The Japanese Restaurant: Tasting the New Exotic in Australia (Routledge Contemporary Japan Series) [1 ed.] 9781032423685, 9781032423692, 9781003362463

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The Japanese Restaurant

This book explores the growth and operations of the Japanese restaurant in Australia since the early 2000s from perspectives of both restaurant workers and consumers. Through first-­hand testimonies, collected from chefs, restaurateurs, gourmets and casual diners, it demonstrates how Japanese restaurants act as cultural hubs, connecting a diverse community of migrants, Australian citizens and international tourists, while also disseminating knowledge of Japanese culinary cultures. The ethnographic evidence presented challenges the colonialist and essentialist understandings of the ‘exotic’ and ‘Japaneseness’ as the ‘inferior other’ to the West. In so doing, the book highlights the complex manifestations of cross-­cultural desires, translating practices and the performative racial-­ethnic mimesis of Japanese ethnicity. Featuring critical investigation into the fixed notions of otherness, race, ethnicity and authenticity, this book will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Japanese society and culture, particularly Japanese food culture. Iori Hamada is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Monash University, Australia. Much of her work to date has been concerned with making sense of how shared systems of ideas shape people’s transnational experiences, which vary by culture, race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, social status, geographical location and other variables. In 2019, Iori was awarded the Institute of Social Science and Oxford University Press Prize for her co-authored journal article titled ‘Silent Exits: Risk and Post-3.11 Skilled Migration from Japan to Australia’. In 2021, she was also awarded a Higher Education Academy Fellowship by Advance HE, United Kingdom.

Routledge Contemporary Japan Series

99 Japanese Propriety, Past and Present Disciplined Liberalism Florian Coulmas 100 Japan’s Triple Disaster Pursuing Justice after the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima Nuclear Accident Edited by Natalia Novikova, Julia Gerster, and Manuela G. Hartwig 101 Political Economy of the Tokyo Olympics Unrestrained Capital and Development without Sustainable Principles Edited by Miyo Aramata 102 Japanese Digital Cultural Promotion Online Experience of Kyoto Nadejda Gadjeva 103 Civil Society and International Students in Japan The Making of Social Capital Polina Ivanova 104 Border-Crossing Japanese Literature Reading Multiplicity Edited by Akiko Uchiyama and Barbara Hartley 105 The Japanese Restaurant Tasting the New Exotic in Australia Iori Hamada For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Contemporary-Japan-Series/book-series/SE0002

The Japanese Restaurant Tasting the New Exotic in Australia Iori Hamada

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Iori Hamada The right of Iori Hamada to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-42368-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-42369-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-36246-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003362463 Typeset in Times New Roman by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii 1 Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant

1

2 Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires into the New Exotic

37

3 Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic

60

4 Cross-Cultural Translation: Decoding the Japanese Restaurant

87

5 The Exotic Genre’s Formula: The Supply and Demand of Japanese Ethnicity

116

6 Conclusion

128

Index 133

Figures

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 4.1

Ike-zukuri 18 Sōmen noodles 20 Saka-gura 43 Sugi-dama 47 Nomi-ya 103

Acknowledgements

Many people have sustained me since the birth of an idea for research about the Japanese restaurant as my doctoral project at the University of Melbourne until the completion of this manuscript. First and foremost, my deepest gratitude goes to my former supervisor Professor Carolyn S. Stevens, who took me under her wing with great patience, encouragement and positivity throughout the journey. I would also like to thank my former associate supervisor, Associate Professor Ikuko Nakane, for her generous support. In addition, I appreciate my examiner Professor Merry I. White for her constructive comments and Professor Koichi Iwabuchi for his critical feedback on my early thesis draft. My fieldwork has been generously supported by many individuals and organisations at various times and for various phases of the project. First of all, I cannot say enough to thank more than 90 individuals whom I interviewed formally and informally. They answered my questions and provided me with introductions to their own friends and colleagues. A long list of people deserve my sincere gratitude for their cooperation and help with my research on the Japanese restaurant. To thank them all individually would be impossible and would also go against the promises of anonymity. I also gratefully acknowledge the profound weight of the history that lies with me and other members of Japanese communities in Australia. Early Japanese immigrants faced enormous adversity, including discrimination, when they first arrived in the new destination and began their lives from almost nothing. Without their persevering efforts and hopes, I could not have even started this research. The Australian Government and the University of Melbourne both provided me with considerable funding, enabling me to support myself financially and carry out my fieldwork. My heartfelt thanks to my colleagues and students at Monash University and the University of Melbourne, who have been more supportive and inspiring to me than they probably know. Stephanie Rogers and Andrew Leach at Routledge have also been helpful and great to work with. Finally, my love as always to my families in Japan and Australia: my parents, Tomiko and Tokushiro, and my brother, Shigenori; my parents-­in-­law, Julie and Peter; my sister-­in-­law, Belinda; and my dearest partner, Warren, and our inspirational sons, Hue and Sage, who have supported all my decisions with the utmost love and encouragement.

viii Acknowledgements Part of Chapter 2 appeared in New Voices in Japanese Studies, 5, 84–102, under the title ‘The Japanese Restaurant as an Exotic Genre: A Study of Culinary Providers’ Practices and Dialogues in Melbourne’. An earlier draft of sections of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘Fitting Japanese Cuisine into Australia: Im-­perfect Translations’ in Internationalising Japan: Discourse and Practice edited by Jeremy Breaden, Stacey Steele and Carolyn S. Stevens (Abingdon Oxon UK: Routledge, 2014), 68–83. Bibliography Hamada, Iori. “The Japanese Restaurant as an Exotic Genre: A Study of Culinary Providers Practices and Dialogues in Melbourne.” New Voices 5 (December 2011): 84–102. https://doi.org/10.21159/nv.05.04 ———. “Fitting Japanese Cuisine into Australia: Im-­perfect Translations.” In Internationalising Japan: Discourse and Practice, Edited by Jeremy Breaden, Stacey Steele, and Carolyn S. Stevens, 68–83. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014.

1

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant

‘Japanese Gastro-Cool’ on the Rise Without ever having to travell to Japan, one may explore ‘the taste of Japan’ in Abu Dhabi, Kuala Lumpur, San Francisco or any other global metropolis. Within a day, miles away from Japan, having a bowl of steaming-hot ramen noodles for lunch and a chef’s omakase feast for dinner is no longer a farfetched idea.1 Outside of Japan, there are an almost infinite variety of restaurants claiming to be ‘Japanese’, ranging from ubiquitous sushi takeaway shops and cult-like ramen franchises to hip izakaya dining bars and exquisite multi-course kaiseki restaurants. The so-called Japanese restaurant is in effect all over the globe, regardless of style, scale, target audience or business focus: it finds us just like we find it in global markets, even in the most unexpected places—from the Arctic Circle to the Galápagos Islands.2 The Japanese restaurant has gone global and is still rising. The sushi boom started in North America in the 1970s and 1980s, and it shows no signs of slowing down (Cwiertka 2006, 182). Since then, the Japanese restaurant has grown in popularity, from around 24,000 outlets in 2006 to over 156,000 in 2019, a sixfold rise in a decade (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries [MAFF] 2015, 2019). This global presence of the Japanese restaurant does not appear to be waning anytime soon. The industry has now found a new group of clientele—‘Asia’s emerging middle-class’, whose population is expected to climb to 3.5 billion and accounts for two-thirds of the global middle-class population by 2030 (Buchholz 2020; Kharas 2017, 13, 16; Tonby et al. 2019). Data shows that the number of Japanese restaurants in Asian countries increased by 53 percent between 2015 and 2017, reaching over 69,300, or about 60 percent of all Japanese restaurants worldwide (MAFF 2019). These numbers tell us that the Japanese restaurant is far from a passing fad. It is a time-tested cultural and market sector that will continue to expand globally together with Asia’s booming middle-class. The rise of the Japanese restaurant did not, of course, happen overnight. It has its own history, evolving from its beginnings as a self-contained ‘ethnic enclave/ghetto’ for early Japanese immigrants until the 1950s, to a commodified ‘ethnic precinct’ for locals and international tourists until the end of DOI: 10.4324/9781003362463-1

2  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant Japan’s bubble economy and now to a juncture of newer images and representations of what I label here as ‘Japanese gastro-cool’ (for the history of Japanese restaurants in the United States, see Farrer et al. 2019 and Japanese Restaurant Association of America n.d.; for the history of Japanese restaurants in Australia, see O’Connell n.d. and Veenhuyzen 2021). Japanese gastro-cool travells in various forms in global consumer cultures—food, cooking, culinary aesthetics, dining styles and so on—embedding itself in the ongoing wave of Japan’s popular cultural production and consumption since the 1990s. It permeates both ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’ gastronomic spaces, from cookbooks and food selfies to local grocery stores and, of course, the Japanese restaurant. This particular type of ‘Japaneseness’ marks certain foods and food practices as aesthetically appealing, socially palatable and globally marketable, while retaining some connection with Japan as a point of ‘origin’. At one end of the spectrum is the Japanese gastro-cool of accessible food chains, for example. While many of the Japanese restaurants are independently owned, there is a tangible influx of Japan’s chain restaurants landing offshores, albeit to varying degrees of success. Ippudo, the ramen chain with branches in 15 countries and 290 locations at the time of writing, exemplifies the global visibility of Japanese gastro-cool (Chikaranomoto Holdings n.d.). Shigemi Kawahara, the founder of Ippudo and its parent company, Chikaranomoto (literally meaning ‘the source of power’) Holdings, speaks about his ambition to make the ramen business ‘cool’ in an interview with Forbes (Business Journal 2017; Wang 2017). The ‘ramen king’—a title he earned after winning the ramen competition three times in a row on the Japanese TV show ‘Ramen Master Chef Championships’ between 1997 and 1999—has been committed to this vision since 1985 when he opened his first ramen shop in Fukuoka Prefecture, the birthplace of Ippudo’s iconic dish, tonkotsu pork base soup ramen. To the ramen king of the ramen chain kingdom, ‘being cool is very important’ (Wang 2017). In fact, being cool is central to his efforts to make over. Over the past few decades, he has been working to transform the image of ramen shops from ‘scary’, ‘grungy’, ‘stinky’ places frequented by working-class men to ‘classy’, ‘clean’, ‘cool’ places that he thinks can expand their consumer base, including ‘young women’ (Business Journal 2017; Wang 2017). Ippudo’s urban interior design and ambient jazz background music, for example, demonstrate his intention to make his vision a reality. Its signature dish, tonkotsu ramen, also underwent changes as part of this makeover. Kawahara decided to use thin noodles with little water content, rather than thick noodles and a fatty broth, to achieve a lighter appearance, a lighter aroma and a lighter aftertaste. For his international chains, ‘Ippudo Outside’, he made his tonkotsu ramen look and taste even lighter to make it appealing and palatable to overseas ramen enthusiasts (Wang 2017). At the other end of the spectrum is the Japanese gastro-cool of fine dining restaurants. A Michelin-starred chef, Nobuyuki Matsuhisa and his global luxury restaurant and hotel chain, Nobu, are an example of this. When Matsuhisa set up his second restaurant in Los Angeles in 1985 prior to the launch of Nobu restaurant, he was so devastated. This was because his first independent

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  3 restaurant in Alaska, in which he had put his life savings, had burned down due to an electrical fire just two weeks after it had opened, leaving him deeply in debt. In the early 2000s, however, he made a comeback. Since the first flagship restaurant of Nobu opened its doors in Tribeca, New York, in 1994, the name ‘Nobu’ became ‘synonymous with fashionable dining rooms and expensive menus, and celebrities flock to eat and be seen at one of the world’s hippest restaurant chains’ (CNN 2007). From Beverly Hills to Dubai to Monte Carlo to Mexico City, Nobu Hospitality LLC—a joint venture by Matsuhisa, Hollywood actor Robert De Niro and film producer Meir Teper—now owns over 40 restaurants and 14 hotels in 56 destinations across 5 continents (Nobu Restaurant n.d.). ‘Food is like fashion’, Matsuhisa says. ‘[T]here are different cultures, different foods, to translate to new ones’ (O’Connell 2017). Although the statement ‘food is like fashion’ itself may not seem to suggest a direct link between Nobu restaurants and the ‘cool’ factors of Japanese gastro-cool, it is clear that the founder of the worldwide enterprise associates food with the ‘fashionable’ factor of fashion that appeals to the senses, translating into ‘new ones’. But this newness is an oxymoron. ‘Nobu is the same, and why change something people obviously crave?’ Nate Storey claims in a piece for the U.S.based online trend magazine Surface (2017; emphasis in original). Storey makes the case by quoting a 2005 restaurant review of Nobu 57 in New York City that was written by former New York Times food critic Frank Bruni. Bruni notes, Perhaps no other recently opened restaurant raises the question of how much originality matters, of innovation’s importance, as pointedly as Nobu 57 does. […] What mattered was how well it navigated terrain that’s become common precisely because it’s so appealing, and Nobu 57 […] navigated it expertly enough to compensate for any lack of originality. (Bruni cited in Storey 2017) There is thus a good reason for the ‘lack of originality’ in the Nobu restaurant enterprise: consistency that promises the same newness that attracts its patrons. Nobu’s long-time devotee and business partner Robert De Niro affirms that it is exactly because of this consistency that the restaurant enterprise has come to be known as the one. In the same Surface article, Storey cites the Hollywood actor’s words: That’s how I am with a place. I go there for many years—I expect it to be the same, […] Sometimes you go to these restaurants and they get a new chef and things change. The thing the restaurant was famous for isn’t there anymore. People rely on those kinds of consistencies, especially in different cities and countries. (Storey 2017) It is this same newness that permits Nobu restaurants to spread across the globe as a franchise business. Note that the same newness does not mean fixity

4  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant or uniformity. Nobu adapts its products, menu, interior design and other key elements of its restaurants depending on the resources available in the country and city where it is located. This means that as Nobu franchises its restaurants and reaches far, the same newness takes in, in the founder’s words, ‘different cultures, different foods, to translate to new ones’. At the same time, Nobu will not compromise on its consistency in order to retain its global brand. One example is its persistence to continue serving its signature dishes, such as ‘Bigeye and Bluefin Toro Tartar’ and ‘Bluefin Otoro Nigiri and Sashimi’, despite criticism from Greenpeace activists, as well as international celebrities, like Sting and Stephen Fry, about the use of endangered bluefin tuna in some of these dishes (Trenor 2009; Yaqoob 2010). While incorporating local features, these dishes maintain the same newness throughout Nobu restaurants globally, I would suggest, in the form of Japanese gastro-cool. Matsuhisa claims Nobu as ‘[his] way of presenting Japanese culture to the world’, in which food is treated like fashion that absorbs different elements yet stays ‘fashionable’ within the purview of the Japanese restaurant (Yaqoob 2010). In this way, Nobu replicates itself and expands outside of Japan, though the same newness may already overfatigue some (Hughes 2009). These vignettes only point to the larger phenomenon of the globalisation of the Japanese restaurant, which allows Japanese gastro-cool to further spread its reach. It is vital to note that Japanese gastro-cool does not footlessly traverse and permeate the globe. Rather, I argue that it is part of what Douglas McGray famously refers to as ‘gross national cool’—the framework that links Japan’s national-cultural brand and identity to ‘cool’ images that sell in worldwide marketplaces (2002). Japan’s gross national cool lies in the nation’s post-bubble reengagement with the rest of the world (McGray 2002). More crucially, it reveals how the nation viewed itself during the heyday of the economic bubble. As McGray observed, ‘[F]rom pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and animation to cuisine, Japan looks more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic one’ (2002, 44). This shift in focus—from economic power to ‘cultural superpower’—closely involves what Joseph Nye refers to as ‘soft power’ (1990). Nye defines soft power as the ability that can influence or dominate others without relying on the ‘hard power’, such as military forces, overt coercion or economic dominance (1990, 166–7). Note, however, that soft power is neither entirely antithetical to hard power nor completely replaces it. Though its tactics are cultural, soft power is nevertheless employed to ‘both supplement and conceal the exercise of military and economic power’ (Kadosh-Otmazgin 2007, 76). In a similar vein, Japan applies the discourse of soft power to address its own challenges, such as its decades-long economic and political decline on the international stage, as well as other related domestic social issues, including its shrinking labour market, precarious work, rising poverty, national debt crisis and brain- and asset-drain (Arai 2005, 5–12; Daliot-Bul 2009, 250–2; Lam 2007, 352; McGray 2002, 51–2). As David Leheny succinctly articulates, Japan’s engagement with soft power is multi-layered and multi-functional since for the nation, ‘soft power has become a way for observers to cope emotionally

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  5 and intellectually with national decline by believing that virtues they see in their own nation are validated overseas, and that they become power resources in their own right’ (2006, 212). Here lies the raison d’être of ‘Cool Japan’—the nation’s application of the soft power discourse as a means to let its gross national cool be discovered and capitalised. Cool Japan campaign was launched in 2011 by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. It was modelled after the Cool Britannia campaign in the United Kingdom and thus is a top-down initiative. Food plays a vital role in the campaign since it connects commercial interests, as well as the need for nation branding and geopolitical global standing. In fact, the Cool Japan Fund, which involves both public and private investors, will have contributed 50 billion yen (US$509 million) of the 2013 national budget over the course of 20 years to promote food as Japan’s gross national cool abroad (Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet 2013). In order to raise the international profile of Japanese food, the Fund, for example, injected 140 million yen (US$1.4 million) in Tastemade, a U.S.-based food video business in 2018 (Nitta 2018). Following that, another 550 million yen (US$5.7 million) was invested in Go-Jek in 2019. This Indonesian digital start-up offers services such as food delivery and helps Japanese businesses in Indonesia open stores at Go-Jek’s Go-Food Festival sites (Suzuki 2019). Ramen chain Ippudo is also one of their investees. The Cool Japan Fund financed 700 million yen (US$6.7 million) in the parent company of Ippudo, Chikaranomoto Holdings, to help them expand their business abroad (Fukase 2014). While food is among many other assets that the government taps into in its Cool Japan campaign’s soft power diplomacy, it nevertheless serves to mobilise financial and human resources at global scales to generate interest in businesses, nation branding and geopolitics. More importantly, Japanese food is not just a multibillion-dollar business, but a business of meaning-making—one that aims to build value by offering consumers meaningful experiences. Arguably, the government’s meaning-making in Cool Japan is a site of contestation, where a wide range of products and practices—from Kobe beef to cosplay—can be conveniently packaged into globally consumable and marketable ‘cool’ images and imageries (Japan Times 2021). This ‘anything-goes’ ethos is also hinted at by the vague definition of Cool Japan offered by the Cabinet Office Intellectual Property Headquarters. They refer to Cool Japan as ‘contemporary Japanese culture and products such as animations, manga, characters and games, etc. Japanese traditional cuisines and commodities in which people discover new values are also “Cool Japan”. Japanese high-tech robots and cutting-edge green technologies are “Cool Japan” too’ (Cabinet Office Intellectual Property Headquarters 2016). It has been criticised for using this vagueness as a convenient alibi for marketing Japan’s cultural products and practices as ‘cool’ in its nation branding. Japanese American journalist Roland Kelts claims: ‘The phrase “cool Japan” is as convenient as it is vague. Is it just about manga and anime fandom, or does it refer to an aspect of the national or ethnic character that is fundamentally cool?’ (2006, 12). Cool Japan’s ‘coolness’ thus holds a fleeting status—what qualifies

