Tuesday, 9 February 2010

Food in Japan

Writing about Japanese food is one of the dullest subjects imaginable to me. Since I have to listen to interminable comments about food and restaurants in poor English as part of my job, I've come to dislike the whole subject. So in this blog I'm not going to enumerate all the Japanese dishes that I either love or hate. Instead I'm going to attempt to analyze the sociological concept of food in Japan.

We all talk about food we like and probably take a certain amount of pride in our signature dishes. Many also get a nationalistic thrill when they hear their country's cuisine getting glowing reviews. I think this is the case with the Japanese. Unlike much of Asia they don't use chilies in their cooking. One might be tempted to call it bland. They prefer adjectives that come out badly in translation such as 'salty' and 'oily'. The Japanese are happy as larry when they hear foreigners mention that they like sushi and sashimi. Sushi along with cars seems to be Japan's greatest cultural export. For many Japanese their cuisine along with the fact that they have 4 seasons and cherry trees seems to be at the heart of their national identity. They are removed from the Asian continent by the Japanese sea and they don't exactly view themselves as Asian, just as the Brits don't feel comfortable being European. Having non-spicy food is a key point in their desire to define themselves as other than Asian.

This is of course fictional because much of Japanese culture is borrowed originally from their much older neighbour, China. Chopsticks, rice wine, green tea, Buddhism, kimonos and kanji are all cultural imports. They value the group over the individual as does China. Confucianism with its emphasis on social harmony and everyone knowing their place in society is deeply embedded in the Japanese psyche. And lastly, the Chinese like the Japanese traditionally prefer to eat while drinking alcohol; unlike, for example, in the UK where people have their dinner at home prior to going to the pub for a few pints.

Food in Japan is one entry point into the thorny subject of relations between men and women. Japan is without doubt still a very patriarchal society. In Japan it is a man’s world. The stereotypes largely hold good in Japan: men have political power, they go to work to earn money and women stay at home raise the kids and do the house work. (A growing number have part-time jobs to supplement the household income, but the man is still the main bread-winner.) During the several years that I have lived in a Japanese household I have not once seen my Japanese father-in-law cook a meal, nor I have I seen him wash a plate. Not even a glass. The most he will do is put his beer cans by the sink (he can't crush them up and put them in the correct bin). He gets up so early in the morning that his wife (whom he scarily calls ‘mother’) isn't around to cook him breakfast so he just foregoes the meal. Recently because he has to take medicine he has broken this habit and now microwaves some soupy rice. The man is very old school. His dignity is upheld by how he works incredibly long hours to bring home the bacon. His greatest joy is the evening meal. He lingers over his soft over-boiled food. He pours soy sauce on nearly everything and refuses to eat anything with even a hint of spice. During the hour or so it takes for him to eat he dominates the TV controller. We are all subjected to dull shows about fishing, going to hot baths and eating noodles. The only programs with any type of story he will tolerate are samurai dramas.

I don’t believe my household is unique in any of this. Instead I think this is all very representative of Japan and the rubric of eating in Japan. It is to reinforce the inequalities between men and women. The man asserts his right to be served and be acknowledged as the alpha member of the family.

The Japanese take this trend to its logical conclusion in the practice of Nyotaimori – eating sushi off a naked woman. In this instance the sushi chef is more than likely a man (it is a profession after all) but the naked plate is always a young woman. It is impossible to think how you could objectify a woman more than by making her into a plate. A woman is passive and there for men's delight and delectation. Business man can with impunity treat a woman as an object and ogle her nudity. They can legally do a lot more in the many legal brothels in Japan.
As far as women go, they get their revenge by spending some of the monthly housekeeping money on 3 or 4 lunches in restaurants with their friends while the husbands are working. If you go to nearly any reasonably priced restaurant in Japan at lunch time, especially fake Italian places and places with unlimited soft drinks on the menu, you will find the clientele are mostly women. They chat for hours, eat sweet things and thoroughly enjoy gossiping. And for me the oddest thing is their inability to eat with their mouths shut. Men do it as well, but women are the worst for being unable to pause in their flow of speech to finish masticating and swallow. Instead they will put a hand over their mouth as they chomp and chat. And that makes it all right. This was a shock to me when I first witnessed it. In other things the Japanese have exquisite manners. When it comes to food, however, it is fine to make lots of noise slurping your noodles and hot coffee. It is no faux pas to eat with your mouth open. Sometimes I feel like Gulliver after he returns from his journeys and decides to live with the horse in the stables because he finds humans crass and revolting. I’m sure some of my habits such as smoking other people find offensive, but that doesn’t change my dislike for going to restaurants in Japan. They stuff their gobs and look like Marlon Brando in the Godfather. They make constant noise. They show the world the food half chewed in their mouths. I try to be a cultural relativist but some things I just think are wrong. Would you justify female circumcision because some tribes still do it in Africa?
And that brings me to my final point. Japan is very much like every other country I’ve been to in their approach to ‘foreign’ food. They completely change it to suit their tastes. So Chinese food in Japan has the chili peppers eliminated. They seem to be inordinately fond of adding potato starch to Chinese cuisine so every dish has a shiny appearance. Italian food – pasta and pizzas – comes with seaweed; and that great Indian dish called ‘curry’ has been transformed into the blandest thick brown slop imaginable. It is strangely enough a dish which many Japanese claim to make superlatively. This I find mystifying because the main ‘curry’ ingredient is a curry cube that everyone buys from a supermarket. Pankun the performing TV chimp could make a Japanese curry rice dish and it would taste exactly the same as anyone else’s.
So next time you catch yourself spouting off about how good Japanese food is think  about how food reinforces patriarchal society, think about how uncouth the Japanese are in eating it and think about how they are co-opting the cuisine of your country.

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