WHAT DISTINGUISHES A Japanese meal is a set of ordering principles (hat must be understood because they provide analytical insight into Japanese culture, and because they form, for the diner, a structuring of the dining experience. Ordering principles determine how foods are set before a diner, what is meant to be eaten or presented first, how a meal progresses, and what determines this progression. Ordering principles also mean the progression of food choices over the year, which, as in most cultures, includes some knowledge of a ritual calendar and its bases. Inescapably intertwined in this description are two related issues: the degree and form to which diners’ behaviours are determined by the location, the social setting, and the foods eaten, as well as the abstract rules of aesthetic presentation and the degree to which these rules are relative or absolute. These ordering principles are complex and exist on several nested levels. It is also crucial to our understanding that though these ordering principles are overt and firmly connected, they allow, at the same time, a great deal of flexibility and actually encourage, rather than restrict, variation. This variation, however, is channelled along firmly defined lines. To put this latter issue into context, the reader can cany out a simple experiment: set the utensils for your next family meal on the floor of the bedroom, or, alternatively, serve the food in reverse order. That is, in the British household, pudding or dessert, followed by meat, vegetables and carbohydrate, followed by soup (or the reverse of whatever is normal for you). It will quickly become apparent that there are some basic inviolable rules whose disturbance may lead to screams of outrage, if not worse, in all but the most tolerant of households.
The issues surrounding Japanese food come into greater focus when we consider the strange and the abnormal. That is, we must examine extraordinary events, because it is their extra-ordinariness that points out the rules of the ordinary. Mrs. Tagawa’s dinner is a case in point. A middle-class housewife, she prepared a dinner for a small group of gaijin colleagues of her husband, of Whom some had experience with Japanese food, and others did not. Thus she was at pains to utilise foods that were familiar, in order to emphasise and present a Japanese accent that was yet acceptable to non-Japanese.
The table was set elegantly and with excellent colour sense in an eclectic East-West style. There was a low Western-type flower arrangement in the middle of the table. There was, however, no tablecloth on the highly polished wood. Instead, each diner had a table mat of richly patterned matte silk. It was a kara-kusa (Chinese twining vine) pattern, hand-painted in sombre dyes. There were eight diners, and the mats were randomly varied in turquoise, deep green, and mauve; no two neighbouring diners had the same colour. All however had matching paper napkins, Western silver cutlery, and crystal wine glasses and water goblets. In addition, there were disposable cedar chopsticks encased in white paper, lying horizontally on a chopstick rest, each rest different, immediately in front of each diner. The ceramic ware followed Japanese style in its variety of forms, textures and patterns.
The first course was already arrayed on the table as the diners sat down. It consisted of sashimi: two slices of salmon and three of tai (sea bream). These were served in low rectangular bowls, the fish resting on one leaf of coriander which substituted for mitsuba (trefoil), and garnished with carrots which had been pickle-cooked in garlic (in lieu of daikon), and a dab of wasabi. A small flat-rimmed plate nearby was provided for soy sauce. The fish had been moistened slightly with soy sauce to hint at its use for some of the guests. A deep bowl containing a cube of sesame tofu, also with a dab of wasabi, was to the side. A flat rectangular plate contained caramel-cooked walnuts (of Chinese origin), and two pods of boiled eda mame (green soy beans).
With the removal of the first cover, the guests were presented with osuimono: a dish of tofu and crab meat balls in a mild clear stock (dashi). This was served in a red lacquered bowl decorated with butterflies. One of the guests, unfamiliar with the lightness and warmth of good lacquerware, asked what kind of plastic the bowls were made of.
The third course consisted of stir-fried chicken bits in a sweet-and-sour sauce, which had been laid on a lettuce leaf not a Japanese dish, strictly speaking, but certainly part of a repertoire that was as acceptable in Japanese cuisine, as it was familiar to the foreign guests. A cold avocado and mushroom salad, on flat round plates complemented the meat.
The fourth course was quintessentially Japanese: tororo zaru soba. Whole wheat-coloured soba noodles, chilled, had been lightly mounded on red-lacquered, shallow bowls. The white, frothy, and rather sticky sauce was grated mountain yam. It had a mildly astringent flavour. Tororo is a quintessentially “mountain vegetable” dish, associated in many minds with rough, homespun and straw-raincoated farmers. Both the idea of cold noodles and its sauce, whose major interest for the diner is texture rather than flavour, were, if truth be told, little appreciated by the non-Japanese guests.
For the fifth course the hostess served ochazuke. Traditionally, this dish was a frugal way of disposing of leftover rice and cleaning the bowl. Hot tea was simply sluiced into the bowl, any rice stuck to the sides pried with the chopsticks, and everything consumed,1 thus avoiding the social solecism of leaving food in one’s bowl. As with all cuisine items, ochazuke became a dish in its own right, with the addition of garnishes that enhanced the taste of the dish, and its price. Many restaurants in Japan make a speciality of ochazuke, or, at least, offer several variants on the menu. One of our friends considers it the acme of Japanese food, something he remembers from childhood, and still prefers today.
Mrs. Tagawa’s ochazuke was garnished with wakame seaweed, sesame seeds, and salmon caviar. A plate of crunchy short-pickled cucumbers, was placed nearby for those who cared to indulge. Finally, the meal ended with slices of persimmon and kiwi served individually to each guest, and coffee and liqueur.
As in most modern cuisines, Mrs. Tagawa’s dinner caters to a number of opposing tendencies. There was little emphasis on rice. Though served, it was disguised in the ochazuke, which, under normal condition in Japan, would be served to end a meal in which heavy drinking had taken place. The drinks – wine, both red and white with the meal, and coffee and liqueur after – served to emphasise the need to cater to non-Japanese tastes, as was the gradual merging of two traditions, which was handled, overall, in such a skilful manner, that most of the guests were unconscious of the subtlety of the blending. The consumption of a formal dinner follows a number of rules, and this particular one, in which the hosts are Japanese and the guests not, illustrates how these rules are negotiated. The setting, overall, was Western, with the guests in suits, seated at a Western table. This was also set in a country in which Japanese ingredients were not available, even in specialty shops. Thus the challenge for Mrs. Tagawa was how to skillfully blend her limited Japanese provisions with locally available products to result in a dinner presented and prepared in Japanese ways, and yet would not be too much of a cultural shock to the uninitiated. In other words, we see the evolution of a cuisine not only in the process of the passage of foods into upper classes, but also in the passage between one culture and another.
