily yield particular cultural features. But there must be a recognition that environments determine agricultural possibilities, and by doing so, limit particular societies from pursuing particular cultural paths. So too, historical factors – political, social, technical, and other processes and developments – must be kept in mind when discussing particular features.
Sociologists spend a great deal of their time trying to understand the norms that drive and direct human activities. To simplify, a norm is a socially expected behaviour in a particular set of circumstances. That norms are “expected” merely means that they are not always received, and to say that they are socially expected, means that different actors, under different circumstances may be expected to behave differently.
In all societies there are sets of enduring “clusters” as it were of norms, which are associated together, and which demand particular behaviours. Some of these “social institutions” have strong immediate effects on individual behaviour and crop up persistently when we talk about food.
Families are clearly a central “locus” – an arena of activity – of food behaviours, as well as a universal social institution. A family is where most humans are first fed, first learn – by example and then by word – about food, proper behaviour in the presence of food, and the ideologies and beliefs associated with food. The household – roughly, the family acting as an economic unit – is the basis for food practices in later life, as well as for food practices, ranging from cooking and eating to changes in food culture.
Other social institutions are important for food culture as well. Two of these are particularly prominent, certainly in the Japanese context. One is school, where a large proportion of youngsters in the twentieth century, receive their socialisation into behaviours outside the home. This includes their exposure to new food patterns, which they learn as part of the school system, as well as from their peers.
Work constitutes another channel of influence on food practices. Where people’s lives are highly integrated with their work, and where one’s workplace is a major centre of one’s daily activities, food inevitably enters into the activities of the organisation in some form.
There is also a clear association between food and class. Those who are more wealthy are likely to have access to better food, more variety, and in greater amounts than others in the same society. As we know from Veblen, such differences are not only substantive, but also expressive: individuals who have wealth wish not only to enjoy it. They also want to demonstrate that they have the wealth, and to separate themselves in overt ways from their social “inferiors.” This proves to be the case in food consumption, which, in all societies, simple as well as complex, comes to symbolise and represent differences between classes and between individuals.
The ideological dimension of human life, whether religious belief or social philosophy, affects the consumption of food, its presentation, and its importance. Certainly, in almost all societies, foods have a religious dimension of some sort. Religion almost always is at the basis of justifications of particular food cycles, particularly annual ones, of festivity and restraint. Moreover, the ways in which foods are presented, the ways in which specific foods are consumed, come to assume ritual importance. They come to define, in varied and complex ways, who “we” are, as well as separating “us” from “them.”
Foods are universally consumed in cycles: one day replicates another, repeated days are part of annual cycles. These might arise from material needs, such as human physiology and the agricultural environment. However, certainly in modern industrial societies, these cycles are matters of choice, matters of representations of self and of society. Thus, paradoxically, the symbolic importance of choice grows as the material basis of food choice become less important: we choose foods not because that is what is available, but because particular foods we choose from a large variety say something about what and how we are.
Many authors have pointed out that food is not solely, or even largely, a social and collective issue. It goes, not unnaturally, deeply into the process of being and of becoming an individual. Physiological need, and bodily senses determine, in concert with social learning, what foods are desirable, eaten, enjoyed. Socialisation into enjoying and eating, from the recipient’s – that is the individual’s – point of view needs to be considered as well.
Part of the experiences individuals undergo in modern food cultures is the search for variety, paradoxically intertwined with a desire for standardisation of experience. The latter, following a well-known phenomenon most people in developed societies have come into contact with, can be labelled “McDonaldisation” (Ritzer 1993), and it affects individual experience and forms it as well. The search for variety of experience is also apparently related to the “keep up with the Joneses” phenomenon, in which individual drives for variety, or for display of wealth, are fuelled by intra-social competition.
Finally, an individual element that must not be forgotten derives from the aesthetic and artistic element in food. The individual artist-chef is under social pressure, as well as her own internal drives, to innovate, to create new art works, to find different channels for aesthetic expression.
The above summary does only scant justice to the width of theoretical insights that have emerged in the study of food. We shall be utilising these ideas as we proceed to make sense of the Japanese data. Certainly, we do not find ourselves agreeing with all that has been said, nor do we intend to settle theoretical debates and conflicts that have been raging for some time. Nonetheless, the overarching theoretical presentation above frames the entirety of this work.
