Introduction – Allez Cuisine

EDOMAE: FOOD AND THE CITY IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN

A Senior Honors Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Department of History University of Hawaii at Manoa

In Partial Fulfillment of the requirements For Bachelor of Arts with Honors

By Adrian Keoni Martin TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements...... 3

Introduction...... 4

The Importance of Studying Food...... 4

Different Approaches to Studying Food Culture...... 5

Tokugawa Japan: A Case Study...... 6

Methodology...... 8

Chapter 1: Urban Prosperity in the Early Edo Period...... 10

Elite Cuisine before Tokugawa...... 10

The Tokugawa Regime and Culinary Conservatism...... 12

Urbanization...... 14

Commercialization...... 15

A Higher Standard of Living...... 18

Chapter 2: Eating Out in Edo...... 20

Class and Urban Space in Edo...... 20

The Floating World...... 21

Restaurants...... 22

Chapter 3: Reading and Writing about Food...... 28

The Spread of Literacy and Publishing...... 28

Cookbooks and Dilettantes...... 32

Politicizing Rice...... 34

Conclusion...... 38

Works Cited...... 40

Martin 10 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Mark McNally, for signing on for this project and giving me encouragement whenever necessary, as well as the members of my thesis committee, Professors Richard

Rath and Jun Yoo, for giving suggestions for revision. Also, my fellow

Honors students of Honors 495 provided valuable insight in refining my thesis. Professor Vincent Pollard looked at my original proposal and gave valuable comments, and helped me receive a grant from the Univer- sity Research Council in order to research Japanese cuisine in Tokyo.

The Ajinomoto Foundation for Dietary Culture kindly lent me the use of their library for my research, and various hotels and manga cafes gave me a place to rest. Also, Professor Peter Hoffenberg took the time to look at my rough draft and gave me very good insight on how to properly revise this thesis. Finally, I would like to thank my parents and friends for giving me their love and support for the past three semesters.

Martin 10 INTRODUCTION -- ALLEZ CUISINE!

The Importance of Studying Food

The eighteenth century French gourmand, Jean Anthelme Brillat-

Savarin (1755-1826), wrote nearly two centuries ago in his groundbreak- ing gastronomical treatise, The Physiology of Taste: “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are” (Brillat-Savarin, p. 1). This aphorism can be said to be the foundation of not merely the science of gastronomy (of which Brillat-Savarin is said to be its founder) but also of food studies in general. Today it is often said “You are what you eat,” which is a reductionist reinterpretation of the famous aphorism. This modern proverb reduces food to a matter of calories, vita- mins, and other nutrients. However, what Brillat-Savarin really meant was, “Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of person you are.” Food does not merely have a nutritional or even hedonic dimension, but has its personal and social aspects as well.

Anyone receiving communion at a Christian church, or gathering with family to celebrate birthdays, Thanksgivings, the Passover, and other special days, or even enjoying the popcorn at a movie theater can see the importance of the food they ate and the social context of their eating to them and others. Thus, in order to have a thorough understanding of a given society, a historian could also be familiar with that society’s daily life, including its eating habits. Moreover, as the semiotician Roland Barthes wrote, “No doubt, food is, anthropologi- cally speaking (though very much in the abstract), the first need; but ever since man has ceased living off wild berries, this need has been highly structured” (Barthes, pp. 21-22). If the desire for food has a definite and changeable structure, this structure can be studied by social and cultural historians; indeed, the fact that the “first need” Martin 10 has structure makes an understanding of food studies de rigueur for social and cultural historians.

Different Approaches to Studying Food Culture

A citizen of a developed nation, with sufficient money, can purchase nearly any kind of food for supper. Walking into a supermarket today is much like taking a world tour: today’s consumer is confronted with a cornucopia of goods imported from distant nations. We First

Worlders often find it hard to comprehend how people ate before the ad- vent of air-conditioned shipping containers and cargo planes. People hundreds of years ago, much like people in the Third World today, had to rely on whatever the surrounding environment provided. From the first hunter-gatherers, through the birth of agriculture and animal husbandry, and the development of the first advanced civilizations, food was won from a daily struggle with the earth. This struggle was taken as a given from ancient times: according to the Hebrew Scrip- tures, God cursed the first man for his disobedience, saying: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:19 KJV).

Despite the challenges posed by the environment, societies man- aged to invent various methods for producing food, and transmitted those methods to future generations. When food became more than merely a source of nutrition, strict methods of preparation and consumption were also passed down. Thus, food became part of human culture; in this study, “food culture” refers to those transmittable and artificial aspects of food in culture, including material (farming, cooking) and immaterial (cookbooks) aspects.

There are three basic definitions of culture: “One defines culture as a way of life typical of a group, a particular way of doing Martin 10 things; the second as a system of symbols, meanings, and cognitive schemata transmitted through symbolic codes; the third as a set of adaptive strategies for survival related to the ecological setting and its resources.” However, the “three views are not in conflict, but are complementary” (Rapoport, pp. 50-51).

Thus, one could approach the problem of food culture from a cultural materialist viewpoint, identifying certain environmental causes as the source of a particular cultural development. The Jewish prohibition on eating pork could be interpreted as based upon the greater cost of raising pigs in the desert, as well as a well-developed Near

Eastern animus towards pigs originating in Egypt (Harris, pp. 71, 74,

77). From a semiotic perspective one could interpret the prohibition against the “abominable pig” based upon Hebraic notions of “cleanness” and “wholeness” that the pig, being omnivorous, is rendered unclean by its sometime meat-eating (Soler, p. 60). From a social perspective, one would not merely examine why pigs were not kosher, but how this affected social relations within the Hebrew community. This last aspect is the one most often used by culinary historians. Culinary history

“emphasizes the role that food-related activities play in defining community, class, and social status—as epitomized in such fundamental human acts as the choice and consumption of one’s daily bread.” Histori- ans go “beyond anecdotal food folklore and descriptions of cuisine and cooking at a particular point in time to incorporate historical dimen- sions” (Messer, et al., p. 1367). Thus, in order to understand culinary history, one must take social processes into account.

Tokugawa Japan: A Case Study

This thesis examines how food culture developed during the Edo period in Japan (1603-1867). During this period, Japan was unified under a centralized military dictatorship (the shogunate or bakufu) and Martin 10 domestic order was preserved for nearly three centuries. According to

Ishige Naomichi, the Edo period “saw the formation of what the Japanese today regard as their ‘traditional’ culinary values, cooking and eating habits” (Ishige, p. 105). Japan was for the most part closed to the outside world for most of this period. In order to stem the tide of foreign influence (in particular, Christianity and European colonial- ism) the country was officially closed off to nearly all foreign trade from around 1640 until the forced opening of the ports in 1858. Thus,

Japan from the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries developed its own unique culture with minimal European influence. Moreover, the

Edo period saw the creation of the largest urban center in Tokugawa

Japan: the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo), which by the early eighteenth century was the home of over a million people, making it at the time the largest city in the world (Sorensen, p. 12). Although certainly there have been other civilizations with great cities such as

Rome and Tenochtitlan, Japan differed from these civilizations by being more urbanized: according to Gilbert Rozman, “It is likely that Japan was the only large-scale premodern society outside of Europe with more than 10 percent of its population in cities of [over 10,000 inhabi- tants]” (Rozman, p. 6).