8.1Learning Food as a Child: School Lunch
THE EDUCATION OF any child in a modern society takes place partly in the home, partly in school, and partly in public areas where the child interacts with peers and others. Learning and teaching about food in the Japanese case since World War II has certainly involved the school lunch. It is here that the Japanese child learns, in her formative years, to adjust to the requirements of others, including the rules of eating and food.
Kindergartens, and, more importantly, the hōikuen or day-care centres, to which many children of working mothers go, provide school lunches and snacks. Each child’s parents receive a monthly listing of the contents of these meals, as well, sometimes, as their caloric content, exhortations to “Feed me good foods,” and ideas about nutrition. Nonetheless, in many cases, each child is also required to bring a serving of rice to school. So that “he will eat the rice he is familiar with from home,” as one yōchien teacher told us. In other words, culturally speaking, they attempt to forge a direct relationship between the food of the home, and publicly shared food. From an early age, therefore, in public as well as private fora, the child is exposed to a particular form of meal: rice+. This in turn, transmutes itself to the later familiarity with, and expectancy of, rice as the definer of a proper meal.
School lunches also present the child with new experiences in foreign foods (if they have not tried them yet) since it is via school lunches that most new usages meat consumption, milk, whalemeat bacon, Western cakes as snacks – are introduced to the population at large. And while one assumes that the Japanese government makes efforts not to allow the school lunches to be used as platforms for advertising particular food manufacturers and their products, there is no question that tastes are formed for particular types of products through the consumption of new, and foreign foods, in the school lunch.
As in other Asian societies, education is very highly valued. For the past hundred years, since the Meiji Restoration (1868). it has been the ticket to a better life for the individual. Participation in the educational system has meant the success of Japan as a nation, as well as for individuals. Japanese children tend to spend more time, annually, at school, than many others (ranking consistently in the top ten worldwide), and. probably, tend to score extremely high in total hours studying, if homework hours, club hours, and cram school (juku) hours are included as well. A Japanese child cramming for the university entrance exams might spend twenty hours a day studying for at least the year before taking the university entrance examinations. Whatever is learned in school, is accorded a high value (if only because the school system says it is valuable), including food consumption. The process of education does not. however, terminate after childhood. The process of living, in any society, is also a process of learning. How then do Japanese, as adults, learn about their cuisine?
8.2Learning as an Adult: Social Interaction and Media
THE KNOWLEDGE OF Japanese cuisine that the average Japanese possesses is often impressive. When Michael first came to Japan he was offered a lift by a group of road workers in Hokkaido. He spent the day with them, and was treated by this Japanese equivalent of red-necks or Black Country coal miners to an exhibition and series of informed debates on foods, food preparation, correct seasonings, seasonal foods, where the best wild mushrooms were to be found and what was to be done with them, and whether the weakness of Akita sashimi establishments was compensated for by the richness of its winter cookery. It would be quite rare to experience the same breadth and depth of conversation with similar workers elsewhere in the world.
Japanese of many ages and backgrounds are capable of discussing their own food culture with a great degree of knowledge and experience. Some of Michael’s Japanese students, resident in the UK for several years, are amazed that they can neither find nor identify local or regional food specialities in the British town where they live. However they could describe, with great detail, desirable qualities of such foods as noodles and soups, and provide information about the “best” (most famous) places to eat these foods in their home-towns in Japan. Some of that, at least, is owed to a genre of popular Japanese literature – manga.
One of the means by which information is conveyed in the modern world is by mass publication. Japan is almost unique in the ubiquity and mass of one special type of publication – manga comics which are read by virtually everyone in the population. Certainly, they are a prime source of information for individuals blue-collar workers, petty tradesmen – who, in other countries, might read to a far lesser degree.
“The salt that goes with the tempura mushrooms is a natural sea salt. It is made in Australia.”
“Australia? Hmm, indeed, using this natural Australian salt brings out the best in the tempura mushrooms.”
“I never realised that one could make a meal solely out of mushrooms. And these are all grown in Japan, of course. Mushrooms come from Western cuisine, but of course in Japan, we have developed so many ways of making them.”
(Oishinbo #45: 22-23)
Manga are ubiquitous. The comic books, usually monochrome (though some, for obscure reasons, are printed on pink paper) can be seen in coffee shops and on trains, read by business types in three-piece suits, students waiting for their friends, and workingmen on their way home. They are truly books, soft bound, one to two hundred pages thick. They cover every subject under the sun, from baby raising to scatological sex. Several hundred manga are published in Japan every month. They have become a form of folk art, providing new narrative and artistic techniques, and serving as the launch pad for a variety of ideas, fads, and choices.
And they talk about food. The dialogue reproduced above comes about because the protagonist’s girlfriend’s parents are dissatisfied by a Western meal he invites them to, and so he takes them out to a small Japanese snack bar. These comic books – distinctively drawn by schools of artists with similar styles – are a lively and interesting window into Japanese society. Each book is divided into several episodes, with a curious similarity.
There are two general types of cooking manga. In the “lone hero” type, a traditional-minded or modern hero either learns or teaches the virtues of a particular dish or procedure. Thus the lone wandering stranger of Hōchō Mushuku (“Vagabond [Cooking] Knife”) who fails a challenge – to slice and prepare a particular fish – at a small fugu (blowfish) bar, takes lessons in knife sharpening from a recluse and returns to demonstrate his skill. In contrast, the other type, the “double-act”, has two protagonists, usually a clown and a straight man, muddling through life and learning about new dishes, procedures, or foods. The bumbling clown of Ajimonme learns to keep fugu safe after a tramp steals one of the fish and the entire restaurant erupts in an uproar for fear the tramp will die.2 Manga are also physically present in food environments as well:
Sitting in a small kabayaki bar and waiting for the grilled eel to arrive, one reaches for the comic book from a pile set on the side for the patrons. The drawings are in some ways more detailed than Western comics, the characters more human, as they hem and haw, scratch their heads, and the artist bends or twists their expressions or body movements to indicate extreme emotion or stress. And reading through the story, puzzling out the sometimes very folksy terms, one finally comes to “the picture”: at some point in the story there is always a detailed drawing of some dish that is part of the plot. A series of panels surrounds this “main course”, and discuss the dish, the procedure, or the food, in didactic detail.
“There are ten kinds of fugu in Japanese seas, of which we eat four kinds: torafugu, mabugu, karasufugu, and shirafugu”, says one character in a series of panels that illustrate the poisonous yet delicious blowfish.
“We make a Japanese version of mushroom salad by cutting up the mushrooms with Japanese (original emphasis in the text) greens, and delicately flavouring with sesame oil. rice vinegar, lemon juice, and salt,” details a counterman in the mushroom story quoted above.
