Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture
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294 Ann Waswo
would be some modest improvements to kitchens in the 1920sand1930sin
both urban and rural dwellings to render them more sanitary and efficient,
26
a floor-sitting culture persisted.
With Japan’s defeat in the Second World War in 1945, the widespread
destruction of dwellings in Japanese cities as a result of aerial fire-bombing
in the year or so preceding Japan’s surrender and a postwar Occupation
set on democratising not only the polity and economy but also the society
of a defeated enemy, the scene was set for unprecedented change in both
housing and housing codes.
As Imamura has documented earlier in this volume, the patriarchal ie
system was abolished in law early in the Occupation years and gender
equality proclaimed in both a new constitution and a new civil code. Rural
land reform laid the basis for improved incomes and living standards in
the countryside, where roughly half the Japanese population still resided.
Although the Occupation did not directly concern itself with housing, it
did not prevent official Japanese efforts to deal with the severe housing
crisis then facing the nation: an estimated crude housing shortage of some
4.2 million dwellings, with the shortages most acute in large cities.
27
As
noted earlier, the Japanese government prioritised economic recovery and
growth, but that meant providing housing of some sort for workers in criti-
cal industries. That in turn provided an opportunity for housing reformers,
many of them active since the late 1920s, to realise the now significantly
amended goal of ‘democratising’ the typical Japanese dwelling. Baldly put,
what that meant was getting the Japanese ‘off the floor’ at home at long
last and into chairs around ‘proper’ tables for family meals in a designated
space within the home that could not also be used for sleeping. It also
meant the elimination of all the ‘feudal’ elements of the past within the
home – no patriarchal or masculine preserves, either for the male head of
the household himself or for the exclusive entertainment of his guests, and
no wasted spaces for ‘ostentatious’ display such as elaborate genkan or
tokonoma. Finally, it meant the provision of separate sleeping rooms for
parents and children and of functional, labour-saving cooking and bathing
facilities to enable the wife, now the equal partner of the husband in Japan’s
new democratic families, to discharge her duties without the aid of a single
servant.
28
Given severe housing shortages in early postwar urban Japan, which
did not abate until the late 1960s, these reformers enjoyed a seller’s market
for their design initiatives. The most fundamental of these was the ‘nDK’
model for urban apartments in the housing estates (danchi) built by the
Housing culture 295
Japan Housing Corporation, a government agency, after 1955. ‘DK’ stands
for a wooden- or vinyl-floored combined dining and kitchen area featuring
a Western-style table and chairs and a small but efficiently organised cook-
ing space, and ‘n’ stands for the number of other rooms, tatami-matted and
envisioned as sleeping rooms, which were originally two in number: one
for the parents and the other for their children. With some modifications,
most notably the addition of an ‘L’ (living room) to the DK, and an increase
in both the number and size of other rooms, this model won general pub-
lic approval and became the template for virtually all house construction
in Japan subsequently, not only of apartments but also of single-family
dwellings.
The spread of Western-style furniture from the original DK to virtually
all the other rooms in these dwellings stemmed in part from the lack of
built-in storage space in both publicly and privately built housing. This
impelled residents to purchase chests of drawers and wardrobes for their
clothing and other personal possessions. But there were other factors at
work as well, not least among them the growth of a domestic Western-
style furniture industry. Kick-started by the sudden demand for tables and
chairs for all those DKs, the new industry was soon offering easy terms
for purchase of such expensive items as sofas and beds. The spread was
further stimulated by the considerable publicity in magazines targeted at
housewives and at local PTA meetings given to the need to provide children
with private, well-fitted study and sleeping spaces.
29
Another innovation within the separate units of early danchi apartments,
was a family bathroom with a deep tub for soaking Japanese-style whose
water was heated by a specially designed gas-fired boiler. This eventually
brought about the demise of public bath-houses in most of urban Japan. A
separate Western-style ‘sit-down’ flush toilet also became well-nigh univer-
sal in Japanese dwellings, leading eventually to the invention of high-tech
toilets with heated seats and variable flushing controls that make most
Western toilets seem backward indeed.