Most change in food culture was thus due to endogenous factors, which are caused by a group of people in society “in coming to terms with changes in their environment” (Ashkenazi and Jacobs, p. 27). As stated above, the major change in the Japanese social environment was the phenomenon of urbanization. The innovators, according to Ishige, were “the urban merchants and artisans (chōnin) who were the chief bearers of dietary culture during the Edo period” (Ishige, p. 107). As a result, Japanese food culture shifted from an elite to a popular, mass orientation. However, the process of innovation was by no means Martin 10 uniform, and was in fact due to a convergence of several factors.

First, the integration of the cities, especially the three metropolises of Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo, into a national economy allowed for the growth of commerce, which led to higher living standards for city dwellers. Second, the resultant increase in leisure allowed for the patronage of entertainment districts (sakariba), which in turn led to the flourishing of public eating, especially in restaurants. Finally, the spread of popular literacy in the late Tokugawa period created an urban culinary culture in Edo. These three developments culminated in a period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that could be called the golden period of Edo cuisine.

Methodology

This thesis is not a history in the purest sense of the world, as it does not comprise a thorough chronological narrative. Rather, it is more like what Jacques Barzun calls “retrospective sociology” because it is focused more on specific social categories rather than spans of time (Barzun, pp. 52-53). Thus, I regard this senior honors thesis as more or less notes or perhaps signposts towards future research. Think of this study as the appetizer rather than the main course.

The three chapters present three different aspects of food culture: material, spatial, and literary. Thus, I don’t consider this solely a social, economic, or cultural history, but a study that tries to bring together disparate elements of a certain phenomenon--Japanese cuisine using a variety of methods. The term Edomae (lit. in front of

Edo) serves as the fulcrum of this project. Edomae can have three different meanings. First, it can refer to the fresh seafood caught in

Edo (Tokyo) Bay. Second, it can also refer to the section of the city in front of Edo Castle which included the commoners’ districts (shitamachi). Finally, the most common usage of Edomae refers to the “essen- Martin 10 tial” style of Edo. Edomae cuisine, for example, makes use of fresh seafood and dark, rich soy sauce. Edomae sushi in particular is famous throughout the world as representative of Japanese cuisine. Thus, the center of this project is the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo) and the urban commercial and informational networks it helped create.

Martin 10 CHAPTER 1 -- URBAN PROSPERITY IN THE EARLY EDO PERIOD

Elite Cuisine before Tokugawa

“This watery slop is disgusting! The cook should promptly be put to death!” With this cutting remark, Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), one of the three great unifying warlords of the sixteenth century, rejected the culinary tradition of the aristocracy, which had lost all vestiges of political power by the time Nobunaga rose in prominence. Tsuboichi, the chef who prepared the meal, was a retainer for the aristocratic

Miyoshi house. Upon hearing Nobunaga’s threat, he became fearful and asked for a second chance, upon which he prepared an “indescribably de- licious” breakfast the next morning. This meal was “third-rate cooking,” suited to the warlord’s unrefined style. Both Nobunaga and his successors Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-

1616) adhered to a warrior ethos which emphasized a coarse diet. Pol- ished rice and other luxuries were discouraged and simple fare such as rice balls were eaten for lunch (Nishiyama, pp. 144-145).

The “watery” food traditionally eaten by aristocrats was indeed cooked without oil or fat. During the Heian period (eighth to twelfth centuries), the height of development for aristocratic banquets, the meals were very simple and stressed display over flavor. Although during the early Heian period vegetables and fruits were in abundance, in the later centuries there was a lack of fresh vegetables, as well as sources of protein, there was serious malnutrition, and nobles suffered from boils and other ailments. As a result, not only did a very melan- choly worldview develop, banquets began to stress drinking sake (rice wine) over eating tasty food. Since a lack of fat in the diet physio- logically makes the body more susceptible to alcohol, it is no surprise that drinking became much more popular (McCullough, pp. 398-399). This Martin 10 tradition continued through the Muromachi period (fourteenth through sixteenth centuries) since the feudal warlords imitated the aristocratic styles. João Rodrigues (1558-1633), a Jesuit missionary who came to

Japan in 1583, condemns this “classical” style of banqueting: “As the end of this pagan people is to serve their bellies in feastings and drunkenness...all the banquets, revelries and recreations are aimed at persuading them by various means to drink too much wine until they end up drunk and many of them completely lose their senses...” (Rodrigues, p. 211). According to Rodrigues’ account, the food served at banquets were primarily side dishes (sakana) designed to whet the appetite for strong drink. However, with the rising popularity of the tea ceremony

(chanoyu) propagated by the Zen Buddhist monks, the quality of dishes improved:

As regards the actual food, they did away with the dishes placed there merely for ornament and to be looked at, and also the cold dishes; in their place they substituted well- seasoned hot food which is brought to the table at the proper time, and is substantial and of high quality. This was done after the fashion of their cha-no-yu which they greatly imitate in this manner...So food nowadays gives pleasure and enjoyment, all apart from the wine, and it is not only for the sake of ceremony and courtesy and merely to look at, as in former times (Rodrigues, pp. 239-240).

Food culture also gained a more popular orientation under Nobuna- ga and Hideyoshi during the Azuchi-Momoyama1 period (1568-1600), especially since there was very little difference between the regular diet of the warriors and the diet of the commoners, since before the Edo period most of the samurai were more closely tied to the land. When the upheavals of the sengoku period helped put lower-ranking samurai into positions of power, they brought their habits and attitudes with them.

It is said that Nobunaga personally prepared the rice for his troops at the battle of Okehazama in 1560, and Hideyoshi famously threw a lavish

1 Also known as the Momoyama period. The name is taken from the respec- tive castles of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi. Martin 10 tea party in 1587 in Kitano, attended by members of every social class

(Nishiyama, pp. 144-145). When a unified state arose in the seventeenth century, class as well as culinary distinctions again became more distinct.

The Tokugawa Regime and Culinary Conservatism

After the death of Hideyoshi in 1598, the last heir to the Toy- otomi clan was a mere child. Thus, there was a vacuum of power in

Japan leading to more conflict between the daimyō, which eventually settled into two parties: the Eastern party, which supported

Hideyoshi’s son, Toyotomi Hideyori (1593-1615), and the Western party, which supported Tokugawa Ieyasu, who after 1590 controlled the Kantō plain in western Japan. In 1600, Ieyasu’s party won a major battle against the Toyotomi supporters on the plain of Sekigahara near Kyoto.

Several years later, after claiming descent from the aristocratic Mi- namoto clan, Ieyasu received the title of seii-taishōgun (lit. great barbarian-subduing generalissimo) and founded the Tokugawa shogunate, which ruled Japan for nearly three centuries (Totman 1981, p. 144).