Having been drawn to eat kabayaki precisely by such an illustrated story, one can now watch the counterman with greater knowledge and sophistication: we know what he is doing and why.
Cooking manga do not only dispense recipes, but they also drive home two other aspects of Japanese society generally, and of cooking specifically. Most of the comics extol, by demonstration, exhortation, and example, traditional Japanese virtues. The “ronin”-like sword-for-hire-but-with-principles protagonist of Hōchō Mushuku demonstrates persistence, strength, and masculine imperviousness (though one feisty lady mutters “Baka [idiot]!” under her breath as he walks away after she has made her favourable inclinations clear to him: modernity is found in strange places!!). The straight man in Ajimonme is always cheerful, hardworking, generous, and studious, and even his clowning friend – lazy, untutored, dreaming of wealth – learns a lesson at the end of every episode. And the surrounding characters (there are rarely any out-and-out villains, unlike the one-dimensional rabid villain-brave hero dichotomy of American comics) in the stories are complex, human, salt-of-the-earth types. Thus do we confound modernity and euphorise tradition. In other words, manga are and can be part of that ill-defined, broadly understood element of Japanese nationalist sentiment – nihonjin-ron – which characterises other aspects of Japanese cuisine.
And yet, paradoxically (and not always in the same panels, but often in the same episodes) we also introduce the influence of the modern world, Westernisation, and of changing Japan. The settings of course are modern – the tall grey buildings and multi-storey offices of modern Japan – but in addition, we also are taken on tours of Western foods, Western restaurants. We are often shown them as inferior unless Japanised, but the stream of foreign influences is definitely not forgotten nor ignored.
Manga are read by virtually everyone, it is to be remembered. And people are taught in manga. Taught not only about foods which one would not expect working-class people to be adventurous about, but also that they should be willing and able to try these “fussy” and upper-class activities. In other words, the manga by emphasising common Japanese-ness, and by showing working-class (and other) people as gourmets in their own right, encourages people of all backgrounds to pursue these foods. The manga (and other, more dedicated media channels, such as food magazines, home-maker magazines, TV shows, and so on) provide the average Japanese with a sense that these foods – some of them real “gourmet” items, in the sense that small delicate sensations are encouraged and encountered are the province of everyone, not just of the elite, who may run into things like that in their expensive clubs and big houses.
Certainly one gets the feeling that the strength of Japanese cuisine is in its very permeation into every nook and cranny of society. This is not to say that everyone eats that well, or has access to such foods or such delicacies, but that, when the occasion arises, even the roughest sort of person could know how to enjoy the subtleties of such food. An Ethiopian informant of Michael’s once said, “Every person should comport himself in such a way that, if the country suddenly decides to crown him king, he should be able to carry it of without embarrassment.” In the same way, the message of the cooking manga is that every person faced by a dinner of exquisite Japanese delicacies, should know what he is eating, and be able to comment on it intelligently. True, people rarely live up to the image, people eat a variety of bad things, junk food, frozen meals. But the ideological concept is there, is ready for exploitation, because of these popular media channels.
Two of the images evoked by manga – epicureanism and “internationalism”‘– are heavily played in the more specialised food and home journals. It is not surprising, parenthetically, that the third element in the tripod Japanese virtues, or nihonjin-ron – is dropped. For the reason that, primarily, cooking journals are aimed at a different audience, largely young, modern-feeling women. Their concept of Japanese culture and what it implies differs substantially from the male-oriented manga.3 Nonetheless, these too serve as a channel by which the fusion of Japanese and international cooking, and no less, the appreciation of such foods, reaches the mass of Japanese.
One of the most significant channels is the television-journal-book triangle of food media familiar from the BBC. Cooking and. no less, food appreciation programmes are legend. NHK, the Japanese equivalent of the BBC, has of course the lion’s share. And several monthly magazines, targeted largely, but not exclusively, at different segments of the female population, accompany many programmes. Here too there is a something of a line drawn between different target populations: traditional food epicures, modern foodies, young/older men, young/older women. Some of these programmes might explore the biochemical characteristics of a particular food element, such as riboflavin, to an (apparently) intent studio audience. Others are spoof or competition shows, in which peculiar or strange foods arc explored by volunteers or media stars. In still others, the intricacies of foreign food centres and attractions are explored in greater or lesser depths. And some shows allow the negative side of Japanese gourmandism to show, by the overt public consumption of rare animals: an exercise in conspicuous consumption that puts almost any other in the shade.
It is highly significant that knowledge of foods is so deeply disseminated to the Japanese populace at a popular level. It means, in essence, that Japanese cuisine has completed a journey into the creation of a cuisine that is mature: it has broadly disseminated itself into most of the populace, it is welcoming to foreign innovations and introductions, and yet, at the same time, it preserves mechanisms which maintain many of its original features. It is true that massive changes have occurred in food practices in the past one hundred and fifty years. These changes have occurred in every institution in Japanese society. Not even the most traditional institutions today are as they have been in Japan in the early Shōwa period, let alone during the Taishō. Meiji or Edo periods. Yet, somehow one is struck by the ability of Japanese to maintain the cores of their traditional culture, however much they have modified their surface expressions.
“WHAT ARE THE meibutsu (famous products or specialities) of this town?” asked a group of Japanese students overseas, when discussing a proposed trip. This question ‘what are the famous foods/products’ – is one that occupies a great many hours in Japanese books, travelogues, discussions, and television programmes. The interest illustrates some important conceptual differences in the ways Japanese and others see their own, and other cultures.
The idea that special products are best, or are finest, from some specific source is of course common throughout most culinary cultures. Dumas (1958) among others, records details of local specialities. Bedouin in the Sinai will drive fifty kilometres through rough terrain with empty water containers to secure some water from the granite-fed streams of the monastery of St. Catherine’s, and wine-lovers can recite the names of varietal grapes and where the best of them grow.
The Japanese idea of meibutsu transcends the idea of localism, transforming it into a medium of social exchange as well as an economic element. With the emergence of ‘tourism’ under the guise of pilgrimage in pre- and early-modern Japan, specialities of particular places started emerging into national consciousness. Many of these derived from the religious nature of the touristic momentum: water from holy springs, the fruit of particular mountains, the products of towns on major pilgrimage routes. However, as tourism became more and more a popular phenomenon, and as Japanese started exploring their country to a greater extent, there was more demand for specific local products which would provide the purchasing traveller with a bona fide identification that he had “been there.” A large number of books and magazines now identify and catalogue the meibutsu of various areas in Japan (and some outside it) to the point that the production of new meibutsu has taken off as a minor industry. Many of these meibutsu, perhaps the majority of them, are articles of food, either foodstuffs (tea, rice, saké, sweets, and fruit are very common) or ready-to-consume foods, including bentō (box lunches). Many of course do provide in and of themselves signs to the origin of the food. These might be by association, direct or indirect, or through actual icomsation: Yuzawa, in which a festival celebrating Akita dogs takes place every winter, sells meibutsu in the shape of white dogs made of mochi.