Although bathrooms and toilets, even if improved in diverse ways, took
up roughly the same space as originally provided, the (L)DK and other
n-rooms seemed increasingly crowded to their occupants as they became
filled with space-consuming furniture. The progressively larger per capita
and overall dwelling sizes stipulated by the GHLC for middle-class hous-
ing loans, and by other government agencies as new five-year targets for
home construction took this dynamic – and increasing urban middle-class
incomes – on board, inching or more accurately metering up the mandated
296 Ann Waswo
space standards each quinquennium, until basically adequate standards for
a Western-style, chair-sitting housing culture were achieved.
Variations and stratification
There always have been, and continue to be, variations in the style, size and
quality of housing within Japan, as in other countries. Some of these are
basically geographical or climatic in origin – houses in regions with harsh
winters have more steeply pitched roofs and better provision for winter
heating than houses in more temperate regions. Others have more complex
demographic and socioeconomic origins, leading to contrasts between, for
example, rates of home ownership, average housing size and the internal
layout of rooms within houses among rural, urban and metropolitan areas
of the country. Considerably lower land prices in many parts of rural and
small-town Japan than in Tokyo and other large cities have contributed to
higher rates of owner-occupancy in these areas. Residents of rural areas,
small towns and the numerous medium-sized regional cities of Japan also
tend to live in larger homes than the vast majority of their metropolitan
counterparts. Moreover, many of these homes – including some built fairly
recently – feature not only modern DK and private bedrooms, but also
traditionally designed ‘public’ spaces in the form of sizable genkan and
linked tatami-matted rooms that exist only in attenuated form, if at all, in
dwellings in the nation’s largest cities.
30
Finally, it is essential to mention what have recently become the
two key issues in studies of Japanese housing and housing policy, both
related to increasing stratification within Japanese society: (1) the growth
in the number of ‘non-standard’ households in need of appropriate and
affordable accommodation; and (2) the growing divide within the nation’s
largest metropolitan areas between those middle-income households who
can realistically contemplate eventual home-ownership and those who
cannot.
As noted earlier, the nuclear family of a married couple and their (two)
children became the norm in early postwar Japan, and it was for such
families – or more accurately, the skilled blue- and white-collar work-
ers within them who were deemed essential to Japan’s postwar economic
recovery and growth – that a limited amount of state-subsidised social hous-
ing was built and on which much subsequent private housing provision
focused. But the percentage of such nuclear families reached a peak in Japan
in the late 1970s and the number of ‘other’ households began to increase.
Housing culture 297
These included: single-parent nuclear families; one-person households of
either working-age adults or elderly widows or widowers; childless couples;
and ‘new’ three-generational households in which either an elderly parent
or parental couple took up residence in the home of one of their adult chil-
dren or an adult child (often a son) and his nuclear family took up residence
in his parental home.
31
For reasons also noted earlier, small units of accom-
modation – essentially studio apartments with kitchen, bath and one other
room – were built for rent or sometimes for sale to working-age singles
or young couples in large cities. Construction firms also began to market
designs for ‘two-household homes’ which promised to provide a friction-
free, non-‘feudal’ balance of shared and private facilities for those with the
land and financial resources to take the ‘new’ multi-generational housing
route.
32
But absent from this list was suitable and affordable housing not
only for low-income ‘standard’ households, who were left as previously
to find whatever social or private rental housing they could, but also for
single-parent households, especially those headed by relatively low-paid
working mothers, and for the elderly, whether home owners seeking to
downsize into rental accommodation to be closer to their children or long-
term renters seeking suitably sheltered accommodation as they encountered
the infirmities of old age.
33
Attracting at least as much attention in recent studies have been the diffi-
culties faced by increasing numbers of middle-income Japanese households
in climbing the established postwar housing ladder from renting to owner-
occupation in the major metropolitan regions of the country, particularly
in greater Tokyo and greater Osaka. For years many households in these
regions had been constrained to purchase apartments or detached houses
at ever greater distances from the main breadwinner’s workplace in order
to secure the living space they needed at a cost they could afford.
34
Dra-
matically rising prices for land and housing during the ‘bubble’ years of the
1980s did not merely intensify these problems, they put home-ownership
of any reasonable sort beyond the reach of such households unless they
had parental or other familial wealth on which to draw. The collapse of
the bubble economy in the early 1990s led to a significant decline in land
and housing prices in these same metropolitan areas, leaving anyone who
had purchased an apartment or a house during the bubble years with an
asset worth considerably less than the housing loans they remained liable
for.