Although he fought against (and in 1615, finally defeated) the very heir of his former lord, Hideyoshi, Ieyasu was essentially contin- uing Hideyoshi’s project in setting up the shogunate. During

Hideyoshi’s period of rule, “sword hunts” were carried out in order to remove all weapons from the hands of the people, in order to prevent any armed uprising. Having risen up against the old medieval order,

Hideyoshi’s generation sought to end the cycle of lower rising against upper (gekokujō) by setting up a permanent ruling class (the samurai) and integrating the other social classes into an authoritarian social order. To this end, Hideyoshi and later Ieyasu encouraged commerce and trade, began a process of urbanization, and set up a bureaucratic sys-

Martin 10 tem based upon the field-command hierarchies that they used in war

(Totman 1981, pp. 139-140).

At first, the warrior class retained its vibrancy as a cultural patron, but with its integration into a bureaucratic state, there was little innovation. For example, the bakufu encouraged the Momoyama style of painting which flourished through the Kanō clan of painters, but in Edo the painting style became “more restricted and academic,” reflecting the conservatism of the bakufu (Munsterberg, p. 357). Food culture was probably even more restrictive. Unlike earlier times when quite a few notable chefs were samurai, warriors during the Tokugawa regime, following the Confucian admission to stay out of the kitchen, did not study the culinary arts at all, much less become chefs (Kumaku- ra, p. 61). Nevertheless, the bakufu patronized masters (iemoto) of various arts, such as calligraphy, the martial arts, historical knowledge, the tea ceremony, sword appraising, and of course cooking. Sev- eral schools (ryū) of fine cooking flourished in the beginning of the

Edo period, especially the Shijō School. However, the cuisine champi- oned by the Shijō and other official culinary schools patronized by the samurai was essentially conservative, relying on centuries of tradition. Hayashi Razan (1583-1657), one of the pioneer thinkers of Japa- nese neo-Confucianism, compiled the historical origins of the proper meals for the major festivals of the calendar as well as major cere- monies marking important life events such as weddings. Razan’s treatise was incorporated into the second volume of the Shijō School’s official records of its “secret transmissions” describing proper culinary technique (Nishiyama, pp. 147-148). Thus, the warriors so cele- brated by Father Rodrigues in the Momoyama period as culinary reformers became the new guardians of culinary tradition, proving the timeworn adage that yesterday’s liberal is today’s conservative. The patrons of Martin 10 culinary culture in the Tokugawa period were thus not the ruling samurai class, but the common people concentrated in the cities. Two trends were necessary to enable the chōnin to enjoy a higher level of material culture: urbanization and commercialization.

Urbanization

Regarding the phenomenon of urban centers, the historian Fernand

Braudel wrote in his magisterial Civilization and Capitalism:

“Towns...are like electric transformers. They increase tension, accelerate the rhythm of exchange and constantly recharge human life...a town never exists unaccompanied by other towns: some dominant, others subordinate or even en- slaved, all are tied to each other forming a hierarchy, in Europe, in China, or anywhere else” (Braudel, pp. 479, 481).

In Tokugawa Japan, towns and cities were part of an integrated economic network, connected by five major highways and several important sea routes. Although according to Eisenstadt (p. 175) the “great spurt of city development” occurred in the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, it was only after the establishment of the Tokugawa bakufu that urbanization, defined as the increase of the proportion of the urban population relative to the rural population, really started to take off.

According to Conrad Totman, early modern Japanese urbanization was based upon two principles of feudal lords dating from the late sixteenth century: requiring vassals to live within the lord’s castle, and holding hostages in order to ensure the cooperation of allies (Totman

1981, p. 189). The first principle was extended to all samurai in the sixteenth century, requiring them to live in the central town of the domainal lord (daimyō), known as the “castle town” (jōkamachi). This separated samurai from the peasantry and set up the distinct division of labor required for urban development (Sorensen, p. 14). In 1615, the bakufu required each daimyō to destroy all but one castle in his domain, thus causing the population to concentrate in every region

Martin 10 (Eisenstadt, p. 177). The second principle was embodied in the shogu- nal policy of “alternate attendance” (sankin kōtai), which required each daimyō to maintain residences in Edo, leaving their family members there as hostages. They had to spend every second or third year in their Edo residence, undertaking “periodic expeditions” from their domain to Edo, which drained their finances. Sankin kōtai drew samurai from across the country like a magnet attracting iron filings: the number of official residences for daimyō and officials reached as high as

2,835 at the end of the seventeenth century, and the total number of samurai living within the city was at least 300,000 to 400,000

(Nishiyama, p. 27; Sorensen, p. 17).

A city solely comprised of warriors is unheard of in the history of the world; even Sparta had some kind of differentiation. The samurai of Edo needed merchants to supply food, clothing, and other neces- sities, workmen to construct their mansions, dig canals, and clear roads, artisans to make their armor and kitchen utensils, and so forth.

Thus, a large proportion of commoners moved into Edo. At first, Ieyasu had to forcibly transfer villagers from the surrounding countryside into the city (Harada 2003, p. 2). However, many merchants and artisans eventually came to the city of their own free will in order to make their fortune. The concentration of both wealth and mercantile know-how in the cities led to a commercial revolution.

Commercialization

The domestic economy of the early modern period originated in the reforms of Oda Nobunaga, who sought to break the power of the traditional feudal authorities of temples, shrines, and aristocrats. These three groups wielded economic power in the cities through guilds (za) which maintained monopolies over commerce. Moreover, another holdover from feudal times was the presence of many checkpoints (sekisho) scat- Martin 10 tered throughout the countryside, making commerce difficult. Nobunaga eliminated both the za and many of the sekisho, allowing for an open market (raku-ichi) in the cities and domestic commerce. Moreover,

Nobunaga standardized the measurement of grains such as rice and wheat

(which were the commodities most traded) by using the measuring box

(masu) of the merchants in Kyoto as the standard measure (the kyō- masu). Nobunaga’s successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, continued Nobunaga’s economic reforms by using the kyō-masu to standardize measurements of rice. He then introduced the kokudaka system of rice taxation, in which a portion of the rice produced in koku2 in each fief was taken as taxation by the daimyō. This system was retained by Ieyasu after he became shogun (Ōishi, pp. 13-14).

Essentially, the kokudaka system made the economy during the early Edo period dependent upon rice, since that was the major unit of taxation. However, since man does not live by rice alone, the ruling elite had to exchange their tax rice for cash. Thus, central markets arose which handled such transactions. A major rice exchange market was founded in Osaka, making it the center of commerce. Not only rice, but local goods produced in the local domains as well as other commodities were traded by Osakan brokers and wholesalers. The economy became monetized, and Osaka thus became the “kitchen of the realm,” shipping essential provisions all over Japan, but especially to the political center of Japan, Edo. In this bustling economy, many merchant families emerged to become economic powerhouses (Sakudō, p. 148). Many of these names are still familiar to Japanese today, and even to capitalists around the world: Mitsui, Sumitomo, and Konoike. Even defunct merchant houses such as the Yodoya are still remembered today for their ostenta-

2 One koku is about 5.6 bushels (Totman 1993, p. 561). Martin 10 tious opulence, which, in the case of Yodoya, led to their downfall at the hands of the bakufu.