2.3The Utility of the Concept of “Rules”
THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK we make repeated reference to a concept of social and cultural “rules.” It is an anthropological conceit (well, of some anthropologists, at any rate) that societies can be viewed as if they are composed of consciously and unconsciously known rules, that the “natives” follow. While it is doubtful whether this view does justice to the ways in which people think (Dreyfus [1997] a philosopher and cyberneticist in particular has been scathing about this view and its implications), it is a convenient shorthand for an outside observer to describe what it is the natives (or what the anthropologist thinks the natives) are doing. Some of these perceived rules are carried out consciously – individuals know, in any culture, at a conscious level, that, to take a simple example, one uses different tones of voice to children and to adults. Other rules are known unconsciously – who are “adults” and who are “children” – but can be retrieved into conscious knowledge, as for example, when a nosy social scientist ask ‘Why?” Of course, knowledge of these “rules” is not fully congruent between individuals, differs in interpretation, and is subject to debate, manipulation, chicanery, and other individual vagaries. Food can be subject to this sort of rendering as well, and it is a useful way to conceptualise how this very complex system we have been describing comes into being at an individual and collective level.
It makes sense to consider food culture in the context of rules for a number of reasons. First, it allows us to more clearly highlight elements of a given food culture, whether for comparative purposes, or so that we can see where such rules lead. Moreover, rules, as we all know, are often enough breached in actual execution, otherwise, of course, we would need neither police nor critics. Rules, for the social scientist, are an outsider’s attempt to reach the essence of the actor’s norms. Quite often, actors are unconscious of abstracted rule(s): they know, somehow, that things are either wrong or right. One of the experiments we did during the progress of this study illustrates this nicely: asked to place items on a plate or table, Japanese respondents always had a clear idea of right or wrong placement, but could rarely explain why or how they reached that intuitive conclusion.
There are rules for all elements of a food culture. In some areas of life, or for some instances, in some societies, they may be formally stated – “the soup spoon goes outwards of the knife on the right side” or informally known – “cooked savoury vegetables go with meat.” And as such, they are not innate. They must be learned, consciously or unconsciously. How we learn these rules, from whom, and when, therefore, become issues of concern if we try to understand them. Clearly, too, these rules differ, in small details or large, depending on who is doing the teaching, and whom the learning. This is another way of saying that subsets of food rules apply to different parts of the population. And, where we find that many, or most of the rules are followed in the same way throughout a society, we can argue that the society itself is relatively homogenous: something we see in Japanese food culture, and which reflects a great degree of uniformity within Japanese culture as a whole.1
That rules are a way to achieve what Elias calls “the civilisation of appetite,” arises because certain segments of the population have more power, have more access to the media, and are able to impose their wills to a greater degree on others: their rules prevail. Thus it is in Japan, where local standards of taste remain as cultural codicils, whereas the culture as a whole has accepted the aesthetic and taste canons of a relatively small elite – samurai and merchants –and of the relatively restricted Tokyo area, albeit influenced by more “refined” Kyoto taste and Osaka lavishness. This, the rules of three great cities, and particularly of their wealthier inhabitants, are what is familiar overseas as Japanese cuisine.
2.4The Food Event as an Analytical Phenomenon
FOOD CAN BE conceptualised in terms of several conceptual issues. The basic phenomenon is that of food itself. The nature of consumed foodstuffs in any society raises a series of interrelated questions: What foodstuffs (that is, edible material) are chosen to make food in any particular society? How is it handled or prepared, a question which raises issues of available technology and manpower.
Food consumption is not haphazard. Food is usually consumed in ritualised settings, with certain people in attendance, and specific rules regarding the event. The issue of events, different for each society, raises a number of questions as well, which we should be able to answer: we should know which foods are associated (or forbidden) with which other foods and why, who participates in which events, who prepares and serves, what determines event timing and repetition, what ideas are associated with foods or arrangements of foods. Closely related, and serving as a bridge to larger issues such as religion and ideology, are questions of timing. When do food events occur? What triggers them? Under what circumstances are they repeated, and by whom, for what reasons?
The foregoing issues also raise questions of broader scope, such as the autonomy of the foods and events, their association with other cultural features, and so on. And at a more complex, and abstract level, we should ask questions of general cultural significance, two of which are particularly important: how is the food system related to the corpus of other arts in the society concerned? And, how does change come about, if at all, and what are its implications, both for the cuisine in question, and, reciprocally, for the culture it is a part of?
