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the daily life of the Palace at all. The service was perfect – a
footman to every two guests; and all this crowd of men did
not get in each other’s way, attended quietly to one’s wants,
and made, in their dark liveries of crimson and black and gold,
an effective background to the long rows of guests, where the
women were almost all in white, relieved with gold or silver
and covered with jewels, the men with hardly an exception in
all the glory of smart uniforms. 17
A slightly different account of the same evening was given by Ella M. Hart
Bennett, who recalled that ‘the little Japanese Admiral, who spoke no
English, tried to entertain me by making all sorts of figures out of his
bread. At each course he asked for a fresh roll, and, by the end of dinner,
we had an array of minute bread soldiers, ladies and animals on the table
before us, really most cleverly contrived.’ 18 English conversation skills
notwithstanding, it seems that by the 1890s the Japanese elite had became
fully acquainted with Western-style dining.
This was by no means an easy task, considering the fact that practically
every aspect of Western-style dining revolutionized the existing
Japanese conventions. Not only did the form and taste of the food differ
greatly from native fare, but also the eating utensils and dining furniture
contradicted Japanese customs. Sitting on chairs and handling cutlery were
already tortures for novice Japanese diners, not to mention the challenging
flavours of butter, beef and wine. On the top of that, a Western-style
banquet required its participants to be dressed in Western style, which at
the time was in itself an adventure for many members of the Japanese
upper class. In short, the introduction of Western food into the lives of the
Japanese elite meant much more than simply a change of the menu.
The policies of bunmei kaika divided the life of the Japanese elite into
two separate spheres – the Western sphere (represented by the ideogram
yō) and the Japanese sphere (ideogram wa). 19 Western-style cuisine ( yōshoku)
was served in a Western-style room (yōma) and the diners were dressed
in Western-style clothes (yōfuku). Since the intimate aspects of the lives
of aristocrats, intellectuals and government officials of the Meiji period
(1868–1912) remained predominantly in the Japanese sphere, the Western
sphere became strongly associated with official state ceremonies. In time,
the practical meaning of what was Western and what Japanese became less
clear-cut, shifting across the social territories of Japan. Ultimately, the
Westernized, official culture fostered by the state would merge with native
class- and community-based practices and conventions. 20
20