6  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant as ‘cool’ in the sphere of Japanese popular culture is as hazy as what qualifies as ‘Japanese popular culture’ in the realm of the cool. Another problem is the government’s arbitrary handling of the nation’s popular culture. Until it garnered international acclaim, they had officially shown little interest in Japanese popular culture. In fact, Japanese popular culture was once seen as ‘trivial’ or even ‘vulgar’, at least on an institutional level, and its esoteric vocabulary was primarily reserved for home usage (Kinsella 1998, 289–316). What changed this undervaluation (or devaluation) is the external impulse—namely, the globalisation of Japanese popular culture that turns its ‘banality’ into a tangible global currency. Cool Japan did not come about internally but rather externally in response to ‘the image that others hold’ (Yano 2013, 259). And this is how Japan often goes about regaining its sense of national pride at least during the past century—that is, the country has largely relied on outside gazes and evaluations as a source of its own self-image and self-esteem. Once again, food plays an integral part in Japanese popular culture in the global consumer capitalism, as earlier illustrated by the examples of the government-endorsed Cool Japan Fund. While the Japanese restaurant operates as a cultural-culinary hub for global foodies, the greatest attraction for international tourists to Japan is its food, which generated more than 1 trillion yen (US$9.1 billion) in 2019 (Arba 2022; Japan Tourist Agency 2022). Cool Japan may have paved the path for Japanese gastro-cool to take many forms throughout global gastronomic arenas. However, Japanese gastro-cool goes beyond Cool Japan’s institutional bounds, reaching out to individuals— entrepreneurs, suppliers, marketers and consumers—who may not know or care about the government’s aims. As will be shown in this book, what interests those individuals instead is what kind of experience a certain product or service can offer and what value can be produced through the experience. In this book, I claim that the ‘cool’ factors of Japanese gastro-cool, which are informed by the global popularity of Japanese popular culture, become defining elements of the experience and value that the workers and consumers of the Japanese restaurant invest in. But what exactly are the ‘cool’ factors of Japanese gastro-cool? Or can we even pin them down? Ekta Duggal and Harsh Verma write that ‘cool gets its force and popularity from its elusiveness, mutability and semantic flexibility’ (2019, 133). More specifically, the cool slips into different and often ambivalent signifying terrains, ranging from ‘pastiche and retro’ (Nancarrow et al. 2002) to ‘innovation and rebellion’ (Fitton et al. 2012). And yet, I would argue that this fluidity and tension is precisely where the pull of cool lies. In the context of the Japanese restaurant, the cool factors of Japanese gastro-cool refer to a multitude of meanings. They may represent the Japanese restaurant as ‘urban-cool’, ‘kitsch-cool’, ‘rustic-cool’, ‘pop-cool’, ‘minimalist-cool’ or other modalities, depending on different purposes and uses (this will be discussed further in the following chapters). As such, meaning can certainly stretch the bounds of signification. However, in the context of the Japanese restaurant, this book highlights that the meanings of Japanese gastro-cool are not entirely free to float. Whatever cool

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  7 it may be, it suggests that Japanese gastro-cool falls within the parameters of what makes it specifically ‘Japanese’ in the first place. In other words, the Japanese restaurant’s global appeal rests on its own otherness—a concept that is radically different from oneself and can elicit both fascination and anxiety— rather than sorely on the ‘coolness’ of the cool. But the question remains, What precisely is it about this otherness that is connected so closely with the ‘cool’ that sells in global marketplaces? What is the functionality of the otherness of Japanese gastro-cool that reaches out to, and possibly makes sense to, global consumers, entrepreneurs, suppliers and marketers alike via the Japanese restaurant? And what is new about this otherness? It is this reengagement of Japaneseness that underpins the investigation of the global rise of the Japanese restaurant in this book. The New Exotic: The Japanese Restaurant as an ‘Exotic Genre’ There are stereotyped, clichéd exotic images associated with the Japanese restaurant—‘teppanyaki on the fire’, ‘Asian fonts on the menu’ and ‘a waitress wearing a kimono serving a sukiyaki hotpot’. But what one can see now in the global economy of the Japanese restaurant seems very different. As exemplified by the Japanese gastro-cool of Ippudo and Nobu, it is no longer entirely ‘foreign’ and ‘far’, but as James Clifford once wrote, it is ‘the “exotic” that is uncannily close’ (1988, 13–4). What stands out about the exotic is thus how it represents a spatial, temporal and ontological distance from the other that is getting more and more compressed as a result of globalisation, digitisation and urbanisation (Harvey 1989). In this book, I locate the Japaneseness of Japanese gastro-cool, as a particular kind of otherness, within the representational formation of what I call the ‘new exotic’. The new exotic distinguishes itself from essentialist, colonialist understandings of the exotic, which define the non-West’s cultural differences or strangeness as the West’s fantasy and are thus ‘built on limitation’ (Lee 2014). Instead of completely othering itself, the new exotic moves between the ‘inside’ (that is, familiar and fashionable) and the ‘outside’ (that is, foreign and strange), whereby the familiar is endlessly encountered anew and vice versa. In the process, the new exotic can be conjoined with the cool—both ‘in’ and ‘on the edge’ simultaneously. Japanese gastro-cool does not make its ‘coolness’ all familiar and recognisable to global consumers. Instead, it creates paradoxical effects as part of its necessary appeal—reaching out while distancing at the same time, whereby the ‘foreignness’ as a component of its own coolness is retained. Put differently, it is this sweet spot that the Japanese restaurant of today hinges on to survive and thrive in ever-competitive global markets. Given that the exotic that the Japanese restaurant seeks and generates has become ‘uncannily close’ and hence a new exotic, how did all this come about? In this book, I posit that the new exotic is a product of Asia’s economies and modernities in the last half-century, where interactions across nations in the region and their neighbours have undergone a profound reconfiguration. The

8  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant region’s economic rise and emergent modernities are made possible by the collapsed gaps in time and space through the ever-accelerating processes of globalisation, digitisation and urbanisation (Chu and Zheng 2020; McKinnon 2011). The new exotic is an effect of these regional connections and developments occurring variously and simultaneously. The outcome is the emergence of the new exotic formation that is more flexible and complex than the colonial exotic formation that was dependent on the rigid categories of ‘self’ and ‘other’, and ‘West’ and ‘East’. Examining the Japanese restaurant allows us to see how the new exotic figures the exotic other who is no longer backward but is modernising. With the growth of Asia, cross-cultural exchanges and interactions are intensifying, and the global rise of the Japanese restaurant is a reflection of this. As a cross-culturally constructed site that exists at the nexus of inside and outside, homeland and host-land and subject and object, the Japanese restaurant is continually defining itself in-between spaces. It is this unsettled and shifting nature of the Japanese restaurant that I discuss throughout the book. At the same time, I want to stress that the Japanese restaurant is not completely unfettered in its forms and operations. Instead, I argue that it lies in the bounds of its own classification. By this I mean that the Japanese restaurant works within the parameters that designate itself as ‘Japanese’. And precisely because of this purview, I suggest that it can maintain its otherness while uncannily close. In order to describe the classificatory boundaries, I frame the Japanese restaurant as an ‘exotic genre’. I use the term ‘genre’ to refer to the realm of how the Japanese restaurant operates as a part of the new exotic. Here, it is important to note that the line separating the exotic genre from other genres is not always clear-cut. As literary theorist Linda Hutcheon writes, ‘[C]lassifications of genres are paradoxically built upon the impossibility of firmly defining genre boundaries’ (1988, 22). The purpose of using the term exotic genre is thus to highlight the ways in which the Japanese restaurant incorporates different national/spatial, temporal and ontological contexts into its own otherness while also making sense of it in global marketplaces. In doing so, I argue that the Japanese restaurant must operate within its own boundaries. The Fold as the New Exotic The Japanese restaurant, as an exotic genre, blurs the lines between the notions of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, folding between different time-space contexts— for example, between ‘Japanese retro’ and ‘Australian gothic’, between ‘Japanese wabisabi’ and ‘Nordic hygge’ and between ‘Japanese kawaii’ and ‘Pan-Asian pop’. What was once perceived as the outside is now folded into the inside, producing the effects of the new exotic. This form of incorporation allows for a shift in perspective by cutting through inside-outside dichotomies. In conceptualising the shift, this book draws on French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concept—‘fold’. The fold enables us to figure out the dynamic

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  9 and contradictory operations of the Japanese restaurant visually and conceptually. In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze utilises the metaphor of the fold to explain a dialectic interaction between the inner and the exterior (1993). Drawing on German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s monadic theory, Deleuze proposes the world as an unending process of folding and unfolding of time and space. Leibniz’s concept of monads, or distinct entities of knowable existence, prompts Deleuze to see that each monad corresponds to one way of perceiving the world as a viewpoint, and there is a continual shift in perspective. A series of folds on a piece of fabric or a sheet of paper joins the two sides of the division while marking a boundary. In order to explain the principle of this endless production of folds, Deleuze uses the model of the ‘Baroque House’. The term ‘Baroque’ here describes an ‘operative function’ rather than a specific historical time (1993, 3). The Baroque House has two levels: the lower level is accessible to the outside world through windows that represent the five senses. The upper level represents the inner self or soul, as a closed, private room. These two levels, however, are not separate—they are ‘one and the same world’, connecting through the folds that are ‘virtual’ (1993, 35). Crucially, Deleuze’s notion of the virtual is not the same as virtual reality. Virtual reality is a term colloquially used to describe the notion of simulating reality and duplicating its experience in an artificial medium. Instead, the virtual in a Deleuzian sense refers to ‘the reality of the virtual’, or the inner world that has ‘real’ effects. The trope of the Baroque House figures the movements of folding between the actual and the virtual, the body and the soul and an object and a subject. In this way, the metaphor of the fold calls into question a certain essence or fixed categories of identity and identification, such as an essentialised form of otherness. As a result, it becomes difficult to differentiate between a ‘self’ and a ‘other’ as separate, essentialised entities since the fold continuously shifts from an object to a subject position as it moves. In this book, I claim that the Japanese restaurant expands, penetrates and inhabits in global markets in the form of the new exotic that is alternative to earlier colonialist representations. My central contention is that the Japanese restaurant forms, and is informed by, the new exotic emerging from Asia’s economies and modernities. I utilise the metaphor of the fold throughout the book to depict the formation of the new exotic that follows the movements of folding—folding between various points of view, whereby the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ becomes no longer entirely clear. In the context of the Japanese restaurant, the new exotic lies in the intersections and interactions between nations in Asia and their neighbours, resulting in new images and representations of Japaneseness, such as Japanese gastro-cool. These representations produce both closeness and distinctness, or othering. Nevertheless, the emergence of the new exotic is neither automatic nor ahistorical; in order for the new exotic to arise, old representations thus must first undergo scrutiny.

10  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant Exoticisms and Modernities ‘Exoticism is not dead’ (Leys cited in Segalen 2002, xix), and it has a long epistemological and etymological history. The term ‘exotic’, as the exoticism’s necessary epithet, is derived from the Greek adverb éxo (‘outside’) and adjective exotikós (‘from the outside’) (Kapferer and Theodossopoulos 2016, 1). It is said to have been coined during the early 15th-century expansion of European colonisation of the East (Arnold 2002, xiii–xiv; Sund 2019). The word was first used to refer to unusual flora and fauna of distant regions, but it was later expanded to include the other outside of or beyond a Western system of thought (Mason 1991, 167). While the exotic has a broad array of connotations ranging from ‘mysterious’ to ‘strange’ to ‘dangerous’, it entails the desires and longings for ‘otherness’ that the West inscribes on the East and thus instates binarism and hierarchy throughout histories of colonialism and colonial fantasies of power. Likewise, the term ‘exoticism’, which was coined in the 19th century, refers to a sense of nostalgia for the ideals that were lost with European civilisations and thus sought ailleurs—or ‘elsewhere’ (Bongie 1991, 5). In Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin de Siécle, Chris Bongie defines exoticism as ‘a nineteenth-century literary and existential practice that posited another space, the space of an other, outside or beyond the confines of a “civilisation”’ (1991, 4). The notion of exoticism stems from this colonialist portrayal of the other, which is based on the binary power relationship that ‘metaphorically constructs the West’s hegemony over the East’s “primitive”’ (Bongie 1991, 5). As a result, the East became the primary source of the exoticist project for the West (Bongie 1991, 5). The epistemological underpinnings to popular notions of exoticism in relation to Japan can be traced back to the 19th-century movements known as ‘Japonism’—European literary and artistic utilisation of Japanese art and design following the forced reopening of Japan’s seaports to international trade in 1858 after its 215-year-long national policy of seclusion known in Japanese as ‘sakoku’. Pierre Loti, the pen name of the French naval officer and novelist Louis Marie Julien Viaud, wrote books that are paradigmatic of an exoticist praxis of Japonism, including Madame Chrysanthème. In his stories, Loti became fascinated by Japanese aesthetics through love affairs with Japanese women. Dalia Kandiyoti describes this French traveller’s encounter with Japan as ‘devoid of meaning, composed of purely aesthetic objects which he sometimes appreciates and mostly ridicules’ (1995, 393). However, this aestheticisation process through the Japanese other may provide plenty of meaning in terms of the politics of identity. Indeed, it is via this exoticist quest that the West constructs ‘Japan’, which is frequently feminised and sexualised within Japonism, as its own essential other. Aestheticisation (and feminisation) are used here to represent the West as superior to Japan as ‘the experience of ailleurs’ as the unchangeable past that the West depends on in its own quest for nostalgic utopias (Kandiyoti 1995, 394; emphasis in

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  11 original). It is therefore ‘essentially a mimetic one in which self and other collapse’, as Kandiyoti explains, yet paradoxically, it also implies ‘an extreme estrangement and alienation from the other, the necessary tactic of subjugation’ (1995, 393). In short, as Graham Huggan succinctly articulates, traditional forms of exoticism, such as Japonism, are political as much as aesthetic, but ‘this politics is often concealed, hidden beneath layers of mystification’ (2001, 14). In the context of current globalisation, what complicates these colonialist, essentialist discourses of exoticism are Asian economies and modernities arising from nations in the region, of which Japan became a forerunner. Here, it should be emphasised that the formation of modernity has its own beginning in a distinct historical period and results in different effects and outcomes. In examining this plurality of modernity, Aihwa Ong’s concept of ‘alternative modernities’ becomes useful. Alternative modernities characterise the global economic growth of Asia that began in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Crucially, Ong does not use the term ‘alternative’ to refer to the ideological positions of Asia’s global economies as ‘an absolute moral or epistemological difference from ones held in the West’ (Ong 1997, 194). Instead, Ong describes it as ‘a dynamic that is oppositional to existing hegemonies, a counterforce arising from other sites that are not without their own particular mix of expansive and repressive technologies’ (Ong 1997, 194). Ong’s concept of alternative modernities is instructive because it enables us to understand different experiences of modernity, which neither completely rely on a Western paradigm of modernisation nor simply oppose it. Rather, they are tied to (post-)colonial histories and traditions, nation building and economic prosperity (also see Raud 2007). Interestingly, Ong’s arguments correspond to Naoki Sakai’s account of Japan’s modernisation, in which Japan’s economic, technological and cultural ambitions are simultaneously viewed as a source of fear and threat as well as fascination. Sakai addresses that ‘Japan is a discursive construct which is not external to the West: even in its particularism, Japan was already implicated in the ubiquitous West, so that neither historically nor geopolitically could Japan be seen as the outside of the West’ (1989, 113; emphasis in original). Rather than perceiving the West as a separate entity, Sakai locates the West as Japan’s essential other, suggesting that Japan’s modernisation is a process of internalising the West. What is more, Japanese modernity was once seen as not only a fascination but also a threat to the West because it not only internalised but also outpowered it. This is the post-war paradigm shift that David Morley and Kevin Robins describe as ‘Japan panic’. The idea of Japan panic highlights how Japan’s economic dominance over the West fuelled the West’s fear and panic over the nation’s economic aggression. They argue this by situating Japan panic within ‘Techno-Orientalist discourses’—that is, discourses concerning the imaginings of Asia and Asians in hyper-technological terms in media representations—in the context of Japan’s economic, technological and popular cultural prominence during its economic bubble period:

12  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant Now it seems to have found a new and ideal host culture in Japan. It is as if the future had passed from Europe to America to Japan, from ‘us’ to ‘them’. This has created a disturbing sense of insecurity around Western modernity. If the Japanese can become modern, then what is still distinctive about the West? Where and what the West now? Who is us? This is what the Japan panic is about. (Morley and Robins 1995, 173) This ‘disturbing sense of insecurity’ was so widespread in the United States that, according to a poll conducted by The New York Times in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the public saw rising Japan as ‘a greater threat than the Soviet Union’s military’ (Nymalm 2019). Although Japan panic has now been replaced by ‘China’s rise’ (Huang 2021) or ‘China panic’ (Brophy 2021), revisiting the sentiment is nevertheless useful in our examination of how Asian modernities complicate essentialist, colonialist discourses of exoticism. This is because modern Japan disrupts the ‘modern West’ and ‘backward East’ hierarchy, causing what Morley and Robins articulate as ‘a panic of disorientation’ in the West (1995, 160). Given that the target of panic has changed over time—from the West to Japan to now other Asian countries, most notably China, it is also important to consider the question of ‘whose panic is it?’ (Brophy 2021; Huang 2021; Nymalm 2019). China’s economic and military rise presents a significant challenge for its neighbouring nations, including Japan and the United States. However, this shift in geopolitical power should not be seen simply as a binary confrontation of ‘Chinese modernity versus the Rest’. Rather, it is crucial to understand the intricate connections between diverse modernisation trajectories and perspectives. Japan’s position in Asia during the 20th century included being a ‘coloniser’ of East and Southeast Asia as part of its imperialist intention to replace the colonial order of Western power, as well as being a ‘occupied territory’ by the United States and the Allies, and more recently as a ‘valued trade partner’ by Australia and China. This implies that Japan’s modernisation has been facilitated not only by Western modernity but also by that of its Asian neighbours. It is precisely the interweaving of diverse modernities that generates a novel ‘exotic’ phenomenon, which I explore in this book by analysing the Japanese restaurant. The new exotic emerges as an effect of collapsing time-space distances marked by various modernities, which have reshaped power relations on intra-regional and cross-national levels in the last half-century. The Japanese restaurant is a nodal point at which both the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ intersect in a form that is exotically distant yet uncannily proximate—or the new exotic—within and across multiple cultural settings. The paradoxical formation of the new exotic thus describes an interruption in the West-East hierarchy, or to put it another way, the fixity of conventional orientalist representations. In order to further clarify this point, let us revisit Edward Said’s formulation of Orientalism. Said defines Orientalism as ‘a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”’—in other words,

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  13 it is ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (1979, 2–3). Orientalism refers to a regime of knowledge and power, by which the Orient becomes constituted and contained. Although Said’s attention is largely turned to the issues of a particular geopolitical place, a Palestinian homeland, the interpretations of the term ‘Orient’ across various disciplines extend its realm from the Middle East and North Africa to Central and Southeast Asian region (Lowe 1991, 7). Under the regime of the knowledge and power, the Orient and the Oriental subject become a source for the reproduction and reassertion of the Occident’s control and fantasies over the Orient other. It is this essentialist narrative that assigns the other to an enduring (spatial, temporal and ontological) position, which is perpetually behind the Western self. This binary paradigm—the self and the other, the West and the East, and the coloniser and the colonised—renders the Orient other as primitive, inferior and oppressed, thereby locating it outside of Western modernities. Although this binary orientalist thought has become increasingly unstable, this does not mean that Orientalism has vanished entirely. As Ien Ang and Jon Stratton address, ‘Orientalism in the West is not dead’ (1995, 189). They argue, on the contrary, that ‘classical Orientalism has now been transformed into a new-Orientalism, where it is no longer a powerless, colonised Asia which is the subject of othering, but an empowered and, to a certain extent, threatening modern Asia’ (1995, 189). Their restatement of Orientalism thus posits a shifting formation, one that includes the emergence of Asian economies and modernities. Unlike previous forms of Orientalism, the current discourses of Orientalism can allude to the Orient’s subjectivities, and modern Asia embodies this shift as a more powerful and strategic subject. Orientalism is also ‘not a single developmental tradition but is profoundly heterogenous’, as Lisa Lowe points out (1991, ix). Lowe proclaims that Orientalism is not a monolithic depiction in which the ‘Orient’ is defined as the ‘Occident’s other’. Rather than relying on a fixed Orient-Occident relationship, Lowe describes Orientalism as a discursive creation that is ‘crossed, intersected, and engaged by other representations’ (1991, ix). This perspective helps us better comprehend the formation of the new exotic, as well as the new types of Orientalism and oriental conditions emerging from Asia’s rise and recent global realignments in the Asia-Pacific region. In this book, I suggest that what is new about the new exotic is suspended positionality. By this I mean that the representation of the new exotic is neither ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’, but may inhabit both spaces at the same time through interactions within and across different cultural contexts. Contemporary alternatives to colonialist portrayals of the other offer a shift in viewpoint due to ongoing exchanges between the inside and the outside, which may result in subjectivity. Further, whereas essentialist discourses locate the exotic outside time (thus ‘untouched’ and ‘ahistorical’), the new exotic arises with time and is therefore contemporary in its development. In this book, I demonstrate how the Japanese restaurant allows us to see the new exotic that can be figured as a product of the regional formation of alternative modernities.

14  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant Food and Food Practices: Meaning-Making, Sensing and Sense-Making This book examines the Japanese restaurant as a site of signification, where people experience, interpret and understand events, objects and relationships in the light of their previous knowledge and practice. Put simply, the Japanese restaurant is more than just a place to feed and eat—it is a place to make meaning, sense and make sense. Where this semiotic and anthropological gist takes us is a place of complex tensions in which the Japanese restaurant exists, folding between the inside (the ‘virtual’, the ‘soul’ and the ‘self’) and the outside (the ‘actual’, the ‘body’ and the ‘other’). The central argument of this book is that the Japanese restaurant leverages and incorporates these tensions in its meaning-making, sensing and sense-making processes to engage with global consumers. It asks, How does the Japanese restaurant function as a signifying terrain to enable this? What meanings are created, transmitted and interpreted by the movement of the fold that figures the operations of the Japanese restaurant? And how, and under what conditions, are the meanings produced, delivered and communicated? I will go over these issues in detail in each chapter, but in the first place, let us consider food and food practices as a system of signification, through which ‘we represent the world to ourselves and one another’ (Hall 1985, 103). Despite their banality, food and food practices are contested and contestable. Food encompasses not only substance and nutrition but also habits, norms, techniques and technologies that weave an array of meanings into human lives. It is important to remember here that this process of signification is by no means automatic. It is through practices—cooking, designing, marketing, consuming and so on—that food materials are enacted and perceived as ‘edible’, ‘palatable’ or even ‘desirable’. The examples of Ippudo and Nobu demonstrate how ideas of ‘food as cool’ and ‘food like fashion’ are formed, executed and disseminated through their meaning-making, sensing and sense-making processes, ultimately generating a certain kind of Japaneseness, such as Japanese gastro-cool. The idea that ‘food becomes food through practices’ is not new. In The Raw and Cooked, social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously addressed this process of becoming food, deploying his ‘culinary triangle’ model. The model depicts food transformation in numerous forms, from nature to culture (1970). In the model, Lévi-Strauss suggests that a ‘wild’ nature becomes perceived as ‘food’ only after it has been culturalised via culinary practices, such as boiling and smoking. In its more recent instance, Marcus Nyman’s exploration of urban foraging highlights practices as enablers of the process of becoming food. Nyman shows how plants and fungi (or parts of them) in and around urban spaces, which would otherwise be ‘unintended and/or unattended’ and thus unthinkable to eat, become food through the practices of harvesting, picking and exchanging (2019, 171; emphasis in original). At the same time, culturising practices do not always ensure that people will eat the unthinkable. People must also make judgements about what (not) to eat based on the conventions, moral codes and other societal variables that impact

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  15 their perception of food and eating. This is, for example, shown by Emma Roe’s observation of artist William Speakman’s live art sushi-making performance titled Beauty Is Perfection, in which the artist created a sushi kitchen as an art installation (Roe 2006, 109). In the staged kitchen, a competent chef kills live fish and converts it into fresh sushi for the clients watching the tableside performance. However, some people find the end product inedible, while others do not. Roe recounts the sushi-making performance in her fieldwork journal: Live fish swimming in a tank. The fish are brought out, killed, prepared and eaten, one by one. This is a spectacle of the process by which things (animals, plants) become food. The fish’s throat is cut and the fish wriggles for a minute or so. On seeing this, a young girl cries out, ‘It’s still alive’, but the chef insists, ‘It’s dead now’. The fish blood soaks the cloths and spills over the preparation board as the animal is skinned, filtered and prepared, before being passed to the chef, who transforms it into an ornate piece of designer food: sushi. Then the sushi is offered up for consumption to those people incorporated into this installation through observing this spectacle. Some people happily eat the sushi, others do not. (2006, 109) As described in Roe’s observation, one’s view of sushi as a palatable ‘designer food’ may be entirely irrelevant to others, regardless of the end product delivered to the table through the practice of ‘becoming food’. As Nyman notes, ‘“[F]ood” is never produced only through the process of its production, but also the various and fractured social, spatial and temporal conditions (immediate and distant) in which it is enmeshed’ (2019, 173; emphasis in original). But what are the social, geographical and temporal conditions that shape food’s meaning and social value? How can food like sushi, which was once considered ‘unthinkable’, become acceptable or even desirable, and under what circumstances? In order to answer these questions, it is worthwhile to delve deeper into the globalisation of sushi. From Los Angeles to São Paulo to Amsterdam, sushi has spread as far as the Japanese restaurant has. However, it ‘isn’t an easy concept to sell the uninitiated’ (Bestor 2009). Sushi was first presented to the American public in 1929 by the magazine Ladies’ Home Journal, according to Theodore Bestor, who noted that it was difficult to appeal this Japanese delicacy to the public. Bestor explains, ‘There have been purposely omitted […] any recipes using the delicate and raw tuna fish which is sliced wafer thin and served iced with attractive garnishes. [These] […] might not sound so entirely delicious as they are in reality’ (2009). However, over time, the meaning and social value that sushi carries have altered, becoming a symbol of novelty, health-conscious elitism, cosmopolitan culture and now global consumership (Cwiertka 2006, 182–3). Numerous factors made this change possible. In the early 1900s, small service communities founded by Japanese immigrants and expatriates were the only places where sushi was

16  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant produced and consumed in the United States (Cwiertka 2006, 181–5; Ishige et al. 1985; Kojima 2012; Rath 2021). After World War Two, the U.S.-led alliance prompted the export of Japanese commodities, technologies and capital, as well as the expansion of Japanese businesses and expatriate communities. Japan’s capitalist economy also helped to increase trade between the two nations after the 1970s (Beckley, Horiuchi and Miller 2018; Cwiertka 2006, 184–5). Concurrently, the media’s portrayal of Japanese cultural production, including food, was transforming the image of Japanese products. In the 1970s and 1980s, major media outlets such as The New York Times featured sushi as ‘novel’, ‘healthy’ and ‘hip’, appealing to elites and celebrities (Bestor 2009).3 Chefs and entrepreneurs like Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, the founder of the global restaurant and hotel empire Nobu, played an important part in fostering positive perceptions of sushi and other Japanese delicacies in American society (Cwiertka 2006, 181). The changing meanings and social values of sushi in the United States can be understood as part of the larger phenomenon of what Samuel Yamashita calls the ‘Japanese turn’, or the rise of Japanese cuisine influencing the global fine dining restaurant industry since the 1970s (2020). Yamashita describes the trend in three distinctive stages: First, it was an extended historical moment that began in the 1970s and extended to 2020 when Japanese cooks became a presence at haute cuisine restaurants in Europe and Japanese cuisine influenced fine dining in France and the United States. Second, the Japanese turn first was manifested in France in the 1970s, then in Los Angeles and New York City in the 1980s, and developed further in the 1990s and early 2000s, spreading to the San Francisco Bay Area as well. Third, the Japanese turn took place just as fine dining was being redefined by nouvelle cuisine, the ‘new cuisine’ that emerged in France in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the several regional cuisines it spawned in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. (2020, 45) Yamashita claims that the ‘reimagining of fine dining in Europe and the United States’ has facilitated the Japanese turn, with Japanese culinary influences at both a supplementary level (e.g., Japanese ingredients, such as shiitake mushroom, shiso perilla, yuzu citrus fruit and shishitō green peppers) and at a structural level (e.g., Japanese cooking techniques such as ‘iki-jime’ literally meaning ‘to force to live’) (2020).4 Although the Japanese turn, which is closely linked to the notions of ‘haute cuisine’ and ‘fine dining’, is certainly not the sole reason for the wide acceptance of sushi in the United States, it can nevertheless be seen as a parallel phenomenon that has somewhat contributed to the changing meanings and social values of sushi, and by extension, other Japanese cuisines. Further to this, rather than just becoming food through practices, this is an illustration of food going global while retaining a national-cultural marker— in this case, Japaneseness. The Japanese restaurant deploys food (and often

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  17 non-food cultural elements) to express its otherness while also striving to be appealing. Across the chapters, I will show how it does so by looking at its process of meaning-making, sensing and sense-making. As an exotic genre, the Japanese restaurant can only find a place in global markets if it is recognised and recognisable as such, therefore the process practically serves as its own justification. Now, there are underlying principles that the Japanese restaurant relies on when it asserts its Japaneseness—that is, the codes of Japan’s culinary system that govern and circumscribe what makes certain food and food practices symbolically ‘Japanese’. Decoding Japan’s Culinary System Given the ongoing exchanges of different foods from different cultures and regions throughout Japan’s food history, it might seem as though the nation’s culinary system follows no rules. Although there may be some truth to this in the process of the cross-pollination, invention and evolution of its cuisines, Japan’s culinary system is nevertheless founded on a set of codes. It is important to stress here that the codes of Japan’s culinary system function to determine how proximate cuisine is to the purported ‘roots’ of what is considered ‘Japanese’ (this is a question about authenticity and interiority that is further discussed in the following chapters). Yet, the codes are often unspoken, therefore requiring decoding. My goal in this section is to offer a snapshot of such codes that are frequently employed but rarely discussed in the context of the Japanese restaurant—most notably, ‘naturalness’, ‘rawness’, ‘seasonality’ and ‘domesticity’. These codes also serve as the main tenets of how the restaurant workers and consumers I spoke with view the Japanese restaurant. First of all, naturalness is paramount in Japan’s culinary system. It symbolises a temporal and spatial closeness to the idealised ‘nature’ when effectively displayed. Although it can seem counterintuitive, cooking is a necessary component of achieving naturalness. For example, two classic Japanese dishes—sushi and sashimi—appear to take little preparation, yet a thorough preparation is exactly what makes it possible for them to preserve their ‘fresh and natural’ appearance. Another example is a packed lunch, obentō. In her work on the obentō, Anne Allison remarks that ‘the food appears not only to be natural, but more nearly perfect than nature without human intervention ever could be’ (1991, 197). It is a process of ‘naturalisation’, as Allison puts it, in which ‘nature [is] made artificial’ (1991, 197). To expand on Allison’s analysis, I view this process as ‘cultural purification’, in which nature is culturalised as ‘pure’. Purity is a desirable state of being in Japanese sociocultural contexts, and it is also the intended outcome in the culinary pursue of naturalness. How to achieve this is, I contend, the skillful use of culinary aesthetics that can frame and tame the awe of nature, or the nature that is viewed as a fearsome entity to be revered in Japan’s indigenous religious beliefs, Shintō (Asquith and Kalland 1997, 2–3). Shintō deities, or kami, who are believed to inhabit in natural objects and phenomena—mountains, rice paddies, rocks, the winds and so on—symbolise the

18  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant belief that nature is menacing and unapproachable, thereby requiring purification and distancing. The way to purify nature is to aestheticise it, so that a distance from it can be established. Kami signify purified and beautified entities, allowing humanity to coexist peacefully with nature. In this sense, the ideal form of nature in the Japanese culinary context is an aesthetically appropriated one. In other words, ‘wild’, ‘untamed’ nature is the least welcome, whereby nature has been artificialised with a human touch (Allison 1991, 197; Ashkenazi and Jacob 2000, 142; Asquith and Kalland 1997, 2–3; Richie 1992, 11). Relatedly, rawness is another key code of Japan’s culinary system. Like the code of naturalness, the code of rawness does not refer to a raw condition of ingredients in Japanese culinary contexts. Quite the contrary, rawness is a culturalised condition of nature, and it can be achieved again through cultural purification and culinary aestheticisation.5 As Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney remarks, ‘The raw in Japanese culture thus represents culturalized nature […] the raw food of the Japanese represents a highly crafted cultural artifact presented as natural food’ (1990, 206). For example, the traditional Japanese delicacy ikezukuri or iki-zukuri (literally ‘prepared alive’; see Figure 1.1) marks the peak of

Figure 1.1 Ike-zukuri. Photograph by artist Nao from iStock.com. Image source URL: https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/japanese-food-gm90386789-1637454

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  19 rawness in the Japanese culinary domain.6 At traditional-style Japanese restaurants and inns, live fish is slaughtered directly from the fish tank. Its quivering flesh is reassembled in the shape of its former self, including the cut-off head and tail, and sometimes displayed on a wooden ship-shaped container, highlighting its proximity to nature. Despite being considered ethically ‘amoral’ in both its preparation and presentation (Liao and Meskin 2018, 671–2), this traditional delicacy remains popular in the country, owing to its display of rawness as pristine quality and craftsmanship, as well as its dramatised presentation and extravagance, all of which are enacted through cultural purification and culinary aestheticisation. Seasonality is also integral to Japan’s culinary system. Industrial agriculture and global trade have made the connection between food and seasons increasingly unclear to consumers. In Japan’s culinary system, however, or maybe precisely because of the lack of apparent seasonality, a purposeful display of seasonality remains crucial. In fact, the symbolic prominence of seasonality in the Japanese culinary lexicon is described by a term called shun (literally meaning ‘being in season’). The concept of shun is used to describe seasonal foods, or shun no mono, literally ‘things of shun’—that are available only for a brief period of time and thus have a high scarcity value. Shun is expressed in various ways, including the choice of ingredients, dishes, food practices, utensils and table settings, to produce certain (aesthetically constructed) sensory effects, such as ‘coolness’ in the summer and ‘warmness’ in the winter—from silkthread-like wheat-flour sōmen noodles (Figure 1.2) flowing in a stream of cold water to be ‘caught’ to be eaten in the summer to matsutake mushrooms eagerly awaited and at their peak in the autumn. Notably, seasonality is not always conveyed by a direct connection to a natural cycle, which is defined by the four regulated seasons in modern Japan. For example, momiji oroshi (literally ‘Japanese maple and a thing that is grated’)—a side garnish made with grated daikon radish and carrot or red chilli pepper—is used not only as a flavourful garnish, but also as an aesthetic gesture to trigger a visual sensation, due to its colour representing maple trees in the autumn mountain, albeit without using any maple products in the garnish. By appealing to the senses, this culinary anesthetisation appropriates ‘real’ nature (in this case, the colourful maple trees in the autumn mountains) and symbolically converts it into the palatably ‘seasonal’. Last but not least, Japan’s culinary system is governed by the code of domesticity. It is utilised as a powerful device to assess how closely the place of food production is to ‘the land of origin’, leading to the conceptual hierarchy of ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’. Rice—more specifically, domestically cultivated white glutinous short grain rice, also known in Japanese as ‘haku-mai’ (‘white rice’)—is an ultimate marker of domesticity, and by extension, the pure-impure hierarchy. What underpins the ideology of domesticity of ‘Japanese rice’ is nationalist discourses—namely, the discourses of nihonjin-ron (‘the theories of the Japanese’). Norinaga Motoori, one of the early nihonjin-ron thinkers in the 18th century, claimed in his books such as Naobino Mitama (1936 [1771])

20  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant

Figure 1.2 Sōmen noodles. Photograph by artist Kaorinne from iStock.com. Image source URL: https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/hiyashi-somen-gm818 241150-132315973

that the quality of Japanese rice is proof of Japan’s supremacy as a Shintō deity-selected country. This nationalist view is based on ancient mythologies and religions that claim a mystical link between ‘Japanese rice’ and the essence of Japan.7 Ohnuki-Tierney writes that in nihonjin-ron ‘[t]he purity of white rice (haku-mai) or ‘pure rice’ ( jun-mai) became a powerful metaphor for the purity of the Japanese self’ (2004, 8; emphasis in original). In the nationalist view, the ‘impurity’ of foreign rice is in direct opposition to the purity of domestic rice, with the foreign serving as a means of reinforcing the self’s superior standing. Ohnuki-Tierney articulates this hierarchy as the underpinning of nihonjin-ron: ‘Chemicals, dead mice, etc. symbolize the impurity of foreign rice which poses a threat to the purity of the Japanese self’ (2004, 8). This privileged symbolic status given to domestic rice has long been protected and maintained by the domestic institutions, including the government, the political parties (particularly, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party [LDP]) and the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (the LDP’s electoral support organisation), as well as the domestic consumers (Yamashita 2015). Some of these institutions and individuals deploy rice as a method of gaining a privileged position in the geopolitical hierarchy. They argue that domestic rice is superior to foreign rice in terms of appearance, texture, aroma and taste, based on the notion

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  21 that the former is cultivated in ‘our pure land’ (Brau 2004, 41; Ohnuki-Tierney 2004, 8). In other words, asserting rice’s domesticity is also a form of cultural purification: it excludes what is seen as ‘foreign’ and labels it as ‘impure’, so justifying the superiority of ‘the domestic as pure’ over ‘the foreign as impure’. The nationalist ideology of ‘the domestic as pure and the foreign as impure’ now draws our attention to the indisputable foreign component of Japanese cuisines. Japanese cuisines, like any other cuisine, are in constant contact with the outside world (Heldke 2003, xix). The centuries-long evolution of sushi is one of the most prominent examples of this. While Japan is credited with being the first to prepare sushi as a complete meal, sushi has undergone many transformations due to cross-cultural influences. It was initially developed around the 4th century B.C. in Southeast Asia, transferred to China and then Japan in the Heian era (794–1185) (Ishige 2001, 230–1).8 According to the food anthropologist Naomichi Ishige, in the 14th century, nare-zushi was changed into ‘namanare-zushi’ (‘semi-fermented sushi’), which was regarded as a ‘luxury delicacy’ served at festivals and feasts (2001, 230). Unlike nare-zushi, where the fermented rice was initially eliminated and only the fish was served as a side dish, namanare-zushi includes rice with the fish (Ishige 2001, 231). Ishige notes that ‘the emergence of namanare-zushi was the point where sushi took on the character of a complete snack, combining staple and side dish’ (2001, 231). From the late 17th century onward, namanare-zushi was further developed as ‘haya-zushi’ (‘quick sushi’).9 Later in Osaka, ‘oshi-zushi’ (‘pressed sushi’), also known as ‘hako-zushi’ (‘boxed sushi’), was invented by pressing rice and cooked fish in a box. It was brought to Edo (modern-day Tokyo) in the mid-18th century and became a popular street snack known as ‘Edo-mae nigiri-zushi’ (‘Edostyle hand-formed sushi’), which is an archetype of what is now known as sushi. Ishige considers Edo-mae nigiri-zushi to be ‘the final stage in the transformation of sushi from a preserved food into a fast food’ because ‘the fact that vinegar is still always added to sushi rice to give it a slightly tart taste means that a culinary tradition survives unbroken, if only barely, in the form of contemporary sushi’ (2001, 231). As illustrated in the pathway to becoming sushi, the foreign in the familiar never seems to be adapted all at once. This is consistent in a variety of ways and forms, ranging from sushi to ramen, and from ‘kissaten’ coffeehouses to McDonald’s Japan, all of which draw on foreign influences in the processes of becoming (see Rath 2021; Ishige 2001 for sushi; Kushner 2012 and Solt 2014 for ramen; Watson 2006 for McDonald’s in Japan; White 2012 for kissaten).10 Once again, cultural purification is a crucial step in the adaptation process since it enables the foreign to be suitably ‘sanitised’ to meet domestic wants and needs. During this process, only traits that are compatible with the codes of Japan’s culinary system are accepted, and any other traits that can potentially disrupt the codes are rejected or toned down. The Japanese restaurant is a contested site from the perspective of domesticity as it is positioned at the intersection of the domestic and the foreign. On the one hand, it relies on the point of ‘origin’—mainland Japan—in order to claim its Japaneseness. Simultaneously, the Japanese restaurant leaves the

22  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant origin as it spreads as an exotic genre, implying deviation from some origin or norm and thus dubiety. Indeed, there is a Japanese phrase that describes the exotic genre’s deviancy and dubiety: ‘Japa-resu’ (generally spelled as ‘ジャパレ ス’ in Japanese). Japa-resu is an abbreviation for the phrase ‘Japanı ̄zu resutoran’ (‘Japanese restaurant’), which is commonly used by Japanese speakers overseas to refer to ‘Japanese restaurants’ outside of Japan. In other words, Japa-resu denotes eating establishments that do not categorically exist or fit in the homeland. This is because the classification of Japanı̄zu resutoran or ‘nihonshoku resutoran’ (‘Japanese food restaurant’) is far too broad to capture the myriad subsets of restaurants serving traditional Japanese food in Japan. Such restaurants include everything from soba-ya (restaurants that specialise in buckwheat soba noodle dishes) to tempura-ya (restaurants that specialise in tempura dishes), from okonomiyaki-ya (restaurants that specialise in savoury okonomiyaki pancakes) to gyu ̄don-ya (restaurants that specialise in beef rice bowl dishes). Further to this, the fact that the phrase is usually written in katakana, a Japanese syllabary used to translate foreign words or concepts into the indigenous Japanese writing system, indicates the perpetual foreignness of the Japanese restaurant. That is, Japa-resu holds the position that katakana denotes: it is distinguished from the indigenous lexicon while nevertheless deriving from that system. Thus, Japa-resu both relies on and deviates from the origin or norm in this contradictory space. In this book, I do not intend to refer to only one geographic and ideological centre to view the Japanese restaurant. Nor do I purport that there is only one ‘true’ representation or reading of what it means to be a ‘Japanese restaurant’. My aim is instead to interrogate the globalised industry of the Japanese restaurant as an exotic genre from multiple cross-cultural perspectives. In doing so, I pose the questions, In what ways does Japan’s culinary system interact with local desires, ideologies and orders via the Japanese restaurant, and what are the consequences? What happens when the process of cultural purification is reversed and the ‘purified foreign’ undergoes scrutiny in a new context like Australia? And how does that challenge the codes of Japan’s culinary system? In order to set out these questions, let us now take a closer look at the book’s focus site—the foodscapes down under. More Room for Ethnicities?: The Presence/Absence of Australia’s National Cuisine The quest for a national identity in Australia has revolved around discussions about the presence/absence of its ‘national cuisine’ (Baker 2000; Santich 2012; Saunders 1999; Symons 2007, 2014). At the same time, Australia’s national identity is often defined by the nation’s tangled ties to Aboriginal cultures, adopted British heritage, Mediterranean immigrant cultures and, more recently, Asian immigrant traditions and economies. The nation’s settler-colonial entanglement and reliance on immigrants pose the question: how relevant is it for the nation to distil all of these aspects into its unique cuisine? What

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  23 rationale lies behind the desire to define Australia’s national cuisine? And who needs a cuisine that is identified with ‘Australia’? This is a line of inquiry that has fuelled debates surrounding the presence/absence of Australia’s national cuisine, but historical and anthropological research is yet to resolve. Thinking about the ‘what, why and for whom’ of Australia’s national cuisine exposes different and often competing sentiments about a cuisine that is simultaneously ‘present’ and ‘absent’. The following remarks by Australian food writer Alan Saunders shed light on one side of the debates on the presence/absence of Australia’s national cuisine. Saunders questions the rationale for what culinary principles, basic carbohydrate and fundamental flavours collectively define a cuisine as ‘Australian’. In Australian Food: In Celebration of the New Australian Cuisine, Saunders writes, ‘It seems to me quite clear that if a cuisine is a style of preparing food of which these questions can reasonably be asked, then Australian does not have its own cuisine. […] I find it very difficult to give any very clear sense to this idea’ (1999, 13–4). Saunders also discusses the opposing viewpoint, claiming that the desire for Australia’s national cuisine is rooted in the rhetoric of Australia’s republicanism, which he suggests supports the idea that Australia needs its own cuisine rather than borrowing one from the United Kingdom, where the monarch retains several powers under the Australian Constitution (1999, 16). Saunders uses the words of the food writer Cherry Ripe to explain this. Ripe rhetorically asks in Goodbye Culinary Cringe: ‘To whose who say it is too early for us to have an Australian cuisine—what are we waiting for? Who is going to fire the starting gun to give us permission? Or is it that, in usual cringe fashion, we are waiting for it to be recognised by outsiders?’ (1993, 15). Ripe’s questions, according to Saunders, give ‘an urgency to much of our culinary patriotism’ (Saunders 1999, 15). In other words, what ‘culinary patriots’ call ‘an Australian cuisine’, as Saunders suggests, ‘serves as a symbol of (or, if you like, a metaphor for) an Australia independent in body and spirit of colonial ties’ (1999, 16). Saunders further mentions that this culinary patriotism expresses a desire to redefine Australia’s standing in global culinary markets. In The Food of Australia, Tony Baker expresses, ‘To write about Australian food a couple of decades ago would have been to invite disbelief, if not downright laughter, together with derisive remarks about kangaroo and emu steaks’ (2000, 5). In a global gastronomic context, however, these clichéd images are arguably being replaced by new images of what is commonly referred to as ‘modern Australian cuisine’ (Symons 2007). It is often said that current Australian food draws on ‘the best from elsewhere’ (Duncan cited in Saunders 1999, 13)—from ‘French traditional and nouvelle cuisine’ to ‘regional Italian and pan-Asian styles’ to ‘cool Californian chic’ (Baker 2000, 5). From this viewpoint, Australia’s food cultures are no longer regarded as ‘backward’ but instead are developing to become more ‘modern’ and ‘diverse’. Today, in Australia, one can find an array of dishes served at the same table, including stir-fried chicken, curry, spaghetti bolognaise and sushi, although since the early days of colonisation English cooking—which is typically described as a ‘baked meat and three vegetables’

24  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant meal—has remained the nation’s primary Anglo-Celtic culinary heritage (Lai, Khoo-Lattimore and Wang 2018, 582). But in what sociocultural contexts is this new representation updated by Australia’s shifting foodscapes? And who are the main players in this transformation? One of the key drivers of the transformation of Australia’s food culture has been the influx of immigrants from Mediterranean countries previously and Asia more recently, who have brought their cuisines to the destination country. However, some view that the culinary traditions of immigrants have not been entirely integrated or accepted in Australia (e.g., Carr and Sinclair 2016; Gallegos 2000; Sheridan 2000; Wise 2011). Instead, they argue that foods brought by immigrants from those regions have been appropriated in such a way that they supplement the presence/absence of Australia’s national cuisine. Danielle Gallegos provides an insightful perspective in her case study, which examines how new ‘ethnic’ foods and flavours were promoted in Australia’s domestic (predominantly white) market through women’s magazines from the 1930s to the 1990s. Gallegos proposes a three-stage approach to facilitate the process systematically: firstly, removing negative stereotypes associated with a particular ‘ethnic’ food being marketed; secondly, celebrating the food as part of Australia’s cultural diversity; and thirdly, linking the ethnicity of the food to Australia’s national identity (2000, 43). While there are some similarities between this approach and the process of cultural purification discussed in the previous section, Gallegos’ case study locates it specifically in the Australian commercial food-media scene. Gallegos contends that the industry perpetuates myths that define ‘ethnic’ foods as ‘tastier’, ‘fresher’, ‘more authentic’ and ‘healthier’ alternatives to Anglo-Celtic culinary traditions (2000, 44). The author suggests that these depictions, as part of the perpetuating mythologies, are subsequently equated with ‘remedies for modern life’. That is, ethnic foods are used to assuage ‘feelings of guilt for busy men and women’ as a type of ‘fast food’ that is made ‘still good enough’ and requires ‘little intellectual input, experience or prior knowledge’ to prepare (examples of such fast food include the ‘dim sim’ and the ‘sushi roll’ in Australia’s quotidian food spaces) (Gallegos 2000, 44). Gallegos argues that this separates ethnic foods from Australian modernity, which is characterised by ‘busy men and women’ who represent whiteness and civilisation (Gallegos 2000, 44). Central to Gallegos’ argument is thus that ethnic foods are used to satisfy ‘civilising appetite’, which the author defines as ‘a process where taste not hunger is the driving force behind food selection’ (2000, 45). This linkage between the civilising of appetite and taste reflects what Pierre Bourdieu famously cites as social distinction and class-based tastes. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Bourdieu argues that the symbolic power of taste preferences constructs and reinforces the space of social positions (1984). In Gallegos’ case study, the civilising of appetite is closely linked to class-based taste, specifically the eclectic palates of Australia’s urban middle-class (although the class boundaries remain debatable). Gallegos’ study is noteworthy because it highlights the supplementary role that (‘non-white’ or ‘not-quite-white’) ethnic

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  25 foods play in the construction of class-based tastes in Australia. Gallegos describes a variety of ‘pastes, powders and potions’ as ‘the most readily accessible interpretation of ethnic cuisine’ for this classed culinary eclecticism (2000, 45). Certainly, this ethnic-culinary representation is not a personal construction but an institutional one, as Gallegos argues. She uses the phrase ‘corporatisation of “ethnic” food’ to describe how institutional practices, such as corporate advertising, highjack ‘ethnic’ cuisines and relegate their complexities to pastes, powders and potions in order to market the corporate brand as ‘multiculinary’, ‘healthy’, ‘authentic’ and ‘tolerant’ (2000, 39, 45). Crucially, this institutionalisation of Australia’s classed culinary eclecticism can extend beyond corporative practices to larger narratives, such as multiculturalism in Australia. Multiculturalism in Australia is a state-run, ‘top-down’ political strategy that was adopted by the Whitlam Labour administration in 1973 after the abolition of the White Australia Policy. The trajectory of Australia’s multiculturalism fundamentally differs from multiculturalism implemented in the United States, which is a ‘bottom-up’ approach initiated by minorities in opposition to the government’s ideology of the nation as a ‘melting pot’ (Stratton and Ang 1994, 126). Australia’s multiculturalism involves the politics of desire, power and consumption. As discussed in Gallegos’ analysis of the supplementary role that (non-white or not-quite-white) ethnic foods play in the construction of Australia’s eclectic palates, ethnic subjects become ‘desirable’ through white subjects’ consumption. Within the narrative of Australia’s multiculturalism, Ghassan Hage theorises this power imbalance as what he describes as ‘cosmo-multiculturalism’. Hage claims that cosmopolitan consumerism characterises Australia’s multiculturalism, citing the Fitzgerald Inquiry report from 1988, which used the word ‘cosmopolitanism’ to describe multiculturalism (2000a, 201). Here, Hage suggests individuals who engage with cosmopolitan consumption as ‘cosmopolite’. He addresses that ‘the cosmopolite is a class figure and a White person, capable of appreciating and consuming “high-quality” commodities and cultures, including “ethnic” culture’ (2000a, 201; emphasis in original). It is also worth noting that the concept of cosmo-multiculturalism is based on Hage’s contestation that Australia’s multiculturalism is a ‘white national fantasy’. It is ‘white multiculturalism’, Hage claims, that allows some white Australians to manage ‘cultural diversity’ by sanctioning the ‘other’ and their fears over them (2000a, 119). White multiculturalism, according to him, deploys non-white (and often not-quite-white) ethnicities to valorise a white centre while ostensibly celebrating the white nation’s cultural diversity. Importantly, who has access to white power and its associated privileges is not static, as the definition of ‘white’ can shift over time. From 1901 until 1939, Australia’s ‘White Alien’ immigration policy divided whiteness into two categories: ‘British’ (representing mainstream whiteness) and ‘white aliens’ (consisting of Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs and Poles) (Langfield 1999, 208).11 This political framing positions the mainstream British whites over non-British Europeans (Green, Sonn and Matsebula 2007, 389–419). The concept of whiteness is

