From Washoku to We-Shoku

The first piece I wrote about Japanese food for Gastronomica was published thirteen years ago, roughly half of the time of this twenty-five-year anniversary of the journal we are celebrating this issue. My modest contribution appeared in a section called “Rumblings from the World of Food,” which featured short takes and letters to the editor, and I described how the Japanese government was lobbying the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to have “the traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese” (washoku) declared an intangible cultural asset (Rath 2012). I was excited that an area of my research was getting more international attention, and I hoped that would translate into international conferences and perhaps media appearances for me related to increased academic interest in Japanese food.Japan succeeded in gaining its listing in 2013, but the huge upswing in popular interest in the academic side of Japanese cuisine I had hoped for afterward never materialized. The UNESCO listing matters back in Japan but not in the United States, which does not have any examples of intangible cultural heritage on UNESCO’s lists and where half of the population today might view anything associated with the United Nations with suspicion. Countries like China, Turkey, and France, which have taken the leader spots in these UNESCO listings, are Japan’s international competitors in seeking recognition for their indigenous culture and therefore less interested in Japan’s own assertions.Globally more and more people want to eat Japanese food, but most do not feel a need to dive deep into its rich history, and that is true even for historians of Japan. The New Cambridge History of Japan, a definitive reference for Japanese history published just a few years ago, only makes passing reference to food in its volumes that cover early modern and modern Japan, omitting discussion of a vital part of human existence and culture. Historical “who-cares-about-that” minutiae like the ideas of the early modern intellectual Ishida Baigan (1685–1744), the particulars of the Boshin War (1868–69), and Japan’s oil empire apparently warrant coverage but not the country’s centuries-old restaurant culture; or how the hundreds of cookbooks published in the early modern period gave rise to a national cuisine; or any of Japan’s world-class foods and drinks and its globally renowned local and national cuisines (Howell 2024; Hein 2023). An alien archaeologist who chances on these books some millennia from now might conclude that people in Japan once paid tribute, taxes, and rents in kind with rice, but never ate it or any other foods, existing instead by inhaling the vapors of incense like some Buddhist divinities are said to do. But we know that for centuries the Japanese drank tea or excellent sake, and beer and whiskey sometimes too. They ate sushi, tempura, sweets, and any of a hundred good things. Moreover, they appreciated food’s importance to daily life; and food played a central role in all holidays and celebrations, more facts that testify to the centrality of food to Japanese civilization that the latest two supposedly definitive Cambridge texts shamefully ignore.No thanks to the Japanese government or UNESCO, the global popularization of Japanese food actually happened decades before 2012 with the sushi boom, which started in North America in the 1980s and spread to Europe and beyond in the 1990s, and the more recent ramen boom in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Some push the globalization of Japanese cuisine back even further to the sukiyaki fad of the 1920s and 1930s followed by the opening of teppanyaki “chef cooks at your table” places like Hiroki “Rocky” Aoki’s (1938–2008) Benihana which launched its first restaurant in New York City in 1964 (Vyletalova, Farrer, Wang, and Hess 2023: 117–63). The popularization of eating Japanese food has only grown since the turn of the millennium. As of 2023 there are 187,000 Japanese restaurants globally, approximately 20 percent more than in 2021, notwithstanding the pandemic (Nōrin Suisansho 2025).Despite their “Japaneseness” the successful popularization of ramen and sushi globally stems greatly from the development of hybrid versions compatible with local food culture that appeal to local consumers. The California Roll, made from avocado, imitation crab, mayonnaise, cucumber and often served with the nori seaweed hidden inside is a prime example of a dish created in Los Angeles by someone in the 1960s as a gateway “Japanese” food for non-Japanese. Today there are hundreds of such local sushi rolls served outside of Japan, some of which no longer even look like rolls for all the multihued sauces and toppings put on them. “Mexican ramen,” which incorporates birra stew, a local delicacy in Jalisco made from chillis and the meat of goat, beef, or lamb, is another recent example of this trend to adapt Japanese food for new consumers. Having eaten my share of sushi and ramen in North America I can safely testify that these usually bear little resemblance to the versions in Japan, but perhaps because of that they have their growing number of American fans. Purists who might turn their noses up at “non-Japanese” versions of sushi should be reminded that neither sushi nor ramen are indigenous Japanese dishes. The earliest sushi recipe dates to sixth century China, and according to the historical record the Japanese began making a similar dish two hundred years later. Ramen was the invention of Chinese immigrants to Japan in the Meiji period (1868–1912) and popularized in the postwar era thanks to Korean, Chinese, and Japanese cooks. In their histories, neither dish remained static but instead constantly evolved.Rather than an effort to promote Japanese food internationally, Japan’s 2012 campaign to list washoku with UNESCO is better understood as a reaction to the globalization of Japanese cuisine and an effort to reappropriate it by appealing to the authority of intangible cultural elements supposedly indigenous to Japan and absent