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An urban working family at a shared table, 1932.
at last when the child welcomes him on the road, and the wife
greets him at the door. Meanwhile, the family is seated in front
of the table, the mixed smell of rice and fish cooked by the wife
saturates the air. Then, when he starts eating, he relaxes, the
hardships of the whole day are gone without a trace, and the
room brims with a peaceful spirit of satisfaction. 16
Three changes were necessary in order to achieve such an atmosphere:
mealtimes of all family members needed to be synchronized; individual
trays had to be replaced with a shared table; and the quality and variety of
home meals had to be improved. After the turn of the century, an increasing
number of middle-class families abandoned their trays and began to
take meals sitting on the floor around a low table. They were soon followed
by working-class families; by the 1920s a large proportion of them
adopted shared tables, mainly due to practical considerations – one large
table with folded legs took less space than several individual trays and
could be used for other purposes as well. 17 The new shared table, commonly
referred to as chabudai, was either round or rectangular, with the
diameter of approximately 60–70 centimetres. Such tables had long
been used in Nagasaki restaurants that served shippoku cuisine, a Chinese-
Japanese fusion cooking. 18 By the 1920s chabudai had become the heart of
the domestic ideology in Japan, and half a century later, when Western-style
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