26  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant indeed elusive, and it is unrealistic to pinpoint who is truly ‘white’. And yet, it has a powerful political influence on Australia’s social and political systems, where some privileged ‘white’ people continue to dominate (Green, Sonn and Matsebula 2007, 408). Ongoing debates on Australia’s multiculturalism highlight this point: multiculturalism in Australia is primarily concerned with what some privileged ‘white’ Australians may experience, not with what multiculturalism is or is not (Hage 2000a, 18). In short, multiculturalism in Australia places whiteness above other racial-ethnic representations, allowing some privileged ‘white’ Australians to engage with and experience ‘cultural diversity’ as a part of their own ‘cultural enrichment’. And it is this cultural enrichment that Hage makes clear through his framework of cosmo-multiculturalism. What challenges, if not entirely disrupts, the narrative of white multiculturalism is Australia’s changing social landscape, or most recently, the so-called ‘Asianisation’. Asianisation in this context refers to Australia’s reengagement with Asia that has intensified since the 2000s with the rise of Asian economies and modernities. Asia now plays a critical role in Australia’s economy as manifested by the ‘Asian Century White Paper’ that former prime minister Julia Gillard released in 2012. Asianisation also has a direct impact on Australia’s demographic composition. In the past decade, immigration trends have steadily shifted away from Europe and towards regions of Asia. South and Central Asia were the largest sources of new immigrants in 2020, followed by Oceania and North-East Asia (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2021). Consequently, there is an emergence of what Hage calls ‘white decline’, or a sentiment that white privileges in the economic, political, cultural and institutional realms are no longer assured in Australia: During this colonial era, ‘Whiteness’ gave those who could identify as White a sense of viability and hope, linked to a sense of belonging to the dominant and most fortunate ethno-cultural grouping within capitalism. However, the changes in the ethno-cultural configuration of capitalist development in the era of postcolonial and global capitalism (the rise of Asian capitalism, for example) produced a crisis of identification for those who derived their main sense of viability from their Whiteness. (Hage 2000b, 90) Thus, white decline is closely linked to a ‘crisis’ of identity for white Australia, or more specifically, the privileged ‘white Anglo-Saxon male’ (Hanson cited in Hage 2000b, 182). The Japanese restaurant operates at this tension between the legacy of white supremacy and the ascent of Asia. On the one hand, it is circumscribed in the domestic dominant (white) market, where classed whiteness is imagined and reclaimed. Some restaurant operators specifically define their dominant clientele as ‘middle- to upper middle-class Anglo-Celtic Australians’, while others use a broader term of ‘European Australians’ to refer to their main customer base. Here, central to the operations of the Japanese restaurant is to make it intelligible as well as palatable to those particular cosmopolite consumer figures (this will be discussed further in Chapter 2). On the other hand, it also

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  27 works closely with emerging clients as a result of Asia’s growing economies and modernities, including middle-class Asians and Asian Australians. This nascent consumership thus reconfigures the power relationship between ‘white subjects as consumers’ and ‘non-white/not-quite-white subjects as being consumed’ within the narrative of Australia’s white multiculturalism. Crucially, the current diversity of those who engage in the Japanese restaurant as part of cosmopolitan practices surpasses the binary distinction between ‘white’ and ‘non-white/not-quite-white’ groups (Farrer and Wang 2021). The workers and consumers of the Japanese restaurant in Australia and elsewhere have become more diverse than ever in terms of ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds. In fact, data shows that non-Japanese now own over 80 percent of the Japanese restaurants in the world, more than doubling the percentage in the early 2000s (Japan External Trade Organization 2016, 31, 2017, 35). The goal of this book is to distabilise rigid representational categories, such as whiteness and Asianness, by demonstrating how the Japanese restaurant enables the cross-cultural-ethnic-racial representations of Japaneseness. It does so by locating the Japanese restaurant in today’s Australian foodscapes, which are still predominantly ‘white’ but increasingly ‘Asianising’. The sociocultural dynamics of the specific time-space context provide an apt platform to critically assess colonialist and essentialist understandings of the exotic and Japaneseness as the West’s ‘inferior other’. Scope and Limitations I acknowledge that the time-space span of the Japanese restaurant’s global presence goes far beyond my purview. Instead of covering the phenomenon in breadth, my research presents conceptual tools to analyse the synergy between the Japanese restaurant and the specific time-space context: Australia in the 2000s. It is an illustrative case of time-space compression that expedites cross-cultural exchanges and interactions. The 2000s have seen exponential growth of the Japanese restaurant industry across the world, and this is particularly true in Australia and other Oceanian countries, which have experienced a 386 percent growth in the number of eating establishments designated as ‘Japanese restaurants’, rising from about 700 in 2013 to about 3,400 in 2019 (MAFF 2015, 2019). This is the largest growth among other regions, including Asia (274 percent), Europe (122 percent) and North America (73 percent). Further, Australia, where one in every four individuals was born outside of the country, is an ideal location for investigating what impact the diversity of population has on the operations of the Japanese restaurant. Australia’s diverse demographic composition allows us to contest the previous idea that the Japanese restaurant is an ethnic enclave for an ethnic minority, where the inside-outside boundary is neatly demarcated. By situating the Japanese restaurant in Australia, this book details the complex layers of desire, power and consumption that the exotic genre embraces. Certainly, the Japanese restaurant’s ongoing expansion and evolution requires investigation in wider geographical areas, where different socio-political

28  Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant realities may respond to this phenomenon in very different ways. At the same time, while the issues raised in this book pertain to the specific time-space context, they may have broader implications on how and why a cross-culturalethnic-racial site, such as the Japanese restaurant, challenges fixed notions of otherness, race, ethnicity and authenticity. It is thus my hope that this book will offer some patterns of the global rise and operations of the Japanese restaurant that can be observed elsewhere. Overview of Chapters The chapters that follow analyse the growth and operations of the Japanese restaurant in Australia since the early 2000s from the perspectives of both restaurant workers and consumers. Chapter 2, ‘Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires into the New Exotic’, identifies the key factors that drive restaurant operators to partake in the Japanese restaurant industry in Melbourne, ‘Australia’s culinary capital’ (Visit Melbourne n.d.). In doing so, the chapter uses the metaphor of the fold as a conceptual tool. Chapter 3, ‘Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic’, looks at the consumption of the new exotic via the Japanese restaurant. Consumer narratives locate the Japanese restaurant within the context of popular culture entertainment, showing how eating out and tasting the new exotic is sensed and made sense as Japanese gastro-cool. The chapter also examines consumers’ never-ending quest for ‘authentic’ Japanese restaurants by viewing the notion of authenticity as a ‘claim’ about a product or practice’s symbolic and sensory proximity to the ‘original’. It asks, What claims of authenticity are made on whose judgement? Whose authority is cited when a certain product or practice offered by the Japanese restaurant is claimed to be authentic? What role do different reference points play in influencing consumers’ claims of authenticity? Moreover, in what way does the Japanese restaurant fuel consumers’ perpetual search for authenticity? Chapter 4, ‘Cross-Cultural Translation: Decoding the Japanese Restaurant’, investigates the method employed by the Japanese restaurant: cross-cultural translation. Drawing on Lawrence Venuti’s idea of ‘domestic subjects’, it illuminates the target audience and how the codes of Japan’s culinary system are decoded and perceived as ‘intelligible’, and as a result, ‘palatable’ by this audience. The purpose is to show that cross-cultural practices sustaining the exotic genre are intrinsic and often ambivalent, which require a more nuanced interpretation than popular frameworks, such as ‘fusion’ and ‘hybridisation’. Chapter 5, ‘The Exotic Genre’s Formula: The Supply and Demand of Japanese Ethnicity’, argues ‘Japanese ethnicity’ as the Japanese restaurant’s necessary formula. Authenticity, which consumers often see as a sign of the presence or presentness of Japanese ethnicity, is once again scrutinised. The chapter employs Rey Chow’s concept of ‘coercive mimeticism’ and Judith Butler’s formulation of ‘performativity’ to reveal restaurant workers’ strategic usage and co-construction of Japanese ethnicity through their ‘Asian’ bodies within the Japanese restaurant.

Mapping Out the Japanese Restaurant  29 Notes 1 The word ‘omakase’ translates to ‘I’ll leave it up to you’ in English. It is a traditional Japanese dining style in which diners entrust their meal entirely to the chef, who carefully selects, prepares and serves a tailored menu based on the best ingredients available that day. 2 The location of Niri Sushi and Dinner is in Hammerfest in Norway, which is known as the world’s northernmost town (Niri Sushi and Dinner n.d.). Meanwhile, Midori Sushi and Pub is situated on the Galápagos Islands (Midori Sushi and Pub n.d.). 3 Popular media representations of Japanese cuisines are also noteworthy. In the North American context, Iron Chef (Ryōri no Tetsujin, literally ‘Ironmen of Cooking’) is one such example. Initially presented by the Japanese broadcaster Fuji Television between 1993 and 1999, this pioneer of cooking competition shows was first aired in the United States through KTSF, a San Francisco-based multicultural channel, in the late 1990s (Lukacs 2010, 411). It became a cult hit thanks to online communities, and its popularity grew once the American cable channel Food Network started broadcasting a dubbed version of the original Iron Chef (Lukacs 2010, 412). However, it should also be noted that the impact of Iron Chef on the popularity of Japanese cuisines is not always evident. In Gabriella Lukacs’ study, the majority of respondents did not see Iron Chef as a reflection of Japanese culinary cultures (2010, 415). 4 The term ‘iki-jime’ alternatively known as ‘ike-jime’ refers to a preparation method that immobilises a fish and drains its blood to improve the quality of the flesh and extend its storage life. 5 Technology is essential in achieving optimal freshness and quality in the fish business, from storage and refrigeration to processing (Bestor 2004, 150–2). 6 The words ‘iki’ and ‘tsukuri’ mean ‘alive’ and ‘structured’, respectively. The term iki-zukuri or ike-zukuri therefore refer to food that has been prepared to give the appearance of being alive. 7 Japan is referred to as ‘mizuho no kuni’ (‘land of a bounteous rice’) in the oldest existent records, the Kojiki (‘Records of Ancient Matters’ compiled in 712 A.D.) and the Nihonshoki (‘Chronicle of Japan’ compiled in 720 A.D.). The Sun Goddess, Amaterasu Ō mikami, appears as the primary spirit among the spirits of the rice paddies since she is said to have invented wet rice farming in Japan. 8 ‘Nare-zushi’, also known as ‘buna-zushi’ or ‘funa-zushi’, is a type of fermented sushi prepared with crucian carp that initially appeared in Shiga Prefecture in Japan and is still produced along the shores of Lake Biwa in the prefecture today (Ishige 2001, 230). 9 ‘Haya-zushi’ does not involve fermentation, but is made by simply adding vinegar to the rice (Ishige 2001, 231). 10 Ramen was first introduced to Japan by Chinese immigrants in the late 19th or early 20th century; kissaten was found in Ueno in 1888 by Eikei Tei, a Yale University– educated man who was attracted to coffee houses in New York City (White 2012); McDonald’s Japan was introduced in 1971 by Den Fujita (Watson 2006). The franchise is so pervasive in Japan that many Japanese children believe it is a Japanese invention (Kelts 2006, 69). 11 Non-Europeans, including Asians, were systematically excluded by the Australian government through the White Australian Policy starting in 1901 as they were seen as dangers to racial purity, democratic institutions and ‘wages fit for white men’ (Castles and Vasta cited in Walsh 2014, 283). Anglo-Celtic people made up 89.7 percent of the population between 1891 and 1947, while the percentage of non-Europeans and Aboriginal people decreased from 6 to 1.7 percent (OMA cited in Walsh 2014, 283).

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2

Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires into the New Exotic

Introduction A restaurant is a business. Meanwhile, meaning-making, sensing and sensemaking can be just as crucial to a restaurant as money-making. And this is certainly true for the Japanese restaurant that operates as an exotic genre— where food and food practices are utilised to signify ‘Japaneseness’ as commodity. In this chapter, I feature five key figures from the fieldwork I conducted in Melbourne, Australia, between 2009 and 2011; Jun, the manager and chef of a well-established casual restaurant called KANARI-YA; Chris, a sake master and the owner of one of Melbourne’s oldest izakaya eateries IZAKAYA ICHI; Keiko, the co-owner of a high-end izakaya restaurant CHIKA; Kanta, the owner of a café/shop in a renovated warehouse MARU; and Ryo, the owner-chef of an award-winning laneway bistro RURŌ TENTEN.1 These restaurateurs all have at least ten years of restaurant industry experience in Australia, despite the differences in their backgrounds and areas of expertise. While each of their businesses, culinary practices and values to communicate with their clientele are distinctive, they are all driven by this cross-cultural desire for new images and representations of Japaneseness that are sensed and made sense in Australia’s foodscapes. As their stories will show, this desire is paradoxical. On the one hand, they want to stay connected to Australia’s mainstream market, which is still predominantly ‘white’ but progressively ‘Asianising’. But on the other hand, they also want to differentiate their business from it. In figuring this contradictory desire, I use the metaphor of ‘the fold’ (discussed in Chapter 1). My application of the fold is largely dependent on Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Gottfried Wihelm Leibniz’s monadic philosophy. The fold metaphor allows us to perceive a two-way movement—both in terms of how the Japanese restaurant brings the outside in and responds to domestic needs and expectations, as well as how it keeps inside its own purview. The fold, as a motif of this movement, also serves as a theoretical prism through which to understand how and why the Japanese restaurant generates the new exotic that is both ‘inside’ (familiar and popular) and ‘outside’ (different and strange). The new exotic, unlike essentialist versions of exoticism, envisions a shift from object to subject DOI: 10.4324/9781003362463-2

38  Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires status (discussed in Chapter 1). The new exotic may reach out to people and touch them by shifting between the inside and the outside, rather than demarketing between these positions. Jun from KANARI-YA: Opening Out, Keeping Inside It was a Saturday night in August 2009. A familiar, cheerful yell of ‘irrashaimase’ from the staff echoed across the high-ceiling space as we entered KANARI-YA, a casual restaurant that has been operating in Melbourne’s inner-city area since 2004. The Japanese casual dining establishment was completely full, with the sound of clattering plates and lively conversation filling the venue. Since the tables on the main floor were all seated, we were ushered to a secret attic-like mezzanine upstairs. We entered the dimly lit six-tatamimat-sized sitting room after following a wait staff up the steep, narrow stairs. We took off our shoes and seated at one of the low tables laid on zabuton floor cushions. Behind us, a couple and a family were eating dinner at different tables, talking in Mandarin and English. This hidden, additional area was designed to provide diners with a bird’s-eye view of the main dining area below. The dining room downstairs is expanded to the outside, with bamboo chairs in the front and a function room that overlooks a small Japanese garden at the back of the restaurant. This casual and fluid atmosphere is further enhanced by their handcrafted interior décor, which includes thick wooden beams framing the space, Japanese folklore ornaments, replicas of the early Shōwa era (from Emperor Shōwa’s enthronement in 1926 to the end of World War Two in 1945) tabloid posters on the walls and colourful paper lanterns hanging above the bar counter, all of which serve to provide a sense of warmth, rusticity and patina—or ‘wabisabi’ on its own terms. Their modest home-style meals provide comfort to customers while also hinting at subtle cross-cultural twists. The dishes, which are meant to be shared, range from sliced tuna sashimi with avocado and cucumber cooked in spicy soy (AU$20) to taro and potato croquette combined with edamame and a red miso sauce (AU$25) and chicken wrapped asparagus, carrot and cream cheese served with miso mustard (AU$29). ‘What we offer isn’t just food, but it’s the whole experience’, commented Jun, the Japanese-born restaurant manager and chef in his 30s. ‘Here is where you see nice, little accidents happen. Everyone can see one another and talk to one another. It’s easy for them to mingle, and also it’s easy for us to interact with them’, he added, pointing at a long communal table in the centre of the dining room downstairs. Jun and his team purposefully designed the space to let ‘nice, little accidents’ happen and get people connected. In fact, openness to the outside through accessible venue and friendly service is their motto. Jun began by describing how they made an effort to be open to what their customers had to say about them: We often ask our customers about their dining experiences and how they enjoy them. We don’t hesitate to ask for feedback because it’s really important for us to know what our customers want and need. We

Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires  39 sometimes hear things we don’t necessarily want to hear, but it’s still good to know what they really think about our restaurant, service and food so that we can continue to improve. Rather than an ethnic enclave, Jun considers KANARI-YA to be a ‘meeting point’ for customers and the staff that is open to the outside world. He elaborated, It’s not like we’re enclosed in some kind of ‘sumi-wake’ (‘an isolated habitat’, ‘segregation’) or shut off from the outside world. That is clearly not the case. But I think it’s more like a meeting point for our customers, and it also allows us to interact with them and get feedback. We try to make this space open and welcoming and ensure that we continue to provide the best possible food and service to our customers. Instead of being enclosed within the ethnic ‘inside’, they incorporate the outside into their operation by engaging with the local community, folding between different points of view, as figured in the movement of the fold. One explicit example of their ‘folding’ gestures is their extensive renovation that took place between 2017 and 2018. KANARI-YA has now transformed its Japanese retro-style interior into a contemporary, minimalist space that reflects current architectural design trends in the local area. Furthermore, the menu has been updated to include exclusively pescatarian and vegetarian meals, as well as a selection of gluten-free alternatives, to meet the growing demand for vegetarian and vegan cuisine both locally and worldwide. In fact, Australia is at the forefront of the transition to plant-based diet while it continues to be one of the world’s greatest per capita meat consumers. Over 2.5 million Australians (about 12 percent of the total population) were eating entirely or almost entirely plant-based diets (Roy Morgan 2019).2 It is in this changing foodscape that KANARI-YA seeks to pivot by continually folding the outside world into its operation. This does not, however, mean that they completely absorb local market demands. Quite the contrary, they respond to the extent to which they can maintain their distinctiveness in the mainstream (white) market. Jun said in the interview that when it came to his own identity, and by extension, his culinary and business philosophy, he sought to find a balance between ‘what to change’ and ‘what not to change’: Despite the fact that I’ve lived here [in Australia] for almost half of my life, I’d say I still have my nihonjin posa [Japanese-like or Japaneseness]. This is not a matter of national pride or anything like that, but even after living here for more than 10 years, I’ve found that my way of thinking is fundamentally Japanese, and that it was formed mostly during my adolescence. I suppose I’m happy with being Japanese and who I am. I’m not interested in becoming like someone else.

