Washoku & Yoshoku

The prefix wa- just means Japanese. So, wagyu = Japanese beef; washi = Japanese paper; washoku is Japanese cuisine. The food that I ate on the farm in Fukushima was a lot of traditional, homestyle cooking: bowls of rice and miso soup, pickles, boiled slices of vegetables, fresh and pickled salads. At the other ends of the spectrum are the highly refined, painstakingly sourced and beautifully presented dishes of kaiseki and other professional cuisine. Both rustic and cultivated traditions are highly dependent on the seasons and the particular foods available and traditional for each time of the year.

But yoshoku is also Japanese food, though the word means "Western cuisine". Western foods have been being assimilated into Japan for centuries and naturally in the process they are transformed. So while the origins are clear, the dishes become something other, unique, and just as Japanese if with less of a history here.

Bread was brought to Japan in the 1600s by the Portuguese, hence the word for it: pan. Because the earliest and most sustained Western influence in Japan was here in Kyuushu (Christianity was introduced into Japan here by St. Francis Xavier, and when most of Japan was closed to the rest of the world, the port of Nagasaki was open to Dutch trading ships), there are a particular set of specialties of the area. Nagasaki is famous for castella, a delicious light spongy cake that comes in various flavours including green tea. I assume soft ice cream is also a yoshoku borrowing but flavours like matcha, sweet potato, and even shiso could only come from Japan!

Yoshoku also got support from the American Occupation of Japan after WWII, which was naturally used as an excuse to create a market for US wheat and other goods. When staying in Kagoshima, I ate "shi-chikkin" or canned tuna (from "chicken of the sea")! Clearly it was regarded as a different animal from the native maguro and bonito. The extensive use of mayonnaise might date from this time, though again it's changed in the translation. Recently I shared a mall food court with approximately all of the young teenagers from Kagoshima, many of them, like me, eating omu-raisu or omelette rice, one of my favourite yoshoku dishes. Fried rice is wrapped with a thin layer of omelette, which is then topped with a sauce. This can just be ketchup, or Japanese curry or demi-glace, but I had the typical okonomiyaki topping of brown sauce, mayonnaise, bonito flakes and pickled ginger.

Fast food chains abound in Japan, serving a much wider range of foods than do North American chains. There are rice bowl chains, udon chains, and Mos Burger, which serves its burgers on a bun made of molded rice rather than bread! Pasta restaurants are very popular and serve many options from creamy ham or mushroom dishes a Westerner would find familiar, to spaghetti with cod roe, green onions and poached egg.

And the recent influence hasn't only been American. French-style bakeries are everywhere, but again the food is transformed. All the breads are much softer, and while there are croissants and baguettes, there are also anpan (small buns stuffed with red bean paste), karepan (buns stuffed with curry and coated in panko or fried breadcrumbs), breads with little hot dogs baked into them, and seasonal treats like the breads studded with sesame and sweet potato or pumpkin that I've been enjoying.

All this to say that far from Japan being a culturally isolated place, various influences have been added over the centuries, gradually being made anew. Itadakimasu!