To deal with this complex series of questions in an orderly way, we choose, throughout, to focus on what Douglas has called the “food event.” Any occasion in which an individual human ingests something orally (to be pedantic) is a food event. Using this definition can of course lead into strange byways, ranging from the simplistic bovine-like event of chewing a stick of chewing gum, or more elaborately, a piece of betel nut, to a multiple-course multi-day Chinese Imperial dinner. But within any human food culture, there is to be found a central food event, one which, for the native members themselves, represents the essence of good, appropriate, filling and fulfilling dining. This will usually be defined in terms of the constituents of the food event – a staple, such as rice, a combination of foods, such as the Sunday dinner in Britain or the presence of a particular set of diners, such as the family. These central, or major food events we shall call “meals” which is more a bow to familiarity than a proper definition. Meals are useful heuristic devices because, at least in all those societies that possess a cuisine (and, we would venture, in all societies) there is such an event. Moreover, methodologically and empirically meals are a useful focus for examination because individuals in societies that have (or “do”) meals, can identify them as such (however called). A meal is a central food event, one that, normally, involves a household (if eaten domestically), and one that has a number of qualities associated with it. Meals generally include a central carbohydrate, they have a normative (for the society concerned) structure, they are consumed most often in the domestic sphere, with people who are part of the household. True, each of these terms requires some elaboration and qualification to be useful analytically, but significantly, almost every normal human being can identify such a food event for his culture.
Meals are composed of many elements besides the ingestion of food. And just as the cuisine as a whole is subject to change, so too are its identifiable elements such as meals. Even in France, where meals and mealtimes approach sanctity, there is evidence that meals are losing their structure and centrality. Such changes, as Herpin (1988) and others have shown, affect different social classes to different degrees.
Nonetheless, what characterises meals overall is that they are highly structured, very rule-bound events. These rules determine food choice, order of the menu, diners and diner behaviour. And when one speaks of meals, or of a cuisine “changing” one must keep in mind that such changes may affect one, but not others, of the set of rules. In practice, of course, changes in one set of rules, say in the number and order of dishes for a Sunday dinner, will also affect others. After all, if one is serving fewer dishes in a modern family, the server might need less help, and thus rules about who serves at the table may be changed as well. Moreover, with changes in the realms of work, of relations between sexes and between generations, there are bound to occur changes in such a way that the original format of the meal appears (from a conservative point of view) to be losing its structure. From another point of view, however, participants and potential participants are simply rearranging the rules: they are, in other words, bringing about change.
CLEARLY, AS ALMOST anyone in the latter half of the century has experienced, foods (as well as other cultural features) undergo change. Of course, we are living in a period in human civilisation in which change is particularly noticeable, sharp, and fast. It affects everyone, not always for the better. This is, in a sense, a direct correlate of the idea of cuisine. If food culture did not change, how could members of the elite maintain their supposed separation from the herd? As they reach for different and exotic foodstuffs, as they make their dining arrangements and rituals more complex, in order to highlight their differences, so too do they draw those with less resources into adopting these new fashions. Essentially this implies that change is constantly being generated within the system, whether it relies on exotica imported from abroad, or on elaborating whatever items (material, social, or behavioural) are already in the system. As Clark (1975a, b) observes of 19th century France, the ideas diffuse through participation in restaurant meals, publications, criticism, artistic presentation, literature, and every other media imaginable. In the twentieth century, films, TV, standardisation, international travel, and global marketing can be added. Significantly, this diffusive process which precipitates and carries change, can and does bring about two diametrically opposed results (and Japan experiences both). It brings about a diffusion of elite gastronomy to a wider audience (provided that audience is enjoying other benefits of a complex society, particularly economic ones), yet, at the same time, the standardisation we have spoken of above may also bring about a reduction in choice and in sensitivity to choices.
Food, as one of a large number of inter-related cultural elements that make up our society, changes according to general rules that affect everything else, though Mary Douglas has suggested the opposite view, that “pressure of the social system upon the food system will always tend to destroy the autonomy of the latter when a social system is undergoing rapid social change. This has the reactionary implication that social stability is favourable to the development of food as an art form and social change inimical to it.” (Douglas 1982: 111–112). As we shall see, at least in the Japanese case, this is not true.
Given too that Japanese society has changed even more radically than most (as the past 150 years of its history demonstrate) one can, and should expect Japanese food to have changed radically as well. This is indeed the case, as we show throughout the book. Moreover, these changes are still in the process of happening even as this book is read.
Change in food systems, as in any other human area of human culture, is often brought about by endogenous means (or triggered from without, e.g., Chinese migrations overseas have resulted in cross-borrowings between ethnic Chinese and indigenous food systems in Asia). That is, by the innovations proposed and carried out by persons in a society, who, for whatever reason, consciously or unconsciously create a new method, product, social process, in coming to terms with changes in their environment. Such persons may be individuals, or even collectives: several people working on a project, without knowing who was the specific individual innovator.