The importance of meibutsu as an element in “Japanese-ness” has grown because of the growing homogenisation of Japanese society. Since at least the fifties, and starling even earlier, much of the local character of the Japanese countryside has been swamped by the growing power of the metropolitan centre. This can be seen in all fields of life. Partly this is the effect of modernisation, and particularly of the growing power of the centre, mainly Tokyo and its government and economic offices, over the countryside. Partly it is the effect of communication, writ large. Communication allows young people (and older ones too) to travel to the metropolis – the vast urban and cultural sprawl where most Japanese live – and return from there with new, non-local ideas. Communication in the form of the media – printed material, television, radio – usually presents the central (as opposed to the prefectural/rural) point of view and elements of culture. Partly the effect derives from demographic movement as younger people leave the periphery and head for the large cities and population areas to make a living. A net result has been a decline in the population of smaller and more rural areas, and, in many cases, a loss of their sense of identity. Local authorities and individuals have countered this tendency by a variety of means, ranging from the provision of services through maintaining ties with “expatriates.” Certainly, one important way has been providing support for, and even inventing meibutsu, some with historical connections that imply great antiquity. This is true of the numerous new forms of bentō that have emerged in the past few decades, as well as attempts by rural areas to revive their connections with city people by the provision of special local foods (Knight 1996) and produce. This has meant that a growing number of local communities have been searching, some desperately and hopefully, others with more certainty, for foods and other items that will represent them to the national public. Of course, there is an economic element here, and some manufacturer or other, as well as shops, benefit from the commerce generated. Far more significant, however, is that the creation, regeneration, or sale of a meibutsu provides a rallying point for local feelings and local pride. Some of this is also engendered by other means, such as the creation or support of local festivals, shrines, and special events. The creation of a meibutsu, however, is similar to the production of that other icon of tourism, the photograph. Gifts from afar, brought back by one’s acquaintances, particularly when they are accompanied, as they often are, with a note about provenance and locale where they were bought, provide graphic, tactile, sensual testimony to the quality and goodness, the rich cultural heritage, the ancient history, of the place from which they came. They also generate publicity The local places become the equivalent of other places throughout Japan, a place with a name that has been noticed.
Paradoxically, this move is in a sense doomed to failure. The natural progression of modern economics foils this attempt simply because it submerges any attempt to be individual and noticed, into a large sea of similarly inclined efforts. Thus the Japanese postal system produces several times a year catalogue books from which one may order delicacies from many places in Japan without ever having been there, or having spent any money there except that for the item itself. Thus meibutsu from numerous places can be acquired without the main purpose – identifying the place they come from to those from the outside, and by doing so making it special ever occurring. Many meibutsu also become so famous, that they become discrete entities in their own right, divorced from necessary locality associations. What is worse, one can buy them virtually anywhere, possibly limiting the benefits of the meibutsu to the local economy. Hokkaido kegani (hairy crabs), an expensive local delicacy, can be bought by post, as can Uji tea, or “domu bentō” (dome box lunch) named for a particular baseball stadium, now evolved into a staple box lunch at nationwide baseball stadia.
8.4Changing Tastes: The World of Food Fads
IN 1856 THE Japanese had their second exposure to Europe, and with it, a second surge of Western food fads. The first had occurred when Portuguese traders first contacted the Japanese in 1501. The results of the first contact, culinarily speaking, were the introduction of maize, sweet potatoes, and wheat, largely in the form of sweet dishes (for example, sponge cake, which is known as kasutera and is one of the meibutsu of Nagasaki), and of a new method of cooking – tempura – still popular today. The results of the second exposure were more far-reaching, and this exposure is interestingly viewed as food fads, which, in the Japanese experience, have often been a first step in the Japanisation of foods.
For our purposes, a food fad is a measurable rise in demand for a particular food. Usually this rise in demand is for a food that has been either unknown or largely ignored until the fad catches on. It usually affects one particular segment of the population, and usually ends with the sinking of the food into obscurity. During the fad, new ways of consuming the food emerge, usually based on previously known and utilised modes of cooking, into which the new food is “fitted.” Or not. The examples we bring are from different modern periods, and have ended in somewhat different ways.
The arrival of a meat-hungry population of foreigners after 1854 did much to disturb the Japanese. Arguments pro-beef eating (the major preference of both British and American expatriates) went against the strictures of many Buddhist churches, though by no means all.4 In practice upper-class Japanese, as well as those who lived in the mountains and thus had access to game, had been eating meat in small quantities throughout history. Beefsteak “in the Western style” enjoyed a period of intense popularity from about 1890 to the end of the century. The number of restaurants serving beef had increased since Rengatei opened in 1868 at the Ginza. The well-known Iroha restaurant, dedicated to meat dishes, was opened in 1878. To put this in perspective, the American Navy forced Japan to open its borders in 1854, and the Emperor Meiji had been restored to “power”5 in 1868, which date marks the beginning of Japan’s modern era. Very quickly, the eating of beef became something of a Japanese speciality, a niche food in a culture of niche foods. Some areas in Japan, notably areas around Kobe, Matsuzaka, and a small area in Akita, have specialised in the production of superior beef for the table:
One does not normally associate steaks with Japanese cooking, so when we ate for the first time at Saito’s steak house in a back street in Yuzawa, we were surprised at the offering – large sizzling iron plates bearing thick grilled steaks in an aroma of charred, perfectly grilled meat. It was served with a knob of herb butter on top, with exquisitely cut vegetables: carrots and a tomato, and some snow peas, and a delicate scoop of mashed potato. Bowls of rice, of course, came separately.
“Was it tender?” the young son of the owner asked anxiously.
We assured him it was, and he relaxed with a satisfied smile.
“Steak should be tender enough to cut with a fork,” another friend explained later. “Pink inside, full of juice, but most importantly, soft as butter.” The British, who still occasionally eat hung meat (BSE notwithstanding) will understand the sentiment, but the process is completely different, a Japanese adaptation to Japanese taste. Cattle are fattened on a diet of beer or sake lees (and, not coincidentally, the three major famous beef producing areas are also famous for their sake), and massaged repeatedly. This gives the meat a unique flavour, and, more importantly, distributes the fat throughout the meat so that cut against the grain, the meat has a lacy appearance. A British butcher, proud of the milky layer of fat that coats his beef, would probably not accept this as “real” beef, but to the Japanese taste, the permeation of fat throughout the meat ensures the desired texture as well as taste.
