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Chinatown restaurant. Only a handful of Chinese restaurants operated outside
the Chinatown areas in late nineteenth-century Japan. For example, in
the 1880s Tokyo counted three Chinese restaurants: Eiwasai (opened in
1879), Kairakuen (established in 1883) and Shūhōen (set up in 1884). They
were all very exclusive and recreated the nostalgic atmosphere of the
pre-modern merchant enclave of Nagasaki. Although frequented by the
Japanese political elite, they were far less fashionable than Western-style
establishments. 16 As Gennifer Weisenfeld observed, ‘defining and differentiating
“Japaneseness” vis-à-vis the West and within Asia was an ongoing
project requiring constant renegotiation in relation to changing geopolitical
conditions’. 17 In the late nineteenth century there was as yet no place for
Asia in the construction of new forms of consumption in Japan; borrowings
from the West constituted at the time the marrow of modernizing processes.
The situation changed after the turn of the century. With the ‘unequal
treaties’ revised and victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1905)
under its belt, Japan’s confidence in the international arena increased and
the infatuation with the West cooled off. The time was ripe for the Chinese
food boom to begin.
Popular restaurants serving Chinese food, either Chinese-owned or
run by a Japanese proprietor but employing Chinese cooks, mushroomed
in Tokyo during the second and third decade of the twentieth century.
Their number is reported to have increased from two establishments in
1906 to fifteen hundred in 1923. 18 Similar restaurants also emerged in other
cities. In Sapporo, for example, which would later become famous for its
Chinese-style noodles, seven Chinese-style eateries opened during the first
half of the 1920s. The first one, Takeya Shokudō, catered primarily to the
Chinese students of Hokkaido Imperial University, but they were soon
outnumbered by Japanese customers. 19
The restaurant Rairaiken, set up in Tokyo in 1910, went into history
as the first establishment to serve Shina soba (‘China’+‘noodles’) in
Japan. 20 It was owned and run by Ozaki Kan’ichi, a former official at the
Yokohama Customs Office, and employed thirteen Chinese cooks hailing
from the Yokohama Chinatown. On busy days up to 2,5000 Japanese customers
gobbled down the Guangdong-style food served there. 21
Shina soba was one of the signature dishes of Rairaiken. The name
was easy to remember, since most Tokyo dwellers were familiar with soba
noodles sold in the streets of the capital since Tokugawa times. However,
Shina soba acquired the status of a ‘national’ dish in Japan under a different
name – rāmen. The change of name from Shina soba to rāmen took place
during the 1950s and ’60s. The word Shina, used historically in reference to
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