Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity (review)

Culinary history has opened up new perspectives in the study of culture, technology, economics, and politics as well as other fields. Katarzyna Cwiertka’s recent work is a lucid example of such a treatment of history through foodways, clarifying, on the one hand, ideas of nationalism and ideologies of identity, and, on the other, from the ground up, cultural understandings of taste and human behavior. Such works can add to the power of area studies to tell stories that cross the borders of cultures and nation-states. There is that bowl of kare raisu (the now ubiquitous “curry and rice”), for example, a foreign foodway becoming paradoxically in war and later in peace a national dish. Cwiertka’s work provides such delicious stories, it is hard to resist simply recounting them. But there is much more here than table talk.

Among the discussions in Cwiertka’s book is the interesting one of authenticity, ownership, and the insistence upon knowing the roots. Recent kimuchi battles between Korea and Japan over who can legitimately make the pickle called kimchi tell such stories of the imperatives of ownership of taste. Western engagements with Asian foods also engage the problem of “the real thing”: is what you are eating in Amsterdam, Boston, or Los Angeles real sushi? If a Hispanic itamae-san prepares the nigiri, is it Japanese? When Japanese foods first came to America, they arrived with the Issei whose food was home cooking, and few questions of authenticity were raised, unless grandmother mourned the lack of Japanese rice. But now, it is the Western connoisseur who is anxious about such matters.

Cwiertka treats a number of cases in which modernity is measured in food, nation-state building is reckoned through the naming of foods as “Japanese,” and state power to determine the welfare of the nation is doled out in diets, army, school, and home. The most successful chapters in my opinion are those that treat “Imperial food projects” in which the strength of the nation is epitomized in diets and specific foods prescribed by officials. The Meiji-period culinary story is interesting as the incorporation of Western foodways to strengthen Japan’s body politic is described both as fashion and as necessity. Japan’s emergence on the world scene demanded the power to resist dependencies, even as the borrowing of trends demonstrated cosmopolitan confidence. But it is the central chapters, on strengthening the military, wartime mobilization, and the culinary outcomes of Japanese imperialism, in which a clear and consistent narrative is maintained. The postwar period of affluence, while interesting, seems telescoped, and the creation of national cuisine in the face of globalization is treated less comprehensively, however interesting the details. In the framing of the book, “modern” takes many different forms as the foodways are molded by historical change and economic exigencies.

Contemporary work on Japanese food in the rapidly growing field of food studies complements Japan area studies. The hot themes in culinary studies, and in Cwiertka’s work, are congruent with those of current work in Japan studies—globalization and regionalisms, cultural ecologies, transformation, modernization, and identity. In these areas, looking at food gets us to the heart of interesting problems, topical and area focused, and naturally becomes an interdisciplinary engagement. As Cwiertka brings together policy, culture, ideology, economics, and social change in her treatment of changing foodways, she exposes some contentious issues particularly in regard to the concepts of nationalism and modernization. And in this pursuit, she alerts us to the problems in considering any Japanese food “unique” and “authentic”—even that made by a farm wife in a Tohoku kitchen. In her work, we see that change is the real constant.

There is something about Japanese food that inspires words like unique and authentic, something that makes us crave “the real thing.” Japanese food has a worldwide reputation for being a high cuisine, with demanding and even scary aspects (remember the first time you had a plate of uni, the...