Japan's Cuisines

A cuisine is more than a collection of ingredients and cooking techniques: a cuisine also represents the efforts of authorities to guide citizens' behaviour by defining consumption habits. This unique study combines food and cultural history, as it describes the ideologies and events that have underpinned Japan's hugely popular modern cuisines. Japanese cuisine has never been more popular around the world and in 2013, 'Japanese dietary cultures' (washoku) were added to unesco's Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Washoku's predecessor, however, was 'national people's cuisine', an attempt during World War ii to create a uniform diet for all citizens. Japan's Cuisines reveals the great diversity of Japanese cuisine and also explains how Japan's modern food culture arose through the direction of private and public institutions. Readers will find out how and why tea cuisine came to be portrayed as the origin of Japanese cuisine, how lunch became a gourmet meal, and how regions on Japan's periphery are now reasserting their distinct food cultures. From wartime foodstuffs to modern diets, this fascinating book shows how the cuisine from the land of the rising sun shapes national, local and personal identity.