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kyōkasho (‘Catering Textbook for Navy Accountants’) published in 1918.
In the same year, the Army Provisions Depot arranged for a regular transfer
of cooks from China, and dispatched them throughout the army units
to provide the catering sections with necessary supervision and advice. 30
Reformers of military catering began to view Chinese dishes as an alternative
to yōshoku, since Chinese dishes contained meat and fat, while being
close to Japanese cuisine in, for example, the use of soy sauce. Historical
records imply that in the 1930s conscripts singled out Chinese dishes, along
with yōshoku, as the favourites on military menus (see chapter Three). The
wartime militarization of nutrition and the shortage of rice sustained
further popularization of Chinese-style dishes, in particular wheat-based
dumplings, buns and noodles (see chapter Five).
Chinese and Western cuisines played a very important role in the
process of Japan’s culinary self-definition. Representations of the West
and Asia provided the space to negotiate new practices and meanings,
fulfilling a unifying and democratizing function in the construction of
modern Japanese cuisine. Ambiguities and contradictions of this process
are clearly reflected in the Japanese-Western-Chinese tripod. On the one
hand, the Japanese-Western and Japanese-Chinese hybrids have become
fully integrated within Japanese consumption patterns, and have acquired
a solid position as components of Japanese national cuisine. On the other
hand, they retained their distinctive identity as the yōshoku and Chūka
categories.
The passionate embrace of Chinese cuisine by the Japanese masses
cannot be explained by its gustatory qualities alone. The imperialist expansion
into China was equally important for the popularization of Chinese
food in Japan as the policies of ‘civilization and enlightenment’ (see chapter
One) were for the popularization of Western food. Imperialism constituted
a critical force in the making of a Japanese national cuisine.
Embracing Korean Food
The incorporation of Chinese food into Japanese cuisine is the most visible,
but not the only, channel through which Japanese imperialism shaped
the culinary culture of twentieth-century Japan. Another important
process was the gradual embrace of Korean cuisine, which has been completed
only in recent years.
Contrary to the case of Chinese food, Korean cuisine was practically
unknown in Japan prior to the 1940s. Publications that introduced Korean
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