The kokudaka system was also one reason why there was a stark separation between town and country during the Edo period. Although commercial activity started to be taxed in the later Edo period, most of the tax money came from agricultural produce. In the minds of the ruling class, the land was the only “real” source of wealth (Totman

1976, p. 105). Thus, peasants (hyakushō) were treated much more harsh- ly than merchants and artisans, although theoretically the peasantry was considered of higher social status than commoners in the cities.

More than 80 percent of the population consisted of peasants who lived in farm villages (nōson). Peasants could neither leave the land nor sell it, and samurai and daimyō, who previously had lived a self-sufficient existence on their feudal holdings, had to relocate to the many castle towns (jōkamachi) that were being built during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Sorensen, p. 13). Thus, cities during the Edo period served (on balance) as centers of consumption, and the farm villages became sources of production, with urban demand being met by rural supply. Numerous decrees were issued by the bakufu in order to encourage the peasants to work harder and grow more rice. One of the more extensive decrees, promulgated in 1649, enjoined the peasants to pay the land tax (as their primary responsibility), ceaselessly work during waking hours, and refrain from luxuries such as sake and tea.

Even the peasants' own excrement had to be reused for fertilizer in order to produce as much rice as possible. Moreover, instead of rice, they were ordered to eat as their staple barley, millet, cabbage, and daikon radish. In sum, this and other proclamations were designed to keep the peasants tied to the land and harvesting rice for the common- weal. Peasants were taxed (with rates reaching as much as 60 percent) Martin 10 so that they “could not live but would not die” (Satō, pp. 37-41, 43).

Nishiyama notes a “pitiful story” about a peculiar custom in one vil- lage. At the deathbed of a poor man, a bamboo tube filled with a few grains of rice was shaken, and the dying man was told, “Listen! This is white rice” (Nishiyama, p. 159).

A Higher Standard of Living

By comparison, city life was relatively easy, and commoners were even starting to enjoy luxuries restricted to the elite. That is not to say that the comforts of city life were experienced by all; the street-front merchants certainly enjoyed a better life than their back- alley servants. Nevertheless, the living standards of the chōnin as a whole improved relative to the samurai and the peasant classes. One piece of evidence supporting this is the increased usage of palanquins

(kago) in Edo in the seventeenth century. Although before 1600 the kago was only used by members of the samurai class, twenty-five years later it was becoming an integral part of daily life. By 1663 the number of kago was limited by the authorities to six hundred. Following that regulation, the bakufu issued a number of decrees limiting the use of kago, finally by 1681 banning its use altogether. The common people simply ignored the rule, and the kago business flourished unhindered.

By the eighteenth century, the number of kago on the streets of Edo topped 3,500 (Tanaka, p. 72).

There was also a marked improvement in housing during the Edo period. A record of urban life in Kyoto in 1729 records that most chōnin at the turn of the century had dirt floors in their houses upon which they spread straw mats for sleeping and sitting. However, at the time of the document, many not only had wooden floors, but also ceilings and tatami mats–just like the samurai (Hanley, pp.42-43). Even merchants in Edo began to imitate the samurai in dress and speech, calling their Martin 10 wives the formal title goshinzō-sama instead of the common okami-sama, and their daughters as ojō-sama (Nishiyama, p. 45). Thus, not only did the wealth generated by tax rice come down to the chōnin from the samurai, but also some aspects of samurai culture. Indeed, some of the more affluent merchants, acting as agents for the bakufu, received a

“semisamurai” status and were allowed to have family names and even carry swords (Eisenstadt, p. 197).

Even menial workers, who often had to live packed-in like sar- dines in tenement houses (nagaya), made a decent living. The Osaka novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693) noted that the laborers, “busy with quarreling, the laundry, and mending walls,” were at the same time free from worrying about bill collectors, since they paid for their own daily needs in cash without taking loans. Ogyū Sorai (1666-1728), a reac- tionary Confucian scholar, complained that even the street peddlers of

Edo were able to enjoy fine sake, eat miso soup, and purchase tatami and sliding-doors (shōji) for their hovels. Gary Leupp concludes that

“Even the most impoverished urban neighborhoods seem to have enjoyed a standard of cleanliness unknown in the poorer neighborhoods of European cities” (Leupp, pp. 148-150).

With a higher standard of living, chōnin were able to patronize restaurants and other eating places as the period progressed, as we shall see in the next chapter. However, not only was this patronage on account of the townspeople’s prosperity, but also his desire to leave the mundane and often repressive world of Tokugawa Japan.

Martin 10 CHAPTER 2 -- EATING OUT IN EDO

Class and Urban Space in Edo

The bakufu imposed severe restrictions on the chōnin. This can be seen in the way Edo was zoned for development. The city can be roughly divided into two areas: the first area, reserved for merchants and artisans, was known as the shitamachi (lit. low city) or machichi

(town areas) and was located near Edo bay and to the southeast of Edo

Castle. The bakufu created the original shitamachi by filling in the swamplands near the Sumida and Tone rivers. However, by the end of the

Tokugawa period, the machichi expanded along the Sumida River and in small enclaves located in the samurai areas. Nevertheless, the shitamachi comprised a very small portion (about one-fifth, or thirteen square kilometers) of the total area of the city. Half a million townsmen were packed into a portion of the city which would only make up only two (out of twenty-three) of the present wards in Tokyo today.

The other four-fifths of the city were filled with the grand estates of the daimyō as well as the humbler abodes of their retainers and servants (Jinnai, p. 141; Seidensticker, pp. 8, 13; Sorensen, p. 25).

It was not accidental that the population density of the shitamachi (about 50,000 persons per square kilometer) was much greater than the population density of the other areas. The official stance of the

Tokugawa government towards the chōnin can be summed up in the phrase kansō minpi (respect for authority and disdain for the people). In

Western Europe, there were many self-governing cities dominated by merchants that helped facilitate the Renaissance and encourage economic and cultural transformation such as the independent city-states of

Italy such as Florence and Venice as well as the German free cities in the Holy Roman Empire such as Bremen and Cologne. In contrast, the chōnin of Tokugawa Japan did not have self-governing authority on the Martin 10 level of these European cities (Sorensen, pp. 22, 27). In fact, townspeople did not fit into the vision of society embraced by intellectuals during the Tokugawa period. The neo-Confucian thought of the time ide- alized a large agrarian class ruled directly by an elite samurai class.

Townspeople according to this mindset were considered more or less extraneous, and thus the castle towns constructed during the early modern period lacked walls –the outer areas were considered a “buffer zone” defending the castle from foreign attack (Sorensen, pp. 17, 23). Thus, the attitude of the bakufu towards the chōnin ranged from “salutary ne- glect” to outright suspicion.

Demographically, the chōnin, as well as probably the samurai, were lopsided. A census taken in 1743 of the Edoites showed that there were approximately 310,000 men and 210,000 women. Since the city was filled with people from the countryside seeing the “good life” in the city, there were many single young men. Many of them were educated clerks at large dry-goods stores such as Echigoya, which had over five hundred employees in both the main store and its branch. Sankin kōtai also probably produced similar numbers in the samurai areas as well, since many samurai serving their daimyō often left their wives and children back home (Harada 2003, pp. 2-4). Although demographics are not exactly destiny, it does tell us in this case that there were many men who lived without families in Edo. Unrestrained by paternal or filial obligations, both chōnin and samurai turned to satisfy their passions for food, drink, and sex. Thus was born the great pleasure districts.