Much change takes place in the individual exposure to cultural institutions. People learn about change, demand change, because of their experiences as diners, whether at home or in public. If the restaurant is where change is bitten off and swallowed, the domestic kitchen is where changes in food are digested and absorbed. It is here that individuals take their first steps in infancy into the food culture of their society, and it is here where the decision is made – paraphrasing Lenin, people vote with their palates – whether a particular food is acceptable or not. The contrast between restaurants – public eating places – and the home kitchen or dining room is not just the difference between two spheres of activity. It is manifestly a dynamic relationship which, taken as a whole, is a core part of what constitutes any culture’s cuisine.
Individual cooks are under contradictory pressures to both maintain norms and standards, and to provide new meals, new taste sensations, whether for their clients, or for their families. The housewife expected to rustle up “something interesting” is, in the micro, expected to be no less ingenious than the three-star chef. Both of them also must operate under the same rules: invent, but with comprehensible and acceptable limits, or your production will not be accepted.
Nonetheless, initiative and innovation, sometimes at very detailed levels, are the order of the day. Many cooks are also artists, and like artists in other fields, they are drawn to experiment, to create new things, to push their actions to the limit. This is not restricted to the professionals. Housewives in Japan (and to a far, far lesser though growing degree, househusbands) try new things. New foodstuffs, new foods, new arrangements of the table and of menus. These are all in the realm of individual artistic effort: a response, individual or collective, to the aesthetic drive.
Another source of change derives from pressures generated within a culture, but which do not concern food directly. We deal with this case when we detail changes that have come about in, for example, convenience foods in Japan, due to social factors such as marketing, which are not necessarily food related.
Japanese culture is, and has been for the past century, a society in which change is the norm, rather than the exception. In this, it exemplifies modernity, to an even greater degree than Western societies such as the US (whose fundamental social realities have hardly changed as much) in the past century. These changes – in the size and composition of the family, in the position of women and children in society, in the work regime, in access to means of production, in leisure – drag changes in food along with them. This can be seen everywhere and anywhere in Japan. Some of these changes, and their effects on food, though by no means all, are detailed throughout the book. Many of those are brought as illustrative examples, and more detailed work is needed to uncover even a fair fraction of them.
A third source of change is that from exogenous sources. Whether these are the discovery of a new trade route, as Vasco de Gama did when he started the Portuguese trade with the Spice Islands, or whether it is the introduction of the microwave, curry, or meat eating from abroad, such changes have differing impacts, speeds of absorption and acceptability. As we shall see, Japanese acceptance of new foods is high, but there are definite parameters which determine how and what foods are accepted.
The importance to Japan of overseas trade ties, and of overseas ideas in technology can hardly be overestimated. Japan has also, in parallel, imported foreign ideas in the realms of aesthetics generally, and food specifically. Many of these, as we shall see, have been incorporated to a greater or lesser degree in the corpus of Japanese food culture. Not all of these new items or their sources can be documented, since they tend to derive from multiple sources, and to have been incorporated at different rates and times.
Japan has excelled, for the past thousand years at least, and even before that, in its ability to import and incorporate. Importation of new ideas, Ivan Morris has noted, is almost always followed by a period of closure, during which Japan has incorporated those new ideas and turned them into something that is peculiarly, and undeniably, Japanese. This elegant ability to incorporate outside ideas perhaps is the basis of Japan’s strength and cultural viability. A large number of ideas and of technological gadgets have been imported, then given that particular Japanese twist. The realm of technology is easier to identify. From writing and ceramics, which the Japanese imported from their close neighbours and gave particular Japanese flavours to, through guns,2 to VCRs, micro-chips, and microwave ovens. All of these have been accepted by the Japanese, and adapted to their individual, domestic, or industrial needs. Japanese imported Chinese forms of government, Korean and Chinese religious concepts, European industrial patterns, American management ideas, changed them, and made them uniquely their own. Often these ideas – Quality Circles, Just In Time production – were then re-exported to their places of origin.
2.6Food as an Aesthetic and as Art
AESTHETICS ARE AN important element in any description of food. Aesthetic elements are deeply associated with socially–learned preferences. In the following discussion we intend to try and show how the Japanese view their food culture in its aesthetic terms, and how these terms can be understood by someone from outside Japanese culture. Clearly, aesthetic choices, aesthetic descriptions, and aesthetic ideas are not easy to translate from one culture to another. No less clearly, trying to interpret the aesthetics of one culture to others is important. To do so, however, we must first try to describe the phenomenon of aesthetics in an analytical manner.
