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Novelty as such was not mentioned among the six points indicated as
guidelines in the preparation of family meals by the regular textbook of
home economics published by Japan Women’s College two years earlier.
However, novelty was a natural outcome if the six principles were followed,
because they could not be achieved without thorough reform of
home menus: 1) nourishment and digestibility; 2) inexpensiveness; 3) suitability
to the occasion (e.g. breakfast requires a different menu from
dinner) and particular needs of each individual (e.g. white-collar versus
manual workers, invalids, etc.); 4) taste; 5) suitability for age (e.g. children
need different food from the elderly); 6) aesthetics of presentation. 40
Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), a pioneering Japanese ethnographer,
noted an increased variety of food as one of the significant changes that
the patterns of food consumption in Japan underwent in the early twentieth
century. 41 The introduction of new foodstuffs from abroad, along with
the development of new dishes inspired by foreign cuisine, constituted the
core of this shift. The ideology of domesticity, with its emphasis on
reforming monotonous meals of the past, propelled the dissemination of
the new elements, since it revolutionized the general attitude toward home
meals. Increased attention towards food cooked at home, and greater efforts
to improve its quality, resulted in the growing differentiation between the
home menus of members of the same neighbourhood. Many middle-class
housewives strove to make their cooking varied and distinctive, and they
were aided in this task by cookery columns of women’s magazine, which not
only provided them with new recipes, but also regularly published weekly
menu suggestions (see overleaf ). Variety in the menu is striking; even miso
soup – the breakfast’s mainstay – uses a different type of vegetable each
day. The high concentration of Western-style dishes during the weekend
(chicken and peas in creamy sauce and pork balls on Saturday, and a
Western-style fish dish on Sunday) indicates that these dishes were considered
somehow special.
Send-in-recipe contests organized by women’s magazines proved
very popular among their readers. For example, in the early 1920s the
magazine Shufu no tomo (‘Housewife’s Companion’) conducted a contest
with the theme ‘Side Dishes that our Home is Proud of ’. Shufu no tomo,
first published in 1917, was the most influential women’s magazine in
pre-war Japan, with a nationwide circulation of 230,000–240,000 copies
twice monthly. 42 The results of kitchen experiments from virtually the
entire country were entered in the ‘Side Dishes that our Home is Proud of ’
contest. 43 Many of the awarded recipes were Japanese-Western hybrid
combinations, such as pork steamed in soy sauce, mashed potatoes with
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