Keynote lecture by Eric Rath
What is Traditional Japanese Food? — A Historical View of Washoku
The UNESCO definition of “traditional Japanese dietary cultures” (washoku) presents a timeless vision of Japan’s food cultures, but the realities of what most Japanese ate before World War II were far humbler and heterogeneous as this talk examines. The white rice and tasty side dishes that are prominent features in discussions of Japan’s traditional dietary cultures did not become normative in the diet until the 1960s. Washoku’s promoters want to guide Japan’s population to consume more seafood and domestic produce, but Japanese consumer surveys reveal complaints about the troublesome nature of having to prepare Japanese food and explain their preferences for other food choices. My talk proposes an alternative view of washoku to contextualize the commodified versions of “traditional food” on offer today and to allow for a more inclusive appraisal of the variety of foods once consumed in Japan with greater respect for the people who prepared and ate them.
Stephanie Assmann “Containing Globalization through Food Education: The Return to a National Cuisine in Japan”
This presentation assesses how a Japanese food education initiative termed shokuiku gains recognition for an elaborate cuisine globally while it contains the realities of culinary globalization domestically. Globally, the Japanese government reconfirms the positive image of sushi and tempura. To that end, in 2008, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) founded the Organization to Promote Japanese Restaurants Abroad (JRO) (Nihonshoku resutoran kaigai fukyū suishin kikō), which conducts cooking shows abroad that display sushi and tempura as Japanese haute cuisine. Domestically, the Japanese government aims to increase food literacy among its citizens through a nationwide food education campaign, which was initiated in 2005 through the Fundamental Law on Food Education (shokuiku kihon-hō). The food education campaign establishes bodily norms and seeks to internalize a standardized national cuisine based on an indigenous food fare. Food education is part of school lunch programs while visual elements like the Food Guide Spinning Top, health surveys, and medical check-ups highlight normalized ideals with regards to physical appearance, body weight, and familial conviviality. This renewed focus on a national cuisine in both global and domestic food education contains within it a culinary politics that places responsibility for good and healthy eating on the individual rather than the state, society or community.
Kateryna Bugayevska “Beijing Obento: The popularization of Japanese food in Beijing”
In the early 1960s, there was only one Japanese restaurant in all of China. Today, there are more than 300 in Beijing alone. This can be regarded as evidence that more Chinese people have become involved with Japanese food and culture in general. The cultures of Japan and China share many similarities, but at the same time are completely different, which also applies to the food tradition of both countries. An old Chinese saying states that Chinese food is eaten with the tongue, while Japanese food is eaten with the eyes. This indicates the common perspective that Chinese people pay more attention to the flavor and quantity of food, while Japanese people appreciate its aesthetic image and nutritious qualities. Despite such differences, Japanese cuisine has become a part of daily life in modern Chinese cities. As Japanese food enters the Beijing market, it is also being readjusted to local tastes. Local cooks are being trained and new dishes combining Chinese and Japanese elements are being created. Nevertheless, there is still much skepticism about Japanese food in China. In a 2014 survey carried out in Nanjing, 80% of respondents admitted that they do not like Japanese food, not only due to the “unusual taste,” but also because of the “national conflict.”
So what is the general reception of Japanese food in Beijing? To what extent is it affected by cultural tension? In which ways is traditional Japanese cuisine being readapted to local consumer needs, and what is the possible future of Japanese food in Beijing? These are the core questions of this study, which is based on Chinese and English academic resources, social surveys, and personal interviews with the Japanese restaurant owners in Beijing.
Felice Farina “Japan in the international food regimes: understanding japanese food self-sufficiency decline”
The aim of this paper is to investigate the linkages between Japan’s foreign policy and its food self-sufficiency rate, analyzing Japan’s role in the post-war international food regime, in order to outline the international causes that determined Japan’s dependence from imported food. Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate was 79% in 1960, but it fell down rapidly and reached 39% in 2011, the lowest among major industrialized countries (MAFF, 2012). The mechanisms of this decline have been mostly explained as the result of the drastic change of dietary habits under a rapid economic growth, since the ‘60s (Kako, 2009): as the economy grew steadily, the consumption of domestically produced food (e.g rice) has decreased, while the consumption of imported food (e.g. meat, dairy products, oils) has grown constantly (i.e. ‘Bennet’s law’).
Yet, evidences suggest that Japan’s foreign policy choices and international environment considerably influenced Japan’s low food self-sufficiency rate. Relying on ‘international food regime theory’ (Friedmann and McMichael 1989), this analysis will hopefully shed some light on the international political factors that affected Japan’s dependence. I will try to demonstrate, thus, how national security interests and international norms and rules that underpin the food regime have played an important in determining Japan’s low self-sufficiency rate.
Helena Grinshpun “The Drink of the Nation? Coffee in Japan’s culinary culture”
Despite its long-term association with tea culture, Japan has long since become one of the world’s major consumers of coffee. Ever since their entry to Japan in the latter half of the 19th century, coffee and coffee shops have been closely linked to the economic, political, and socio-cultural transformations undergone by Japanese society. While today coffee occupies a massive niche in Japan’s everyday life and consumption, its cultural ‘baggage’ still shapes the manner of its appropriation and appreciation.
This talk focuses on coffee as one component of Japanese culinary practice and places it in the context of the ongoing dialog on culture, identity, and taste. The distinction between wa and yo, Japanese and non-Japanese, has long served as one of the main principles delineating national culinary identity; this talk will discuss how globalized substances like coffee epitomize the complexity behind such binaries.
I explore coffee-drinking as an everyday practice embedded in national historical process and trace its manifestations in contemporary Japan. Specifically, I look at global coffee chains and the way they construct a cultural and culinary experience around coffee. I demonstrate how this is carried out through “coffee education” enacted by the chains and juxtapose coffee with another beverage of national choice – green tea. While tea is commonly associated with Japan’s cultural legacy, coffee can be seen as a metaphor for the nation’s participation in global culture.
Maya Hey ‘’ A Qualitative Study on Food Procurement And Food Production in a Post-Fukushima Food System in Japan”
The Fukushima nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011 has sparked an international discussion on radioactive contamination in the food supply. Of lasting concern is food safety, particularly with regards to radioactive particles that have half-lives spanning 30 years or more. The purpose of this research was to investigate the changes in food procurement and food production in a post-Fukushima food system. A qualitative methodology based on the principles of interpretative phenomenological analysis was developed to study the perceptions of food safety in the two-year aftermath of the disaster. Research questions focused on the beliefs and behaviors of food producers and consumers in the two years aftermath of the nuclear disaster. What challenges are they facing in an effort to restore economic vitality?
In the wake of evolving food policies and food distribution, changes in food procurement/production patterns have affected food identity in Japan.
Aya Kimura “School lunch after the Fukushima nuclear accident: politics of science and gendered publics”
The Fukushima nuclear accident was arguably one of the most serious food safety threats in the Japanese history. This talk examines the role of women’s mobilizations in the contemporary food activism in Japan through the case study of the school lunch safety movement. The movement emerged after the nuclear accident to demand safety measures in the school lunch program and was highly feminized. Drawing on feminist Science and Technology Studies, the talk highlights gendered opportunities and constraints on women activists on the food contamination issue that was scientifically complex and uncertain. The talk also highlights the important contexts of post-disaster nationalism and neoliberalism in shaping the meaning of the Japanese food after the accident and examine the extent to which it enabled or constrained women’s mobilization for food safety.
Tatsuya Mitsuda “Snacking practices and confectionary identities in Japan, 1890-1935”
Contemporary discourse on the superior health qualities of Japanese food, it hardly needs reminding, bears little historical scrutiny. Until recently, yōshoku – not washoku – was seen to be more nutritious: it was through eating more meat, for example, that Japan should modernize and catch up with the west. Extending analysis into a neglected and peripheral area of food culture – sweets and snacking – this paper builds on recent historical reappraisals of Japanese food through showing the extent to which conflicting narratives of yōgashi and wagashi privileged the former at the expense of the latter. Informed by a powerful biomedical discourse on health and hygiene that admonished wagashi as unhealthy, useless and ornamental, the paper demonstrates how, by contrast, yōgashi was hailed as healthy, useful and rational – to be devoured as much as possible.
Such a realization fed into broader moves to reform traditional practices such as to forgo offering yōkan and monaka to entertain guests or to police children stealing the parental gaze to escape to the dagashiya. Much of the debate over sweets and snacking boiled down to when, where and how confections should be produced, purchased and consumed: should sweets be made by hand and bought in small shops and local markets or should they be made by machines in large factories and bought on the national market? Due to the way in which yōgashi was hygienically packaged, the paper illustrates how these modern sweets carved out new spaces and times for snacking: wrapped-up caramel or chocolate could be consumed anywhere and at any time – on trips, at work, on crowded trains – as opposed to wagashi which struggled to withstand movement and last more than a few days. Ultimately the paper suggests that the popular defense of over-packaging as a reflection of a unique Japanese spirit of omotenashi is a re-invention that emerged out of the tussle between wagashi and yōgashi.
