Download - Brainshare Public Online Library

interconnectedness between food-processing industries, distribution networks
and the restaurant business was emblematic for the transformation
that urban gastronomy underwent in interwar Japan.
The restaurant Chūōtei is a telling example of this new trend.
Watanabe Kamakichi, Chūōtei’s founder, had learnt to cook Western style
as a servant in a Western household, just like many of his contemporaries.
By the 1880s he was a well-established chef, preparing exclusive diplomatic
dinners and elite banquets. In 1907 he opened Chūōtei – a posh Westernstyle
restaurant catering for politicians and business leaders. However, as
a result of the tight competition that arose between the by then numerous
exclusive Western-style restaurants in Tokyo, Chūōtei was on the verge of
bankruptcy merely a decade after its opening. In 1918 the restaurant was
taken over by the trading company Meidi-ya, Chūōtei’s main supplier of
Western liquor and ingredients. Turned into a stock company, Chūōtei Co.
Ltd was to become an advertising medium for Meidi-ya’s products. The
restaurant was then reshaped from a high-class establishment into a middle-class
popular chain – an up-to-date version of yōshokuya. By the end
of 1926 Chūōtei was operating nine outlets: five in Tokyo, two in Osaka,
one in Nagoya and one in Kobe. 53
The proliferation of yōshoku as a popular food for the masses took
off at full speed through restaurants set up by railway companies at their
newly constructed terminals. For example, in 1920 Minoo Arima Railway
opened a restaurant at Umeda Station in Osaka that served commuters
with beefsteak, omelette, ham salad, potato croquettes and curry. By 1927
an average of nearly 5,000 people dined there daily. 54 That year, another
railway company, Tokyo Yokohama Dentetsu, set up a similar restaurant
at Shibuya Station in Tokyo. 55 They constituted direct competition to
the boxed lunch (ekiben) sold at train stations by independent pedlars. 56
Bolstered by big capital, yōshoku persistently acquired a growing share of
the catering market.
By the 1930s restaurants serving multicultural menus to the urban
masses and controlled by big corporations such as department stores, the
food industry and railway companies became ubiquitous. They gradually
replaced independent yōshokuya as the main vehicles for shifting meanings
and values ascribed to Western food. By then, yōshoku had lost its association
with the West and came to represent the new, urban mass gastronomy
of modern Japan with a strong, multicultural character.
Two factors were crucial in the road towards multicultural Japanese
gastronomy – the fashion for Western food that had been effectively
launched by a political elite half a century earlier, and the potential of
54