The origins of food aesthetic must be found in the human physiology. As Brillat-Savarin and later writers have indicated, food must be understood, if it is to be understood at all, from the palate, the tongue, the nasal membranes. Food links the biological characteristics of humanity, and its social impulses. Humans are addicted to sugar (which, as Mintz’s [1985] wonderful monograph shows, has had a tremendous impact on human history and demography), salt, and a variety of other flavouring and aromatic additives. By presenting these in varied combinations they indicate both states of being (“I am rich enough to afford this,” “Eating this will give strength”) and are able to make aesthetic – sensually pleasing – statements. Historically, as more and more flavours were added to the palette, as it were, different statements could be made, and laws of aesthetic presentation could be formulated, whether expressly or as covert rules known only to the cognoscenti. “Good” flavours can of course be learned. Curry (that is, highly spiced Indian food) and the appreciation of curry were learned by the British populace over several centuries, first as a result of trading with India, then as result of returned expatriates, and finally, by the waves of immigrants who brought their much hotter cuisine with them. The “dangerous” (as Rozin and Rozin would have it) flavour of hot chillies soon became a desirable aesthetic experience. While this learning was done on a social level, there is evidence to suggest that physiological reactions which are initially inherent in the human organism from birth, are soon modified by learning from parents’ reactions, actual experiences, and surrounding environmental pressures. Inevitably, therefore, an individual’s appreciation of aesthetic elements in food is tied directly to two factors: human physiology and human society. At the same time, however, an “aesthetic” food probably must also be a pleasing food, one that includes elements derived from birth, and possibly even from early human origins.
Moreover, as Barlosius and Manz (1988) argue, an aesthetic is developed not only from the satisfaction of a physiological need, but also from the process of elaborating on that need, providing alternatives and differentiation, all of which are, ultimately, supplied socially rather than individually. The refinement of taste, Barlosius (1987) argues, emerges as a society provides subtle and individual alterations to the sensory stimulation offered to members of a culture. These “alterations-within-rules” provide a number of things. At the physiological level, one would imagine that constant positive stimulation is engendered, since the nerve endings are allowed to switch from one sensation to another, which maintains interest. At the individual level, this elaboration is accompanied and also expressed in the form of elaboration on various senses: sight, smell, sound and so on, which are brought together in what appear to humans to be pleasing patterns. At the social level, these different sensual stimuli are accompanied by complex rules: the social persona, no less than the physical one, requires new-stimuli to provide interest. Thus the connection between class status and the emergence of both major aestheticism and cuisines is not surprising: it is the wealthy and powerful who, partly to dissociate themselves from their lessers, and partly because they have the means, elaborate on both the foods they eat and on the rules of service, presentation, and dining.
Modern industrialised and fast food show another aspect of that pattern: by providing standardised food, they eliminate the subtle variations that hand-made, artistically–oriented foods provide, and by doing so, limit the ability of those who eat those foods to discriminate. In effect, it “de-aestheticises” aspects of life. One has to be trained to detect subtleties, it is never inherent, and the standardisation which is an effect of marketing, industrialisation and “rationalisation” of food, is inherently opposed to its aesthetic quality. Though food industrialisation does mean greater accessibility and more gross variety available to all classes, it also, effectively, isolates those who consume food from their aesthetic and culinary heritage, a heritage and culture that is often extremely rich, as Grignon and Grignon’s detailed survey of 12,000 French households shows: a process we shall see is occurring in Japan as well.
Aesthetics, in any sphere of life, goes beyond the individual consumer. It may well be an inherent part of our phylogenetic makeup (since there is evidence of aesthetic sense in many hominid species, including sapiens, neanderthalis, and habilis), but the expression and appreciation of aesthetic arts are clearly forged in a social crucible. For the aesthetic purist art is art, immutable (and this, indeed is the position one of the authors here, trained in the arts, takes); for the more sociologically inclined, art is a function of/embedded in a social matrix (and this is the position the other one of us, trained in the social sciences, takes).
An “aesthetic” then, can be viewed as a shared taste, one in which more than one individual participates, and which evokes and involves rules of sensory reception and transmission. Not everyone, perhaps, enjoys oil-heated ova, burned grain, and fermented muscle, but most people can learn to appreciate fried eggs, toast, and ham: one is an “objective” or “etic” biological description, the other a “cultural” or “etic” one. One might evoke equal distaste in a member of any culture, the other would be highly attractive to members of some cultures. So we share, in our smaller or larger islands of common taste, a preference for certain foodstuffs prepared in certain ways. And we are able to judge, based partly on our physiology, but definitely mutated by experience whether the food has been prepared according to the canons we have come to expect.