Andreas Niehaus “Healthy food: Ideologizing Edo-period cuisine in the Yôjôkun”
‘Traditional’ cuisine and food in Japan is regularly linked to questions of identity: to ideas of health and purity, to the creation of a specific Japanese landscape and the uniqueness of Japanese culture and society. In that sense cultivating, preparing and eating “Japanese” food means to perform Japaneseness and accordingly to preserve and transmit what is considered to be the unchanged and unchanging nucleus of the nation. Several studies have already rightly argued that the specific “Japaneseness” of the Japanese cuisine was invented only during the process of transforming the country into a modern nation-state, and have analysed the processes in which food served as an ideological tool to unite the new citizens behind a common denominator.
However, I will argue that already intellectuals during the Edo-period (1600-1867) embedded food within an ideological framework that aimed at unifying and stabilizing a “natural” social hierarchy and securing political and social stability. One example, where such an ideologization of food and dietary choices can be found is Kaibara Ekiken’s Yôjôkun (Rules for a Health, 1713); a widely circulated book written in a rather colloquial style for the general public as a handbook to a healthy life. It will be shown how food in this text is seen – based on Neo-Confucian ideology and kampô-medicine – as a means for self-cultivation and health preservation in accordance with the given natural social order. The Yôjôkun is also an interesting reference for research concerning the construction of modern Japanese food identities as it regularly serves as source to argue for the pure and healthy nature of ‘traditional’ Japanese cuisine.
Ono Junichi “Islam and culinary context of Japan”
My paper deals with “identity and cuisine” which Japanese and muslims in Japan actualize. Japanese cuisine is given as criteria of healthy, aesthetics, and refinement in the present context, where the identity of Japan is produced by historicist representation of “Japanese cuisine”. Food cultures with non “Japan-origine“ are also thrown into this context, and they are confronted with a self-consciousness concerning food ways . Topicalizing muslim Halal food from this perspective, I will discuss what problems the muslim community in Japan are confronted with.
Paul O’Shea: “Import-dependency and the future of food security in Japan”
Despite decades of government subsidies and import-tariffs, Japan’s food self-sufficiency has fallen below 40 per cent. The future looks bleak as the area of land under cultivation is almost one-third lower than in 1960, while 61 per cent of farmers are over 65. Successive prime ministers have flagged Japan’s willingness to participate in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement that seeks to remove all trade tariffs within ten years. Japan faces a dilemma: its protectionist policies have clearly failed to prevent it becoming the most import-dependent large advanced economy on earth, while agricultural liberalisation, through either the TPP or bi/multilateral free trade agreements, threatens to further undermine its domestic production and import-dependent status. This paper analyses the dilemma facing Japan, focusing on the various domestic and international implications of agricultural liberalisation.
The implications of liberalisation go beyond simple percentages: the agriculturally-dependent regions which are currently protected by the government, such as Hokkaido, Tohoku and Kyushu, are already in near-terminal demographic decline. In terms of securing food imports, highly import-dependent states such as Japan find themselves in a potentially precarious position: spikes in grain prices in 2008 and 2009 led to key Asian grain exporters implementing export restrictions; increasing quantities of grain are being diverted for biofuel production; and climate change threatens to further increase the unpredictability of harvests. Meanwhile, Japan has grown dependent on frozen food imports from China in tandem with Sino-Japanese relations entering into deep freeze. China has used informal export embargoes as a diplomatic weapon against Japan in the recent past, and with the future of bilateral relations looking bleak, informal food export restrictions are hardly inconceivable.
Conversely, those in favour of the TPP argue that its implementation will help strengthen Japan’s relations with the United States and friendly Asia-Pacific states, thus opening up new sources of food imports, thereby simultaneously double-hedging against geopolitical and food security risks.
Eric C. Rath “Obentō and the Invention of Lunch in Modern Japan”
Lunch is both older and newer in Japan than we might imagine.The mid day meal is said to have become a norm by the 1700s when most of the population finally broke with ancient precedent to dine at the middle of the day. However, the notion that ancient courtly and religious practices prevented people from satisfying their growling stomachs deserves reconsideration. In the early twentieth century in some locales farmers consumed four, five, or even six meals a day, so it is illogical to assume that their forebears, who labored equally as hard, would deny themselves food energy at noon time. But eating a midday meal — or even several of them — is not the same as creating and having lunch. Lunch was a new category of meal, a modern custom introduced through Western culinary culture by cookbook writers in the late nineteenth century. The history of lunch can be traced through changing approaches to creating obentō, the packaged meals that have become synonymous today with “boxed lunches.” My paper reviews early modern and modern bentō cookbooks in the context of the history of lunch in Japan charting how fancy boxed meals evolved into prosaic packed lunches, which still retained a distinct culinary flair when resources, creativity, and energy allowed.
