Food Identities at Home and on the Move

Explorations at the Intersection of Food, Belonging and Dwelling

Raul Matta, Charles-Edouard de Suremain, Chantal Crenn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000182583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How does food restore the fragmented world of migrants and the displaced? What similar processes are involved in challenging, maintaining or reinforcing divisions between groups coexisting in the same living place? Food Identities at Home and on the Move examines how 'home' is negotiated around food in the current worldwide context of uncertainty, mobility and displacement. Drawing on empirical approaches to heritage, identity and migration studies, the contributors analyse the relationship between food and the various understandings of home and dwelling. With case studies on sushi around the world, food as heritage in the Afghan diaspora and Mexican foodways in Chicago, these chapters offer novel readings on the convergence of food and migration studies, the anthropology of space and place and the field of mobility by focusing on how entangled stories of food and home are put on display for constructing the present and imagining the future.

Part One

Food identities in motion

1
Sushi Leaves Home

Japanese food and identity abroad

Voltaire Cang

Introduction

Washoku, literally ‘Japanese food’, was inscribed in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in December 2013. Its official title, ‘Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, notably for the celebration of New Year’, reflects the desire of the Japanese government to have the idea of ‘Japanese food’ represented by traditional New Year cuisine, called osechi ryōri. This will be a difficult undertaking: osechi ryōri will have to supersede the popularity of foods spearheading today’s global boom in Japanese cuisine and, rather improbably, it will have to replace the superstar among them all, sushi.

When introduced to North America early after the Second World War, most Americans dismissed sushi as unappetizing ‘rice sandwiches’ of raw fish (Issenberg 2007). Today, sushi has become an aesthetically pleasing, healthy and desirable restaurant and snack food that is readily available in places as diverse as neighbourhood cafes and tea salons, airport kiosks, starred restaurants, hotel buffets and sandwich shops around the world. Many authors trace the shift in attitudes towards sushi from around the 1960s, when Japanese food attained haute cuisine status in the United States on the heels of Japan’s rapid economic ascent. Sushi eventually entered the diet of ‘hip’, health-conscious advocates in the US West Coast in the 1970s and quickly spread around North America, finally taking root in continental Europe and Great Britain by the 1990s (Bestor 2000; Cwiertka 2001; Sakamoto and Allen 2011).

The boom has not abated since, and is reflected in the surge of sushi restaurants established worldwide. Official statistics place the current number of Japanese food establishments abroad at around 118,000, nearly fivefold from the 24,000 counted in 2006 when Japan began collecting data through its diplomatic offices (‘Number’ 2017). Although the popularity of ramen and other noodle restaurants is also fuelling the boom, sushi still holds dominion over the Japanese foodscape, with an estimated 50,000 of all Japanese restaurants overseas identified as sushi shops (‘Sekai’ 2017). Sushi’s universal image as healthy food and the rise of income levels in many parts of the world have made it more popular than ever. Today, sushi is made, sold and eaten in a bewildering array of styles, containing anything from goat meat to cheese, durian, chocolate and every other food item not necessarily Japanese in provenance or origin (Fukue 2012). Although Japanese are proud of sushi’s global popularity, their pride is tempered by anxiety over the seemingly ‘un-Japanese’ ways in which sushi is often unrecognizably transformed abroad. Broadcast media and bloggers frequently assail the many ‘blasphemous’ styles of sushi in the world, reacting with amusement, shock, humiliation as well as alarm (Sakamoto and Allen 2011).

The anxiety over sushi losing its inherent ‘Japaneseness’ came to a head in 2006 with the Japanese government’s scheme to regulate Japanese restaurants overseas, whereby inspectors would come frequently unannounced to check the menu and food preparation methods and judge the establishment’s ‘authenticity’ as a Japanese restaurant. Mockingly called the ‘Sushi Police’ project in a widely circulated report in the Washington Post, the initiative was criticized even in Japan for its clandestine methods and nationalistic bent; it was discontinued not long after (Faiola 2006). In recent years, though, the government has launched several accreditation and certification programmes that appear to be taking over the duties of the defunct ‘Sushi Police’, reflecting the still-existing anxiety over the perceived bastardization of Japanese food abroad. The many metamorphoses of sushi are not the sole prerogative of foreigners who do not know any better, however. In many cases, it is the Japanese, most often restaurateurs and chefs, who are behind drastic transformations. The California roll, for example, one of the earliest ‘non-Japanese’ sushi styles that is now the most ubiquitous outside Japan, was invented by a Japanese sushi chef based in North America in the 1970s or earlier. Japanese sushi chefs, however, are rarely questioned, much less criticized, when their handiwork transcends conventional ideas and rules about Japanese sushi and food tradition. Their cultural identity as Japanese, reinforced by background experience in Japan, automatically legitimizes their roles in (re)creating Japanese food culture and discourse, so much so that many in Japan and outside accept these roles outright, even celebrating them at times.

