March 19, 2022

Branding Japanese Food: From Meibutsu to Washoku (review)

After Cwiertka's impressive Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity, “Branding Japanese Food” is somewhat of a let-down. Katarzyna Cwiertka and co-author Miho Yasuhara have an ideological ax to grind, and in this book they do little else but grind their axes, chopping away at the rather innocent concept of “washoku.”

Now in my view it was an important milestone when Japanese cuisine was in 2013 added by UNESCO to their “Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” In that listing Japanese food was described as “Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, notably for the celebration of New Year.” There is a longer definition which says something about “the form of the daily meals at home of the Japanese (consisting of rice, soup, side dishes and pickled vegetables), eating habits at annual events, celebrations and ceremonial occasions that strengthen the bonds between people in local communities (such as o-sechi dishes at New Year, or the joint mashing of rice cakes) and local specialties.” (read the full definition at the UNESCO website: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/washoku-traditional-dietary-cultures-of-the-japanese-notably-for-the-celebration-of-new-year-00869)

I hoped that this registration and the positive news it generated would promote interest in Japanese food, and also en passant help that wonderful beverage, Japanese sake, spread further around the world (and I think it indeed did so, as it enhanced the soft power of Japanese culture). The Japanese government undoubtedly also hoped it would give the Japanese more pride in their own food culture, which is under siege from fast food and changes in society which mean people have less leisure to prepare this time-and-labor consuming cuisine.

Now we come to the present book. Rice is central to washoku, but the authors argue that for most of the Japanese population, white rice was only for a few decades in the modern period a real staple food (it was too expensive, so other grains, tubers and beans were added to brown rice). They also maintain that most meals do not consist of the holy washoku set of “one soup and three side dishes” (plus rice and pickles), as most people through history ate only one side dish or none at all. I don’t see the problem the authors have here: rice was sacred in Japanese culture, so whether it was a daily dish for everybody or not, is irrelevant: eating rice was the ideal (and the same is mutatis mutandis true for “one soup, three side dishes”).

Another problem is that the authors don’t understand that advertising and promotion is something different from academic work. They look at the promotion of local specialties (meibutsu) and souvenirs (omiyage) in Japan in the past and see a parallel with the promotion of washoku, for these specialties were often linked to historical persons or origins which were not always historically proven. Perhaps they were not – product promotion is after all different from historical research.

Then the authors are irritated by the term “washoku”. This term - complain the authors - was very little used until it was picked up by the committee preparing the UNESCO application. And although the definition of Japanese food in the application is broader, Cwiertka and Yasuhara maintain that in fact it was in the first place the elite Kaiseki “haute cuisine” which was registered. Again, so what? Kaiseki is the apex of Japanese food, and its ideology has pervaded Japanese culture. We are talking about “branding” here, not about scientific definitions. Registering “Kaiseki” would have been too narrow, and the advantage of calling Japanese food “washoku” was exactly that it was a little used and therefore open term. On top of that, it is a word easy to pronounce and remember also for non-Japanese – that is exactly what you want when you are branding something!

Finally, the authors blame their colleagues, Japanese food scholars, including the great food historian Isao Kumakura, for not standing up against these "problems." As argued above, I don't really see these concerns (or they are too small to get excited about), and I am glad that these Japanese scholars looked over the walls of their classrooms at the greater good: the effective promotion and branding of Japanese food.

See also this interesting review by professor Eric Rath: https://networks.h-net.org/node/20904/reviews/6128874/rath-cwiertka-and-yasuhara-branding-japanese-food-meibutsu-washoku