Cornelia Reiher “Who defines what the Japanese should eat? Food education revisited after 3.11”
Japan’s Basic Law on Food Education (Shokuiku kihonhō) was enacted in June 2005 as a response to various concerns related to food and nutrition, such as food scandals, an increase in obesity and lifestyle-related diseases and an assumed loss of traditional food culture. The Law defines food education (shokuiku) rather vaguely as the acquisition of knowledge about food and the ability to make appropriate food choices. In this paper, my focus is the impact of shokuiku on discourses about food safety in relation to the nuclear disaster. I will address the following problems: Firstly, the assumption that ‘domestic food products are the safest in the world’; secondly, the power relations between the central government, municipal authorities, producers and consumers in Japan; and thirdly, the question of whether food education can adequately address food safety concerns after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I argue that, although the Basic Law offers a holistic approach to food in theory, with its focus on nutrition, Japaneseness and the emphasis on domestic food, food education, practiced according to the Basic Law cannot adequately deal with the food safety problems that Japanese consumers face after the Fukushima nuclear accident. On the contrary, with the law’s emphasis on firstly, domestic food, and secondly, the urge to support the farmers in the Tōhoku area after the triple disaster; shokuiku might actually endanger the health of Japanese citizens who eat ‘Japanese food’.
Dick Stegewerns “Deconstructing ‘Kokushu’ – The Promotion of Sake as Japan’s National Alcohol Drink in Times of Crisis in the Sake Industry”
Whereas sake was only termed ‘Nihonshu’ (Japanese alcoholic drink) in the late 19th century, as a translation of the English term ‘Japanese rice wine’ that foreign traders used to promote the export of this new exotic alcoholic drink, sake occupied such an overwhelming share of alcohol production and consumption in Japan, that most Japanese ignored the newly coined term and continued to use the word ‘sake’, which in theory stands for all alcoholic drinks. In sharp contrast, the recently coined term ‘kokushu’ (national alcoholic drink) has come about under the very different circumstances that the sake industry had been decimated and most Japanese, especially younger generations and women, no longer drink sake. In a situation where sake thus hardly any longer can be termed Japan’s nationally consumed alcoholic drink, the sake brewing industry and the Japanese government have jointly started promoting the use of the term ‘kokushu’. However, in the related discourse the dire situation in which Japan’s ‘national alcoholic drink’ has been for almost half a century is not acknowledged. Moreover, when it is acknowledged the Japanese people at large are blamed for forgetting about their cultural roots, while the decimation of the sake industry was primarily the result of ill-advised decisions by the government and the sake brewing industry in the postwar period.
This paper will analyze the introduction of the term ‘kokushu’ (national alcoholic drink) and will scrutinize the various ways it is linked to Japanese culture and Japanese national identity. In doing so it will also analyze to which extent this government-promoted discourse on sake as Japan’s national alcoholic drink is in line with historical reality.
Takeda Hiroko “A national Solidarity of Food Risks: Food Practice and Nationalism in post-3/11 Japan”
The triple disaster in March 2011 incurred a large scale of radioactive contamination in Japan’s prime area of agriculture production, resulting in the intensification of the sense of food risk among Japanese people. Simultaneously, it was also agriculture production that was highlighted as a medium of building a sense of solidarity with the devastated area—consuming food produced in the Tohoku area was portrayed as an act to provide the devastated region with support for moving towards recovery. To promote this, the Japanese government implemented an official campaign to encourage consumers to be well aware of harms generated by reputation risks over radioactive contamination of food in a circumstance where the regulatory framework to manage radioactive food contamination itself was not yet consolidated and there was no conclusive scientific view about impacts that may be caused by the consumption of food contaminated by radionuclides. On top of this, normative discourses to call for consumers’ ‘prudence’ were spread through the mass media, and in this way, a national solidarity of food risk(s) was to be formed in post-3/11 Japan.
The overarching purpose of the paper is to understand, first, if such a solidarity of food risks was formed in post-3/11 Japan, and then, if so, even partially, how it operated and how individuals negotiated within it. To approach these questions, the first part of the paper outlines the historical trajectory of discursive politics concerning food risks in Japan to contextualize developments since the triple disaster. Then, the second part of the paper examines the government campaign and elucidates the logic behind it. The third part of the paper turns its attention to individuals’ manoeuvring, i.e. their responses to the government campaign and the normative discourses that urged the building of this solidarity. By taking these steps, the paper tries to identify the link between food practice and the sense of nationalism mediated through the notions of food risk in a concrete manner in post-3/11 Japan.