One suspects such legitimization and acknowledgement of the Japanese chef’s roles to be prime reasons for minimal academic inquiry on Japanese chefs, especially sushi chefs abroad. This chapter is an attempt to address the deficiency as it is also a prolegomenon to research on the role of Japanese sushi chefs within the context of the global boom in Japanese cuisine. Drawing from recent literature and fieldwork in Japan and the Philippines, this study investigates the backgrounds and current situation of sushi chefs ‘at home’ in Japan who, as the discussion below will show, are going through major and revolutionary shifts affecting their personal and professional identities as a result of the global popularity of Japanese food. From this discussion, the chapter will then consider the current situation of Japanese sushi chefs abroad, and through specific examples discuss their roles in shaping Japanese food culture outside Japan today.

While the global boom in Japanese food has boosted academic research on sushi in numerous contexts and disciplines, including fields as diverse as business management, medicine, communication and even pragmatics, hardly any studies have focused on the Japanese chef. There is simply a dearth of scholarly inquiry on the subject, and no study in English so far has specifically dealt with the Japanese sushi chef abroad. This absence was lamented by a recent paper in Japanese (Wang 2015). The paper investigated labour issues through the career development of four Japanese sushi chefs at home in Japan and discussed working conditions amid problems affecting the food industry, like deflation and encroaching mechanization. It briefly delineated the chefs’ education and training, emphasizing that none of them studied beyond high school as they trained through the ‘traditional’ route, that is, through several years’ apprenticeship under sushi chef masters.

Another paper by the same author followed in 2016, with the research field shifting to China (Wang 2016). Although it discussed the career development of sushi chefs and restaurateurs (all Chinese nationals) at large-scale, popular sushi restaurants in Shanghai, the paper was more focused on the means by which they adapted Japanese ingredients, food preparation and service styles to the local market. Nonetheless, with their focus on sushi chefs, this paper and its predecessor are novel contributions to the literature, even if limited to Japanese-language readership.

One paper in English that profiled Japanese celebrity chef Nobuyuki ‘Nobu’ Matsuhisa supplements the literature to some degree (Imai 2010). In this study, Nobu – who trained in Japan before working abroad – was discussed in the context of today’s Japanese food boom, delineating how ‘Nobu-style, hybridized Japanese food’ as influenced by North and South American cuisines resulted in global fame for the chef and his culinary brand. The study pointed to Nobu’s restaurant locations in the world’s major cities as key to Nobu’s success, postulating that these locations created a viable network that simultaneously supported and contained the flow of people, materials and information, thereby ‘maintaining [Nobu’s] authenticity’ on a consistent level everywhere. While this study provided an acute explanation of one Japanese chef’s influence in promoting Japanese cuisine globally, it curiously omitted background account of Nobu’s years of sushi chef training in his country of birth, which likely would have had a large impact on his approaches to Japanese food.

Another paper provided similarly framed profiles of Japanese chef–restaurateurs in Melbourne, Australia (Hamada and Stevens 2014). It discussed ‘key figures in the Melbourne Japanese culinary scene’ and the ways they negotiated ‘Japaneseness’ personally and through their food and environments in order to stay ‘authentic’ and ‘original’ yet also appeal to local dining tastes (p. 72). The authors described the negotiation process as a form of ‘translation’, whereby the foreign is made understandable and palatable to local consumers even as the translated object (Japanese food) remains different.

But, here again, discussion on the chefs’ personal history, education and training was missing. Any scholarly inquiry on chefs, Japanese or not, working in or outside Japan, specializing in sushi or otherwise, would necessitate investigation and discussion on their backgrounds, particularly their formative culinary training and education in their home countries. Such information becomes more critical in the study of Japanese chefs abroad, as it forms the foundation on which the chefs shape their discourse on Japanese food and present it, along with their food and their own selves, to the world at large. This chapter will initiate the discussion with an investigation of sushi chef education and training in Japan.

The sushi chef at home

‘Traditional’ training for sushi chefs in Japan can involve different approaches depending on factors such as the location of the training – in a big-city restaurant or in a small-town establishment, for example – as well as the personalities and attitudes of both trainer and trainee. Almost all traditional sushi chef training regimens, however, follow trajectories described in Wang’s 2015 paper.

