A quite frequent story you will hear is that American GIs were stationed in some place and they acquired a taste for some local food and brought the demand for it back to the US, sparking off its popularization for the American palate.
I haven’t heard any such stories about Japan. Were the Japanese soldiers stationed across China and SE Asia eating purely Japanese food or were they also eating local food? Did the return of Japanese soldiers change Japan’s culinary palate?
That’s a great question.
I suspect our lack of information on that here is due to this being an America-based message board rather than a Japanese one.
The Japanese certainly are open to adopting new foods now, not sure how they’ve felt about it in the past.
A coworker of Japanese heritage once told me that there were a large number of Japanese soldiers at the end of WWI who were starving in China. All they had was some sort of coarse bean, and the ones they had were moldy.
After they were repatriated, they found that they had developed a taste for those coarse beans with mold - and it became a regular part of their meals.
Like a lot of cultures, the Japanese eat a disgusting fermented food - (personally, I don’t mind some cheeses you can smell from the other end of the house).
In Japan, the most iconic disgusting food is Natto – fermented soybeans. One traditional attribution is to Japanese soldiers in Japan, who ate it because it was what they had, and liked it.
Soybeans came to Japan from China, and the Chinese also eat fermented soybeans, but the origin of both Chinese and Japanese variations is long before WWII.
The Japanese have always adopted Chinese foods, (like French food in England) they didn’t wait until they were occupiers.
Yeah, like a thousand years before.
The Koreans have an apple called the Busa, its like a Fuji apple but the size of a softball. Legend had it, in Korea, that when the Japanese came and conqured Korea they cut down all of the trees (but like 10) on the peninsula but they stole the Busa apple trees and took them back to Japan where they didn’t grow as well and became Fujis. My understanding is that apples aren’t native to Japan and were a conquest import.
My understand is that Okinawan cuisine has adopted a lot of American style ingredients due to the American military bases there. There’s a popular Okinawan dish called taco rice, for example.
WW2 bumped up Japan’s consumption of wheat, but it wasn’t because Japanese soldiers brought it home:
This culinary transfer seems unlikely, based on info from a friend who spent years in a Japanese POW camp (and nearly died of starvation there). He said that Japanese soldiers were taught that Japan & everything Japanese were superior to the rest of the world. Thus eating (and enjoying) local food would be considered an insult to Japan 6 the Emperor.
For example, speaking English was forbidden, and Japanese overseers gave all orders in Japanese, and prisoners were whipped if they didn’t obey – even if the prisoner clearly did not understand what the order was. Any Japanese soldier who tried to explain by giving the English term for the order was reprimanded, often severely, if overheard by his ranking Japanese officer.
With this kind of attitude, it hardly seems likely that any Japanese occupiers would have even tried any non-Japanese food, unless they were near-starvation. And in that case, the Japanese occupiers would have already confiscated all the ingredients from the locals – how could there be any local food dishes to eat?
As I understand it, no occupation or war was necessary for the Japanese to learn to make bread from the Portuguese in the 16th century, and they still call it pan [citation needed] today. And tempura also developed from Portuguese ingredients around the same time, the name included.
Japan has not only imported all sorts of Chinese foodstuff and coocking techniques, but curry from India as well, though they make it mild.
The only thing Japan seems to ignore are cooked tomatoes, though they use the cherry variety in salads and bento boxes, it seems, as I was told in this thread.
ETA: Oh, yes! And German beer, they adopted that one too. And still brew an acceptable concoction to this day. No occupation involved in that one either.
Japan imported curry from the British navy, so only indirectly from India. It was used in the Japanese navy starting in the 19th century then spread to the rest of Japanese society from there. So, well before they were occupying anywhere.
I can’t think of any 1895-1945 food imports that would go back to anyplace they occupied, but wouldn’t be surprised if there were some.
I’m not sure of the history here, but the Japanese have this odd penchant for “delicacies” made from Spam – no, not SPAM, but the Hormel product that’s made from, like, spare ham bits pressed together into a cube-like shape.
Like I said, I have no idea of the roots of that affinity. I mentioned it to my wife, who spent a decade in Hawaii, and she said she thought the Hawaiians picked up the recipes from either Portuguese or Phillipino immigrants and maybe the Japanese picked it up from the Phillipinos during WWII.
I had a girlfriend when I was in Japan and when she and her mother came to visit, they wanted to go visit Costco (as well as Disneyland and Las Vegas). My girlfriend’s mother was ecstatic to find Spam by the case-load at Costco and I tried (and failed) to explain to her that, in America and England, the product was the subject of many bad jokes.
I believe the Satsuma orange and the Satsuma pear might have been brought northward when Japan took over the ryukyu archipelago and said, “We in charge of this place now; we’re gonna call it Okinawa.” I know there’s a snakeskin covered lute-like instrument that originated in Okinawa and made its way north and east – but that’s not culinary.
As a side-note, I’ll point out that the fermented black soybean (douchi) is not the same black bean (turtle beans) as used in Mexican and American southern/southwestern cooking, nor is it the same as the fermented tofu (natto) mentioned in another post. And, in any case, a lot of the Chinese cuisine and ingredients used in Japan were brought in during the 600’s and 900’s when Japan was in its “we want to adopt everything Chinese” phases.
–G!
"The Fuji came out of a continuous effort in Aomori to breed a better apple. In 1939, researchers in the town of Fujisaki applied Red Delicious pollen to a local Ralls Janet flower pistil. The resulting fruit was sweet and crunchy, with a speckled red skin. They called it “Agriculture-Forestry No.7.”
Apple cultivation in Japan dates back to the 1860s and 1870s.
Tomatoes have been a commonplace crop in Japan since the 1920s, and full-sized tomatoes such as the Momotaro are grown and eaten.
Interesting. I’ve tried to look in to the Busa genetics over the years and its always hard to find. I didn’t realize the Fuji was cultivated before 1910. I guess another one of those cultural myths they tell children that are untrue.