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Culinary nation-making was by no means peculiar to Japan. The
proliferation of the concept of ‘national cuisine’ is a characteristic feature
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, clearly a result of the expanding
horizon within which people framed their existence. The sense of identity
and other cultural values that in the past had developed merely around
local life have been during the last two centuries extended to include
national and global perspectives. 3 This change obviously finds articulation
not only in what we eat, but also in the way we perceive and label food.
Today, we tend to describe different types of food by referring to their
‘nationality’. However, when talking of French, Italian, Mexican, Brazilian,
Chinese, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Eritrean and Ethiopian cuisines, we often
take these labels for granted. Unaware of the short-lived origins and
borrowed, reinterpreted or simply invented attributes of the food behind
them, we tend to project national cuisines as far more time-honoured than
they really are.
Individuals came to identify themselves as belonging to a nation relatively
recently. Despite an ongoing debate among historians whether the
nation is a peculiarly modern social formation or is embedded in history,
there is a general consensus that the rise of the nation as the global political
norm did not occurr before the nineteenth century. Another point of
contention among scholars is the extent to which nations are to be seen
as inventions or reconstructions shaped by earlier ethnic sentiments.
Members of the ‘modernist’ school claim that the rise of national consciousness
is rooted in modernity; that it can emerge only in a modern,
politically and culturally centralized society with a pervasive social mobility
and ever increasing equalization of conditions. 4 They argue that even
if one might occasionally trace a national consciousness among the elites
in agrarian societies, it was always secondary to religious, regional and
class loyalties. Quite the opposite is true for modern nationalism, which
‘effectively commands men’s loyalty, overriding the claims of both lesser
communities within it and those which cut across it or potentially enfold it
within a still greater society’. 5
One of the ground-breaking ideas in the scholarship of nationalism
was the concept of a nation as an ‘imagined community’, which proposes
that any community larger than a group of people who all know each other
is imagined. 6 Once imagined, however, national consciousness is continuously
reinforced through the unified ‘national culture ’ manufactured by
the state and distributed through its educational and bureaucratic networks.
This culture does not function to reinforce and underwrite the hierarchical
status system, as was the crucial role of culture in agrarian society, but
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