40  Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires Jun’s ‘nihonjin posa’ is a part of ‘what not to change’ with which he identifies. This ‘way of thinking’ can then influence how he perceives food and the restaurant business, as well as how he shares his worldview with customers and his team through food and non-food elements characterising the restaurant. Jun explained, From a Japanese perspective, I believe there is a distinct way of appreciating food. Using gokan [the five senses], for example, is definitely one of the most important aspects of understanding the canon of Japanese food culture, and it’s something that we value at our restaurant. But this [value] doesn’t always translate well. It’s actually quite difficult to explain it to, say, O ̄ jı̄ [Aussie], who are used to Japanese food made with thick sauce, like teriyaki. Say, for example, we serve humble Japanese traditional dishes like tōfu no shira ae [a mixed salad of mashed tōfu and boiled vegetables with a slightly sweet-tart sesame sauce]. The dish is very simple, delicate and subtle, but it’s packed with a full of fūmi [flavour] and shokkan [texture]. But some Ō jı ̄ don’t really appreciate the subtlety and say, ‘this is tasteless’. You know, they have different ways of experiencing the world. Jun refers to the clients who ‘don’t really appreciate the subtlety’ as ‘Ō jı’̄ (‘オージー’)—a Japanese term for the Australian slang ‘Aussie’, which means Australians and is used by Japanese speakers to refer to ‘Anglo-Celtic Australians’ narrowly or ‘European Australians’ more broadly. And yet, Jun and his team have kept the dish on the menu to set their restaurant apart from the mainstream eating establishments, where ‘different ways of experiencing the world’ in his words operate. By doing so, they manifest the retention of ‘a Japanese perspective’ because it gives them ‘insider’ status and thus authority within the restaurant. In other words, it is through distancing practice that they claim authenticity, authority and agency to stand out in the mainstream market. And here is where the paradoxical movement of connection and separation becomes apparent. While KANARI-YA consciously opens itself out, it is also concerned with a certain interiority that it contains. Jun said in the interview, ‘It is our conscious effort to interact with our customers and keep open to their feedback and critique, but it is also a way to check and see if iroiro [all sorts of things] are kept in balance’. The intended ambiguity alluded to by the word ‘iroiro’ implies that there is something that needs to be kept inside and controlled, while there is fluidity in the operation of the restaurant. In this way, KANARI-YA is able to respond to some of the mainstream market’s needs and demands, while maintaining a certain level of ‘Japaneseness’ that gives them authority, subjectivity and potentially empowerment inside the space. It is this paradoxical operation of KANARI-YA—where the outside is folded into the inside, but the inside

Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires  41 retains its interiority—that can be figured by the movement of the fold. What keeps the restaurant ‘in balance’ is the inside-outside boundary—the boundary between a ‘Japanese’ way of sensing and making sense of food through ‘gokan’ and an ‘Ō jı’̄ way of consuming what is commonly marketed as ‘Japanese food’, for example. Note, however, that the categories of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ do not exist in a fixed, self-contained state. Instead, as figured in the fold metaphor, they imply both fluidity and equilibrium due to the reciprocal action of opposing forces, permitting them to be somewhat ‘kept in balance’. Chris from IZAYAKAYA ICHI: Folding ‘Whiteness’ into Japanese Gastro-Cool On a summer day in January 2009, I met Chris at a café a few blocks from his restaurant, IZAKAYA ICHI, one of Melbourne’s oldest izakaya-style restaurants located in its Central Business District (CBD). ‘This is my life’, the European Australian restaurateur (originally from Perth, Western Australia) in his 30s told me in the interview. ‘I love Japanese food. It’s a hobby. I’m lucky to have a hobby that is also my job. My friends say that it’s not fair that I get to go to Japan and eat and drink and it’s work.’ Some restaurateurs may only see the Japanese restaurant as a ‘lucrative business’, nothing more. Chris certainly sees much more in this exotic genre. In fact, the Japanese restaurant came about as a result of him connecting dots. Since he was a schoolkid and first encountered ‘Japan’ through media, its culture has been all around him. One of his favourite pastimes was to watch Japanese anime ‘Kimba the White Lion’ on TV after school, for example.3 He then fell in love with Japanese technology. ‘I’m interested in technology, like otaku computer games. I love gadgets and technologies, lots of new technologies and great gadgets coming from Japan’, he said. Then when he first landed at Narita Airport in 1996, he recalled, ‘After that, that was it. When I got off from an airplane in Japan, “I’m home”’. Chris returned to Melbourne after spending some time in Japan and decided to establish his own business. I asked him about his first business, BAR POP, the first Australian bar to provide Japanese culture and sake in Melbourne, according to Chris, which opened in the CBD in 2000. He answered, ‘I thought that having Japanese things would be perfect. I imported everything I was interested in. I was interested in anime, manga and technologies, so I opened up a bar. We used to call it a “Japanese pop culture bar”. We used to show anime at the bar’. The trajectory of Chris’ restaurant business parallels the narrative of Japan’s ‘gross national cool’ emerging from the expanded international dissemination of Japanese popular cultural products, most notably anime and manga, during the 1990s (see Chapter 1). In the interview, Chris elaborated on how popular ‘Japanese things’ became for their new, ‘cool’ images in Australia’s local market:

42  Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires That was very early on, I guess, because in the early 2000 there was like ‘Japan was very cool’. That was when anime and manga were coming out of Japan, been absorbed by the U.S. and Europe and Australia. Before the mid-2000, things like anime were very underground. Big things like Akira and that sort of things, everybody knew but that was it.4 Late 90s you could get that kind of stuff, but it was very hard. Now you walk into any Borders [a U.S.-based bookstore, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia] and Target anywhere, the whole shelves are anime in a bookshop. So the explosion took off in the early 2000 and mid-2000. Increased interest in Japanese culture is not just in pop culture, but in dining and restaurants. So maybe in the 80s and 90s, Japanese restaurants were just sort of Japanese-run and they are small family operations. But then Japanese cuisine has become cool and sushi explosion, where all of sudden throughout the late 80s and early 90s, [you saw] a sushi bar every corner in every city. That was pushed by famous restaurant operations like Yo!Sushi in London. Those corporate operations took a Japanese food concept and made it mainstream. Chris’ bar incorporated the novelty of Japanese sake and drinking culture into the mundanity of Australian pub culture, making its ‘foreignness’ more approachable. He achieved this by employing images of what I have called Japanese gastro-cool to generate meaning that is both familiar and strange (see Chapter 1). Here he located Japan’s gastro-assets (sake culture, in this case) within Japan’s gross national cool (anime and manga, in this case). In this process of meaning-making, Chris extended the scope of the Japanese restaurant from ‘small family operations’ to encompass the outlet of globally marketable Japanese gastro-cool. It is worth mentioning that his meaning-making process spans beyond semantic investigations. His decades-long dedication to sake culture is the best demonstration of this. Chris earned an Advanced Sake Professional Certificate from the Sake Education Council, a Tokyo-based non-profit educational organisation, after completing their professional sake courses. By visiting saka-gura (sake breweries) in regions known for their sake production, such as the Prefectures of Shimane, Tottori and Niigata, he gained knowledge of the materials, brewing techniques and other fundamentals of sake production (see Figure 2.1). Chris frequently visits Japan to deepen his understanding of sake and, more lately, other Japanese alcoholic beverages, such as shōchū (a traditional Japanese hard liquor, distilled spirits made from grains and vegetables, such as sweet potato, barley and sugar cane). Through his tactile experience of learning the grammar of sake, Chris folds between the inside (e.g., Australia) and the outside (e.g., Japan), and the virtual (e.g., anime and computer games) and the actual (e.g., the bar space and the sake certifications). The bar was a hit, but Chris wanted to take it even further. In 2003, he acquired the management licence for IZAKAYA ICHI, which has been in business since 1989. Chris mentioned in the interview that the izakaya—literally

Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires  43

Figure 2.1 Saka-gura. Photograph by artist Gyro from iStock.com. Image source URL: https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/fushimi-sake-brewery-gm844853 472-140042371?phrase=sake%20brewery

meaning ‘a shop for people to stay with sake’—is an effective business model that is still generally seen as ‘novel’, yet not entirely ‘foreign’ to diners in Melbourne. He made the following observation: Japanese izakaya-style cuisine is a very accessible style of dining. It’s like Spanish tapas, you know. You can eat lots of small things and you can share and, it’s very communal. It’s a niche market, but I think it’s getting bigger. Four or five izakaya-style restaurants opened up rapidly over the last year or two [in Melbourne]. Definitely, it’s getting popular. And Chris was right—since then there have been more restaurants with an izakaya-inspired menu spread out around Melbourne’s CBD and inner suburbs. The foodscapes of Melbourne have been updated by this traditional Japanese dining/drinking style, which evolved from casual eateries once called ‘ni-uriya’ in the Edo era (1603–1867),5 as an emerging exotic genre. ‘Until recently the notion of the izakaya was pretty much exclusively known to Japanophiles. Now, it’s a mini-trend taking Melbourne by storm’, Larissa Dubecki wrote in the same year I interviewed Chris for a restaurant review article for Australia’s leading newspaper, The Age (2009). In fact, the izakaya boom has taken up nationwide. This trend is ongoing in Australia, and there is good reason for this. The izakaya fills a gap in Australian drinking culture by presenting something that did not exist before. The

44  Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires izakaya, unlike traditional Australian pubs, bars, taverns and nightclubs, does not distinguish between drinking and dining. Instead, there is a nearly seamless integration of the two, which is indeed the keystone of the izakaya. In the interview, Chris mentioned the izakaya’s distinctive role in Australia’s culinary scene, contrasting the nation’s traditional pub culture, which involves drinking as well as other ‘pub’ activities, including gambling games. In the interview, Chris explained that the izakaya culture in Japan often places a higher emphasis on dining than drinking, resulting in a less aggressive drinking environment compared to Australian pubs. He also pointed out that this difference could be attributed to how people’s behaviour is influenced by their environment and society’s perception of space in Japan and Australia. He noted that Japan’s higher population density (approximately 340 people per square kilometre) compared to that of Australia (3.3 people per square kilometre) may contribute to shaping people’s sense of space and how they behave to function within the limited space (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2021; Statistics Bureau of Japan 2021). Chris bases this on his personal experiences staying in Japan, describing: Initially, in Japan I was overwhelmed by their sense of space, even though there are 129 million people [back then], so many people live in such a small place, but generally interactions with people are very respectful. Different from Australia. If you go to a pub or bar here, you know, this is very generic, if you go to a local pub or bar on Friday nights [in Australia], there is a bit of aggression there and fight or something, but if you are in Japan, [there is] nothing like that. I mean obviously there is a dark side to Japan. I’m not ignorant of that and occasionally I’ve seen it, but generally the way people treat each other is more respectful. The izakaya is a one-of-a-kind establishment. And yet, it makes itself somehow ‘accessible’ in Australia’s foodscapes. This is partly because, according to Chris and other izakaya owners I spoke with, the izakaya has a distinctive dining style that is akin to Spanish tapas, or perhaps more closely ‘mezze’, a style of eating that is popular in the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, the Balkans, Western Asia and the Middle East, from which many immigrants in Australia come.6 Whereas Spanish tapas are typically served as an appetizer, mezze is a mix of small plates that can be shared among a group of diners and can form a complete meal. Similar principles apply when dining in an izakaya. The izakaya invites diners to share dishes with a group of people, as opposed to a course dinner, where one dish is served at a time in line with a predefined meal order (usually an entrée, a main and a dessert). Small plates may be served all at once or as needed throughout a meal. Diners can also reorder dishes if desired (the eating style as ‘the logic of the izakaya’ will be further discussed in the following section). This is partly why, izakaya owners I spoke to said, many people who are familiar with tapas, mezze or similar styles of eating can relate to the izakaya style. Another factor in the izakaya’s popularity in Australia is the way that it incorporates food and wine pairings into its operations.

Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires  45 Australia, which is one of the world’s largest wine exporters, embraces food and wine pairings as a marketing strategy (Australian Trade and Investment Commission 2022). Local izakaya-style restaurants often utilise this business strategy as well, featuring locally produced wines in addition to sake and other Japanese liquors, to offer unique pairing choices that appeal to local customers. Unpacking the izakaya boom in Australia through Chris’ eyes also reveals that there is a fold between Japaneseness and whiteness, and that whiteness manifests itself in a variety of ways. Local wines, for example, serve as markers of whiteness, which are then folded into the izakaya dining and drinking model, producing the new exotic that is both ‘familiar’ and ‘novel’ simultaneously. Furthermore, Chris’ whiteness, as a European Australian, adds complexity to this cross-cultural practice. By incorporating his cross-cultural desire for Japanese gastro-cool into the mainstream (white) market, Chris enables his establishments to be responsive to domestic needs and demands while maintaining their exoticness through folding. This process also causes a change in perspective, moving from the inside to the outside, the self to the other and the virtual to the actual, allowing him to continually assess his relationship to the new exotic. And most notably, Chris’ engagement in this folding practice fundamentally differs from an essentialist portrayal of the Japanese other because his commitment to the Japanese restaurant industry lies in understanding, not essentialising, the Japanese other. Keiko from CHIKA: Moving from the ‘Virtual’ to the ‘Actual’ On a late summer day in February 2010, Keiko and I sat at a café above her co-owned urban-style basement izakaya in Melbourne’s CBD. This Japanese-born restaurateur in her 50s exuded frankness and tenacity, which was contrasted by her anxiously caressing her large earrings at times during our conversation. Born in the late 1950s in Japan, Keiko was a member of the ‘shinjin-rui’ (‘new breed’) generation who spent their adolescence in the prosperous post-war Japan of the late 1970s.7 The shinjin-rui is often considered the generation that represents the side-effects of affluence—an insatiable search for an alternative lifestyle and freedom, ‘not here, but elsewhere’ (‘kokodewa nai dokoka’). Keiko arrived in Australia in 1983 as a government-funded art student whose work critiqued consumerist post-war Japan. When she was not working on her artistic projects, she was working part-time as wait staff in a teppanyaki restaurant in Melbourne. ‘I ended up staying in the restaurant business here [in Melbourne]’, she responded when I asked her what happened after working in the teppanyaki restaurant. ‘It’s been almost two decades now. Well, it’s a lot longer than I expected [laugh]’. After working in a number of other Japanese restaurants, Keiko and her business partners—Adrian, a European Australian restaurateur, and Masa, the former Japanese-born assistant manager of Adrian’s Japanese-influenced high-end restaurant SPIRAL—decided to open a Tokyo-style izakaya dining space, CHIKA, in the CBD in 2009. In my interview, she described,

46  Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires This is something we’ve been working on for five to six years. Adrian and I were bouncing ideas off each other, and then Masa came in because he was working at Adrian’s restaurant at that time. There were a few of hiccups along the way, but we kept going and tried to work it out. We knew exactly what we wanted to do, something Japanese but definitely contemporary, something that people here [in Melbourne] had never seen before. What drove them is their desire to update old images and representations of the Japanese restaurant. Keiko said, After all, anywhere you go [in Melbourne], you’ll find traditional Japan. I mean, that’s fine, but we also wanted to do something new, something different from what most people would often think of as a ‘Japanese restaurant’. We felt that the food culture in Japan had come so far, but the restaurants here in Melbourne weren’t keeping up with it. Enough with the sushi and teriyaki chicken. It was time to showcase a newer Japan and what was actually happening over there. Keiko and her business partners were ready to break away from popular clichés, such as ‘sushi’ and ‘teriyaki chicken’, and challenge the perception of the Japanese restaurant as being perpetually stuck in the ‘past’. Actualising this vision is therefore a part of their meaning-making process, through which they produce the images of contemporaneity that could address the time-space lag between ‘here’ and ‘there’. In this meaning-making process, there was a book titled Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook, written by Mark Robinson that she told me that they were inspired by: Then we came across a book called Izakaya written by an Australian guy living in Tokyo. It tells the stories of all those different kinds of izakaya places in Tokyo, but each has its own distinct flair in terms of ambience and business focus. […] The book was inspiring. It helped us figure out how to turn our ideas into something more concrete. In Izakaya, the Tokyo-born, Sydney-raised Japanese Australian writer explores the izakaya in Tokyo via shifting ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ views. The izakaya, in his iteration, is a ‘cultural entity’ that has historically been overlooked in Japan (Jeffs 2008). Eight izakaya eateries are featured in the book, ranging from a century-old downtown izakaya to a new addition to stand-up ‘tachi-nomi’ izakaya. Shinsuke in Yushima is one of them, located within a stroll from Ueno Park, Tokyo’s most famous cherry-blossom viewing place. Since 1924, four generations of the Yabe family have owned Shinsuke, and before that, seven generations of sake retailers (Shinsuke n.d.). The well-used, tasteful façade and interior, accented by vertical wooden slats in the windows and a sake brewery’s signature sugi-dama (Figure 2.2) cider ball at the front

Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires  47

Figure 2.2  Sugi-dama. Photograph by artist TokioMarineLife from iStock.com. Image source URL: https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/sugidama-a-ballmade-from-sprigs-of-japanese-cedar-hung-on-the-eaves-of-sake-brewery -gm1226873813-361622721

entrance, testify to its long-standing presence.8 Shinsuke is certainly an izakaya to ‘revere’ rather than ‘carouse’ in, as Robinson puts it (Jeffs 2008). Nomiya Buchi, on the other hand, is a modern-style tachi-nomi izakaya. Located in Shinagawa Ward, south of the central Tokyo and adjacent to Tokyo Bay, Nomiya Buchi’s contemporary take on tachi-nomi is expressed, for example, by the eclectic menu including ‘Char-grilled Jamon Iberico’ and ‘Sea Urchin sauteed with Water Cress’ (Buchi n.d.; Robinson 2008). It is this versatility in style and application that Robinson’s book highlights as part of the izayaka’s appeal. The book captivated Keiko’s and her business partners’ interest, but it did not end there. They, in fact, visited some of the izakaya featured in the book to experience them first-hand. Keiko recalled, We made a trip to Tokyo to visit those places featured in the book and see what they’re like. The trip was a bit crazy. We were on a tight schedule, so we hopped from one izakaya to the next each night, trying different foods and drinks, talking to various people and getting some ideas for other places to visit. But it was great fun, and we’ve got lots of great ideas from the trip. The whole experience became really useful when we designed the space, the interior, the menu and so on.