The Floating World

The pleasure districts did not appear spontaneously in regimented

Edo. Much like the “bread and circuses” of Imperial Rome, they were very much the invention of the shogunate, who, with a “military mind” Martin 10 decided to create a district of brothels in Edo. This district, called

Yoshiwara, was very much a different world unto itself, featuring en- tertainments of varying degrees of respectability, appealing to both the high and the low class. For the “connoisseurs” merely entering the district called for some kind of ritual; often they would leisurely sail up the river where they would disembark at a certain point, change into shining white garments, and ride an equally white horse to their destination, where they would spend even more money on wine, women, and song, hoping to impress the high-level courtesans (tayū) with their money-flinging (Dunn, p. 182-184). Needless to say, the cuisine was not emphasized. In fact, what food was served in the Licensed Quarters between drinks was usually to whet the appetite for more drinking and other postprandial activities, similar to the banquets which Father Ro- drigues condemned in the Momoyama period. Thus, there developed many kinds of grilled, salted, and pickled morsels; in a way, the food served at pubs in Japan today is not too dissimilar to the food served during the Edo period in the Yoshiwara (Perez, p. 80). Because of the popularity of areas such as the Yoshiwara, restaurants in Japan did not become very popular until the late eighteenth century.

Restaurants

Brillat-Savarin (p. 325) defines a restaurant as a business “of- fering to the public a repast which is always ready, and whose dishes are served in set portions at set prices, on the order of those people who wish to eat them.” Although restaurants are ubiquitous in the developed world, they are a very recent phenomenon, appearing in Western

Europe in the late eighteenth century. In 1765, a Parisian named

Boulanger opened an establishment on the rue des Poulies selling forti- fied soups called bouillons restaurants. Intended to “restore” the strength of people unable to eat solid food, Monsieur Boulanger’s en- Martin 10 deavor enjoyed moderate success, especially after he won a lawsuit against the caterers’ guild for serving leg of lamb in white sauce in addition to bouillon. Many of these restaurants were opened in the years before the French Revolution, serving not only the soups after which the restaurants were named, but specialized dishes such as bran- dade de morue (salt cod pounded with garlic, oil and cream) with ser- vice similar to modern restaurants, featuring cloth-covered private ta- bles, menus, and a bill at the end of dinner (Pitte, p. 474-475).

However, five hundred years before restaurants appeared on the streets of Paris, China during the Southern Sung Dynasty (c. twelfth to thirteenth centuries) had a vibrant restaurant culture. Hangchow, the capital of the Southern Song had “innumerable restaurants” serving a plethora of exotic dishes such as double-cooked purple Su-chow fish, quail eggs fried in oil, and fried Lo-yang snow pears (Gernet, p. 133;

Freeman, p. 158). Also, originating in a grisly custom from North Chi- na, even the flesh of women, old men, young girls, and children was served at some restaurants and euphemistically called “two-legged mut- ton” (Gernet, p. 135).

Restaurants in both eighteenth-century Paris and twelfth-century

Hangchow were developed in an urban environment: “Eating at restaurants was an inseparable part of being a city dweller. Restaurants created a demimonde with its own delights, hazards, bywords, and peculiar flavor”

(Freeman, p. 158). They are also an integral factor in developing a cuisine, because dishes that were once enjoyed by only aristocrats could be diffused to lower classes, and totally new dishes could be created by the restaurants themselves: “Many historians of French cuisine date its inception from the arrival of Catherine de Medici in

Paris with her Italian chefs, but the real beginning was...the exten- sion of that style of cooking to a much broader part of society after Martin 10 the French Revolution” (Freeman, p. 145). Thus, when restaurants appear “on the scene” in a given society, culinary historians should def- initely take notice.

Although confectioners and noodle shops existed before the Toku- gawa period, the first Japanese restaurants did not appear until the middle of the seventeenth century in Edo (Nishiyama, p. 166). Restau- rants in Japan, like in France and China, developed in the cities. In comparing the growth of the restaurant industry in both Japan and West- ern Europe, Ishige (p. 117) claims that the “maturing” of civic society, which is made up of commercial institutions and voluntary social associations, was the common trend that allowed restaurants to flourish in both societies. Civic society in Edo, however, was very restricted to the chōnin, who had no political power. For them, public eating spaces served two functions: nutrition and socialization. Not only did restaurants provide filling meals to whoever could afford them, they also provided a respite from the everyday world, allowing for new social contacts to be made outside one’s station or occupation.

Before the appearance of restaurants, people ate out at inns and taverns. In Japan, travelers received meals at inns known as hatago, which were built along the major highways leading into Edo. Regional specialties began to be offered by these innkeepers, and some inns thus became known for their cuisine. However, for the most part the food served at these inns was very standardized. In the early nineteenth century, a scholar summoned from Osaka by the lord of Sendai kept a detailed record of his meals eaten from Osaka to Sendai. There was very little variety in the cuisine: soups always included daikon (large white radish), and stews contained tofu, carrot, potato, and other standard ingredients. Although in the second leg of his trip his meals became more interesting (like a wild duck served in Odawara) there was Martin 10 nothing out of the ordinary. However, his trip was made in the middle of winter, so perhaps there was more variety in other seasons (Nishiya- ma, pp. 163-194). Because of their rural presence as well as the stan- dardization in culinary offerings, inn probably did not influence early restaurants.

The first restaurants were the linear descendants of roadside teahouses. In the fourteenth century, a Kyoto entrepreneur, noticing the increased popularity of tea, decided to start a teahouse business, selling one cup of tea at the reduced rate of one sen (ippuku issen).

These teahouses became very popular, springing up near popular religious establishments such as the Tōji temple, as well as on the streets of Kyoto (Takahashi, p. 27). Variants of these teahouses made inroads into Edo in the late seventeenth century; their signature dish was Nara tea-rice (Nara chameshi), a mixture of fish and vegetables boiled in soy sauce with tea, rice, and boiled soybeans (Nishiyama, p. 167).

However, these teahouses were no more than a curiosity to the Edoites.

What allowed for the flourishing of restaurants in the late Edo period was the development of truck farming on the outskirts of Edo.3

Night soil (human excrement) was sold by Edoites to farmers who used it for fertilizing vegetables (Yamamoto, pp. 169-170). The steady supply of fresh vegetables allowed for a greater variety of foods; chefs skilled in the culinary arts tested their skills in developing new dishes for the populace. The publishing of cookbooks (ryōrisho) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as seen in the following chapter, also allowed for cooking to become more innovative. Whereas in the past aristocrats and warriors were noted chefs, the best chef in Edo was the proprietor of a restaurant, Kuriyama Zenshirō (fl. early 19th

3 Today, this area comprises the now very urban Shibuya and Toshima wards of Tokyo. Martin 10 century). His cooking was so highly regarded that according to one anecdote three gourmands were willing to wait half the day (and pay the extraordinary amount of 1 ryō and 2 bu4) for a simple dish of pickles, green tea, and rice (Nishiyama pp. 164-165). Zenshirō was also a man of culture, and had an extensive network of literati who often used his restaurant as a meeting place. High-class restaurants thus began to function as meeting places (Harada 2007, p. 11). Two restaurants in the late eighteenth century were notable for this. The Surugaya, though it offered no particular specialty, was a restaurant patronized by the Asakusa rice brokers. The Masuya, in contrast, was patronized by bakufu officials, household caretakers for daimyō (rusuiyaku), and connoisseurs (Nishiyama, p. 167).

