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Although serving the interests of the state, however, the reform of domestic
space in Japan was by no means a state-sponsored, top-down project
comparable to ‘civilization and enlightenment’ (see chapter One). To be
sure, the state provided the legal foundation and institutional framework
for the reform, but it proceeded through the interaction of various initiatives.
3 The reform also opened up a myriad of business opportunities for
producers of furniture and cooking equipment, publishers of magazines
and cookbooks. All these players were in constant negotiation with each
other, not to mention the men and women who adjusted their family life to
the newly emerging concepts and expectations.
In his House and Home in Modern Japan, Jordan Sand meticulously
explains the creation of domestic space in modern Japan, in both abstract
and concrete terms. In this chapter, based on Sand’s insights, I will illuminate
aspects that were critical for the elevation of the family meal into a
cult of family performance and the glorification of cooking as the epitome
of housewifery. These two developments are central to the construction
of Japanese national cuisine and contemporary attitudes towards cooking.
Home economics classes, sustained by nationally circulated magazines and
later by radio and television, helped to disseminate the nationally homogenous
repertoire of home cooking. They were also responsible for the
popularization of the culinary aesthetics hitherto restricted to gastronomy
as the characteristic feature of ‘Japaneseness’.
The Family Meal as the Hub of Domesticity
The launch of the domestic discourse in Japan was fertilized by the exposure
to the Victorian ‘cult of domesticity’, manifested by the sentimentalization
of home life and the romanticization of motherly duties in British
and North American middle-class homes. This family morality that had
developed under the influence of industrial capitalism and Protestant
reform movements found no parallel in Japan. By the end of the nineteenth
century, however, the Anglo-American domestic ideal received the
increasing attention of Japanese social reformers and was widely featured
in the Japanese media. The neologism katei – a term that soon entered the
Japanese language as the equivalent of the English word ‘home’ – was
especially constructed in order to express the full meaning of the new
concept. Katei soon became a trendy word and a ‘katei’ column became a
standard component in popular mainstream magazines and newspapers. In
conjunction with katei, the phrase ikka danran (the family circle) became
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