35
In addition, the ensuing long recession – the so-called ‘lost decade’ –
and the unprecedented economic and employment uncertainties it gen-
erated trapped many younger Japanese households possessing what had
298 Ann Waswo
previously been regarded as very good career prospects in rental accom-
modation, unless they inherited land or housing from their parents or oth-
erwise received familial assistance. Put another way, inherited advantage
which privileged the children of middle- or higher-income families, espe-
cially those who already owned their own homes, over the children of
families of lesser means, especially those who rented their homes, began to
play a noticeable role in movement up the metropolitan housing ladder. This
posed a considerable challenge to one of the basic tenets of postwar Japanese
meritocracy, that of upward social mobility by dint of the individual’s own
efforts and achievements regardless of family background.
The implications of this latter development in the housing sphere, which
impinges directly on those Japanese who have achieved notable success
in educational selection, has contributed to greater academic and public
attention to social inequalities within Japan than has been the case for
decades.
Notes
1. See Ravetz (1995: 149–65) for a discussion of changing codes of room use in 20th-
century England.
2. Garon (1997: 25–40).
3. Rybczynski (1986: 78–81).
4. Perkins (1999: 172–3); Rybczynski (1986: 26, 81–5).
5. ‘Obituary: Sir Roy Denham’, The Times (19 April 2006), online at: http://www.
timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article706856.ece.
6. Bob Johnstone (1997: 18).
7. Waswo (2002: 110–13).
8. Varying definitions of habitable space in national surveys, not to mention the dif-
fering categories of the housing included in those surveys, render such international
comparisons imperfect. Whether or not kitchens are included, or only kitchens of at
least a certain size, is a major variable. US and, until recently, English surveys exclude
apartments, which tend to be smaller than single-family dwellings. Japanese housing
surveys have always tended to maximise the area of housing units, but they have also
included apartments as well as single-family dwellings. When apartments were even-
tually included in English surveys in 2001, the average area of all housing fell below
recorded Japanese levels. See Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (2006:
169).
9. See Louie (1996) for illustrations of this ‘anomaly’ and other explanations of the heavy
casualties incurred in Kobe.
10. Hirayama (2007: 26).
11. This is the limit cited by Hirayama (2007: 26), but a limit of 10 years is cited by
Kanemoto (1997: 534).
It could well be that the GHLC amended its policy toward
providing loans on used houses sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
Housing culture 299
12. Eiji
¯
Oizumi (2007: 69–70); Kanemoto (1997: 634).
13. Waswo (2002: 39–43).
14. Harloe (1995).
15. Waswo (2002: 45–60).
16. Iwao Sato (2007: 79–85); Waswo (2002: 92–4).
17. As shown in Figure 15.1, the difference in living space between owned and rental
housing in Japan was greater than in the other countries listed in the early 1990s, and
the space available in rental housing – predominantly apartments – was considerably
lower than in the other countries. This remained the case in 2003. See Ministry of
Land, Infrastructure and Transport (2006: 169, table 9.1).
18. Kanemoto (1997: 632–4).
19. Waswo (2002: 87–8).
20. Chairs had been introduced to Japan from China late in the Nara period, it appears,
but they never came into widespread use among the court aristocracy (Morris 1964:
31) and disappeared from elite dwellings thereafter.
21. Nishiyama (1989: 100).
22. Sand (2003
: 21–54).
23. This
is a very crude estimate, using data from the 1930 Japanese census and the
occupational categories devised by British sociologists for the analysis of class in post-
war Britain. See Halsey (1995: 40–1) for the application of these categories to prewar
Britain.
24. Sand (2003: 43–4).
25. Sand (2003: 44).
26. Sand (2003: 62–94); Partner (2001).
27. Nishiyama (1989: 290–1).
28. Waswo (2002: 69–75), Nishikawa (1999: 485–93).
29. Waswo (2002: 82–4).
30. Sumita (1983).
31. Hinokidani (2007: 118, 127).
32. Coaldrake (1989: 64–6).
33. Hinokidani (2007: 122–3, 128
–9);
Izuhara (2007: 107–8).