Perhaps the most important trend establishing the social central- ity of Edo restaurants was the institution of the shogakai (lit., painting and calligraphy gathering), which was “a convivial banquet at which the host and his invited associates produced spontaneous examples of their art or ingenuity” (Markus 1993, p. 135). In reality, the shogakai were for the most part “mammoth galas” open to anyone able to afford the ticket price. In fact, shogakai were merely glorified fundraising banquets; the sponsor, usually a writer or artist, spread the word among his friends, especially the more famous ones, in order to get them to appear at the banquet. Tickets were sold in advance

(for about one shu) and only included admission; entree tickets (zen- fuda) and side-dish tickets (sakana-fuda) had to be purchased separate- ly (Markus 1993, pp. 138-139). The largest shogakai of all time was held at the Manpachirō in the autumn of 1836, sponsored by the successful author Kyokutei (Takizawa) Bakin (1767-1848), famed for his 106-

4 About the equivalent of several hundred dollars. One-sixteenth of a ryō. Martin 10 volume epic novel the Nansō satomi hakkenden. Although preparations were for three hundred guests, over seven hundred paying guests arrive, and because of some ne’er-do-wells holding forged tickets, even more meals had to be prepared. In all, 1184 meals were served, and three and a half kegs of sake drunk over the course of a single day. At

Bakin’s shogakai, celebrities of the literary world, caretakers for Edo

Castle, ladies-in-waiting, publishing agents and even paper wholesalers all attended (Markus 1993, pp. 147-149).

The excesses of shogakai did not go unrecognized by contempo- raries. Terakado Seiken (1796-1848), in his Edo hanjōki (An Account of the Prosperity of Edo, 1832-1836) subtly criticizes the trend with his ironic pen:

Flourishing indeed, the fortunes of letters in our times! Men of culture form congresses, convene in associations. Those who can claim even the slightest refinement, who possess some modest mod- icum of artistic talent or virtue, immediately upon joining these associations are revered as sensei "august masters" by the common crowds.

Seiken then goes on to point out that the popularity of the shogakai were mainly based upon the promotional efforts of the spon- sors, who hoisted large billboards advertising the luminaries attending the banquet (Markus 1993, 154-156). Thus, perhaps in many ways the prosperity of restaurants in the late Edo period was merely an expres- sion of conspicuous consumption. Nevertheless, food was still taken seriously by some segments of the literate population, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Martin 10 CHAPTER 3 -- READING AND WRITING ABOUT FOOD

The Spread of Literacy and Publishing

Several factors led to the spread of literacy among the chōnin.

The first factor was based upon pure necessity: the bakufu, in order to strengthen its ability to effectively administer the populace, recorded on paper all official orders, records, and bureaucratic procedures.

Official edicts of the bakufu were set on signposts (banzuke) and post- ed at the major bridges for everyone to read. Thus, some knowledge of written Japanese was necessary for the ordinary chōnin to know the law

(Yōzō, p. 17).

Second, with the development of a national economy in the seventeenth century, a complementary national communications system sprung up around the same time. In order to coordinate the shipping of the three major coastal circuits: the Western, Eastern, and Kamigata, a network of express messengers known as hikyaku had been developed from the medieval period. The bakufu, in order to relay political information, also employed a similar system along the Tōkaidō highway which linked Edo with Kyoto and Osaka. Messengers both on foot and horseback would race between Edo and the Kamigata within the space of a week; in the later Edo period, messengers were able to cross the five hundred kilometer distance between Edo and Osaka in merely three and a half days. The merchants and bureaucrats who demanded this information had to be literate; the merchants as well as their many servants especially had to have advanced reading, writing, and arithmetical (abacus) skills in order to interpret economic information. According to Katsuhisa

Moriya, merchants in the eighteenth century had already developed, without foreign influence, bookkeeping practices used in the West (K.

Moriya, pp. 106-107, 110-111, 114). Many of the children of chōnin went to special private schools located at temples known as terakoya to Martin 10 learn how to read and write. These schools proliferated from the eighteenth through nineteenth centuries, and by the Meiji Restoration were, according to Umesao, “distributed in about the same density as police boxes in present-day Japan” (Umesao, pp. 4-5). According the Kanpo-

Enkyo Kofu fūzoku shi, which recorded the customs in Edo during the mid-eighteenth century, “By 1750, just about anyone could become an el- ementary writing teacher. Tuition has become extremely inexpensive, and school-registration procedures were simplified…as a result, even people of low status have enrolled in terakoya, to the point that nowadays ‘brushless [illiterate] people’ are a rarity” (K. Moriya, p. 120).

The third important reason why literacy spread in early modern

Japan was the growth of intellectual curiosity and the desire to become more cultured. With the cultural abeyance of the samurai in the seventeenth century, a kind of cultural vacuum appeared which was filled by the chōnin. As Umesao summarizes:

"Excluded from the government system by the warriors and shut out from climbing the hierarchy, the intellectual masses vented their energy by devoting themselves to cultural activities, such as publishing and appreciation of paintings, pleasure trips, and 'yūgei.' This urban culture embraced by townspeople was the very origin of today's mass culture, and the germination of the intellectual mass society" (Umesao, p. 11).

During the late seventeenth century, chōnin learned the yūgei from certain “masters” (iemoto) who operated schools in the three metropolises. The life of a “lesson-pro” freely participated in these cultural practices, known collectively as okeikogoto, learning anything and everything, as long as it was kept at the level of recreation.

Thus, a spirit of dilettantism reigned (T. Moriya, pp. 44-45). This sentiment was similar to the samurai expectation to know a variety of arts. A daimyō of the Kyoho period (1716-1736) classified the then popular arts and teachings into Confucian learning, calendar calcula-

Martin 10 tion, calligraphy, learning of court practices, Shintoism, haiku poetry, and kabuki, listing the contemporary masters of each art. For example, Ogyu Sorai was listed for Confucian learning, the actor Ichikawa

Danjuro for kabuki, and so forth. Ihara Saikaku depicted a dilettan- tish merchant in his novel Nippon eitai-gura (The Japanese Family

Storehouse) as having learned calligraphy, tea ceremony, poetry, liter- ature, haiku poetry, Noh drama, dancing, bunraku (puppet drama), foot- ball (kemari), and many other arts (Watanabe, p. 19). Many of these arts (especially in the case of calligraphy and poetry) required a high degree of literacy. In the case of haiku, it is recorded that there were more than seven hundred haiku teachers in Kyoto; K. Moriya esti- mates from these numbers that “better than one Kyoto adult in twenty may have been able to make at least a modest attempt at writing a haiku poem.” By the late seventeenth century, hundreds of titles on haiku were published in Kyoto; undoubtedly, there would have been hundreds of thousands of books in the hands of the Kyoto chōnin (K. Moriya, p.

