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

ByAdrian Keoni Martin

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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

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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.

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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, vitamins, 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 di-

mension, but has its personal and social aspects as well. Anyone re-

ceiving 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 impor-

tance 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, anthropologically 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 struc-

tured” (Barthes, pp. 21-22). If the desire for food has a definite and

changeable structure, this structure can be studied by social and cul-

tural historians; indeed, the fact that the “first need” has structure

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makes an understanding of food studies de rigueur for social and cul-

tural 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 Scriptures, 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 managed

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 as-

pects of food in culture, including material (farming, cooking) and im-

material (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 things;

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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 re-

sources.” However, the “three views are not in conflict, but are com-

plementary” (Rapoport, pp. 50-51).

Thus, one could approach the problem of food culture from a cul-

tural 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 an-

imus 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 “whole-

ness” that the pig, being omnivorous, is rendered unclean by its some-

time meat-eating (Soler, p. 60). From a social perspective, one would

not merely examine why pigs were not kosher, but how this affected so-

cial 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.” Historians go “beyond

anecdotal food folklore and descriptions of cuisine and cooking at a

particular point in time to incorporate historical dimensions” (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 pe-

riod in Japan (1603-1867). During this period, Japan was unified under

a centralized military dictatorship (the shogunate or bakufu) and domes-

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tic 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 colonialism)

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 cen-

tury 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 ur-

banized: 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 inhabitants]” (Roz-

man, 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 bear-

ers 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 uni-

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form, and was in fact due to a convergence of several factors. First,

the integration of the cities, especially the three metropolises of Ky-

oto, Osaka, and Edo, into a national economy allowed for the growth of

commerce, which led to higher living standards for city dwellers. Sec-

ond, the resultant increase in leisure allowed for the patronage of en-

tertainment 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 cul-

ture: 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 dif-

ferent 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 (shita-

machi). Finally, the most common usage of Edomae refers to the “essen-

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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.

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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 delicious”

breakfast the next morning. This meal was “third-rate cooking,” suited

to the warlord’s unrefined style. Both Nobunaga and his successors Toy-

otomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) adhered to a

warrior ethos which emphasized a coarse diet. Polished 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 dur-

ing 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

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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 Nobunaga

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 tea party in

1 Also known as the Momoyama period. The name is taken from the respec-tive castles of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi.

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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 Minamoto clan, Ieyasu re-

ceived the title of seii-taishōgun (lit. great barbarian-subduing gener-

alissimo) 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 continu-

ing 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 up-

rising. 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 in-

tegrating 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 system based

upon the field-command hierarchies that they used in war (Totman 1981,

pp. 139-140).

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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,” re-

flecting 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 (Ku-

makura, p. 61). Nevertheless, the bakufu patronized masters (iemoto) of

various arts, such as calligraphy, the martial arts, historical knowl-

edge, 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 Japanese neo-

Confucianism, compiled the historical origins of the proper meals for

the major festivals of the calendar as well as major ceremonies marking

important life events such as weddings. Razan’s treatise was incorpo-

rated 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 celebrated by Father

Rodrigues in the Momoyama period as culinary reformers became the new

guardians of culinary tradition, proving the timeworn adage that yester-

day’s liberal is today’s conservative. The patrons of 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

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enable the chōnin to enjoy a higher level of material culture: urbaniza-

tion 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 ten-sion, 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 urbaniza-

tion, 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 samu-

rai from the peasantry and set up the distinct division of labor re-

quired for urban development (Sorensen, p. 14). In 1615, the bakufu re-

quired each daimyō to destroy all but one castle in his domain, thus

causing the population to concentrate in every region (Eisenstadt, p.

177). The second principle was embodied in the shogunal policy of “al-

ternate attendance” (sankin kōtai), which required each daimyō to main-

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tain residences in Edo, leaving their family members there as hostages.

They had to spend every second or third year in their Edo residence, un-

dertaking “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 seven-

teenth 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 necessities,

workmen to construct their mansions, dig canals, and clear roads, arti-

sans 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 eventu-

ally came to the city of their own free will in order to make their for-

tune. 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 tradi-

tional 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-

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,

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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 taxa-

tion. 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 mone-

tized, and Osaka thus became the “kitchen of the realm,” shipping essen-

tial 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 ostentatious opu-

lence, 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 sep-

aration between town and country during the Edo period. Although com-

2 One koku is about 5.6 bushels (Totman 1993, p. 561).

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mercial activity started to be taxed in the later Edo period, most of

the tax money came from agricultural produce. In the minds of the rul-

ing class, the land was the only “real” source of wealth (Totman 1976,

p. 105). Thus, peasants (hyakushō) were treated much more harshly than

merchants and artisans, although theoretically the peasantry was consid-

ered of higher social status than commoners in the cities. More than 80

percent of the population consisted of peasants who lived in farm vil-

lages (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. Nu-

merous decrees were issued by the bakufu in order to encourage the peas-

ants to work harder and grow more rice. One of the more extensive de-

crees, 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 commonweal. Peasants were taxed

(with rates reaching as much as 60 percent) 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 village. At the deathbed of a

poor man, a bamboo tube filled with a few grains of rice was shaken, and

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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 be-

coming 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 eigh-

teenth 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 pe-

riod. 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

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 samu-

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rai, 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 sardines

in tenement houses (nagaya), made a decent living. The Osaka novelist

Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693) noted that the laborers, “busy with quarrel-

ing, 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 stan-

dard 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 arti-

sans, was known as the shitamachi (lit. low city) or machichi (town ar-

eas) 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 en-

claves located in the samurai areas. Nevertheless, the shitamachi com-

prised a very small portion (about one-fifth, or thirteen square kilome-

ters) 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 shita-

machi (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 mer-

chants 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 level of

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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 idealized a

large agrarian class ruled directly by an elite samurai class. Towns-

people according to this mindset were considered more or less extrane-

ous, and thus the castle towns constructed during the early modern pe-

riod lacked walls –the outer areas were considered a “buffer zone” de-

fending 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 em-

ployees in both the main store and its branch. Sankin kōtai also prob-

ably 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 des-

tiny, it does tell us in this case that there were many men who lived

without families in Edo. Unrestrained by paternal or filial obliga-

tions, 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”

decided to create a district of brothels in Edo. This district, called

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Yoshiwara, was very much a different world unto itself, featuring enter-

tainments of varying degrees of respectability, appealing to both the

high and the low class. For the “connoisseurs” merely entering the dis-

trict 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 desti-

nation, 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 em-

phasized. In fact, what food was served in the Licensed Quarters be-

tween 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 popular-

ity 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 de-

veloped 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-

deavor enjoyed moderate success, especially after he won a lawsuit

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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 service

similar to modern restaurants, featuring cloth-covered private tables,

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

China, 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 extension of that style

of cooking to a much broader part of society after the French Revolu-

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tion” (Freeman, p. 145). Thus, when restaurants appear “on the scene”

in a given society, culinary historians should definitely 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 associ-

ations, 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 restau-

rants provide filling meals to whoever could afford them, they also pro-

vided a respite from the everyday world, allowing for new social con-

tacts 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 de-

tailed 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 nothing

out of the ordinary. However, his trip was made in the middle of win-

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ter, so perhaps there was more variety in other seasons (Nishiyama, pp.

163-194). Because of their rural presence as well as the standardiza-

tion in culinary offerings, inn probably did not influence early restau-

rants.

The first restaurants were the linear descendants of roadside tea-

houses. In the fourteenth century, a Kyoto entrepreneur, noticing the

increased popularity of tea, decided to start a teahouse business, sell-

ing one cup of tea at the reduced rate of one sen (ippuku issen). These

teahouses became very popular, springing up near popular religious es-

tablishments 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 century).

His cooking was so highly regarded that according to one anecdote three

3 Today, this area comprises the now very urban Shibuya and Toshima wards of Tokyo.

Martin 10

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 par-

ticular specialty, was a restaurant patronized by the Asakusa rice bro-

kers. 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., paint-

ing 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 ban-

quets; 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 separately (Markus 1993,

pp. 138-139). The largest shogakai of all time was held at the Man-

pachirō in the autumn of 1836, sponsored by the successful author

Kyokutei (Takizawa) Bakin (1767-1848), famed for his 106-volume epic

novel the Nansō satomi hakkenden. Although preparations were for three

4 About the equivalent of several hundred dollars.? One-sixteenth of a ryō.

Martin 10

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 sponsors,

who hoisted large billboards advertising the luminaries attending the

banquet (Markus 1993, 154-156). Thus, perhaps in many ways the prosper-

ity of restaurants in the late Edo period was merely an expression of

conspicuous consumption. Nevertheless, food was still taken seriously

by some segments of the literate population, as we shall see in the next

chapter.

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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. Of-

ficial edicts of the bakufu were set on signposts (banzuke) and posted

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 seven-

teenth 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 em-

ployed a similar system along the Tōkaidō highway which linked Edo with

Kyoto and Osaka. Messengers both on foot and horseback would race be-

tween Edo and the Kamigata within the space of a week; in the later Edo

period, messengers were able to cross the five hundred kilometer dis-

tance between Edo and Osaka in merely three and a half days. The mer-

chants and bureaucrats who demanded this information had to be literate;

the merchants as well as their many servants especially had to have ad-

vanced reading, writing, and arithmetical (abacus) skills in order to

interpret economic information. According to Katsuhisa Moriya, mer-

chants 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 pri-

vate schools located at temples known as terakoya to learn how to read

Martin 10

and write. These schools proliferated from the eighteenth through nine-

teenth centuries, and by the Meiji Restoration were, according to Ume-

sao, “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 cen-

tury, “By 1750, just about anyone could become an elementary writing

teacher. Tuition has become extremely inexpensive, and school-registra-

tion procedures were simplified…as a result, even people of low status

have enrolled in terakoya, to the point that nowadays ‘brushless [illit-

erate] 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 seven-

teenth 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 cul-tural 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 soci-ety" (Umesao, p. 11).

During the late seventeenth century, chōnin learned the yūgei from

certain “masters” (iemoto) who operated schools in the three metropo-

lises. The life of a “lesson-pro” freely participated in these cultural

practices, known collectively as okeikogoto, learning anything and ev-

erything, 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 calculation, calligra-

Martin 10

phy, 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 dilettantish merchant in

his novel Nippon eitai-gura (The Japanese Family Storehouse) as having

learned calligraphy, tea ceremony, poetry, literature, haiku poetry, Noh

drama, dancing, bunraku (puppet drama), football (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 hun-

dred haiku teachers in Kyoto; K. Moriya estimates 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 seven-

teenth century, hundreds of titles on haiku were published in Kyoto; un-

doubtedly, there would have been hundreds of thousands of books in the

hands of the Kyoto chōnin (K. Moriya, p. 119). Since the yūgei encom-

passed much more than haiku, the number of volumes published on other

subjects must have been much greater. Thus, from the demand for cul-

tural knowledge, a publishing industry was born.

The first Japanese printed materials were Buddhist mantras pro-

duced in the eighth century using carved wooden blocks.  By Imperial or-

der, about one million of these mantras were printed, each of them put

into a miniature wooden pagoda.  About a tenth of them were dedicated to

the major temples at the time, including Hōryūji, Tōdaiji, and Kō-

fukuji.  Printing was mainly reserved for Buddhist texts until around

the fourteenth century, when Zen priests began to print some Chinese po-

etry 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 movable-type

Martin 10

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 Ky-

oto dominated publishing during the seventeenth century, publishers be-

gan to establish themselves in both Osaka and Edo, so that by the nine-

teenth century there were 494 publishers in Kyoto, 504 in Osaka, and 917

in Edo. Moriya Katsuhisa sums this trend up as “culture’s march east-

ward” (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 au-

thors held special private parties known as shogakai which drew the lu-

minaries 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 vicariously ex-

plored 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 commentary.

