Meaning Behind Eating in Contemporary Japan
Chair / Organizer: Chrissie Tate Reilly, Monmouth University
Presenters:
1) Chrissie Tate Reilly, Monmouth University
Food Fight: Patriotic Eating in World War II Japan
2) Hiroko Shimbo, Japanese Cooking Authority, Chef, Cookbook Author
The Happiest Black Pig: Sustainable farming and Okinawa style pork diet
3) Stephanie Assmann, Tohoku University
Slow Food Japan: Reviving Local Foodways in a Global Food Paradise
4) Joshua Evan Schlachet, Kagoshima University
We Are What They Ate: Lived Imagination in Contemporary Satsuma Cuisine
Discussant:
1) Elizabeth Andoh, A Taste of Culture
Meaning Behind Eating in Contemporary Japan
Chair / Organizer: Chrissie Tate Reilly, Monmouth University
This panel
features presentations and commentary by both Japanese food theorists
and practitioners. Two papers examine the rise of local foodways, one
paper looks at the globalization of sushi, and one paper discusses food
during World War II. The search for national and regional identity
expressed through food is one central theme of our panel. We will
examine Japanese food, its changes and trends, its modern
manifestations, its ability to adapt, its global presence, and all of
these implications. The depth and regional variety of Japanese cuisine
is highlighted by contrasting it with wartime imported foods, showing
how pork – a usually taboo food – is an essential part of an island’s
ecosystem, seeking to maintain its authenticity through the Slow Food
movement, and the task of maintaining Japanese cuisine’s integrity
overseas. We seek to provide detailed answers to the following
questions: Is it possible that eating locally grown native foods make a
person more Japanese? In what situations does the consumption of
foreign foods ever present a benefit? And how does the dissemination of
a food make it even more iconic?
1) Chrissie Tate Reilly, Monmouth University
Food Fight: Patriotic Eating in World War II Japan
Eating during
wartime is especially problematic. The usual concerns of getting
adequate nutrition are exacerbated by crop destruction, government
intervention, scarcity, and inflation. These conditions are countered
by culinary ingenuity, sacrifice, and symbolism. I will argue that the
conditions during WWII had a polarizing effect for indigenous and
foreign foods. Imported cuisine, like military fare, substitute
cuisine, like sweet potatoes, and native cuisine, like rice, made up
the wartime diet. Imported foods were extolled because of their caloric
density. Substitute cuisine was favored because of its availability and
low cost. Each of these allowed more native foods to be sent as rations
to members of the Japanese military. When native foods were available
for public consumption, they were important nutritionally, but also
what they represented was elevated: sacrifice for soldiers and the good
of the nation. This phenomenon is patriotic eating. The evolution of
this will be examined from the Manchurian Incident through the summer
of 1945.
2) Hiroko Shimbo, Hiroko's Kitchen, Japanese Cooking Authority, Chef, Cookbook Author
The Happiest Black Pig: Sustainable farming and Okinawa style pork diet
Okinawa is an
island of great human longevity and often attributed to the unique
aspects of the Okinawan diet. In traditional Okinawan cuisine pork has
always played an important role, and Okinawans’ love affair with pork
continues. Until quite recently every family kept a pig or two at home.
Pigs were fed with materials produced in the kitchen and slaughtered
once at the beginning of the year. New Year was celebrated with special
dishes that Okinawans could not afford during the rest of the year.
This tradition of keeping pigs at home changed to large-scale,
unsustainable, resource intensive pig framing as has happened in other
parts of the world resulting in many unhappy pig stories. An interest
in Okinawan cuisine led me to visit Ganaha Chikusan (Ganaha Pig
Farm) in Okinawa Prefecture. The owner/president Mr. Ganaha has been
raising his pigs with humane and sustainable methods, and his pigs are
among the happiest on earth. The meat from these animals is recognized
as the most delicious pork in Japan. In this lecture I will present the
methods of high quality, sustainable pig farming practiced at
Ganaha Chikusan.
The special diet and calcium water extracted from coral that the pigs
consume every day is an important part of the process. Even
environmental hygiene is carried out with renewable, sustainable
materials. In a recently developed process the barns are fumigated with
lactic acid liquid; resulting in a pig farm with absolutely no odor.
The lecture includes delicious recipes.
3) Stephanie Assmann, Tohoku University
Slow Food Japan: Reviving Local Foodways in a Global Food Paradise
While Japanese
foods such as sushi and sashimi have become increasingly popular
outside Japan, the rise of Chinese, Korean, Mexican and European foods
has led to a remarkable diversity of foods and a blending with Japanese
foodways, especially in Japan’s major cities. In opposition to the
globalization of food, Slow Food Japan, which is part of the worldwide
Italian Slow Food Movement, seeks to preserve historic agricultural
products such as vegetables, fruits and cattle that are in danger of
vanishing and tied to a specific region and cultivation techniques.
Members of Slow Food Japan argue that the need to improve Japan’s low
self-sufficiency rate of 40 percent and the dangers of relying on
imported foods as documented in a recent series of food scandals in
Japan request a return to national produce (kokusan). Taking the
case of Slow Food Japan in Miyagi Prefecture in Northern Japan as an
example, I argue that the quest for a return to supposedly safer
domestic foods disguises a search for national identity expressed
through the (re)discovery and promotion of local foods. In this
context, I will also examine the efforts of local farmers in Miyagi who
revive agricultural products characteristic of a specific region in
order to show how the promotion of an indigenous fare is tied to the
development of tourism, especially in rural areas in Japan that are
driven to the margins of the country.
4) Joshua Evan Schlachet, Kagoshima University
We Are What They Ate: Lived Imagination in Contemporary Satsuma Cuisine
The consumption of Japanese
cuisine by the Japanese public entails both a physical ingestion of
food and a symbolic negotiation with the representational vocabulary of
identity, culture and commodity, entering both the producers and
consumers implicitly into a discourse on broader cultural imagination.
This paper examines the lingering notion of historical continuity
embedded in the contemporary Japanese self-image, focusing specifically
on local and national cuisines as symbols of the perceived
interconnection between individual, place, nation and past. Utilizing
marketing materials and strategies for current Japanese food products,
I explore the manner in which romanticized images of history and space
are re-packaged to reinforce the notion of the Japanese self as
inherently related to Japan-as-place. These images of continuity and
internal coherence, however, begin to unravel when confronted with
various micro- and macrocosms of regional contestation and global
re-contextualization. This paper focuses on representations of Satsuma
(modern-day Kagoshima) cuisine, paying particular attention to the
intersection between nostalgic imagination and the lived experience of
everyday consumption. Cuisine, both as a necessary aspect of everyday
life and as a form of consumable culture that mediates our bodily
interaction with the social world, is a natural element of such
questions of identity.
Discussant:
1) Elizabeth Andoh, owner/director of A Taste of Culture, and author of Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen