Moment(s)

I think I'm going to start changing the way I use this blog. Not because I'm going to make the decision to, but because it's just the way things are going. I feel that creation is something uniquely, and maybe most, beautiful in its moment, in spontaneous expression of thought and emotion. I've found myself making music by this idea more and more, and when I write in my journal, I often do it that way. So here's something that's been tugging at my mind all week, but really struck me just now:

This school's "International Food Week" is stupid. Monday - Brazilian, Tuesday - Vietnamese, Wednesday - Italian, Thursday - Japanese, Friday - Russian. School lunch is Japanese food every day of the year, and even in these five, infinitesimal days they cannot resist putting in Japan. Plus the fact that all the meals so far have just been small variations on the same Japanese food we get all the time anyways - rice, a soup, a little salad-type thing, maybe some small fish, and a fruit. As I look at the school flyer describing the food, I see: the days of the week with their corresponding country written next to them, the katakana (Japanese alphabet for "foreign" words) reading of the foods and the Japanese description of what's inside, a photo of the food, and a little picture of the country's flag sometimes accompanied by a cute little ethnically essentialized cartoon of a happy person from that country. Thursday, however, has none of this; only a little chart that reads, "Japanese Food's Good Points." All you have to do is read this to know you're in for another lesson in the way people can continue to create cultural characteristics out of nothing.

"It has a sense of the four seasons. There are lots of different ingredients and it has good nutritional balance." These are things I've heard over and over again since I've been here. People always ask me, "Do you have four seasons in America? Japan does." And then, "Oh yeah, in foreign countries, people have really bad nutritional balance. In America, don't you just eat bread all the time? Japanese food has very good nutritional balance and is good for you." I don't even want to get into taking apart all the different parts of this sentiment, but I'll mention that when people here do talk to me about the massive amount of unhealthy food in Japan (ie. fried shrimp, fried chicken, fried pork, pretty much fried anything) and the diseases caused by this, they say it's because of foreign influence and that "traditional" Japanese food is not like that.

But what even is "traditional" Japanese food, or even just "Japanese" food? If you look around any town, the three most prominent foods are curry, grilled meat, and ramen, hailing from India, Korea, and China respectively. After that, okonomiyaki and yakisoba are pretty popular and make appearances at pretty much any festival. But where do those two foods even come from? They are part of the Japanese food canon, but how long have they even been around? From what I've picked up, the origins of okonomiyaki and yakisoba, which are much stronger in taste than most foods that are traditionally Japanese (something that is admittedly also pretty unclear), probably lie sometime in the Meiji era, when richer sauces from Western countries began being imported. And I mean, okonomiyaki is made out of flour dough, not an ingredient usually considered "traditionally" Japanese. After these, udon, soba, and tempura are pretty main staples of cheap food here, but I don't know their histories so I can't make any guesses about them.

But if all these different foods which are so quintessentially "Japanese," and consumed in such huge volumes by Japanese people, do not even come originally from Japan, what makes them Japanese? Are they made Japanese by the unique way people here modify them to fit their own tastes? If so, is the essence of "Japanese food" found in the commonalities between those changes?

"It includes lots of fish, soy beans, vegetables, and ingredients from the sea. It makes it so harmful substances do not build up in your system." Japanese food does have a lot of those ingredients, and I'm not going to try to question that last part since I don't know anything about its scientific properties.

This is the most ridiculous one, though: "There are different ways of cooking it." I don't know since when having a variety of cooking styles has been a uniquely Japanese characteristic...

I've heard the things about different ways of cooking and good nutritional balance so many times and I really wonder from where they come. The four seaons thing, too.

So, there you go. I have effectively written on an idea that struck a chord in me until I lost my train of thought and don't really feel that provoked by it anymore.

I'm hungry.