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Six
The Culinary Consequences
of Japanese Imperialism
The powerful role of the West in the construction of modern Japan has
been widely recognized and rarely questioned. There is a general consensus
among the general public and scholars alike that the building bricks of
Japanese modernity were material goods, practices and ideas of Western
origin that were gradually integrated into the Japanese context and ultimately
acquired a Japanese identity. 1 In contrast, the contribution of non-
Western ethnic minorities in the making of modern Japan remains largely
unacknowledged, despite the growing body of scholarship on the topic. 2
As John Lie argued in 2001 in the introduction to his book Multiethnic
Japan, ‘the assumption that Japan is a monoethnic society is widely shared
not just by scholars of Japan and the Japanese themselves, but also by
virtually everyone else ’. 3 Although the dominant paradigm of Japanese
ethnic homogeneity has since the 1990s become significantly lower in voice,
it remains unchallenged, partly due to a relatively small proportion of ethnic
minorities in Japan. The estimated total of non-Japanese living in Japan in
the 1990s was 4–6 million in a country of 125 million people. 4 However,
Lie claims that it is not so much the demographic estimate, but the constitutive
role of ethnic minorities in modern Japan that makes the monoethnic
myth problematic. Cuisine provides a vivid testimony for Lie ’s
argument that multi-ethnicity occupies a central role in modern Japanese
society and culture.
The Japanese-Western-Chinese Culinary Tripod
I argued in chapter One that the formation of the dual Japanese and
Western styles of dining among the Meiji elite initiated the construction of
a Japanese-Western-Chinese tripod, which by the mid-twentieth century
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