elsewhere. For the Japanese government the term washoku, which could be translated literally as “Japanese food,” is not really about specific foods at all as we can see from the definition on the UNESCO website:Washoku is a social practice based on a set of skills, knowledge, practice and traditions related to the production, processing, preparation and consumption of food. It is associated with an essential spirit of respect for nature that is closely related to the sustainable use of natural resources. The basic knowledge and the social and cultural characteristics associated with Washoku are typically seen during New Year celebrations. The Japanese make various preparations to welcome the deities of the incoming year, pounding rice cakes and preparing special meals and beautifully decorated dishes using fresh ingredients, each of which has a symbolic meaning. These dishes are served on special tableware and shared by family members or collectively among communities. The practice favours the consumption of various natural, locally sourced ingredients such as rice, fish, vegetables and edible wild plants. The basic knowledge and skills related to Washoku, such as the proper seasoning of home cooking, are passed down in the home at shared mealtimes. Grassroots groups, schoolteachers and cooking instructors also play a role in transmitting the knowledge and skills by means of formal and non-formal education or through practice. (UNESCO 2013)Rice and rice cakes appear twice in the official washoku definition—an understandable assertion for a country that tries to grow enough rice to feed its population but obtains 60 percent of the other ingredients to make food (washoku or otherwise) from other countries.When I first read the washoku definition in 2012, I thought that it was more inclusive than other possible conceptualizations like “Japanese cuisine” (Nihon ryōri), which is a better descriptor of restaurant dining than of home cooking. Initially, Japan’s government considered an idea proposed by the Kyoto Prefectural government to nominate the multi-course kaiseki cuisine found in restaurants to UNESCO as an example of the country’s food heritage, but after UNESCO deemed the royal cuisine of the Korean Joseon dynasty to be too elitist, Japan reconfigured its application to focus on the supposedly more egalitarian washoku (Cang 2015: 49–58). Washoku’s “Respect for nature” is something not unique to Japan and that pointed again to the cuisine’s inclusivity in my mind (Rath 2012: 2–3). Certainly, we need to nourish the land and seas where food comes from, especially in light of climate change. Yet, Japanese food is not necessarily environmentally friendly. Rice grown in paddies is the second largest producer of the greenhouse gas methane, second only to ranching, and Japan’s love of fish led by the end of the twentieth century to a consumption of seafood five times the size of the country’s population, greatly contributing to the depletion of global fisheries (Smil and Kobayashi 2012: 132, 179). Notwithstanding admirable goals to “respect nature,” we all have to do much better.Now that I look back at what I wrote about washoku’s supposed inclusivity in 2012, it is the second to last line of the UNESCO definition that speaks to me the loudest because it is the antithesis of inclusivity. Washoku according to the UNESCO definition is not about food in a material sense but instead embodies native culture. “Washoku is a social practice....The basic knowledge and skills related to washoku, such as the proper seasoning of home cooking, are passed down in the home at shared mealtimes.” This affirmation not only places the burden of maintaining and transmitting washoku on the silent labor of women, but it also closes the door on nonnative practitioners of washoku, people who missed out on the unique transmission of knowledge in Japanese households. The fact that washoku is also couched in quasi-religious terms as being instrumental to worshipping Japan’s New Years deities further closes the red circle around the country’s food culture. Authentic washoku is limited to the cultural Japanese living in Japan by this definition (UNESCO 2013). How, for instance, do new arrivals to Japan access washoku? As an anonymous reader of a draft of this article pointed out, Japan now ranks sixth among countries in accepting migrants and many work in restaurants in Japan in the back and front of the house. It remains to be seen if these individuals can become equal arbiters and authorities on washoku despite their crucial role in the farm and service sectors and the informal knowledge about food that these jobs might indirectly provide. I worked for a year in a Japanese restaurant in Kyoto, and the owner said he had to pay me ¥200 less per hour than a Japanese person because I was white. After I was hired, I learned that the assistant chef came from the Philippines, but he was soon deported for overstaying his visa.Fast forward to 2024 when UNESCO granted intangible cultural heritage status to Japanese sake-making, validating another Japanese government claim to a foodstuff that has over a century of history of being produced outside of Japan. Described in the UNESCO listing as a “sacred gift from [the Japanese] deities,” sake is gaining even more traction outside of Japan in recent years albeit at a slower pace than sushi and ramen. North America now has over a dozen craft sake breweries, most of which opened in the last five years. Given that sales of sake in Japan hover around 5 percent among alcoholic drinks and Japanese drink four times more beer than their “traditional alcoholic beverage” sake, the only way that the Japanese government can appeal to sake’s significance is by claiming that it is “deeply rooted in Japanese culture” (UNESCO 2024). Appeals to the uniqueness of sake made in Japan are critical to the future of Japan’s breweries given their increasing reliance on overseas markets and the rise of foreign competitors. The Japanese government is itself to blame for sake’s decline for allowing brewers from World War II until 1992 to focus