We find the aesthetic impulse – elaborated to greater or lesser degrees – in all societies. But from a sociological point of view, there is a difference between an aesthetic and an art, which is analogous to the difference between cooking and cuisine. An aesthetic often gives rise to an art, and art – not the appreciation of aesthetic experience, but its codification – is thus a quintessential social phenomenon. In complex societies, where surpluses allow the specialist to exist, we can find artistic expression not as an individual or group expression of aesthetic preferences and sense, but as a social institution, one in which non-artists as well as artists are involved, one in which the economics of the system are complex, and one in which there is an interaction of roles, which inevitably affect the aesthetic. It is particularly important to note that in such a social setting – one of high differentiation and specialisation, and great complexity the aesthetic is modified by social positioning (that is to say, the Delia Smiths and James Beards have more ability to enforce their views than the Joe Bloggses and John Smiths), and, no less importantly, several different aesthetics, of different social classes, sub-cultures, and groups, can happily (more or less) coexist, and, indeed, as Mennel elaborately shows (1982), exchange aesthetic and technical ideas.
This effect is clearly observable in Japan. Economic distribution in Japan before and well into the mid-twentieth century left much of the population in the realm of a subsistence economy. While individuals could, and did, exercise aesthetic taste, expressed often in daily items, the appreciation of art and activities associated with art – specialist producers, critics and professional aesthetes, collections – was limited to the small percentage (circa 15%) of the population who were wealthy, and thus, by internal definition, members (potential or actual) of the art world. Since about the nineteen sixties, however, things have changed. Japan has become wealthy and powerful. No less importantly, income has been better distributed, to the point that over 80% of the Japanese population have been reported to consider themselves part of the middle-classes: an extraordinary achievement in what was a feudal-like country 150 years ago. With this process has occurred a process of “samuraisation” in which members of much of the society have adopted the aesthetic preferences of what used to be the politico-military elite. Flower arranging, Tea-ceremony, scroll-collecting, pottery collecting have become common achievements, indeed, prerequisites for any normal social and cultural life. Art, in short, has become popular. This of course has not skipped food: the desires and demands of the upper classes that Mennel documents so well, have been experienced, and indeed are craved by all. The aesthetic judgements of food and other aesthetic experiences are available to virtually everyone. A similar process has occurred elsewhere. The French bourgeoisie enhanced their cultural position partly, at least, by adopting the grande cuisine of the ancièn regime. By associating themselves with a (suitably modified) grand tradition, the French bourgeois shared in the grand tradition, became, in effect, owners of it, just as the modern Japanese middle-classes have.
Inasmuch as the aesthetic experience is an individual one, how can it be characterised and examined? After all, “chacun à son goût” and “de coloribus et gustibus non est disputandum” and yet, individuals are trained towards (and away from) certain aesthetic evaluations. Food is, particularly but not solely in complex societies, an aesthetic experience. In differentiated and complex societies, where a preserved and philosophical aesthetic can emerge (since only differentiated societies, with their excess resources, can produce the necessary social specialisation) the cooking aesthetic can also become an “art.” This does not mean that complex societies, whether the Aztec, the Chinese, modern Europeans or Japanese, are the only ones equipped to understand and appreciate art, nor that they are the only ones to enjoy good cooking. It does mean that they have the resources to devote to producing specialists who do nothing but art (if only as art critic). When we address the question of food as art, we need to ask then “How does the sensory experience translate itself into an aesthetic?” and “How does the aesthetic become art?”
One of the first to think actively on the issue of the relationship between the individual as an animal appetite, and as a thinking (and thus “enjoying”) being, and as a member of a society was Brillat-Savarin. His writing is notably devoid of most answers (except, perhaps, for his marvellous recipe for a cure for sexual exhaustion: Viagra addicts take note!) but full of important questions. The most significant of which is embodied in the French title of his magnum opus: La physiologie du goût (emphasis ours). We are unable to divorce social experience from sensory-personal experience, says Brillat-Savarin, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the realm of food. This does, however, pose a problem for a form of analysis that is quintessentially social. How does one deal with the realm of the personal and then translate it into the general? While this problem is an endemic methodological one – the issue of reliability – it is most strongly highlighted here, where every experience, every food event at the sensory level is a transitory one. There is no way to record a food event. And since these events are so personal, so intimate, so tied, as any psychologist will tell one, to primary feelings and infant emotions and satisfactions, they must be crucial for understanding how people function and why.