And Japanese beef is of course expensive. Now that cheap Australian beef is available, some of the heat and price has gone out of the meat debate, though it remains high, particularly for wagyu (beef raised in Japan): one hundred grams of the best Matsuzaka beef retailed in 1996 at ¥6,000. Certainly in the early years of the century, the issue was not price: the pro and con parties, on the grounds of religion (Buddhism formally frowns on meat consumption), of Japanese culture, of aesthetics (meat-eaters smell, to the Japanese sensitive nose. “Bata-kusai [stinking of butter]” used to be a common anti-European epithet), raged for decades.
Whatever the case, meat eating in Japan has risen quite substantially. At almost all levels and locales, this has meant a Japanisation of the meat dishes. Not only the meat itself, as in the case of the more expensive cuts. For example, one major international hamburger chain caters to local taste with the provision of plum jam as a relish: a localisation not practised in most other countries. Meat exporters from the major meat exporting countries such as the US, Canada, and Australia, recognise the importance of such localisation. And, although many Japanese households continue to prefer Japanese beef for reasons of taste, many others will buy foreign beef if it is cut to fit their preferences and modes of cooking. That is, the preparation and presentation of meat, whether Western or Japanese recipes, is by the use of Japanese presentation rules. What had started as a fad, an element in the fad for all things Western, has become deeply embedded in Japanese culture.
To illustrate the issue, we can examine one of the categories of foods mentioned here: hamburger. For the Western reader, this, presumably, conveys a particular idea: a patty of meat, with or without garnishing, served in a baked bread bun. In the United States this is the ultimate convenience meal, and indication of “American-ness” (much more so now than apple pie). It is something that defines and exemplifies not only food, but an industrial and commercial idea and ideal. Hostages rescued from captivity, young children, teenagers all crave (at least apparently) this quintessential ideal of Americana.
The Japanese term transliterated here is actually defined and written in two different ways: hanbāga and hanbāgu. These two foods are, in semantic and culinary terms, indicative of the essential points we have been making above. A hanbāga is, like its American original,6 a meat patty served on a bun, with or without garnishes. Indeed, when “hanbāga” is mentioned, the meaning refers almost entirely to the product of one or another of the giant franchise chains that are available in much of Japan’s cities. “Hanbāgu” on the other hand, refers to a different dish. It is a patty of grilled or fried meat, covered in a brown sauce, served on a plate with rice, possibly pickles, and a bowl of miso shiru. It is a matter of choice whether one considered these foods to be related but separate forms (the presence of the meat patty, and their probably similar origin would indicate that) or whether one considers them two different foods: a Western food consumed by Japanese, made to Western (that is, American) standards or presented in a Western manner, and a “Japanised” food style derived from some foreign original.
In the broader context, the hanbāga – hanbāgu dichotomy exemplifies the issue of food adoption and adaptation in Japan. It indicates how successfully the Japanese have been in incorporating foreign foods, while, simultaneously, erecting compartments which insulate, in a sense, these types of experience and category from one another. They also indicate how Japanese culture “domesticates” foreign cultural elements, blending them into its own preferences, and, in effect, offering a smooth series of transitions from “foreign food” through “foreign food slightly domesticated” to “thoroughly domesticated” to “Japanese food”. Moreover, it is precisely these public eating places – restaurants, bars that provide the domain in which many of these foods begin to penetrate Japanese cuisine while at the same time they undergo a process of domestication.
More interesting is the emergence and transformation of another food – curry. Many of the British traders and engineers who arrived on Japanese shores at the end of the nineteenth century to exploit its riches, had arrived in Japan via India. Not unnaturally they had brought with them their culinary preferences, notably a British dish that had evolved in Anglo-Indian homes called “curry.” This was a derivative of Indian food tailored to English taste and sensibilities. In Japan the British taught their local cooks to prepare “curry” to their liking, and, not unnaturally, interest in foreign things in Japan being what it was, many of these cooks retired to open their own businesses.
“Karē-raisu” – curried rice – became a rage. Restaurants sprang up around foreign-dominated cities such as Yokohama. So pervasive was the demand, and intriguing the taste, that one Japanese newspaperman, carried away, one assumes, claimed that the wonderful food karē-raisu would bring civilisation and modernity to the Japanese people. In post World War II Japan karē-raisu became a staple of school lunches. Notwithstanding our friend Noto-san’s claim that school lunches have ruined the Japanese palate (or perhaps because of it?), karē-raisu is a staple in many school lunches and student diners. Its popularity is strongly reinforced by two things. First, the culturally popular mode for “internationalisation” that runs deep in Japan. It means, for most Japanese, the mixing of foreign exotic items into one’s daily life, including one’s diet. Karē-raisu is no longer exotic: indeed, in our survey, most people counted it as a Japanese food, and so it is. Another factor is the growing demand in Japanese society for convenience foods. Modern technology has formed the karē-raisu base into chocolate-bar shaped cakes. Mixed with hot water this produces a paste that is redolent of the spices (cinnamon, turmeric, cumin, fenugreek, some chilli) that go into its making. Its consistency, probably familiar to any eater of British curries, is very thick, due to a butter and flour roux (the word is now Japanese [ru] thanks to curry recipes). The sauce is enhanced with vegetables and sometimes meat or very rarely, prawns (we never personally encountered any fish karē-raisu though this too is probably offered somewhere).7 Richer, more elaborate karē-raisu come in the form of katsu karē-raisu: with a deep fried pork cutlet. The thick curry-flavoured sauce is poured on a bowlful of rice, and a pickle added. This innovation is attributed to many sources, among them the foreign settlement in Yokohama, as well as the Kawagin restaurant in Asakusa which claims their curry-sauce smothered pork cutlet on rice dates from its humble beginning as a mobile kiosk (yatai) during the early Taishō period.
Significantly, we see the contributions of a number of factors to the success of imported foods. First, the introduction of a new, exotic food from overseas by importers. Then the broadcasting of this new food in the form of a health or health-related and supposed virtue (in the case of karē, modernisation). Additionally, the input from the food industry, which is quick to capitalise on the product, via institutional forms (school lunches) and product differentiation (apple karē, Vermont karē, honey karē), and disseminate it far and wide. Throughout this process we also see the gradual assimilation – in form, texture, flavour, serving – of the food into the daily life of people.
In 1979, living in a small northern town we wanted to make a special dessert for some friends, and scoured the town, unsuccessfully, for cream cheese. Half a year later Jeanne was surprised to find one local supermarket with 4 packages, and promptly stocked up. It was then that we became aware, through friends in the metropolis and through journal publications, of the reya chiizukēki fad.
