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on the Japanese menus. 13 As formerly expensive and exclusive types of
food became universally affordable, the daily meals of people of different
social and economic status who resided in different parts of Japan have
grown increasingly similar.
The following seven chapters will portray the seven most important
processes in the dietary transformation of modern Japan: the embrace of
the West as the model for political and economic development (chapter
One), the rise of the new urban mass gastronomy (chapter Two), the
modernization of military catering (chapter Three) and home cookery
(chapter Four), wartime food management (chapter Five), the dietary effects
of Japanese imperialism (chapter Six) and, finally, the impact of the rapid
economic growth in post-war Japan (chapter Seven). The contexts and
implications of each of the processes will be addressed and crucial players
identified. The book concludes with a general analysis of the making
of a national cuisine, and closes with a brief portrayal of the spread of
Japanese food outside Japan.
I will employ the term ‘cuisine’ following the definition provided by
Warren Belasco – a set of socially situated food behaviours comprising ‘a
limited number of “edible” foods (selectivity); a preference for particular
ways of preparing food (techniques); a distinctive set of flavours; textual
and visual characteristics (aesthetics); a set of rules for consuming food
(ritual); and an organized system of producing and distributing the food
(infrastructure)’. 14 Like Belasco’s, my understanding of cuisine differs from
the definitions of scholars like Priscilla Ferguson, who limits the concept
to what Jack Goody would call a ‘high cuisine’ – an elaborated and formalized
style of consumption that serves as a means of differentiating class
distinctions in hierarchical societies. 15 Ferguson sees cuisine as a cultural
construct that ‘systematizes culinary practices and transmutes the spontaneous
culinary gesture into a stable cultural code’. ‘Culinary preparations’
– she explains – ‘become a cuisine when, and only when, the preparations
are articulated and formalized, and enter the public domain’. 16 This, as
Sidney Mintz astutely observed, ‘is like saying that a country does not
exist until someone makes a map of it’. 17 My perception of cuisine follows
Mintz’s approach in stressing the social embedment of cuisine rather than
its intellectual and aesthetic qualities.
What makes a cuisine is not a set of recipes aggregated in a
book, or a series of particular foods associated with a particular
setting, but something more. I think a cuisine requires a population
that eats that cuisine with sufficient frequency to consider
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