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hishio, is recorded to have been used in Japan as early as the eighth century
ad. Miso became the staple in the Japanese diet since the thirteenth century.
Soy sauce similar to the contemporary product was based on a Chinese
recipe that was transmitted to Japan in the seventeenth century. 6 The use
of chopsticks and the structure of the Japanese meal were also largely
influenced by the civilization of ancient China. However, by the mid-nineteenth
century, centuries after their introduction, Chinese elements had
become fully integrated in local consumption patterns and entirely
stripped of their foreign connotations. With a few exceptions, such as the
exclusive Japanese-Chinese style of cooking (shippoku ryōri) that was
developed during the eighteenth century in the merchant enclave of
Nagasaki, pre-modern Japanese never really tasted Chinese food. 7 It was
during the 1920s and ’30s, when the rhetoric of imperialist expansionism
began to dominate public discourse, that Chinese cuisine came to be widely
consumed in Japan.
The formation of the Japanese Empire began in 1876 with Japan
forcing neighbouring Korea to open ports to trade, in a fashion resembling
the tactics of Commodore Perry two decades earlier (see chapter One).
The victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 provided Japan with its first
major colony – the island of Formosa (Taiwan). Korea became Japan’s
protectorate ten years later and was officially colonized in 1910. Taiwan
and Korea constituted Japan’s two major colonies before the establishment
in 1932 of the Japanese-run puppet state of Manchukuo. In 1945 Japan
lost all its colonies, except for the neighbouring islands of Hokkaido and
Ryūkyū (Okinawa), which were seized shortly after the Meiji Restoration. 8
However, the colonial legacy continued to influence Japanese food habits
even after the collapse of the empire. More than a million Japanese who
resided in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria and other Chinese territories under
Japan’s domination, not to mention hundreds of thousands of soldiers
who fought on the continent, acquired a taste for foreign food and played
a critical role in its popularization in post-war Japan. For example, returnees
from Manchukuo were responsible for the dissemination of northern
Chinese dishes, such as gyōza dumplings. They found themselves jobless
in the midst of devastation and food shortages, and many embarked on
the making and selling of gyōza to their hungry customers. 9 Gyōza were
particularly suited to the circumstances of wartime Japan, since they were
made of wheat flour which was easier to acquire than rice and practically
anything qualified as stuffing. In a survey conducted in 2002 among 15,000
respondents, gyōza ended up third among the dishes most frequently served
at dinner tables in contemporary Japan. 10
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