Jutta Teuwsen: Eating Japanese – Being Japanese: Ethnic Food in Hawaii
According to the 2010 US census, 22.49 percent of Hawaii’s population is Japanese. This matter becomes obvious especially through the high visibility and popularity of Japanese food all over the islands. The Japanese Department store Shirokiya in Honolulu offers a wide selection of Japanese food as a mixture of very expensive imports from Japan and local, affordable Japanese American fusion food. Meeting the needs of various local Japanese groups, this place is “relational“ in that it leaves room for social processes of perceiving, using and adopting it for individual and group identity activities and considerations. (Bachmann-Medick 2006: 292)
With food as the key element of identity construction, Shirokiya becomes an anthropological place according to Augé: First, it serves to foster shared identity as it symbolizes the components that a whole group has in common. Second, it strengthens particular identity: this is how groups and individuals understand their identity in relation to each other. Finally, it fosters singular identity: this gives information about the differences between groups and/or individuals. (Augé 1992: 51) The Japanese at Shirokiya use the department store for the construction and maintenance of different social and individual identities: Japanese born residents tend to eat the original Japanese food to be reminded of their homeland; they “(…) revive experiences of childhood through the flavor of something long ago tasted (…)” (Kirkendall 1985: 9). Nisei and Sansei Japanese Americans use the food at Shirokiya in two different ways. First, they love to eat the Japanese American fusion food as it refers to their personal history. Upon that, they tend to exalt all original Japanese food as the true representation of their (parents’) homeland. In that sense, Japanese food is a sort of “heritage trip”. (Walsh 1992: 122)
The paper aims to find out about the different identities that Japanese groups in Hawaii construct through the means of food. While some use it to maintain and uphold their well-established Japanese identity, others use it to construct and invent a certain kind of Japanese identity without even knowing Japan.
Timothy Y. H. Tsu “Branding and Heritage-izing Chinese food in Japan”
This paper discusses notable cases of branding and “heritage-izing” of Chinese food with the purpose to enhancing its image and recognition and so its commercial value. Observed from before WWII, the branding of Chinese food enables easy recognition and creates expectations about quality on the part of consumers. By comparison, “heritage-izing” is a more recent phenomenon, beginning, say, from the 1980s. It involves the ascription of historical narratives to Chinese food stressing some form of continuity in tradition. As a guarantee of authenticity, this narrative of continuity confers added value to one or a range of food while distinguishing it/them from generic competitors. Although branding can be an exercise in commercial labeling that makes no reference to history, “heritage-izing” necessarily focuses on the construction and dissemination of historical “stories.” Riding on the back of surging public interest in collective memory and cultural heritage in Japan, the “heritage-izing” of Chinese food is developing apace. This paper shows that “heritage-izing” has overtaken branding not only in establishing iconic Chinese food for consumers but also in contributing to the articulation of Japanese communal identities as well as the identity of the Chinese in Japan.
Tine Walravens, Hanno Jentzsch “Converging interests for the local and the national behind the chisan chishô campaign”
Agricultural industrialization, a globalized food supply chain and the increased separation between consumers and producers has, among others, led to a growing interest in ‘alternative’ ways of food provision and arising alternative agricultural movements (Renting et al 2003). Chisan chishō (CSCS, Local production, local consumption) is a concept adopted in Japanese national agricultural policy, advocating the consumption of locally produced foods in order to raise the country’s self-sufficiency rate and to solve other food-related crises in Japan. Scholarly literature on Japanese alternative agricultural movements remains little (Kimura & Nishiyama 2005, 2008, Yokoyama & Sakurai 2009, Assmann 2010, 2012), yet all agree in the fact that the CSCS program has its flaws.
The paper argues that (semi-)governmental initiatives within this framework readily use associations with national identity to appeal to the public. In doing so, they politicize the issue at stake; hence facilitating the exploitation of the triggered nationalism for causes other than the welfare of the consumer. Drawing on campaign material and extensive fieldwork in farming communities in Japan, the paper shows how promoting CSCS becomes the vehicle through which the convening interests of MAFF and JA are defended and pursued. These stakeholders exploit the concept as a justification for continuous agricultural support and protection. The CSCS program, despite its proclaimed goals as the protection of the environment, lower consumer or producer costs, raising consumer consciousness or better food safety records, also demonstrates a strong streak of nationalism, self-interest and opposition to globalization and trade liberalization.