In the event, the solution to that problem is not one we can deal with fully. The only way that it can be dealt with, is by comparing personal experiences, and trying to translate them into some sort of common denominator, in the hope that the reader has similar physiological equipment and understanding. Inevitably, therefore, part of the method employed here is to expose the authors to a very great degree. This is not narcissism nor exhibitionism. It assumes, as a methodological device, that human beings share some inner sensors stimuli, and that, by analogy if by no other means, such experiences can be transferred from one to another. This can lead, as in the case of oenology to an over-proliferation of technical terminology which become in-group and initiate mysteries. The Japanese language does that as well. It has numerous words for textures which Europeans have no linguistic equivalents for. These Japanese terms differ from the oenological ones in that they tend to be onomatopoeic, rather than used as analogies, e.g. “flinty” as a oenological term for harsh, and in contrast pari-pari for substances that yield crunchily to the teeth.
2.7Food Culture: And Total Culture
WHEN CONSIDERING CULTURE, particularly public culture which crosses class lines and yet is mutated by this crossing, we should make a distinction, one pioneered by Alfred Kroeber, between culture, and fashion. Roughly, for our purposes these are graduated “shallower” instances of the same thing: of the ways in which individuals and their social surroundings interact to make a collective whole. The distinction is particularly significant, because it points out that people make choices about their cultural being. They do not necessarily think of it as “culture” (though many Japanese do) but by making these choices they are creating culture. Within this culture, fashion moves at a quicker pace, picking up and dropping items and behaviours through some of the mechanisms that have been discussed above. And even fashion has its internal waves – its modes -which add both coherence and instability to the whole.
What is particularly important here is that these expressive and visible aspects of a culture are intimately related to aspects of the total society. They can, of course, be divorced from a society, particularly where artefacts are concerned. We do, after all, enjoy Greek sculpture, Inca weaving, and T’ang pottery, even though the societies that produced these are long gone. But the living, changing movement of these artefacts and their creation are intimately linked to features in those particular societies. To add a level of enjoyment, we must have at least a minimal understanding of the social and environmental backgrounds which brought these – expressions of aesthetic impulse moulded by social factors – to life.
In the realm of food, most particularly in the exploration we are going to make of a contemporary food culture, we inevitably must try to understand something of the surroundings of the food culture described. Very roughly speaking, food in this book will be related to two kinds of social factors. At the micro level are the influence of institutions that impinge in an immediate fashion on individuals in Japanese society (as they do, in their local forms, on everyone anywhere) such as shops, families, and the media. At the macro level are features that affect individuals at second hand, and that derive from more overarching institutions.
At the level of individual exposure to specific institutions, individuals experience food in three broad settings: at home, at school, and at public eating places which, for the time being, we’ll call restaurants. All of these institutions are, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes alternately, conservative and radical. That is, they retain food practices, but also serve as a channel for food changes.
There are two institutions directly concerned with food with which we deal extensively here. One of these is the household – the domestic and private realm and the other is the public realm of the “restaurant,” that is, the public eating house. It is these two institutions in which most individual experience of food is located for the average member of Japanese society. True, other institutions may, and do have a major effect. Notable are the school system, where, particularly in the early years of education, students receive school lunches from the state, and by doing so, learn a “standard” (and also changing) Japanese food culture, for good or ill. Marketing – shops, wholesalers, producers, importers – also play a part, even a major part, in the making of Japan’s food culture. But individuals come into contact with food there more indirectly. Nonetheless, the household and “restaurant” are the major loci where food, in its immediately edible form, is consumed, dealt with, prepared, for most individuals. Thus, though we make extensive reference to other institutions, those mentioned here and others, we focus primarily on the two major food foci.
Choices in food culture are clearly related to, sometimes (as we shall see in food fads) a direct result of, macro-factors in the society. Industrial needs, sometimes dictated by a combination of financial, and political concerns, determine what foods are available, what not. Meat is expensive in Japan partly because, though demand and supply are both high, supply from overseas is restricted.
Major trends in the society also play a role and must be accounted for. Ideological considerations such as nationalism, more individual ones such as fear of pollution, particular fashions and fads in other realms of activity that sweep society, all of these affect what people eat, what they think about what they eat, and how they deal with their food and its ancillary issues. To add to all this, technological changes, their distribution affected by economic issues which are not always related to food, also determine, sometimes very strongly, how a food culture develops, and what it chooses to consume, what raw materials are available, even, sometimes, how people feel about particular foods or foodstuffs.