119). Since the yūgei encompassed much more than haiku, the number of volumes published on other subjects must have been much greater. Thus, from the demand for cultural knowledge, a publishing industry was born.

The first Japanese printed materials were Buddhist mantras produced in the eighth century using carved wooden blocks. By Imperial order, about one million of these mantras were printed, each of them put into a miniature wooden pagoda. About a tenth of them were dedi- cated to the major temples at the time, including Hōryūji, Tōdaiji, and

Kōfukuji. Printing was mainly reserved for Buddhist texts until around the fourteenth century, when Zen priests began to print some Chinese poetry included with the religious text. Urban merchants in Sakai

(near Osaka) published non-Buddhist texts such as the Confucian

Analects. In the sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries introduced Martin 10 movable-type printing, which they used to publish Christian material

(Kirishitan-ban). However, with the banning of Christianity the use of movable-type died out, and traditional wood-block printing became the main publishing technology in the Tokugawa period (Yōzō, pp. 13-17).

The first major publishing center was Kyoto, which since medieval times was home to a flourishing book market. There were many small publishing enterprises known as “book groves” (shorin) and “bookshops”

(shoshi). Although Kyoto dominated publishing during the seventeenth century, publishers began to establish themselves in both Osaka and

Edo, so that by the nineteenth century there were 494 publishers in Ky- oto, 504 in Osaka, and 917 in Edo. Moriya Katsuhisa sums this trend up as “culture’s march eastward” (K. Moriya, p. 115). Supplies of paper and wood publishing plates were abundant. In Europe, publishers were limited by intermittent shortages in paper. In Tokugawa Japan, where paper-making was a cottage industry in many villages, there were no supply problems (Yōzō, pp. 20-21).

The rise of the publishing industry and the proliferation of books during the Edo period affected Japanese food culture in three notable ways. First, as mentioned in the previous chapter, publishers and authors held special private parties known as shogakai which drew the luminaries of Edo society. This led to a revitalization of the restaurant business, making the restaurant a prime location for social interaction. Second, published cookbooks were introduced for the first time, allowing for culinary culture to diffuse to the wider public, and encouraging a new subculture of gourmands or connoisseurs (tsū) who vi- cariously explored culinary worlds through reading. Finally, writers began to refer to food in their books in innovative ways, using food and eating habits as a metaphor for their social and political commen- tary. Martin 10 Cookbooks and Dilettantes

The first cookbooks in Japan were not meant for public eyes, but were strictly kept in the hands of the elite schools of cooking. The

Shijōryū hōchōsho (Text on Food Preparation of the Shijō School) was one such book. This book, first compiled in the late fifteenth century, was meant to be used by the Shijō school of cooking for preparing banquets for the bakufu and daimyō. In its pages are painstaking details on how to rank foods for the banquet, how utensils are to be ar- ranged, and even how to determine what dishes men and women should be served. However, not all of the secrets of the Shijō school were published; the art of arranging fish, “esteemed above all else,” was kept unwritten, and the text tersely tells us that the “secrets of our school concerning this matter must not be revealed to outsiders” (Ad- diss, et al., pp. 184-186).

The first cookbook published in Japan was the Ryōri monogatari in

1643 (the date of the oldest extant version), although Ishige specu- lates that it was likely published closer to the beginning of the seventeenth century. According to Ishige, the Ryōri monogatari “eschew[s] the authoritarian, formalistic descriptions of trivial and antiquated procedures that had characterized previous cookbooks, [and] presents practical knowledge [of cooking] in a thoroughly pragmatic spirit”

(Ishige, p. 125). Thus, there were many sections on technical aspects of cooking certain dishes, as well as a long list of recipes according to ingredient. Such cookbooks in the early period were probably meant for professional chefs. Nevertheless, the pragmatic spirit of the

Ryōri monogatari complemented the prevailing neo-Confucian philosophy promoted during the seventeenth century by Kaibara Ekken (1630-1714).

In his Yōjōkun (Lessons for Cultivating Life), published in 1712, Ekken details his thoughts on food, insisting that consuming food ought to be Martin 10 properly controlled in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle, and ad- vised against “harmful” combinations of foods such as rabbit with gin- ger or venison. Ekken, like another contemporary, Hitomi Hitsudai, took his ideas from Chinese medicine and herbology (honzōgaku). Hit- suidai’s 12-volume encyclopedia of nutrition, the Honchō shokkan, was published posthumously in 1697 (KIIFC, p. 17, Ishige, p. 25).

Although the early Edo period emphasized nutrition and technique, a spirit of “playfulness” and hedonism prevailed in the later Edo period, reflected in the cookbooks published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The new cookbooks (called ryōribon, as op- posed to the old cookbooks, known as ryōrisho) were written in an en- tertaining style and featured many illustrations of the exotic foods featured within their pages. One example of the new style of cookbook was the Tōfu hyakuchin published in 1782. Its author, a sinologist ac- tive in Osaka at the time, included excerpts from Chinese and Japanese classics alongside one hundred tofu recipes, as well as sketches of restaurants specializing in tofu. The cookbook was wildly successful, and a sequel was written detailing one hundred more tofu recipes. This inspired a hyakuchin (hundred-recipe) boomlet, featuring cookbooks on eggs and other common ingredients. According to Harada, “This atmos- phere spawned such traditions as that of spending large sums of money to enjoy the first bonito of the season, as well as food becoming a form of pleasure for the commoner. The enjoyment of food was popular- ized by a social climate that considered spending a virtue” (Harada

2006, p. 3). Thus, the words of Kaibara Ekken in warning against prof- ligate consumption were ignored in the late Edo period. Although he praises the ingenuity of the late Edo period, Harada criticizes the trend of the ryōribon towards including extraneous details and overem- phasizing appearance, rather than concentrating on actual cooking meth- Martin 10 ods. However, since we do not know very much of the cooking of the ordinary people during this time, and mostly have the menus of special events such as weddings as historical sources, it is hard to judge whether there were changes in daily cooking methods. Yamamoto Hirofumi suggests to future culinary historians that continued research into the lifestyle of commoners is necessary for a fuller picture of culinary life (Yamamoto, p. 177). Unfortunately, such research is beyond my competence. However, I think that it’s possible that the reason ryōri- bon became more and more focused on details is because they were not meant for cooking like the ryōrisho, but were meant for public consumption. Since most people probably did not have the cooking materials needed to make some of the dishes detailed in them, perhaps most of the readers were armchair gourmands, dilettantes, who used the ryōribon to flee from daily life in much the same way as the housewives of Edo es- caped the humdrum through reading the many romances published yearly

(Totman 1976, p. 115).

