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The meat-based stock gave the dish a distinctive flavour, since Japanese
cooks relied exclusively on seafood and seaweed while preparing broth for
their noodles. Yet the spirit of the times seems to have been equally critical
for the growing popularity of Shina soba as its attractive taste. Japanese
imperialist expansion into China fostered a China boom in Japan. Chinesestyle
decorations, Chinese costumes and Chinese products were eagerly
consumed by the Japanese public, as they translated colonialism into a
concrete experience. By physically interacting with China through the
ingestion of Chinese food and drink, the Japanese masses were brought
closer to the idea of empire. In 1932 Chinese dishes began to be served in
the Hankyū department store in Osaka, and soon every respectable department
store operated a Chinese restaurant alongside the already furnished
Japanese and Western ones. 26 In 1936 the Takashimaya department store
in Osaka organized a promotion campaign for Chinese wines with sales
personnel dressed in Chinese dress. The prestigious grocer Meidi-ya, with
stores throughout the country, regularly advertised Chinese wines and
liquors, offering a detailed description of their production processes and
taste differences. 27
Following the early Meiji tactics, it was reported that Chinese cuisine
appeared on the emperor’s table, which undoubtedly enhanced the fashion
for Chinese food. 28 The rise of a pan-Asian imperialist vision, and growing
public interest in the colonies, opened up new opportunities for cultural
representations of Japanese empire to shape Japanese modernity. For example,
the number of cookery books devoted to Chinese cuisine dramatically
increased during the 1920s and ’30s, as did the frequency of Chinese
recipes in the cookery columns of women’s magazines. In 1929 the magazine
Shufu no tomo introduced four Chinese recipes suggested by the wife
of Yamamoto Teijirō (1870–1937), agriculture minister in the cabinet of
Tanaka Giichi. The magazine explained that Mr and Mrs Yamamoto had
spent some time in Taiwan, and brought their Taiwanese cook with them
on their return to Japan. 29 Thousands of bureaucrats, professionals and
businessmen had departed for Taiwan since 1895, and later Korea and
Manchuria, to manage the colonial establishment and economy. Many of
them acquired a taste for local food and disseminated their eccentric liking
after returning to Japan. However, it was not until the late 1920s, a time
of growing imperialist sentiment, that their exotic preferences received
public attention.
From the 1920s onward Chinese-style dishes began to play an
important role in military menus as well. The first military cooking manual
to incorporate Chinese recipes was the Kaigun shukeihei chōri jutsu
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