There is a belief, common in the West, that Asians, notably Chinese and Japanese, are unable to digest milk, and that therefore their diet lacks that particular food. This is of course not true. Lactase deficiency is the result of weaning from milk, and most people (excluding those of whatever culture who have a genetic lactase deficiency) can digest milk or milk products provided they have continued to consume cow’s milk after natural weaning. Traditionally of course, lacking the wide grazing areas needed for proper dairy culture, neither Chinese nor Japanese rice farmers raised cattle. Until the mid 70s, it was difficult to find milk products in Japan, though milk production, particularly in Hokkaido, Nagano and Chiba, near Tokyo, had taken off and milk was supplied regularly at all shops and even sold from automatic dispensers.
The origins of reya chiizukēki popularity are obscure, but by the summer of 1980, it had become a fad. There were recipes in all the women’s and cooking magazines, and several food journals ran multi-paged spreads on the “best” recipes, and the “best” confectioneries for the food. One can trace the fad certainly to the renewed passion of the Japanese for things foreign and its confluence with re-established economic confidence after the 1973 oil shock.
The food is still very common, and indeed, we argue that chiizukēki has become a Japanese food as much as karē-raisu is. Some of the housewives in our sample simply thought of it as another Japanese food, one for oyatsu, in line with other Japanese foods that they would eat on a daily basis. In fact, when asked to name kinds of cake, it is usually the first or second (after chocolate) that most of our respondents, young and old, named.
One indication of the degree to which this fad has become a regular unremarkable element of the diet, are the variations, some of them specifically Japanese, that have emerged:
Shimo-Kitazawa used to be a sleepy neighbourhood, situated at the intersection of two commuter train lines. Since the seventies, it has become the hub of an entertainment and shopping district for the young and trendy. Incorporating clothes and knickknack shops, modern bars and night-clubs, and fashionable food shops, it offers everything for the young.
The coffee shop we enter is by no means exceptional, not even if compared with shops outside Shimo-Kitazawa. With several small tables, and a long counter with glassed refrigerator, one can eat in or take-out. The display, as are all Japanese food displays, is mouth-watering. Cream cakes in a variety of colours, an array of biscuits and dried baked things, some made on the premises, others purchased from other sources, some imported. The coffee shop is one of three in a chain. Trying to decide what to sample, on the basis of looks alone, is exhausting and frustrating. A greenish cake topped with the familiar sweet purple-brown daizu beans catches the eye. It is a tea-flavoured cheese cake – a fluffy souffle-type cheese cake infused delicately with the taste of powdered green tea (matcha), more usually confined to Tea ceremony use. Cream cheese filling between layers has been flavoured with a very light touch, and the topping of whipped cream is finished with crunchy bits of sweet beans, tasting salty, sweet, and rather chocolaty (perhaps due to the dark brown colour of the azuki beans) at the same time. The contrast of textures and flavours is of course intentional. A mocha cake we also try, it too garnished with beans, conveys much the same contrast, with different degrees of mocha flavouring in the batter and the cream, and the beans adding a unique Japanese character to the Western cake.
The development of chiizukēki from gourmet fad to everyday dish is a process worth commenting upon. Significant factors in its transformation are the intrinsic qualities of cream cheese, its physical presentation as a cake, and the associations linked with it when first introduced. The interest in dairy products such as cheese and yoghurt was very limited at first. “Cheese” was generally understood to be the processed, individually wrapped product and mostly given to children for snacks. Yoghurt was easier to market to the adult population, due to the successful television campaign featuring long-lived peoples whose main diet was yoghurt. Cream cheese from the US, Australia, New Zealand, and the Scandinavian countries started appearing in supermarkets towards the end of the 70s. Because it is soft and not strong-flavoured nor yet strong-smelling, it came across as a not overpoweringly “milky” product. Significantly, the texture of gelatine cheesecake is not too asimilar to several Japanese dishes, such as soft tofu. Also, cheesecake allows itself to be presentable in ways acceptable to the Japanese canon. For example, that it could be cut in clean lines due to the gelatine base probably helped, as well as the possibility of applying subtle pastel shadings to the cheese. This means that the food could be presented in Japanese aesthetic terms. Cheesecakes can thus be presented in Japanese style, on Japanese utensils as well as Western ones, as indeed became the case. Finally, cheesecake was promoted, and served initially, in places that catered to a particular clientele: young and sophisticated women. Thus coffee shops that catered largely to women were the first to promote reya chiizukēki, and, of course, the features on them were mainly in magazines that had female readership: home and fashion, rather than purely food foci. This was significant. Japanese women “tend to be more open to trying Western foods, particularly those foods not associated with liquor,” as one informant, himself the head of a cooking organisation noted. And, in Japanese society, it is women who, reputedly, eat more sweets. This is true of traditional wagashi (Michael always attracts odd looks from the female clientele of tea-shops when he indulges in his favourite sweet bean-soup), as of Western confectionery (yōgashi). Indeed, as time progressed throughout the eighties, reya chiizukēki became an item of common consumption, and, in their attempt to win more customers, confectioners departed from the international image (or, more properly speaking, interpreted it in truly international ways) and gave the food a Japanese twist, as in the coffee-shop we described, where powdered green tea was added to the mix.
The conversion of chiizukēki is merely one of a long string of such successful incorporations of foreign tradition in foods, foods which turned from “localised” fads, – whether the Heian court’s choice of Chinese modes, the Meiji intelligentsia’s choice of beef, or the modern diner’s liking for cheesecake – into daily food. But not all such fads become successful. This raises several questions: how do food fads occur? And why do some fads settle and become assimilated into the local cuisine, while other vanish? The question is interesting because it allows for a test of one of our main theses: that Japanese cuisine exhibits a sort of overall unity, one which allows great flexibility and change.
Aloe vera, a succulent, became a major fad during the years 1996 1997. It could be found in a variety of forms on supermarket shelves as well as in cafes and homes. We identified aloe vera drinks (mainly yoghurts), cakes, and a large number of recipes published in women’s and cooking magazines. At least one book has been published concerning the cultivation, use, and benefits of the plant.
The year before, a popular Philippine food called nata de coco had been extremely popular. Nala de coco is made of coconut water that has been allowed to ferment, resulting in a thick crust of a hard-jelly consistency. It is used in desserts, and for many years had been a cottage industry, with some limited industrial manufacture, until its popularity in Japan stimulated investment in larger-scale production. By the summer of 1996, however, nala de coco was off the shelves. It was almost impossible to find, except at a newly built gourmet supermarket in Shinjuku and at the bargain section of a department store in Shibuya. Few customers seemed to show any interest in eating or trying it. even at bargain prices.