Politicizing Rice

Since cuisines around the world often originate within a certain nation (such as France and China), the people within those nations are identified (and identify themselves) with the unique food they eat

(e.g. French “frogs”), despite obvious regional differences in the “national” cuisine as seen in China (Szechwan, Cantonese), Italy (North- ern, Southern), and America (Southern, Tex-Mex). A critique of food choices and eating habits is invariably also a critique of the society which produced that food culture. Depending on the interpreter, a society’s food culture can either be its pride or its shame. This kind of criticism in Japan first originated in the Edo period. The use of food as an analytical tool stands out in two writers: Terakado Seiken

(mentioned in the previous chapter), and his contemporary Hirata Atsu- Martin 10 tane (1776-1843), a notable political philosopher of the nativist Na- tional Learning (kokugaku) school.

Seiken’s Edo hanjōki surveyed the sakariba [amusement quarters] of Edo in a satirical manner, finally turning to the subject of the

“gargantuan” appetite of the Edokko. He noted two gastronomic trends: the increased consumption by urbanites of meat and of sweet potatoes.

On the surface, Seiken seems to praise meat-eating:

As the flames grow lively, the meat bubbles and simmers in the pot. Gradually we enter the realm of savory delights...The price of a pot of meat generally falls into three categories: small, at fifty cash; medium, for one hundred; and large, for two hundred. Over the last few years, the price of meat has soared, to the point where it is on a par with eel. Yet its flavor is so tender and suc- culent, its curative powers so swift that who would quibble over mere price (Markus 1992, pp. 12-13)?

Yet, beneath the praise, Seiken subtly criticizes a society in which passers-by casually stop to watch the butchering of animals in the restaurants, with deer lying “bound and trussed, crouching as if still terrified.” In fact, eating meat carried a stigma in its associ- ation with the outcaste eta: hence, pork was sold as “mountain whale” to the hungry populace. Only in 1871, after the Meiji Restoration, was outcaste status abolished and meat-eating officially approved (Howell, p. 167). Thus, the apparent popularity of meat-eating in late Edo society could have seemed like a resurgence of barbarism for Seiken, who mockingly prays, “Oh, in my next life, let me be animal flesh, that I may benefit all mankind.” Moreover, the sweet potato which he praises as the “elixir of immortality” only serves to barely keep alive a growing number of people (including the author) too poor to even afford rice: “You poor students of every land–bow reverently, twice kowtow before you indulge!” In Seiken’s marvelously ironic way, he notes the social upheaval suffered by the poor and caused by the decadent meat- eaters (Markus 1992, pp. 8-9, 12, 17). Martin 10 For much of the Edo period, political philosophy was an adapta- tion of neo-Confucian thought, especially the writings of Zhu Xi (1130-

1200). However, during the Edo period thinkers began to reemphasize the “unique” character of Japanese civilization. Tokugawa Mitsukuni

(1628-1701), one of Ieyasu’s grandsons and the daimyō of Mito, began the compilation of the Dai Nihon shi (Great History of Japan), which stressed the sacred role of the emperor, who was at this point a mere figurehead. Although this was perhaps an imitation of Chinese histo- ries depicting a great nation under one emperor, the Dai Nihon shi inspired a new trend of nationalist thought, as a distinct Japanese identity was being formulated. The most important element of Mito thought was the “national historical essence” (kokutai), a term that was used to describe “the moral values of trust, loyalty, filial piety, peace and well-being among the people” which was in turn entrusted to the Ja- panese race through the divine mandate of the sun goddess Amaterasu and ensured by the divine line of emperors (Najita, pp. 639-640). This line of thought was picked up by later scholars, who began the “Nation- al Learning” school, or kokugaku. Two of the founding fathers of kokugaku were Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) and Hirata Atsutane.

Hirata Atsutane’s criticism was based upon his conviction that

Japanese learning--in the form of Shintō--was inherently superior to all other forms of learning: “All the various types of learning, including Confucianism and Buddhism, are joined in Japanese learning, just as the many rivers flow into the sea, where their waters are joined” (Totman 1981, p. 206). Because of the superiority of Shintō,

Japan was inherently superior to other countries, especially China, for the rice which Japanese ate were granted to them by the gods. Chinese rice, cultivated through the mandate of mere mortals, makes those who eat it “weak and enervated” and thus the inferiority of Chinese rice Martin 10 led to all kinds of political failures in China. However, because the people are “ungrateful” to the gods, they risk cutting themselves off from the divine source, which manifests itself in violence. Thus, he wrote, “In our times, people quarrel at mealtimes...and end by doing such things as throwing their bowls and trays...This bad conduct is, indeed, like dogs who quarrel when eating” (Harootunian, p. 212-213).

Atsutane echoed the claims made by his mentor, Motoori Norinaga:

Thus our country is the source and fountainhead of all other countries, and in all matters it excels all the others. It would be impossible to list all the products in which our country excels, but foremost among them is rice... [which] has no peer in foreign countries, from which fact it may be seen why our other products are also superior...This is a matter for which [the people] should give thanks to our shining deities, but to my great dismay they seem to be unmindful of it (Tsunoda, et al., p. 18).

The self-identification of the Japanese with their “divine” rice in contrast to inferior foreign rice retained its metaphorical power.

For example, the hinomaru bentō encouraged by the Japanese military during the Second World War was a box-lunch that merely consisted of a bed of white rice upon which a single red pickled plum (umeboshi) rest- ed, symbolizing the Japanese flag. The rice itself symbolized the

“pure” character of the Japanese spirit (Ohnuki-Tierney, p. 232).

Thus, of all the survivals of Edo cuisine, perhaps the contribution of the nativist school deserves a closer examination.

Martin 10 CONCLUSION -- WHOSE END IS THEIR DESTRUCTION, WHOSE GOD IS THEIR BELLY?

Catalyzed by the material prosperity of the townspeople of Edo, the intertwining of commerce and literacy led to a gilded age of cook- ery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Not only were meals eaten to a greater extent in public, but cookbooks were also published which disseminated culinary knowledge to the general public.

Japan’s growing self-consciousness as a nation through the nativist school contributed as well to the Japanese self-identification with rice that continues to the present day.

Unfortunately, in between these grand developments in cuisine and the prosperity of the general public, there were many who were left behind, especially the peasants. Because of the development of the domestic economy, peasants in some areas of Japan put less emphasis on subsistence farming and began to grow cash crops. When a famine struck, the peasants were often left without any support. The peasants around Hachinohe, a town in northeastern Japan, began growing soybeans as a cash crop, cutting down trees for upland farming. This disrupted the habitat of the wild boar, who made fallow plots their new homes.

When the “Little Ice Age” caused a crop failure in 1749, peasants and boars ended up competing for food, and large, aggressive boars even terrified the townspeople of Hachinohe. In all, several thousand peasants died as a result of their adoption of monoculture (Walker, pp.

329-331).

Food culture in Edo, as well as culture in general, served to shelter Edoites from any bad news “outside”–at most, whatever effects dead peasants had on them were probably expressed through rising food prices. During one of the worst famines of the Edo period, the Tenpō

Famine (1833-1836), the most lavish shogakai were held for the

“celebrities” and their fawning sycophants in Edo (Markus 1993, p. Martin 10 151). That does not discount the gains made through the development in agriculture as well as food culture. Indeed, many peasants became better off through the spread of rural industry. However, what these in- cidents show is that urban food culture was in certain concrete ways cut off from the countryside, even though the peasants themselves, through their labor, were the ones who contributed the most to the success of that food culture. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

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