2.8A Structured View of Japanese Food
A MAJOR ELEMENT in this book has to do with changes in Japanese cuisine. Many of the foods and food-related issues we describe revolve around issues of change. Our own view of changes in Japanese food is strongly stimulated by the works of Mennel, Goody, and Clark. Broadly speaking, Mennel and Goody separately argue that upper classes, eager to distance themselves from the lower, elaborate on their food culture by the introduction of expensive new substances and processes, by the elaboration of dining rules, and by social exclusion practices in their food events. Lower classes retaliate, when they can, by becoming wealthier, and adopting the customs of the elite, which then tries to re-invent their exclusivity. Clark’s detailed model shows how French cuisine, as an aspect of French culture, evolved originally from the aristocratic culture before the Revolution, became a means for upwardly mobile bourgeoisie to emulate the elite, and was codified and elaborated by chefs in public eating houses, and then brought to the public through the growing influence of the media: journalists, feullitonists, and even fiction authors.
And what happens when, as in the Japanese case, an entire society “moves up in the world” as it were? Then we find that, with the intrusion of modern media and communication, an abundance of resources, and a willingness to learn and adapt. The entire society emulates the behaviour of the elites, and, specifically, of former, no longer extant elites: a solution which keeps a certain balance, and lowers the tension between the classes as well. This process, one we have called “samuraisation” after the class which, though no longer extant, is still emulated to some degree, is what has happened in Japanese society.
A mechanism similar to that in the French case operates within Japanese society to create, structure, and ultimately change Japanese cuisine as well. Moreover, the model of change that we posit here, assumes the intervening stages inherent in a number of modern institutions. Media are one important element, since journals, magazine, books, TV, all contribute to awareness of new things, and to their domestic adoption. Some social institutions that are peculiar to Japanese society play a part as well. This is the case, for instance, with the high incidence of gaishoku (eating out) that all Japanese are exposed to. Thus restaurants and bars become agents of change in the food realm.
Exogenous change (at least in food, and probably in other areas of life in Japan as well) involves a process whereby an item or cultural idea enters Japanese society –through returning Japanese, exposure to media, meeting foreigners — and then may be picked up as a curiosity by a limited segment of the population. As the item is interpreted and reinterpreted by Japanese users, more and more Japanese content is added on: social usage, decoration and presentation, associated social practices, and even substantial changes in taste, texture, size, and so on. Once such an object is “Japanised” it is ready to be broadcast to the population at large, who are able to integrate it into the vast array of cultural items at their disposal because it has acceptable hallmarks of Japanese use. The dispersion agents, in the case of food, are primarily eating places and the media, who, particularly if sufficiently stimulated by commercial interests (such as importers) find themselves leading a spurt of popularity for that dish or cultural item. This is the case, in recent years, with items ranging through Italian desserts (tiramisu), Southeast Asian sweets (nata de coco), and Middle Eastern vegetables (morohēya).
Throughout this process of change, however, whether from indigenous or exogenous sources, Japanese cuisine has managed to maintain and protect its own inherent, basic characteristics. These do not consist in the usage of particular foods or preparation methods, but in an underlying philosophy on the one hand, and a particular cluster of features on the other.
Clark, Priscilla P. 1975a, b “Thoughts for food: French cuisine and French culture”.
Douglas, Mary 1982 “Food as a system of communication”.
Farb, Peter and George Armelagos 1980 Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating.
Fischler, Claude 1988 “Food, self and identity”.
Goody, Jack 1982 Choking, Cuisine, and Class.
Grignon, Claude and Christiane Grignon, 1980 “Styles d’alimentation et gouts populaires”.
Harris, Marvin 1988 Good to eat: Riddles of Food and Culture.
Mennell, Stephen 1987 “On the civilizing of appetite”.
Elias, Norbert 1982 The Civilizing Process.
Ritzer, George 1993 The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life.
1This is not to be taken too far. Though Japanese and foreign scholars have for many years extolled the homogeneity of Japanese society, studies in the past couple of decades have increasingly shown the fissures in Japanese society, and differences due to gender, age, background, place of birth and education. Nonetheless, at least at some levels, Japanese society is far more homogenous than most other nation states.
2Japanese first learned about firearms from the Portuguese in 1502. By 1550 there were more guns in Japan (all of local manufacture) than in the whole of Europe at the same time.