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Conclusion
The Making of a
National Cuisine
During the course of the twentieth century, the daily meals of people of
different social and economic status who resided in different parts of Japan
grew both more varied and increasingly similar. The patchwork of localized
and diverse consumption practices of previous centuries was gradually
replaced by a set of foods, practices and tastes with which the majority of
Japanese willingly identified. The main objective of this book has been to
explain this phenomenal transformation. Each chapter identified the chief
processes that were involved in the making of modern Japanese cuisine.
Since the shifting of the culinary scene in Japan continues, some attention
was also devoted to signalling, although not fully analysing, the most
recent phenomena.
Japanese cuisine as it is projected and valued today is a modern construct
conceived in the midst of the twentieth-century historical dynamics.
Even the term washoku (‘Japanese cuisine ’), nowadays saturated with a
sense of timeless continuity and authenticity, is a modern invention. It
emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to the growing prominence
of foreign cuisines in the Japanese culinary discourse. 1 This by
no means implies, however, that Japanese cuisine is a twentieth-century
fabrication; that it does not rest upon time-honoured foundations. As this
book has demonstrated, the construction of Japanese national cuisine was
deeply embedded in the existing environment and relied on knowledge,
skills and values that the Japanese people had accumulated over time.
Many of the constitutive elements that today stand for culinary ‘Japaneseness’
are indeed deeply rooted in Japan. They often date back several
centuries and are intricately tied to the past of a particular community,
class or region. Some of these elements were embraced as national icons
relatively unchanged, others were transformed by new technologies,
needs and tastes. As with any other cultural constructs, a cuisine is a
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