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 neces- sary, 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 pur- chase 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 af- fected 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 cer- tainly there have been other civilizations with great cities such as Rome and Tenochtitlan, Japan differed from these civilizations by being more

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