on making an ersatz “sake” that was not sake at all but composed of two-thirds other ingredients like brewers’ alcohol, cane sugar, and flavorings like monosodium glutamate. Thanks to this low-quality beverage, many consumers turned away from sake in the 1970s and the industry is still trying to recover (Rath 2025: 176–77).More than just sake, the full title of the UNESCO listing is “the traditional skills of sake-making with koji [sic] mold in Japan,” suggesting that the mold kōji (Aspergillus oryzae), which is also finding increased use among cooks, pickle makers, charcuterie fans, and bakers outside of Japan, is somehow distinct to Japan (UNESCO 2024). This marks only the latest Japanese effort to nationalize kōji. In 2013 the Brewing Society of Japan, an organization that promotes the science of fermentation, dubbed kōji Japan’s “national mold.” Yet, kōji was likely first domesticated in China, where literary references to the fungus date to 500 BCE, more than a thousand years before the earliest Japanese sources mention it. Kōji is not indigenous to East Asia. The mold can be cultivated globally because it is found in nature. Wrap steamed rice in a corn husk and if you are lucky kōji will appear in a few days. If you are unlucky, a relative of kōji, carcinogenic aflatoxin, might grow instead, so be careful.Just as the California Roll was a key gateway food created outside of Japan that helped to popularize Japanese cuisine worldwide, many important innovations in sake brewing critical to the beverage’s globalization developed outside of Japan from year-round brewing, which facilitated sake-making in subtropical locations like Taiwan and Hawai‘i; to the first carbonated sake invented in Hawai‘i; to the invention of flavored sake in Oregon. All of these innovations enhanced the production of sake in places beyond the Japanese islands or were meant to entice non-Japanese consumers to try the drink (Rath 2025).Japanese brewers have centuries of experience, and today most make excellent sake just as sushi chefs in Tokyo may lead their profession; but excellent sake and sushi do not have to be made exclusively on the Japanese islands regardless of anyone’s claims. The patina of Japanese tradition is one of the selling points of sushi, ramen, and sake internationally. Yet, it is hard to call these “Japanese” foodstuffs when they are produced globally or perhaps even in Japan if the blue fin tuna comes from the Mediterranean and the soybeans for the tofu were grown in the United States.By invoking culture, the Japanese government is attempting to link washoku and sake with the Japanese people without resorting to references to ethnicity or race, but more popularly many are quick to bind food and race to the point that there seems to be unease about “outsiders” preparing or even writing about certain types of food regardless of that person’s background or intent. Certainly, there are good reasons to cry cultural appropriation if we spot some huckster trying to monetize a group’s traditional knowledge without paying respect to the people who created it. But just because someone is born into a group does not make them an expert on its food. Many, though, think otherwise. Writing to introduce a recent volume on Asian American foodways, Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur note the “stereotypical view of Asian Americans as being intimately and inherently connected to the production and selling of food” (Ku, Manalansan, and Mannur 2025, 6–7). I have recently been involved in two publication projects about Japanese food culture and history where the editors have told me I needed to include at least a foreword written by a Japanese person. I guess that person is meant to offer a sort of racial seal of approval for my quarter century of experience in the field of Japanese food culture. I doubt that I would have to suffer a similar request if I were writing about architecture, literature, economic history, or any topic where having a doctorate would be proof enough I have something to say. Yet somehow a nonnative cannot be trusted when it comes to (Japanese) food except in certain circumstances. This racial determinism works in reverse sometimes too. I learned that one of the reasons Japan’s national broadcaster NHK wanted to interview me in 2025 for a documentary about the globalization of Japanese cuisine was because I had a white face and I was living outside of Japan. After all, who better to testify about the spread of Japanese cuisine than a white rube living in Kansas? Ironically, it is precisely because I live in rural Kansas that I can claim a greater affinity for premodern Japanese food culture than a typical person living in Tokyo today because my lifestyle is more akin to life in the nineteenth century than theirs. I have bamboo invading my yard; I hear birds and insects not traffic; I have grown upland rice, persimmons, vegetables, and tobacco; I have foraged for ingredients; I have raised a flock of chickens; and I have even had my neighbors’ cows wander on to my property. How many people living in metropolitan Tokyo can claim that?Notwithstanding serious concerns about cultural appropriation, it is reductionistic to assume that certain people inherently have access to some special knowledge because it may or may not have been “passed down in their especially if that is a reference to a person’s economic and a people live a of and we in an where it is and to foods to of food” or of the of two which are of are to the fact that most food are no longer local or even possible for the to back to their point of For the may from and the sushi from but and sushi and their consumers are found and to them to focus only on what is as the versions produced and eaten by certain people in specific places a and foodstuffs and It is a of based on a about the supposed race, and food. My for the food research in the of Gastronomica in the years is that we the of with food that all people can in making and one that we might call a translated as food,” and not

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