= Rice was not a staple food =

Rice was never quite a staple to the Japanese commoners for hundreds if not perhaps thousands of years despite farming it to an extent.

The rice growing methods and tools were poor, no widespread draught animals to rely upon, less caloric intake sustained less caloric physical output through overwhelmingly human labor, so that despite laboring in rice fields, the bulk of any meager rice yield harvested was sent to just the top few percent overlords of the Japanese population.

Apparently, things were so bad for farmers in Japan, newborn baby boys were culled so baby girls could be fed and raised with the intent to be sold off as livestock.

The Meiji restoration American backed usurpers that overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate restarted the greed for swiping food resources beyond Japan’s shores through schemes for military empire, especially from the usual target, Korea.

Japanese men were enticed to join the military by getting to stuff their faces with Korean rice. But the steam mill mechanized grain polishing (to show off the vanity of an island nation with ambitions of conquest finally awash in polished white rice for even commoners) stripped out the nutrients and led to beriberi deaths in droves.

The pre-modern food history of Japan is sadly rather bleak, another reflection of the overall perpetual resource poor situation of the Japanese in general, suffered throughout their island history in silent obedience relinquishing control of their own destiny.

The recent concept of washoku is just far too lavish, a mythicized Japanese fantasy blotting out the bleakness of their beggarly food situation in the not too distant past.

Japanese food is indeed another overlooked aspect deeply embedded in their history of fanatic militarism spanning from long impoverishment to recent overindulgence. Japanese food history is a reflection of alternating between their internal and external colonization.



http://www.pbs.org/empires/japan/enteredo_5.html

Farmer

During the Tokugawa era, farmers were viewed as the foundation of Japan and granted a social standing just below the samurai class.

Yet the government made their lives oppressive and wretched.

To keep farmers in the fields and away from urban centers, government forces severely restricted their ability to travel.

Living under excruciating regulations, many farmers were taxed into poverty. Though they grew rice (the currency of the day), they were unable to keep much.

In certain areas the poverty was so intense that, after the birth of the first son, families killed off all subsequent male children.

Girls were welcomed since they could be sold as servants or prostitutes.

Modern Japanese Cuisine:
Food, Power and National Identity
Katarzyna Cwiertka
https://books.google.com/books/about/Mo … -7LOlWNpEC


“Modern Japanese Cuisine” by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka (BOOK REVIEW)
https://adblankestijn.blogspot.com/2007 … yna-j.html

Take rice, which is still considered as an almost sacred, Ur-Japanese basic food: in pre-modern times rice was only eaten by a few percent of the population, the upperclasses, the rest — including those who cultivated it — could not afford it.

Farmers paid their taxes in rice and only in very good years could they eat some of it, mixed with other grains and vegetables — and that was not the present-day white rice.

White rice was introduced with a vengeance by the military in the Meiji-period: the boys who joined the ranks, had the privilege to eat nothing but white rice for the first time, and many of them lost their lives before they reached the battlefield, as a diet of only white rice causes beri-beri due to Vitamin B1 deficit, but that was not known yet in the early 20th c.

Korean food, by the way, was a different matter. Kimch’i was only accepted in the nineties, during a Korea Boom due to the Seoul Olympics and later a popular television series.

But already in the years of food shortage after the war, yakiniku, grilled meat, became popular (first as horumon-yaki, using tripe and offal).

Koreans in fact played a large role in the popularization of meat in Japan — another fact is that in the early 20th c. most meat eaten in Japan was imported from Korea, another culinary consequence of imperialism.

…McDonalds (so common in Japan that Japanese kids think it is native…

What it all serves to demonstrate is that Japanese food culture is not exotic, unique or even traditional — Japanese national cuisine was devised and defined in the 20th century and Modern Japanese Cuisine unveils the story behind that process.