The first one to two years of apprenticeship consist mostly of menial labour unrelated to actual sushi making, usually cleaning and washing up duties. In the succeeding years, trainees are gradually allowed to assist in food preparation. Still later, they are taught different kitchen techniques and customer service skills. Only after mastering a bevy of skills are they finally acknowledged as sushi chefs, all in all a process that takes many years. All aspects of the training, including kitchen duties and transmission of techniques, even timing of advancement to the next stages and final acknowledgement as a ‘proper’ sushi chef is left to the discretion of the sushi chef master, usually the owner or head chef of the sushi restaurant where the training takes place.

One veteran chef in the study narrated his experiences in the first five years of a two-decade career (including nearly a decade as apprentice), vividly describing typical on-the-job training of the fledgling chef, as follows:

Basically I did as I was told. … Work started from eight in the morning when I helped buy ingredients from the market, and it would go on to about 12:30 midnight; it was a cycle of shopping, cleaning, delivering food, working in the lunch hall, assisting in preparing ingredients in the kitchen, cleaning up after deliveries. (Wang 2015: 10) (author’s translation)

In his early years, he did not make sushi at all. While still apprenticing on this daily routine, he moved to another sushi restaurant to continue job training, working equally long hours. He finally attained the head chef position and was allowed to serve customers directly. This chef’s account of tough training is not unusual: years of working long hours and performing physically taxing jobs have long defined traditional sushi chef education in Japan. All the Japanese chefs in Wang’s paper underwent difficult and long years of training; it is more than likely that Nobu, too, as a trained sushi chef, went through severe experiences early in his career.

The tough, on-the-job training narrative is characteristic of shokunin (artisan/craftsperson) training in Japan. While the term shokunin usually refers to skilled workers in the arts and crafts (e.g. carpentry, swordsmithing, pottery), it is also applied to chefs in certain traditional professions, with the sushi chef as perhaps the most representative. In the Japanese language, sushi chefs are called sushi shokunin, literally ‘sushi artisans’, and not ‘chefs’ (ryōrinin), with the implication that they underwent equally rigorous and lengthy training as their counterparts in the arts and crafts. Indeed, many in Japan expect sushi chefs to have undertaken apprenticeship akin to shokunin, usually lasting an average of ten years. ‘It takes ten years to make a good sushi chef’, as the chairman of the government-mandated World Sushi Skills Institute declared (Booth 2017: 215). Another chef explained: ‘It takes three years before you can master the nigiri [hand-moulded sushi], and five years before you perfect maki sushi, the roll, and you need ten years before you become a full-fledged sushi master’ (Tanikawa 2010). One of Japan’s largest job-hunting sites for careers in the food industry outlined these ten years in more detail through a blog post, as follows:

• Year 1: Washing/Cleaning duties, food delivery, hall duties
• Years 2–3: Boiling rice, preparing shellfish and small fish, cooking eggs, preparing food for restaurant and kitchen staff
• Years 4–6: Assisting in counter work, making maki and other rolls
• Years 7–9: Making nigiri
• Year 10: Becoming a full-fledged sushi chef. (‘Kyūjin’ 2015) (author’s translation)

The blog also described the oft-cited industry standard of ‘three years of boiling rice and eight years of nigiri’ as mandatory experience for all who aspire to the profession. This idea of tough sushi chef training is by no means acknowledged only in Japan. Many non-Japanese scholars express similar views, as in the following comment by anthropologist Theodore Bestor: ‘A sushi chef may spend 10 years as an apprentice, the first couple just learning how to cook rice, before even touching a knife’ (2001: 36).

Most recently, however, many within and outside the Japanese food industry are challenging this idea of chef training. In late 2015, Takafumi Horie, one of Japan’s most outspoken business entrepreneurs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Food and the fabric of home
• Part One Food identities in motion
• 1 Sushi leaves home: Japanese food and identity abroad
• 2 Reimagined community in London: The transmission of food as heritage in the Afghan diaspora
• 3 Between food practices and belongings: Intersectional stories of Moroccan women in Italy
• 4 In Bordeaux winegrowing territories ‘ethnic is everyday’
• Part Two Public foodscapes
• 5 Food and refugees in Rome: Humanitarian practices or agency response?
• 6 Food walks and street doctors: Health and culinary nostalgia in a south Indian city
• 7 ‘It’s the comedor that dwells in me!’: Food aid and construction of urban citizenship in San Luis Potosí, Mexico
• 8 Food outlets in migrant districts: Regional Mexican food in Chicago
• Part Three Food narratives of subsistence
• 9 Nostalgia and landscapes of the present: Memories of first fruit rituals in Turkey
• 10 Poison, bad hearts and vampires: The fear of contamination and the regulation of social relationships in a Rio de Janeiro favela
• 11 Stories on the food-begging Roma: Boundary making in the Finnish peasant homes
• 12 Japanese women on the move: Working in and (not) belonging to Düsseldorf’s Japanese (food) community
• Index