Download - Brainshare Public Online Library

uilding blocks for the new dining style. Yōshokuya supplied an entirely
new dining framework represented by the Western chair and tables
(instead of cushions and trays called for by the native habit) and an entirely
new menu. In other words, yōshokuya created a new space where a cultural
context of modern Japan was to be conceived. The ‘West’ provided
vocabulary for this new culinary language, but the syntax, the accent
and the meaning were all negotiated by the proprietors, employees and
customers of these new establishments.
Multicultural Catering for the Urban Masses
Yōshokuya and its menus served as a blueprint for the modern mass
gastronomy that began to emerge in Japan after the turn of the century. It
was a time when large department stores started to dominate the commercial,
architectural and cultural landscape of Japanese cities. The so-called
hyakka shōten (hundred-goods sales store) or hyakkaten (hundred goods
store), such as Mitsukoshi, Shirokiya, Takashimaya and Matsuya, focused
on upper- and upper-middle-class customers in their commercial strategies,
emphasizing high quality, exclusiveness and fashion. Conversely,
department stores that were founded somewhat later by railway companies
– the so-called teruminaru depāto such as Hanshin, Hankyū, Tōkyū
and Odakyū – focused on the mass market, selling modernity in the form
of mass-produced merchandise at the lowest possible prices. By the 1930s
Matsuya department store in Tokyo, c. 1930s.
50