Cookbooks and Dilettantes

Martin 10

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 arranged, 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” (Addiss, 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 speculates

that it was likely published closer to the beginning of the seventeenth

century. According to Ishige, the Ryōri monogatari “eschew[s] the au-

thoritarian, formalistic descriptions of trivial and antiquated proce-

dures that had characterized previous cookbooks, [and] presents practi-

cal 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 ingredi-

ent. Such cookbooks in the early period were probably meant for profes-

sional chefs. Nevertheless, the pragmatic spirit of the Ryōri mono-

gatari 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 properly

controlled in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle, and advised against

“harmful” combinations of foods such as rabbit with ginger or venison.

Martin 10

Ekken, like another contemporary, Hitomi Hitsudai, took his ideas from

Chinese medicine and herbology (honzōgaku). Hitsuidai’s 12-volume ency-

clopedia 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 pe-

riod, 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 enter-

taining style and featured many illustrations of the exotic foods fea-

tured within their pages. One example of the new style of cookbook was

the Tōfu hyakuchin published in 1782. Its author, a sinologist active

in Osaka at the time, included excerpts from Chinese and Japanese clas-

sics alongside one hundred tofu recipes, as well as sketches of restau-

rants specializing in tofu. The cookbook was wildly successful, and a

sequel was written detailing one hundred more tofu recipes. This in-

spired a hyakuchin (hundred-recipe) boomlet, featuring cookbooks on eggs

and other common ingredients. According to Harada, “This atmosphere

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 plea-

sure for the commoner. The enjoyment of food was popularized by a so-

cial climate that considered spending a virtue” (Harada 2006, p. 3).

Thus, the words of Kaibara Ekken in warning against profligate consump-

tion were ignored in the late Edo period. Although he praises the inge-

nuity of the late Edo period, Harada criticizes the trend of the ryōri-

bon towards including extraneous details and overemphasizing appearance,

rather than concentrating on actual cooking methods. 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

Martin 10

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). Un-

fortunately, such research is beyond my competence. However, I think

that it’s possible that the reason ryōribon 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 de-

tailed 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 escaped 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 (Northern, South-

ern), and America (Southern, Tex-Mex). A critique of food choices and

eating habits is invariably also a critique of the society which pro-

duced 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 analyt-

ical tool stands out in two writers: Terakado Seiken (mentioned in the

previous chapter), and his contemporary Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843), a

notable political philosopher of the nativist National Learning (koku-

gaku) school.

Martin 10

Seiken’s Edo hanjōki surveyed the sakariba [amusement quarters] of

Edo in a satirical manner, finally turning to the subject of the “gar-

gantuan” 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 hun-dred; 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 succulent, 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 association

with the outcaste eta: hence, pork was sold as “mountain whale” to the

hungry populace. Only in 1871, after the Meiji Restoration, was out-

caste 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 mock-

ingly 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 up-

heaval suffered by the poor and caused by the decadent meat-eaters

(Markus 1992, pp. 8-9, 12, 17).

For much of the Edo period, political philosophy was an adaptation

of neo-Confucian thought, especially the writings of Zhu Xi (1130-1200).

Martin 10

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 com-

pilation 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 histories 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 formu-

lated. 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 Japanese 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 “National Learning” school, or koku-

gaku. 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 Ja-

panese 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 inher-

ently 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 led to all kinds of

political failures in China. However, because the people are “ungrate-

ful” to the gods, they risk cutting themselves off from the divine

Martin 10

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 un-mindful 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 dur-

ing 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) rested,

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 cookery

in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Not only were

meals eaten to a greater extent in public, but cookbooks were also pub-

lished 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 be-

hind, especially the peasants. Because of the development of the domes-

tic economy, peasants in some areas of Japan put less emphasis on sub-

sistence 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 “celebri-

ties” and their fawning sycophants in Edo (Markus 1993, p. 151). That

does not discount the gains made through the development in agriculture

Martin 10

as well as food culture. Indeed, many peasants became better off

through the spread of rural industry. However, what these incidents

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.

Martin 10

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