34. Waswo (2002: 110–15, 121–2).
35. Hirayama (2007: 25–6).
Further reading
Hirayama, Yosuke and Richard Ronald (eds) (2007), Housing and Social Transition in
Japan, London: Routledge.
Sand, Jordan (2003), House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space and
Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930, Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center.
Waswo, Ann (2002), Housing in Postwar Japan: A Social History, London: Routledge-
Curzon.
naomichi ishige
16
Food culture
The conventional meal of Japan comprises four types of food: rice,
the staple diet; okazu, secondary components like fish or vegetables; soup
called shiru;andtsukemono, vegetables pickled in salt or rice bran. T he
traditional practice in Japan is for all food to be served on individual plates
and bowls at individual, low tables. Unlike typical meals in the West today,
where dishes are served chronologically, in Japan it has been common for
all dishes to be placed together on a serving tray at the beginning of the
meal.
This chapter first deals with rice as a significant part of Japanese cultural
life and fish as the most important okazu, the two key components of Japan’s
food culture for both pre-modern and modern Japan. Changing patterns
of food culture in and after the Meiji period are then examined,
1
with the
concomitant transformation of the dining table. Finally, the chapter presents
a model that shows the way in which the Japanese today mix different styles
of food, and concludes by discussing issues faced by contemporary Japanese
food culture.
Rice as symbolic food
Rice constitutes the staple diet for the Japanese, both as essential food and
as an important symbol of cultural life. Japan’s rice is the so-called Japonica
type short grain which is normally eaten on its own without seasoning or
flavouring. The Japanese have long regarded rice as central to their meal
culture and all other food as a secondary component of their diet. In the
Japanese language, to eat rice (meshi o kuu) means to have a meal (shokuji o
suru).
Food culture 301
Before the establishment of the modern nation state, feudal lords col-
lected tax in rice, not in money. Japan’s feudal economy was thus built
upon the production of rice. Japanese village life follows the calendar of
rice cultivation, with village festivals organised according to this cycle.
Villagers pray for a rich harvest at spring festivals at the time of plant-
ing seedlings into paddy fields. At summer festivals, farming communi-
ties pray for the protection of rice against harmful insects and typhoons
that hit Japan late in the season, while autumn festivals are harvest
celebrations.
In Japan, as well as in countries in South-East Asia, rice has been regarded
as a sacred grain in which the divine spirit dwells. During festival periods,
people in the lower classes, who had to ‘extend’ their everyday rice by
mixing it with barley, foxtail millet and Japanese millet, ate pure white rice
with no additives, festive meals made from glutinous rice and also drank
sake made from rice. The belief underlying this practice was that these
rice products would empower their consumers with the sacred energy of
rice.
Mochi, made from glutinous rice steamed and pounded in a mortar,
has special significance for many Japanese, who believe that it gives much
physical power to the eater. While dietics and physiology can scientifi-
cally corroborate this belief, it is based upon the folk notion that mochi as
condensed rice imbues the eater with supernatural energy provided by the
sacred spirit that dwells in rice. This is why the Japanese celebrate New
Year’s Day, the most important holiday on the nation’s calendar, by eating
z
¯
oni soup that contains mochi.
Sake is also made from rice. The method of brewing sake was initially
brought to Japan from the Chinese continent and the Korean peninsula.
Japan has developed its own technology, producing sake of 20 per cent
alcoholic content, the highest level among brewed liquors without distilla-
tion. Sake is an indispensable part of Shinto festivals in which all gods are
supposed to enjoy drinking the beverage. Festival participants offer sake
to Shinto shrines, which they later drink together in an act that cements
community solidarity.
Conventionally, people enjoy sake in tokkuri (a small ceramic flank-
shaped bottle) after it is warmed in hot water and served in choku,asmall
ceramic cup. However, since the 1980s, ginj
¯
oshu, high-quality fruity sake
brewed at low temperatures, has been marketed successfully in a chilled
form to be enjoyed like white wine.
302 Naomichi Ishige
Fish – sashimi, sushi and whale meat
Although the typical Buddhist believer did not eat animal products on
specific Buddhist events, funerals, or anniversaries of the death of a family
member, they were able to eat fish and shellfish on other days without
any feelings of guilt. As a result, fish came to be perceived as the greatest
delicacy in traditional Japanese cooking, resulting in a large range of fish-
based dishes. Although various techniques were developed in Japan for the
preparation of fish dishes, in comparison to China and Korea where meat
was eaten, cooking methods featuring a range of spices and using oils and
fats did not develop in Japan.
