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