Continued from the previous post about the recent history of Japanese eating habits.

The recent Japanese interest in "other" "ethnic" cuisines, especially those from Asian countries, is rather similar to the ethnic food boom in the United States. Eating at ethnic restaurants and cooking ethnic food at home are considered to be the proof of one's awareness and appreciation of the exotic beauty. Being able to appreciate the exotic is, in turn, an expression of one's truly "international" character--something that has been much hyped about in Japan in the last few decades (as is evident in their feverish desire to master the English language). And oddly enough, the Japanese interest in once-neglected regional food of their own country may be seen in the same light.

Even during the westernization of the Japanese eating and cooking habits, certain types of Japanese cuisine survived as a much revered tradition. Sushi, which is originally a Tokyo fast food, spread to the entire country, and enjoying expensive, super-fresh sushi remained firmly grounded in the Japanese eating habits. Similarly, things like "kaiseki ryori," an elaborate, myriad-course meal with its origin in tea ceremony, continued to be deeply revered as a very-special-occasion meal. But these did not include ingredients and cooking methods indigenous to most of the regions within Japan. Regional cuisines were (considered to be) merely down-home, grandma-style cooking, which one would only enjoy when back at home. You would never have run into a trendy restaurant that served regional food. There were certainly restaurants that specialized in regional cuisines, especially in urban areas where people from all over Japan craved for the down-home cooking of their regions, but these establishments were usually not hip or trendy. This type of down-home regional restaurants still abound in Japanese cities, and remain to be great places to appreciate the wide variety of regional specialties (and sometimes, oddities).

In the past decade or so, however, the scenery has changed dramatically. The Japanese epicureans have found a new fountain of exotic food in their own country. They did not abandon French, Italian and other conventionally "cool" cuisines, but they started to pay much more attention to the different regional cuisines and ingredients within Japan (along with Thai, Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian cuisines in particular). The recent explosion of interest in traditionally produced vinegars (which was the starting point of this long series of posts) is just one aspect of this re-discovery. It is a full circle, in that the Japanese, who once pursued Western cuisine and followed the standardized national cuisine, started to look back into the regional origins of their cooking and eating habits. But in a few significant ways, it's not just a completion of the circle of capricious culinary trends.

First, the regional cooking and ingredients are now very much a part of the consumer economy, which attaches all sorts of fantasies to its commodities to sell them. So, even though the regional cuisines might have been a part of the mundane (for those who come from the specific regions), they are now exotic food in the eyes of the Japanese consumers who have lost (or never even had) the tie to the foods' origins. Closely tied to this commercialization of the regional cuisines is the tremendous change in the way the Japanese people assign meaning to food and eating. Perhaps it is just a nostalgic fantasy on my part to imagine a time when food didn't carry any meaning beyond subsistence and familial (and/or communal) sharing, but the degree of fantasization that now surrounds food and cuisines seems rather unprecedented in the Japanese history.

As I've touched upon earlier, the consumption in restaurants , and re-creation at home, of certain food items, be it a Thai curry or a specialty from Hokkaido, mean that the eater or the creator has a cool lifestyle with a flair or two. It also means that the eater or the creator can afford that luxury, both economically and psychologically. (Leisure is a psychological state, as much as an economic one.) Being able to "enjoy small moments in life" seems to be one of the hallmark of the "cool" lifestyle among the Japanese food bloggers. Procuring (often over the internet) regional specialties and cooking it up in a recently popularized traditional method seems to fit perfectly into that ideal. It doesn't take an exorbitant amount of money, unlike going to a high-end French restaurant in Shinjuku. Rather, it takes connoisseurship and creativity--two highly prized attributes (at least as far as I can tell through reading various Japanese food blogs and comments left on them). For the most part, the people who support the renaissance of the regional condiments, cooking methods and ingredients are common people with mortgages to pay, children to raise, and/or retirement plan to worry about. With relatively small amount of money, regional condiments and ingredients can give them the edge that’s lacking in the mundane.

To be continued, yet again, till a future post on the role of internet and "otoriyose" boom in the regional food renaissance...