Katarzyna J. Cwiertka

From Ethnic to Hip: Circuits of Japanese Cuisine in Europe

During the last decade, Japanese cuisine has become rooted in Europe. The once unusual-sounding dishes, such as SUSHI, TEPPANYAKI, and TEMPURA, are now familiar to millions of Europeans. They not only merely encounter these names in popular magazines and cooking shows on television, but also a growing number of people in Europe actually consume these dishes on a regular basis, at lunch corners and business receptions, restaurants and bars, and even in their own homes. This article describes the historical development of the establishments serving Japanese cuisine in Europe, with particular focus on Great Britain and the Netherlands. It seeks to highlight the variety of historical and global connections that contributed to the spread of Japanese food in Europe. Furthermore, it demonstrates the diversification of the image of Japanese food in Europe during the last decade, from an exotic, ethnic fare, through a fashionable style of dining, to a health-conscious fast food. Many classic restaurants continue to provide Japanese expatriates with the taste of home and offer Europeans a clichéd “taste of Japan,” represented by waitresses dressed in kimono and interiors featuring lampions, bonsai plants, and calligraphy. Concurrently, however, newer establishments that serve particular types of Japanese food, such as beef from the griddle (TEPPANYAKI), SUSHI, and noodles, have mushroomed, grounding themselves as major genres in European dining. These and other establishments offer an ever-widening choice of culinary variations on the Japanese theme.

From Yokohama to Amsterdam: Meidi-ya and Dietary Change in Modern Japan

Abstract In this paper I will focus on the early history of Meidi-ya, a leading shipping and trading company in modern Japan that specialized in merchandizing luxury Western foods and liquors. Established in 1885, Meidi-ya provided an important means for the spread of Western food culture among the Japanese upper and upper-middle classes, and played a pioneering role in introducing modern promotional strategies to Japanese retailing business. From around the turn of the century, the company expanded its role from that of an importer of foreign products to that of a retailer of domestically produced foods. A few years later, it also became involved in food processing. By entering these new domains, Meidi-ya began to play an increasingly important role in the domestication of Western food in Japan. By analyzing Meidi-yas marketing strategies, I will elucidate its role in the introduction and popularization of Western food in Japan, and the modernization of Japanese retailing and food processing. However, my aim is not to focus solely and simply on food. By examining changing consumption habits and the various socioeconomic processes involved, I will also discuss the role of enterprises like Meidi-ya in producing new class identities and status sensibilities in Japan.

THOUGHTS TOWARD AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF RESTAURANTS

Like many a graduate student, I spent several years working in restaurants: tending bar, a bit of managing, but mostly waiting tables. And as a graduate student of anthropology, the restaurant environment always struck me as a bustling microcosm of many of the social and symbolic processes that I was learning about more abstractly in my classes. Indeed, in the desperate days of winter waiting for grant applications to be accepted or declined, I often thought that a restaurant ethnography would be a good alternative plan of study—except I figured that a juicy subject like restaurants must have already been well covered in the literature. Well, eventually grants did come through, and I was led off in other directions. But when I came back to thinking about restaurants, in the context of looking for books for a course I was designing on food and society, I was quite surprised to find a mere handful of studies of restaurants based on primary fieldwork, most of them out of print, and almost none written by anthropologists.1 Why this dearth of studies in a setting that so resembles the small-scale societies that are the bread-and-butter of the anthropological field site? Two recent studies, one in sociology and the other in oral history, underline, once again, the rich potential of “restaurant ethnography,” while at the same time suggesting some possible ways that anthropologists could contribute to this field in its infancy. In Juggling Food and Feelings, Gatta, a sociologist, combines interviews and 7 months of participant-observation in a variety of restaurant settings,

Feeding Japan. The Cultural and Political Issues of Dependency and Risk

As the conclusion of this review is quite straightforward, I might as well state it at the beginning. This is the best volume dealing with the production and consumption of food in Japan that has been published to date. The quality of the chapters is uneven, but collectively they offer an excellent coverage of the contemporary developments related to food and drink in Japan and the global expansion of Japanese cuisine, whatever this label might entail. The editors specify in the introduction that the aim of the volume is to identify the diversity of processes and patterns behind the construction of “a timeless Japanese cuisine”, its inherent contradictions, and the diversity of agents involved in these conflicting narratives and practices (7). They definitely succeeded in achieving this goal. The book convincingly demonstrates how the imagined notion of “Japanese cuisine” is manipulated by politicians, food producers, activists, and other actors, while they pursue their specific agendas. This is hardly a new observation. At the end of my first monograph, which was based on the PhD research conducted over two decades ago, I made the following remark:

The Soy Sauce Industry in Korea: Scrutinising the Legacy of Japanese Colonialism

With the end of the Cold War and the transformation of domestic politics on the Korean peninsula, the 1990s brought about the re-evaluation of the historical understanding of colonial Korea and a renaissance in historical research on the colonial period (e.g. Eckert, 1991; McNamara, 1996; Shin and Robinson, 1999). New studies challenged the dominant narrative of emerging national self-consciousness and struggle for independence, giving way to a more open, less politicised approach to Japanese colonialism and its consequences. This paper follows this research direction from the mundane angle of soy sauce. By documenting the industrialisation of soy sauce manufacture in Korea and identifying the consequences of this shift, this study aims to illuminate the covert but persistent legacy of Japanese rule. The ubiquitous presence of food and its manifold functions and meanings simultaneously touch upon a wide spectrum of issues that form the core of human life. Due to its intricate connection to human nourishment and comfort, food stands at the centre of the life of individuals (Macbeth, 1997; Rozin, 1998). On the other hand, owing to its connection with profit and power, food plays a critical role in the social and economic organisation of societies (Mintz, 1985; Lien and Nerlich, 2004; Watson and Caldwell, 2005). What happens to food and eating is therefore an important index of change, reflecting on a micro level the consequences of macro-political and economic processes. Due to the all-embracing and yet intimate nature of food, the case of soy sauce is particularly useful in analysing the complex relationship between colonialism, modernity and nationalism in modern Korean history. While Korean cuisine constitutes one of the most potent symbols of Korean nationalism (e.g. Han, 1994; Bak, 1997; Chu, 2000; Walraven, 2002), it simultaneously functions as a living testimony of the colonial past. Asian Studies Review December 2006, Vol. 30, pp. 389–410