Writing Food as History in Japan

Writing food in Japan is not a new activity; food studies, or writing about food has been a scholarly concern for centuries – millennia if you consider the courtier writing of the Heian Period in the ninth century or the Chinese writings of Japanese priests from the sixth century. Food scholarship in Japan has lately been supported both by academic and by corporate agencies, and excellent culinary libraries testify to the ongoing interest in food as a significant topic of interest.

Japanese scholarship has treated what Genji, the Shining Prince, ate at court, the foodstuffs prepared in Shinto shrine kitchens for the gods and the globalizing paths of sushi. I will outline earlier writing and concentrate on influences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from Japanese folklore studies, from economic and cultural history and from the changing but significant traditions of national and regional historical studies. Particularly of interest in this is the role of nihonjinron, or “theory of the Japanese,” in culinary history which I will use to track ideas of identity in the era of modernization.