Japan's Cuisines by Eric C. Rath

Author:Eric C. Rath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Rural Food

Lacking a premodern equivalent, the Japanese terms for ‘local food’, kyōdo ryōri and kyōdo shoku, were coined to describe the foodstuffs not just in any locale but in rural areas, reflecting the original meaning of kyōdo, a word that dates from as early as the eighth century and refers to the countryside. In the early twentieth century kyōdo came to suggest a personal connection to lands outside the urban core: the locale where one was born and raised.17 The exact boundaries of the area expressed by the word kyōdo are undefined, but refer to a larger setting than a ‘native village’ (kyōri, furusato). One is tempted to hypothesize that the change in meaning of the term kyōdo is connected to the doubling of the urban population in Japan in the first three decades of the twentieth century, as people who left the farm for the city reflected on the rural life they had left behind.

Beginning in the 1910s with the work of the founding father of the study of Japanese folklore, Yanagita Kunio, and reaching a culmination in 1934 with the organization of the Centre for Research of Rural Lifestyles (Kyōdo Seikatsu Kenkyūjo), native ethnologists following Yanagita identified the rural kyōdo – particularly the most remote mountain and fishing villages – for ethnographic surveys. Yanagita and his colleagues averred that vestiges of Japan’s national past lingered in places far from the influence of advanced urban centres.18 Areas designated as ‘local’ were backward and the same was true of the diet of these places. So-called local foods (kyōdo shoku) were defined in negative terms by the absence of soy sauce and sugar, and of rice as a staple grain.19 Local foods, in other words, lacked the ingredients that people in cities considered necessary for a ‘civilized’ life.20 Rural staple grains such as millet, barnyard millet and foxtail millet were ‘discriminated foods’, marking those who consumed them as stupid and contemptible, as Chapter Two described.21 For city-dwellers, the rural diet might appear to have little to recommend it other than the inventive but unappetizing ways that farmers coped with deprivation.

The monthly magazine Ie no hikari (Light of the Household), founded by the National Agricultural Cooperative in 1925, however, presented the diet of the countryside in a more positive light, respectful of the publication’s rural readership. In 1932 Light of the Household undertook a study of rural diets by convening a panel of six experts, who surveyed the spending and consumption habits of thirty farm households in Tokyo prefecture. The specialists determined that rural cooking was nutritious and could provide inspiration for improving the diet in other non-urban parts of Japan. Based upon such observations and with input from the burgeoning field of nutritional science in Japan, Light of the Household sought to foster a ‘new rural cooking’ that would combine rustic culinary knowhow and local ingredients with modern cooking habits and the science of dietetics.22 Articles in the magazine suggested that vitamin-rich locusts, a local delicacy in Nagano prefecture, might be adopted in other places to enhance the diet, while at the same time finding a use for a pest.

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