To understand how these food rises and falls come about, it is useful to examine and compare nala de coco and aloe vera. Both of these foods are very similar in culinary terms, though their origins are different. When bought, normally each of these is a translucent whitish cube, less than one centimetre to a side. The texture is that of hard jelly, or, more appropriately, the texture of kanten, the Japanese jelly used in wagashi. These three foods (kanten included) are bland, almost flavourless, and. from anecdotal evidence, their main attraction is their texture.
At this point, however, they begin to diverge. Kanten has a long culinary tradition in Japan. It has been used for the making of traditional sweets during the current century and before. Its uses, though restricted mainly to sweet dishes, are connected to the sweet accompaniments for the Tea ceremony. This, essentially, provides the background for nata de coco as well. That is, we would argue, it was the similarity of nata de coco to kanten which made possible the transition from a Philippine dish to a Japanese fad. In the first place, nata de coco fits the Japanese canons of taste, in terms of its colour, texture, and taste. Two other factors added to nata de coco’s attraction. The growing number of Japanese going abroad has meant a growing interest in foreign foods, as we have noted before. In addition, the import of nata de coco, mainly, apparently, handled by small trading firms (since in the Philippines, manufacture was a cottage industry, and thus of little interest to the large sōgo shōsha) meant that a trading “feeding frenzy” of small trading firms occurred. This was bolstered by the fad-generating function of the Japanese youth media, which encourages quick “turnover” of teenage and young adult fads. The fact that the food was associated with “young” culture was not incidental: the name fits the canons of “cutesie” names of which Japanese young women are extremely fond, and which attract their attention (and considerable buying power): cute kittens, real or in cartoon format, little boys in dungarees, and other “kawaii-mono” (cute things) are crucially important for marketing to this consumer segment. “Nata de coco has a cute sound,” confessed one informant. “That’s what made it attractive.” The confluence of culinary appropriateness, media interest, and quick trading profits meant a sudden boom in the sale of the food. The reverse of these processes spelled the end of the fad. The media lost interest, the profits for the small trading companies shrank as rationalisation set in, and larger firms started getting interested, and manufacturers started taking shortcuts and adulterating the nata de coco, as the daily press discovered.
For aloe vera the same process occurred, but with one additional feature. Aloe vera has been used as a cosmetic base for several decades, and some major cosmetic companies market aloe vera-based skin preparations. The plant has a proven record as an attractant for the health-conscious (whether it has indeed the qualities ascribed is a separate, pharmacological issue). In the West, particularly the US, aloe vera has been marketed as a health food. It is not surprising therefore, that aloe vera became a focus of intense interest not only because it fit the food canon, but also because it had an added dimension – health.
At the time of writing, the aloe vera fad was in full swing. It is difficult to tell whether it will survive, or fall as nata de coco has. We rather suspect that, possessing a stronger base in the form of its supposed healthy benefits, the possibility of raising the plant, and utilising it on a household basis (which several of our informants do), is more likely to mean that the plant, and some of its uses, will be incorporated into Japanese cuisine. One magazine featured aloe vera sashimi, the translucent green slices laid on an elegant plate, and served with the usual accompaniments of soy sauce and horseradish. This is not to mean that it will continue riding the wave of popularity it enjoyed in mid-1996, but rather that, like karē-raisu it may gradually be incorporated into Japanese cuisine whether as a sweet or neutral tasting drink (such as Calpis, Oolong tea, or saidā,8 have been), as a health-food drink among the many variations now entering the market (e.g., aluminum-packed carrot-celery-parsley, tomato-apple), as an additive to sweet or savoury yoghurts, as a sweet jelly somewhat like kanten, or even, as a salad vegetable or strikingly coloured sauce.
8.5Invention and Innovation in the Japanese Kitchen
AS THE FOOD fads seem to indicate, Japanese culture has justifiably earned its name as an imitative culture. After all, some critics argue, there is only one Japanese scientific Nobel prize winner, but thousands of derivative patents based on work done in other cultures. The things Japanese are famous for – ears, videos, computers were invented elsewhere, but improved and brought to perfection in Japan, runs the argument. Putting aside for a moment the idea that being able to improve rather than invent is no bad skill to have, it is useful to consider the process of innovation, particularly of food innovation, from the Japanese point of view, in this case, the owner of a traditional ryōtei:
Over the past three generations food preferences have definitely changed. These days there are new cooking methods, with electricity and ovens, that we never used before. We are thus able to adapt our cooking, make it more streamlined, than we could in the days of charcoal fires. And, of course, because Japan is now a world power, at least economically, we have a wide variety of choices from overseas. New information about foods comes from reading books and journals and watching TV. I, or one of ray employees, or someone in my family might see a new thing in the media, and decide to give it a try. We also see new things in the supermarket and try them out.
There is a very clear and specific local preference, and local people, whom I serve every day, pride themselves on being gourmets, and on having good palates. They know and express a knowledge of local delicacies, seasonal quality, and local items, and they often demand that they be served these things, which they consider exceptional. In order to try a new food, therefore, we have to keep these things in mind. We try to arrange the new foods and prepare them in such a way that they will fit into local conceptions of good taste and arrangement, and that they fit the quality and nature of the more familiar foods.
Our locals do not like to be surprised by foods, and they quite often prefer to stick with the tried and familiar. That is why when we do introduce new things – whether it is a new dish I have thought of, or an import – we introduce them a little at a time, adapting the new to fit old patterns. We arrange foreign foods in a Japanese manner, or prepare it by Japanese methods.
Avocado is one example. I like the colour of it – the bright green shading to yellow – as well as the smooth texture. To start with, we made it in the form of a tempura about five or seven years ago. At first, people were very surprised and somewhat suspicious. Either they asked what it was, or they did not try it at all. Eventually we found that people did not like it in that form. We used it in lightly vinegared salads (sunomono) and tried different dressings with it until it took on, and now it is a commonplace thing.
The introduction of a new food into the Japanese kitchen depends, to a very large degree, on the points of similarity Japanese diners and cooks can make between the introduced food and those which they are familiar with. A new food can be conceived of as an item with many sensory characteristics in many dimensions. It has shape, colour, texture, size, in addition to taste. Just so long as several of these dimensions, in concert, fit Japanese characterisations of a food of some category, the foreign food is likely to be accepted.