The philosophy behind Japanese food culture appears to be a paradoxical
belief that no cooking is the best kind of cooking. This manifests itself in the
treatment of fish in Japanese gastronomy. If fish are fresh enough, they ought
to be sliced raw and served as sashimi. If they are not sufficiently fresh, the
second best preparation is to grill them and sprinkle them with salt. Only
when fish lose freshness would they be cooked with such flavourings as
sh
¯
oyu or miso as a last resort. The thinking here is that the extensive use
of cookery and processing methods is vulgar; the natural initial flavours of
ingredients should be retained and eaten in the form as close as possible to
nature.
Sashimi, carefully sliced raw fish meat to be eaten with wasabi and soy
sauce, reflects this value orientation most sharply. Most Japanese consider
sashimi the simplest and therefore the most refined food. High-quality
Japanese cuisine almost invariably includes sashimi.
Sushi
2
is often wrongly thought to be an extension of this idea, because
it is served as a small amount of rice shaped by hand and topped with
sashimi. In fact, sushi originated from the culture of fermenting fish meat
in pre-modern Japan and differed markedly from what we recognise as
sushi today. The idea started with the knowledge that fish preserved with
salt and mixed with cooked rice can be stored for a long period of time
because rice undergoes lactic acid fermentation which raises its acidity level
and thereby prevents bacteria from propagating. Rice grains used this way
break down and become pasty and are normally inedible. Removed from
rice, the preserved fish tastes sour and smells like strong cheese. This was
the type of sushi available before the Edo period. Similar food exists in
paddy regions in South-East Asia, an observation that gives some credence
to the theory that sushi had initially developed in the upper and middle
reaches of the Mekong Delta area in ancient times as a method of preserving
Food culture 303
freshwater fish meat and was brought to Japan with the paddy field method
of rice cultivation. While this type of sushi was eaten in China for some
time, unprocessed food gradually disappeared from the Chinese table, with
only some ethnic minority groups in south-western China still retaining
thepracticetoday.
From around the 15th century, the Japanese began to develop their own
style of sushi, based on a new technique that enabled them to begin eating
it three or four days after preparation and to consume it within one or two
months. The short fermentation method made it possible for both fish and
rice to be eaten at the same time and therefore for sushi to serve as a snack.
Towards the end of the 17th century during the Edo period, haya zushi
(quick sushi) became available, with both rice and fish being flavoured with
vinegar. This method opened the way for the diversification of sushi, which
now included mixing vinegared rice with flavoured and cooked vegetables.
Around the same time, nori maki, which used paper-like dried seaweed to
wrap rice, became popular.
The so-called nigiri zushi, which is served at sushi restaurants today,
acquired popularity in the 1820s in Edo (present-day Tokyo) and became
the standard version, comprising a small ball of vinegared rice shaped by
hand by a professional sushi chef with a slice of fish and a bit of wasabi
to be eaten with a few drops of soy sauce. From around this time, nigiri
zushi ceased to be made in the home altogether and began to be served at
sushi restaurants where chefs were supposed to make various kinds of sushi
on the spot at the request of customers. Thus, the sushi that originated as
long-term preserved food transformed itself into a kind of ‘fast food’ in
Japan, which has recently been popularised around the world.
While the nigiri zushi type is in national and international vogue, it
should be emphasised that there is much regional variation of sushi within
Japan. Funa zushi, for example, the noted product in Shiga Prefecture, is
made from carp caught in Lake Biwa and subjected to lactic acid fermen-
tation based upon the ancient method of sushi production. At commu-
nity festivals and functions, various types of sushi are served in different
localities.
The consumption of mammals such as whale and dolphin was not pro-
hibited in Japan by the Buddhist establishment as these were viewed as large
fish. Whale was not only consumed; oil was extracted from the whale’s blub-
ber and sprayed onto the surface of rice paddies to prevent pests. After the
whale oil was extracted, the remaining fatty layer was dried and used as a
preserved food. Whale meat, in particular, has been ranked as one of the top