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Theodore
C. Bestor is Professor of Anthropology and Japanese Studies at Harvard
University, and is past president of the American Anthropological
Association’s East Asian Studies Section and the Society for Urban
Anthropology. His many publications include: “Neighborhood Tokyo” (1989),” Doing
Fieldwork in Japan” (co-editor, 2003), and his most recent, “Tsukiji:
The Fish Market at the Center of the World” (2004). His current research
looks at the development of Japanese food culture and his ongoing project
on “Global Sushi” examines the “global reach” of
Japanese seafood markets, their impact on markets and fish industries,
and the popularity of sushi and other types of Japanese foods..
1.
Background
2.
Neighborhood Tokyo: Miyamoto-cho
3.
Tokyo's Tsukiji: The Fish Market and the Center of
the World
4.
Japanese Food Culture: Looking at Sushi as
a Japanese Food and Icon
- Sushi in the United States
5.
Issues of Food Safety and Hygiene
6.
Lessons to be Learned from the Field: Linking Kansas
with Japan
7. Concluding
Thoughts
Japanese
Food Culture: Looking at Sushi as a Japanese Food and
Icon
- Sushi in the United States L:
Talking about bluefin tuna again—going back to
the U.S. market—was it in demand as much as it
is now? What did people in the U.S. think about bluefin
tuna before?
B: Well—that’s a great question—I’ve
talked to older people in the fishing business and
essentially until the 1960s, bluefin tuna was really
not a commercial species. It was a sports fish. If
you caught it and were trying to make a living, you
would sell it for cat food or sometimes it would be
canned and sold like “Charlie the Tuna.” There
wasn’t a special market for it [bluefin tuna].
So the only real attention it got was as a trophy fish.
People would hire a fishing boat and go out for the
day and if they caught a tuna, they’d have it
stuffed and mounted over their fireplace.
So, it’s really I think the case that it wasn’t
until the 1970s, that the Japanese fish buyer began
to appear on the east coast of the United States. That
people started to identity tuna as a commercially important
fish. At least that’s when the Americans began
to identity it.
L: In conjunction with that, is that when sushi started
to be discovered in the United States? It’s cool
to eat sushi now but at one time it wasn’t popular
to eat raw fish on rice—
B: It is almost that time, I’d say—it
begins—it’s a reflection of several things.
It’s a reflection of Japanese economic power.
That increasingly, Japanese businessmen were doing
business in the United States and sushi restaurants
in major American cities sort of developed in the first
wave, as places where Japanese business people could
take their American clients to impress them, with this
exotic cuisine. And, similarly, at the same time, American
business people were beginning to go to Tokyo more
and more, and of course being taken out.
So, if you look at different kinds of “ethnic
foods,” in the United States, North American,
more generally—most ethnic foods start out with
immigrant populations. pirogi or spaghetti or tacos,
or whatever. It starts out as kind of a working class
immigrant food and gradually spreads outside in which
the elite gourmet replaces it at the upper echelon.
The history of Japanese food in the United
States is a top-down history rather than a bottom-up
history.
The Japanese American communities on the West coast
really didn’t introduce Japanese food to the
American public. There are good historical reasons
for that—the anti-Japanese sentiment on the West
coast, the impact of World War II, the [Japanese-American]
internment camps—one can easily argue that for
Japanese-Americans in the postwar period, advertising
their difference and advertising the unique, special
qualities of their cuisine would have been culturally
impossible. You are not trying to emphasize your differences.
L: They are trying to act the same—
B: Exactly. So, I think it’s with the
growth of international business with North America
and Japan,
starting in the 1960s and 1970s, that sushi becomes
this very elite, very specialized high status cuisine.
L: And it is always identified as a Japanese food
too, isn’t it?
B: Right, though it’s probably changing. It’s
now so common, even in Boston, you can walk into an
ordinary supermarket and find sushi.
L: Definitely not made by Japanese chefs—
B: Yes, not made by Japanese chefs. But you
are right, it is still identified as Japanese. But
in a generation
I bet it won’t be. It will join the taco and
the pizza and the hamburger as finger food.
L: And sushi is an excellent example of globalization
of food.
Next: Japanese
Food Culture: Looking at Sushi
as a Japanese Food and Icon, cont —Sushi as
fast food
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