Like artists everywhere, Japanese cooks at least the best of them, and those with sufficient independence, financial and spiritual – experiment with new-modes of expressing themselves and pleasing their customers. The owner of the ryōki cited above, as well as many others we interviewed, particularly at the upper end of the scale, were constantly looking for new ways to prepare foods, new and innovative foods and menus. Here too. the degree to which a food is likely to enter into the repertoire is dependent on public acceptance, and that in turn is dependent on the tension between familiarity with at least some of the characteristics of the food concerned, and newness in other dimensions of the same food.
Since utensils and dishes are an intrinsic part of Japanese food, foreign foods which can fit (aesthetically speaking), and which can be placed on a Japanese (-style) utensil, are much closer to acceptance than others. Of course, utensils are evolving as well, as craftsmen and artists try out new techniques and styles, and as cooks, in the home and in public, try to fit themselves to foods that have already arrived, or are already a part of the food canon. The artistic development of both food and utensils is an intertwined phenomenon: new ideas for both spring from the mind of the artists, and are stimulated by foreign examples and ideas. Neither can, in the Japanese case, evolve and grow without the other, so intimate is the relationship.
Learning to be Japanese, is a lengthy process as Hendry (1986) points out. Among other elements, it implies learning to eat like a Japanese, and this, in turn, is both a process and an end result. The elements in this process start from a fairly early age, as the young child is inculcated, through the world of the school lunch as well as the provisions of his or her household, into the eating expectations that others have. Mother is taught how to make a proper bentō, the child is taught the importance of rice, of being as others are, of eating properly in the right time and place. But it is also a life-long process. Adults are taught that food is culture by a variety of means, ranging from their office mates and the process of social drinking and eating that are inevitably part of nemawashi, through a variety of media such as manga which demonstrate to people of all classes, what the virtues of Japanese are, certainly when it comes to food. There may also well be a behavioural training element inherent in part of the process. Certainly the association of “Japanese virtues” with “good food” as can be seen in the manga and other publications, reinforces the inherent ideology of nihonjin-ron as well.
The end product, however, at least in terms of an understanding of Japanese cuisine, seems to be the creation of a food culture. By this we mean that the average Japanese is highly aware, as members of many other cultures may not be, of the subtlety and some of the implications of their foods. Within modern Japanese culture, being knowledgeable about food is, for a number of reasons – national pride, age distinctions, conspicuous consumption – a desirable social ability and accomplishment, much as it may be in France, China, or any other country in which food plays a very forceful element of national identity. As a consequence, many Japanese practice an awareness of their own foods: it becomes a part of their cultural self-identity, both as Japanese, and, often, as residents of a particular part of Japan. Japanese relationship to food is to something that is unique and uniquely pleasurable, subtle, varied. And they relate themselves, as Japanese, to the foods they consume.
Anderson, Jennifer L. 1991 An Introduction to Japanese Tea Ritual.
Arima, Takeru 1987 Michizure Bentō.
Ashkenazi, Michael 1989 “Japanization, internationalization and aesthetics in the Japanese meal”.
Tagawa, Yasushi 1985 Hōchō Mushuku.
White, Merry I. 1993 The Material Child.
1Isabella Bird, one of the earlier European explorers of Japan in the nineteenth century, was amazed that Japanese porters, carrying large kago palanquins (with large Europeans inside them) could survive on what amounts to ochazuke.
2The safe preparation of toxic yet exquisitely tasting fugu (Tetraodontidae, which includes puffers and globefish, all with poisonous viscera) requires, in addition to the standard fish cook’s training, a specialised course and practical examination, upon which successful candidates receive a certificate. This certificate is prominently displayed at the entrance to any shop that serves fugu. The distinctive taste (and aftertaste) of fugu is doubtless due to minute traces of tetradotoxin that remain, despite the most meticulous treatment and which, though harmless, leave a tingly sensation on the tongue and mouth for several hours after eating. Between 1863 and 1963 more than 10,000 cases of fugu poisoning were reported in Japan, out of which 6.000 were fatal. Almost all of these were the result of preparation by amateurs. There have been no reported deaths from professionally prepared fugu since the 1960s.
3There are numerous women- and girl-oriented manga. These deal with themes such as friendship, love, human relationships, work problems and so on. Interestingly enough, the cooking manga fat least those we have seen) are largely, in tone, protagonist, and language, male-oriented. We would suppose that most of their reading audience are males.
4One of Michael’s friends, a Buddhist priest, entertained him at a hommon bar, which specialises in slewed and grilled innards. When asked about the Buddhist doctrine of ahimsa (refraining from taking life), he responded airily that that was a different kind of Buddhism “not the real tiling.”
5Things were, of course, far more complicated. The decision of the shogun to abdicate and return power to the Emperor, a brave and thoughtful political act, for which the seventeenth Tokugawa shogun rarely receives much credit, merely exchanged one group of elderly clan leaders from the Matsudaira clan (from whom the ruling Tokugawa house sprang) for another slightly younger group from the hitherto out-of-power Shimazu, Mori, Satake, and some other clans. Plus ça change, plus e’est la même chose, except that the newest bunch of oligarchs soon found themselves committed to modernisation (including adopting Western food) as a means of chucking the foreigners out, rather than just chucking them out, which had been one of the original rallying cries of the Restoration. For more information on the people who ran Japan subsequent to the Restoration, Akamatsu’s 1868, and The Deer Cry Pavilion are probably best.
6Our own cultural prejudices incline us to accept the claim of Louis’ Diner in downtown New Haven that the hamburger was invented there. Whatever the case, there is evidence for the consumption of fried meat patties in New York in the mid nineteenth century. Perhaps the reporter never made his way to New Haven. The food has no connection (to our knowledge) to the city of Hamburg in Germany.
7Though not exactly akin to the hambāga-ltambagu dichotomy, a karē-raisu and raisu-karē dichotomy exists. While both terms are fairly interchangeable in restaurant and roadside diner menus, the distinction is that the curry sauce may sometimes come in a separate container, usually a ceramic sauceboat, for raisu karē.
8Calpis is a drink made by the fermentation of milk. It derives, ultimately, from the Mongolian (alcoholic) drink called hunts, though without the alcohol. It has a slightly sourish-sweet taste, rather tart and refreshing. Oolong tea, imported from China, has recently (in the nineties) become an important drink in Japan, though it was present before, preferred particularly for its supposed health benefits. “Saidā” is of course a Japanisation of the English “cider” though in Japan the term has come to mean a carbonated lemonade of artificial provenance, with only a bare nod in the direction of a real fruit extract. A similar drink, copied from Victorian lemonades, is still sold (mainly in rural areas) in old-fashioned Victorian bottles with glass stoppers under the name ramune (that is. “lemonade”).