48  Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires From the book to everyday izakaya affairs in Tokyo to the envision of a newer Japanese restaurant in Melbourne, the formation of CHIKA is therefore characterised by this movement that folds between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘actual’. The fold also characterises how CHIKA operates as an exotic genre. The establishment is predicated on a paradoxical structure that allows for both closeness to and distance from the izakaya in contemporary Japan. To demonstrate this, here are some field notes from my first visit to the restaurant in October 2009, shortly after its grand opening: In a Melbourne laneway fashion, CHIKA is located in the basement led by an unmarked set of stairs off a main street in Melbourne’s CBD. This newly launched izakaya, designed by Adrian’s father’s Melbourne-based architecture firm, is infused with an urban atmosphere, carefully integrating Japanese gastro-cool into Melbourne industrial minimal-goth aesthetics. The tunnel-like dining room’s concrete walls, metal ceiling beams and black marble-topped tables that are reflected in a three-metrehigh mirror all add to the thrilling atmosphere of the subterranean. To the beat of funk, reggae and rock music, wait staff wear black uniforms, red sneakers, and colourful headscarves, busily but unobtrusively. After we were seated, a Japanese-speaking wait staff perhaps in her 20s served us chilled oshibori hand towels, water in a reusable sake glass and a menu written in both English and Japanese on scrolls of washi paper. Their regular evening menu ranges in price from smaller (AU$4– $8) to larger (AU$14–$33) dishes. The beverage menu features a variety of sake, sōhchū, six imported Japanese beer labels and locally produced wines (ranging in price from AU$25 for a 400ml bottle to AU$220 for a 720ml bottle of the most expensive brand), all of which come with tasting notes. Their open kitchen behind the bar counter serves as a central pit and creates experimental izakaya-inspired dishes, such as small rectangular pieces of tuna tataki served with soy sauce dressing and wasabi mayonnaise, Queensland’s Hervey Bay scallops with lemon soy and panko breadcrumbs and even salted grilled kingfish heads, a dish commonly found in izakayas in Japan but still uncommon in Melbourne. They also offer a wide variety of vegetarian options, such as lightly steamed crunchy seasonal vegetables with a dipping sauce made of a yuzu citrus chilli koshō spice and sour cream, sesame stir-fried Japanese eringi mushrooms and deep-fried sweet corn fritters with a pinch of green tea sea salt. CHIKA transforms the traditional izakaya, which is a lowcost, casual drinking establishment, into an urban, upscale dining bar that appeals to professional middle- or upper middle-class customers, as demonstrated by their relatively high-priced foods and drinks, elaborate food presentation and urban interior design. As detailed earlier, CHIKA folds the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’—through the local architectural design, Japanese-style wait service, the use of local produce in

Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires  49 izakaya-inspired dishes and the purposeful gesture of utilising signs of Japan’s contemporaneity—and all of these elements form and inform Japanese gastro-cool. When I had lunch at the restaurant other times, it was packed with well-dressed office workers, most of whom were European Australians. While their lunch specials are more reasonably priced (for example, AU$18 for a lunch set), dining at CHIKA is by no means an everyday affair, but clearly a classed experience, as well as a cross-cultural one. In exchange for the prices, customers may expect cosmopolitan pleasures coupled with Japanese gastro-cool (dining out in the Japanese restaurant as a classed consumption practice will be expanded in Chapters 3 and 4). To satisfy this expectation, CHIKA folds Japanese gastro-cool characterising newer images of Japaneseness into whiteness that defines a symbolically and empirically dominant part of Australia’s foodscapes. The European Australian co-owner, his father’s designer architecture, socioeconomically privileged white clientele and some local products are all factors that contribute to making the exotic genre more socially palatable in the case of CHIKA. Most importantly, this is not an easy fusion. Their deliberate use of a ‘different dining logic’, for example, exemplifies how CHIKA separates itself as an exotic genre from the predominantly ‘white’ locality while remaining rooted in it. In the interview, Keiko stated, ‘There is a rojikku [logic] underlying how the izakaya works. It’s a way to learn about and enjoy this type of dining’. This logic, she believes, lies at the core of the izakaya, which is embraced by ‘sharing dishes’ and ‘repeating orders’. ‘When it comes to dining styles, people here [in Melbourne] still have, ah, sort of like, and “entrée-first-then-main” mentality. But the izakaya operates differently. In an izakaya, you share dishes. You order three or four dishes at a time, and then repeat the process until you’re satisfied’, she explained. In his book Izakaya, Robinson discusses the logic of the izakaya, in which diners are supposed to ‘order small-dish delicacies throughout the evening, perhaps in the beginning sharing just a couple of items. The menu is like a road map and the diners are at the wheel, calling out orders as the mood takes them’ (2008, 8). Whereas course meals set temporal and spatial grids that allocate an individual diner in a fixed location, the ‘tablescape’ of the izakaya can become messy, as people, foods, drinks, utensils and other elements composing the tablescape constantly cross over through the practice of sharing dishes and repeating orders. As described in Keiko’s comments earlier, the izakaya is structured through this ‘play’ of spontaneity, rather than through a set course to follow: it is throughout the flow of events that the diner can act and respond spontaneously as the player of the play. Their customers, who at the time of the interview were predominantly middle- to upper middle-class Anglo-Celtic and European Australians, may have found the izakaya dining system and the different logic that governs CHIKA’s operation to be too ‘foreign’. Keiko described, Kocchino hito [people here] sometimes don’t get it. I’m like, ‘Guys, you don’t need to order everything in the first place’. But they often do! When

50  Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires they get to the table, they order their meals and that’s it. That’s what they normally do. After that, they would put the menu aside and eave it there until we came to get it. But the izakaya has a different logic. Things are more spontaneous there. I would let them order anything they want, but I would also say, ‘I’ll bring this and this first, and we’ll see how it goes’. Keiko’s comments highlight the distinction between the ‘inside’ (the ‘rojikku’ of the izakaya) and the ‘outside’ (the ‘kocchino hito’ in Australia). This suggests that the different logic may not be readily understood by some people in Australia. However, as the following remarks demonstrate, ‘sense-making’ is not necessarily dependent on prior knowledge alone. Keiko used the word ‘kankaku’, which loosely translates to ‘feeling’ or ‘sense(s)’, to suggest that people can comprehend the izakaya experience through their senses: You eat, drink, share, communicate and have a good time in an izakaya, so a lot of different things can happen at the same time. People will get it if they experience it by doing. This is the kankaku that you need to use to understand how the izakaya works. And this is the core message that we’re trying to get across. The term ‘kankaku’ used in her comments describes a necessary foundation for grasping a putative ‘essence’—or, as she puts it, ‘the core of the izakaya’. Within the logic of the izakaya, however, the essence is not completely divorced from the senses. It can instead be experienced through the senses, thereby allowing for a transition from essence to representation to embodiment. Kanta from MARU: ‘From Head to Hands and Heart’ In the early 2000s, alongside the izakaya boom, a new type of Japanese restaurant emerged in the local culinary scene: Japanese-style ‘soul food’ cafés. ‘Soul food sounds like a cliché but […] [i]n the Japanese context, soul food means simple but artful dishes that will cure whatever ails you, either physically or existentially’, food critic Larissa Dubecki wrote in a 2011 restaurant review article in The Age (Dubecki 2011). MARU is one of the forerunners of this movement. Since opening its doors on a backstreet of a laid-back inner neighbourhood in Western Melbourne in 2008, the café has operated as an alternative to Melbourne’s long-established café culture, as well as the Japanese restaurant industry (Frost et al. 2010). Run by a Japanese couple, Kanta and Tamaki, in their 30s, the establishment embraces the ethos of a ‘less-is-more’ lifestyle, veering away from popular images associated with the heyday of Japan in the 1980s and early 1990s—Japan the ‘aggressive’, ‘high-tech’ and ‘materialist’. In October 2009, when I interviewed Kanta at MARU, he commented,

Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires  51 This space is dedicated to reflecting aspects of what we love and what we care about. There are three key themes that underpin this café, which are style, food and living. We understand each theme in relation to our body and soul. This comes down to our concept—head, hands and heart. We use it to propose that what makes it possible to live a fulfiling life is really about using these parts of our body to their fullest potential. That is, we can feel, touch and treasure small, beautiful things in our everyday life by using not only our head but also our hands and heart. The café co-owner, who is a former architect from Tokyo, transformed a 250-square-metre warehouse into a tasteful, light-filled café/shop space that caters to the local communities, including residents, university students and other shop workers. This refurbished spacious warehouse located in a quiet residential/industrial area combines two parts into one, folding Japaneseness into whiteness. The café dining area is in the front, where four MARU team members—Kanta, Tamaki, a Japanese chef and a European Australian wait staff—walk in and out of the open kitchen, linking (or compartmentalising) the entire space. Different styles of furniture—new, old, wooden, metal and plastic tables and chairs—were sourced from a mix of local second-hand stores and Danish contacts, allowing for a dynamic interplay between different timespace boundaries. Instead of sushi and tempura, MARU serves simple, unpretentious, everyday Japanese dishes. They include ‘Home-style Japanese Curry’, ‘Chicken Mince Soboro’, and ‘Miso Baked Egg’ on the menu, as well as Western staples, such as sandwiches, but with their own twist. For health-conscious customers, they provide a traditional Japanese breakfast on Saturday mornings. MARU’s breakfast plate is packed with high-quality protein, mineral-rich small dishes, including grilled salmon and tamago-yaki egg rolls, brown rice and Tamaki’s grandmother’s vegetable-filled miso soup. A dish of natto fermented soybeans, umeboshi sour plum, nori seaweed and tsukemono pickled seasonal vegetables can be added to the regular set for a more complete taste of the home-style Japanese breakfast. On the countertop are homemade matcha muffins embedded with azuki red bean paste, which can be accompanied with hōji-cha roasted tea brewed in a Japanese aluminium one-person teapot, if requested. A design shop in the back section sells handcrafted goods imported from Japan and elsewhere, such as multi-purpose tenugui fabric, minimalist kitchenware and ceramics and handblown paper-thin ‘usu-hari’ beer glasses, which are elaborately decorated with minimalist Danish furniture and traditional colourful kami-fūsen paper balloons. MARU is well-received in local culinary and cultural communities, with its less-is-more ethos that is somewhat in line with some of Melbourne’s idiosyncrasy. However, it is not entirely absorbed into it—the same ethos also sustains its ‘foreignness’ in the mainstream (white) market. MARU does this by presenting carefully selected food and non-food items that are both functional and fashionable in the form of Japanese gastro-cool. Here again lies the practice of

52  Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires folding that incorporate multiple layers of whiteness into its operation, feeding their cross-cultural desire. First of all, MARU folds Japanese-style cafés originating in ‘kissaten’ coffeehouses. The first kissaten Kahı ̄-chakan was started in Tokyo, Ueno in 1888 by Tsurukichi Nishimura, also known as Eikei Tei, after returning from Yale University (White 2012, 7–9).9 The kissaten, which is licenced to sell food, offers meals in addition to coffee. The traditional foods of kissanten are ‘yōshoku’ meals, which are cuisines with Western roots that are distinct from Japanese ‘washoku’ culinary heritage but have been adapted to the Japanese palate. One such yōshoku offered at a kissaten is ‘karē raisu’ (‘curry rice’), which was the Imperial Japanese Navy’s rendition of curry imported to Japan through the Royal Navy of the British Empire’s Anglo-Indian officers in the late 19th century (Bell 2016).10 MARU takes some of the kissaten elements and integrates them into other forms of whiteness in the transnational context—from the European Australian wait staff and customers to Danish furnishings. In this way, MARU operates on this imbricated whiteness in many forms that are collapsed into the new exotic. Note that, like the case of Chris at IZAKAYA ICHI, MARU’s whiteness is not a single, unified characteristic. Instead, it weaves together diverse timespace contexts to produce different ‘white’ racial-cultural identities and representations. And equally important, this formation of whiteness does not privilege one kind of whiteness over another. Nor does it suggest ‘reverse exoticism’ (that is, whiteness exoticised by non-whiteness). Instead of insisting on other’s (or one’s own) uniqueness, it provides a site for a discursive exchange of meaning (and by extension folding and incorporation) through which to disrupt fixed forms of representation that materialise a certain ‘essence’. In short, MARU’s folding practices do not belong only to a single point of view—a colonialist perspective or a self-Orientalist perspective. Rather, they invite an alternative frame of view that can displace ‘self’ and ‘other’ binaries, suggesting the emergence of the new exotic. MARU uses both food and non-food resources from various time-space contexts as part of their meaning-making, sensing and sense-making of the new exotic. They communicate a less-is-more lifestyle with their customers by using cross-cultural channels that are accessible to both those who are interested in Japanese culture and those who are interested in minimalist, modest living. ‘Instead of showcasing just one aspect of one culture’, Kanta said in the interview, ‘we wanted to highlight multiple elements that reflect a specific lifestyle that we value, so that we can relate to different individuals with different interests’. This is the parallel operation of customer diversification and brand building (i.e., Japanese gastro-cool) that defines MARU, resulting in paradoxical spatial and temporal effects that are both close and distanced simultaneously. As part of the process of folding, MARU takes aesthetics very seriously. In the practice of signification, they position a ‘form’—that is, what a less-is-more lifestyle looks like—alongside, rather than in opposition to, the ‘content’—that is, what it is and does. Kanta explained,

Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires  53 All of these items were chosen because of their high quality. They can endure the demands of everyday use. They also look nice, so aesthetics is important because it helps us express what we want to express. It’s all about materiality, functionality and aesthetics, and how we can use them to make our everyday life slightly more joyful and sophisticated. Kanta’s comments suggest that a certain kind of aesthetics works as a ‘form’ (or exteriority) that can deliver the ‘content’ (or interiority) that they want to express. That said, there is no clear hierarchy between the categories of form and content in their product selection and presentation. Elizabeth Grosz argues in her examination of Deleuze’s view of the inside and the outside, ‘[I]t is not as if the outside or the exterior must remain eternally counterposed to an interiority that it contains: rather, the outside is the transmutability of the inside. […] The outside is a virtual condition of the inside. […] The virtual is immanent in the real’ (1995, 131–2; emphasis in original). At MARU, exteriority is folded into interiority as customers observe, feel, touch, consume and live with the establishment’s products. In other words, MARU’s operation is made possible by the senses and hence through embodiment. ‘We offer our products in such a way that people can use their senses to enjoy them’, Kanta said. ‘They can buy them, take them home and enjoy them there’. Once again, MARU’s mantra—‘from head to hands and heart’—resonates here. It is through this movement from cognitive experience to bodily and emotional experience that exteriority meets interiority, and as a result, the new exotic takes shape. Ryo from RURŌ TENTEN: Making Non-sense of Japaneseness The previous examples demonstrate how the Japanese restaurant can be recognised and recognisable as such while also being somehow in synch with the trends and norms of the local market. The last section examines what challenges the exotic genre needs to overcome in the process of meaning-making, sensing and sense-making. In doing so, it illustrates the story of Ryo, the Japanese-born owner-chef of Melbourne’s CBD laneway bistro RURŌ TENTEN. Ryo is a professionally trained chef in kyō kaiseki—Japan’s long-established artistic multi-course kaiseki haute cuisine developed exclusively in Kyoto and often referred to as the pinnacle of Japan’s cuisines. Since the age of 18, he has worked in various types of eating establishments in and outside of Japan, ranging from an exclusive kyō kaiseki dining room in Kyoto to an upscale Japanese restaurant with over 100 seats in Melbourne. With this eclectic range of culinary career experiences and expertise, he finally found a place for culinary creation to pursue his decade-long ambition—sōsaku ryōri, or an experimental cuisine—that is, his tapas bistro RURŌ TENTEN in Melbourne. Ryo started working as an apprentice at a ryōtei fine dining establishment in Kyoto, where diners are served traditional Japanese food in private tatami-floored rooms. At the age of 23, he completed his apprenticeship and took

54  Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires over one of his master’s renowned kaiseki restaurants in Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest port city with a mix of international influences. In the interview, he said that the cultural and gastronomical diversity in Yokohama was so refreshing that he decided to pull himself out of the field of kyō kaiseki and pursue sōsaku ryōri. ‘For many who have been trained in kyō kaiseki for many years, having your own kyō kaiseki restaurant is the ultimate goal and status’, he said. ‘But after living in Yokohama, I realised that that’s not really what I wanted to do with my life’. Since then, he has pushed boundaries to broaden his culinary repertoire. He recalled, ‘It was incredibly exciting. I was just intrigued by the creative process of experimenting with different materials that you don’t usually use in kyō kaiseki. So I started thinking, how I could do this as a job so that I could sustain my family’. The opportunity arose not long after. He was given the offer to run a Western-style tavern in Yokohama, where he was permitted to experiment and offer sōsaku ryōri to the full extent. This experience helped him take another opportunity to run his own restaurant in Melbourne, a new laboratory for his cross-cultural culinary exploration and experiment. At RURŌ TENTEN, Ryo criss-crosses different national culinary borders— from Japanese to Spanish and from Korean to Italian. His menu is ambitiously eclectic in style, with dishes that are difficult to pin down, such as ‘Mentaiko Rice Noodles’ (rice noodles with spicy cod roe butter), ‘Peri Peri Prawns’ (prawns sizzling with a garlic, chilli and parsley oil sauce in a handled terracotta, served with thick pieces of bread), ‘Korean-Style Beef Tartar’ (minced raw beef topped with quail raw egg served with a homemade tartar sauce), ‘Kingfish Carpaccio Tataki’ (seared raw kingfish slices with a soy dressing and sesame oil, topped with shredded crunchy daikon horseradish) and ‘Soft Shell Crab’ (four segments of a buttered soft shell crab sitting atop butter lettuce with sour cream mayonnaise, baby capers and yuzu). As a result, Ryo’s recipes allow diners to explore different sensory experiences. And they stir diners’ senses— smell, sight, sound, touch and taste—often all at once. Because his cooking disrupts normative ‘West-East’ and ‘high-low’ distinctions on one plate, it also raises this existential question: is the restaurant ‘Japanese’ or not? Or does it really matter? In the interview, Ryo told me that his restaurant confuses some because it has no clear sign of where it belongs literally and symbolically. ‘You know, we’ve got pizzas on the one side and fries on the other, but no teriyaki chicken or sushi’, Ryo said. ‘All our staff is Japanese, but it doesn’t really seem to be helping customers figure out what kind of restaurant we are and what we have to offer’. He reflected on the restaurant’s early days in the interview: When we started out, even though we knew exactly what we were doing, it was difficult to explain our concept to customers. First of all, we didn’t label ourselves as a ‘Japanese restaurant’, although our restaurant name is actually Japanese so I guess it doesn’t really make sense to many people

Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires  55 anyway. We didn’t have any visible signs outside. Some people would often look through the windows to see what we were like. Others would ask us to see the menu and ask for explanations. But, because we didn’t serve sushi or tempura and struggled to clearly articulate our concept, some customers got confused and walked away. We had this kind of response all the time, which led us to question our identity and how we could better make sense of ourselves. The consequences of making no sense to the public presented themselves as financial challenges. Ryo stated that when he started RURŌ TENTEN, he ‘had a lot of trouble’ since its menu ‘didn’t quite fit in’ with the mainstream expectations of popular representations of Japanese cuisines, such as ‘sushi’ and ‘tempura’. While the restaurant allowed him to pursue his culinary dream, it also presented a categorical problem that he had to deal with. ‘It was incredibly challenging at first, especially for the first six months’, Ryo recalled. ‘There were times when we didn’t have any customers. We were in debt. It was hell’. The restaurant received very little publicity, also due to its inconspicuous location on a small pathway that was easily overlooked, according to Ryo. However, this was a purposeful decision. ‘I didn’t want to put out ads’, he explained. ‘Because I felt that kuchi-komi [a word of mouth] would be the most effective way for our restaurant to become known and judged’. Note that this was before Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms became popular as word-of-mouth marketing tools. Yet, Ryo believed in the power of kuchi-komi and personal recommendations, which he had long counted on when working as a kyō kaiseki chef at ryōtei fine dining establishments in Japan. In fact, the kuchi-komi is a well-known business approach in Kyoto, the birthplace of kyō kaiseki: many shops and restaurants continue to use the century-old ‘ichigen-san okotowari’ (‘no referral, no entry’) system, in which first-time customers are admitted only if a frequent diner vouches for them. The tradition has been retained in ‘ocha-ya’ banquet locations such as upmarket ryōtei restaurants in Hanamachi neighbourhoods, where maiko apprentices and fully-fledged geiko geisha reside and work. This long-standing, well-accepted custom, which is typical in the upscale restaurant industry in Kyoto, serves as the foundation for Ryo’s belief in kuchi-komi. Ryo had no doubts about the power of kuchi-komi that he had benefited from for many years in Japan, even though he had a rocky start when he launched RURŌ TENTEN. Ryo’s reliance on kuchi-komi may be interpreted as overconfidence deriving only from his prior knowledge or naiveté due to his lack of experience in the overseas restaurant sector. Nevertheless, he persisted in using this strategy and was confident that his extensive culinary repertoire and experience, which he had amassed over two decades, would eventually attract more customers to his restaurant. Ryo recalled,

56  Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires Although we faced difficult times, I had a strong intuition that we would overcome them. I believed that once people tasted our food, everything would fall into place. Also I didn’t want to open the restaurant on the main street, which is why I was attracted to this laneway nook. Ryo believed that the most important aspect was for people to experience the food, which is why he encouraged them to taste it before making any judgments or attempting to categorise it. However, in order to entice people to try his food, his restaurant needed to be ‘discovered’ first. This posed a challenge due to his ambivalent desire to ‘be seen but not too easily found’. While being located ‘on the main street’ may have made it easier to attract customers, Ryo was determined not to conform to this marketing approach. Instead, he set out to differentiate his business from other restaurants in Melbourne, including traditional Japanese establishments that are more easily recognisable and often adhere to popular images of what the Japanese restaurant should be like. This is because he believed that advertising, which relies on certain representations, would limit his prospects to a normative category, hindering his ability to showcase his diverse culinary practices and creations. And for this reason, he trusted his instinct and believed in the power of the kuchi-komi, which served him well and greatly contributed to his success in Japan. Then, the situation changed almost overnight when RURŌ TENTEN was named the best restaurant of 2007 in The Age Cheap Eats Guide, where it was described as a ‘peaceful Japanese tapas bar’. Pointing to a copy of the newspaper article and certificates for the award hanging on the restaurant wall, Ryo told me how things unfolded afterwards: Things had taken a complete 180-degree turn. That night is still fresh in my mind. They came in one night, had dinner and then left. We had no idea they were from The Age. It was all done secretly. Then, around 10:30 p.m., we received a phone call telling us that we had been chosen [for the Cheap Eats Champ]. After that day, everything changed. For over eight months, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. People kept coming in one after the other and it was literally nonstop! In hindsight, I’m not sure if what happened to us was actually good for us, because we had to work so hard that we were worn out by the end. But, you know, the whole thing is still working in our favour in terms of drawing attention to our restaurant. Ironically, it was this representational practice of the mainstream media that Ryo initially rejected, but ultimately, it was through their recognition that his restaurant gained traction and became noticed. What is also remarkable about his story is that the very market that he intended to distance his restaurant from eventually became the place for it to thrive. Put differently, the restaurant struggled to attract customers as it did not conform to the clichéd or familiar representations of Japanese restaurants, such as ‘sushi’ and ‘tempura’. The lack of

Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires  57 signage and visibility on the main street further hindered the restaurant’s recognition among the locals. However, when Ryo’s restaurant was featured in the mainstream media, it helped the restaurant gain wider recognition and audience. In conclusion, RURŌ TENTEN does not neatly fit into pre-existing stereotypes. Ryo’s experimental spirit—which crosses over between different culinary categories, such as Japanese, Italian, Spanish, French and Korean cuisines— goes far beyond reveals the limitations of categorical thinking. Precisely because of this transgressive urge, it was not very easy for them to find a ‘proper’ place within conventional representations of the Japanese restaurant. But it also depends on how it is viewed. The establishment, as an exotic genre, has the flexibility to switch between the inside (that is, Ryo’s desire for cross-cultural interactions and exchanges) and the outside (that is, the system of representation within which the establishment is located and defined). Importantly, however, this flexibility is not free-flowing and unbound. It is circumscribed within the scope of the exotic genre, or what is recognised and recognisable as such (for example, The Age’s description of RURŌ TENTEN as a ‘peaceful Japanese tapas bar’). Once again, the fold metaphor aptly figures this restriction of the exotic genre: because RURŌ TENTEN involves transcending culturally and ethnically sanctioned representations of Japaneseness, it faced ‘a lot of trouble’ in getting discovered and making itself understood. To reconcile this conflict, the restaurant ultimately operates within the exotic genre rather than straying too far from its demarcation. In this chapter, I have described what essentially drives the operations of the Japanese restaurant in Australia. Through the voices of the five restaurateurs, I have shown the diversity of how and why the Japanese restaurant operates the way it does in Melbourne, but I have also aimed to demonstrate the common thread running through their stories. In other words, they have this cross-cultural desire to connect their restaurants to the mainstream (white) market while also keeping them separate from it. Using the metaphor of the fold, I have depicted this paradoxical place where the Japanese restaurant inhabits the exotic genre that engages with the outside world while keeping itself inside. I have suggested that the effects of this paradox are the new exotic, or an alternative mode of the exotic to the traditional structure of exoticism that lies in the fixed subject-object relations. The next chapter will delve deeper into the complex dynamics that both embed and distinguish Japanese restaurants within Australia’s foodscapes. Specifically, it will focus on consumers’ desires for the new exotic, of which Japanese gastro-cool is a key characteristic. Notes 1 To protect the anonymity of individuals who generously contributed their time to be interviewed, their names and their establishments’ names have been altered. All of my interview data translations are my own. 2 According to a study published in Chef’s Pencil, a global gastronomy magazine, Australia was ranked as the world’s second popular vegan nation in 2020 (2021), following the United Kingdom. Melbourne was ranked third in Globehunters’ 2019 vegan city global rankings, with 548 vegan and vegetarian eateries (n.d.).

58  Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires 3 ‘Kimba the White Lion’, also known in Japan as ‘Jungle Emperor’, is a manga series created by Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989), who produced over 7,000 manga titles and 60 anime in his lifetime. The series was aired on an Australian TV channel in 1967 (CroKimba, 2015). 4 The 1988 Japanese cyberpunk science fiction animated film Akira was directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. According to Blanc and Odell, home video sales for the film reached US$80 million (2014, 49). 5 Ni-uriya (煮売り屋) were shops that sold ‘simmered food in broth, then later sashimi, tempura and other fish and vegetable dishes (meat being against Buddhist percepts)’ (Robinson 2008, 48–9). These shops appeared by the end of Kansei period (1789–1801) during the Edo era. 6 What is commonly known as ‘mezze’, derived from the Persian word ‘mazze’ meaning ‘taste’, is a combination of cold and hot dishes, such as olives, cheeses, tabbouleh, fresh and pickled vegetables, fruits, dips and bread, typically served with both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages (Zubaida 2021, 129). 7 The term shinjin-rui (new breed; 新 [shin, ‘new’] and 人類 [ jinrui, ‘human race’]) was coined by the Japanese economic anthropologist Shinichirō Kurimoto in the 1970s. Being the first generation not to experience wartime and immediate post-war shortages, they were often criticised as ‘spoiled, too easy to give up, and lacking common sense’ (Nippon.com 2019). 8 ‘Sugi-dama’, also known as ‘sugi-bayashi’, is a ball made of Japanese cedar, or cryptomeria, typically measuring around 50 centimetre (18 inches or so) in diameter. It originated during the Edo era (1604–1868) and is traditionally used by ‘saka-gura’ (sake breweries) to show the completion of a fresh brew. The sugi-dama is suspended by a string in front of saka-gura and today can be seen at sake pubs and sake retailers. The cedar leaves used in sugi-dama are traditionally harvested from Mt. Miwa in Sakurai City, Nara Prefecture, where Ō miwa Shrine is located. The ‘sugi’ (cryptomeria) tree holds religious significance in the Shinto religion, particularly in connection with Ō miwa Shrine, which is dedicated to deities of sake named Omononushi no Mikoto and Sukunahiko no Kami (Nihonmono 2010). 9 The history of yōshoku dates back to the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when Japan sought to modernise and look to the West for inspiration under the slogan of ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’ (‘Bunmei Kaika’). Prior to this period, meat-eating was forbidden due to the influence of Buddhism and the Edo shogunate. However, the Meiji government saw meat-eating as a symbol of an progressive society and a means to strengthen the nation, aiming to elevate the physical status of Japanese people to that of Europeans. In the early Meiji era (1868–1912), yōshoku was mainly consumed by the privileged class, but soon after, numerous affordable yōshoku restaurants opened in the downtown Tokyo to cater to curious Tokyoites. 10 Despite originating in India, Japanese curry, known as ‘karē raisu’ (curry with rice) is commonly categorised as a yōshoku dish in Japan. This is because, when curry was first introduced to Japan by the British Navy in the 19th century, it was initially thought to be of Western origin from the Japanese perspective. The British Navy had brought Indian cuisines to the Imperial Japanese Army. The sauce of karē raisu is much thicker and sweeter than authentic Indian curry, as it is said that the British navy made it so to prevent it from spilling while their ships rocked. For further discussion on the history of Japanese curry, see Markus Bell (2016).

Bibliography Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Regional Population.” 26 July 2021. https://www.abs. gov.au/statistics/people/population/regional-population/latest-release

Folding Restaurateurs’ Cross-Cultural Desires  59 Australian Trade and investment Commission. “Strengthening Australian Wine Exports.” 18 July 2022. https://www.austrade.gov.au/news/media-releases/strengtheningaustralian-wine-exports Bell, Markus. “From India to North Korea, via Japan: Curry’s Global Journey.” NPR, 8 April 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/04/08/473376519/ from-india-to-north-korea-via-japan-currys-global-journey Blanc, Michelle Le, and Colin Odell. Akira. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. Buchi. “Nomiya Buchi Kōshiki [Bar Dining Buchi Official].” n.d. Accessed 30 January 2021. https://nomiya-buchi.site/ Chef’s Pencil. “Most Popular Countries and Cities for Vegans in 2020 (Jan-2021 Update).” 4 January 2021. https://www.chefspencil.com/most-popular-countries-and-cities-forvegans-in-2020-jan-2021-update/ CroKimba. “60 Years of Kimba the White Lion (Jungle Emperor).” 11 November 2015. http://www.50yearsofkimba.com/historybycountry.html Dubecki, Larissa. “Espresso.” The Age Online, 5 May 2009. https://www.theage.com. au/lifestyle/espresso-20090616-ge7xnx.html ———. “Kappaya.” The Age Online, 15 October 2011. https://www.goodfood.com.au/ kappaya-abbotsford/kappaya-20111014-2akd1 Frost, Warwick, Jennifer Laing, Fiona Wheeler, and Keir Reeves. “Coffee Culture, Heritage and Destination Image: Melbourne and the Italian Model.” In Coffee Culture, Destinations and Tourism, Edited by Lee Jolliffe, 99–110. Bristol and Buffalo, NY: Channel View Publications, 2010. Globehunters. “The Best Vegan & Veggie Holiday Destinations.” n.d. Accessed 26 October 2021. https://www.globehunters.com/vegan-holiday-hotspots/ Grosz, Elizabeth A. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York: Routledge, 1995. Jeffs, Angela. “Inside the Japanese Pub: Unique Cookbook Gives Readers Reverent Look into Izakaya Culture.” The Japan Times, 1 November 2008. https://www. japantimes.co.jp/community/2008/11/01/general/inside-the-japanese-pub/ Nihonmono. “Worshipping the Gods of Sake and the Legend of the Creation of the Country ‘Miwayama Ohmiwa Shrine’.” 10 May 2010. https://nihonmono.jp/en/area/9862/ Nippon.com. “Japanese Generations: Boom, Bubble, and Ice Age.” 12 September 2019. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00535/japanese-generations-boom-bubbleand-ice-age.html Robinson, Mark. “Tokyo’s Pubs Are the People’s Choice.” The Australian, 19 September 2008. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/travel/pubs-are-the-peoples-choice/ news-story/2857ff817b73206bb9340c475758ef18 Roy Morgan. “Rise in Vegetarianism Not Halting the March of Obesity.” 12 April 2019.https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/rise-in-vegetarianism-not-halting-the-marchof-obesity Shinsuke. “Yushimano Sakaba Shinsuke [Bar Dining Shinsuke in Yushima].” n.d. Accessed 30 January 2021. https://www.shinsuketokyo.com/ Statistics Bureau of Japan. “Statistical Handbook of Japan 2021.” Accessed 26 October 2021. https://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/handbook/c0117.html White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. California Studies in Food and Culture 36. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Zubaida, Sami. “Circuits of Food and Cuisine.” In Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century, Edited by Asef Bayat, and Linda Herrera, 119–32. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021.

3

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic

Introduction The story of the Japanese restaurant also comes from consumers. Consumers play a pivotal role in pushing and configuring the globalisation of the Japanese restaurant because what they want to see and consume shapes how the Japanese restaurant operates. In fact, consumers’ contribution to the industry forms a connected economy of desires—by this I mean that consumers’ desires for the new exotic reflect and amplify restaurant workers’ cross-cultural desires, which have been illustrated in Chapter 2. The new exotic fuels what consumers want to see and consume. They are fascinated with, and anxious about, an endless fold between the inside and the outside and the paradoxical effects caused by this movement—‘the familiar as foreign’ and ‘the foreign as familiar’—or the new exotic. In short, it is this synergy of desires that runs through the economy of the Japanese restaurant. In this chapter, I show how the Japanese restaurant, as a platform for a connected economy of desires, draws consumers into the endless loop of the fold. The consumer narratives were drawn from interviews that I conducted between 2009 and 2011. I query, What is the enabler of the new exotic that the Japanese restaurant communicates to consumers? What mode of consumption drives consumers into the inside-outside dialectic of the new exotic? And how do consumers come to terms with ideas of ‘authenticity’ while following what they want to see and consume? Consuming Japanese Gastro-Cool ‘I like Japanese restaurants because they’re cool’, Kate, a European Australian office worker in her 30s said when I asked what part of the Japanese restaurant drew her in. Her response sums up what many other consumers I interviewed said when they talked about the ‘coolness’ that gives the Japanese restaurant its appeal. Notably, this coolness often extends beyond the realm of the Japanese restaurant and imbues the coolness of cool images of other Japanese popular cultural products—from anime to Nintendo games to city pop—that sell globally yet unevenly. Andrew, a European Australian university student in his 20s who was taking a Japanese language course at the time of the interview, said, DOI: 10.4324/9781003362463-3

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  61 ‘I mean, anything coming from Japan is kind of cool now’. He explained to me how his prior contact with Japanese cultural products had an impact on his consumer choices and exposed him to other parts of the nation’s culture, from its language to its cuisine: It was the Nintendo 64. I thought that was really cool. That was probably while I was in Year Two,1 but my friend had one, and when I went to his house, we had a lot of fun playing with it, so my parents got me one for Christmas. After that, I picked Japanese [as a second language] in Year Nine. I did it because I really liked the games. I liked playing Final Fantasy, so I wanted to learn more about the language. Then, in 2005, I went to Japan as an exchange student for three weeks. So eating out at a Japanese restaurant here [in Melbourne] is a chance for me to stay connected to the Japanese culture that I like. And I like Japanese food. I don’t know, but it’s kind of cool. Although Andrew’s story is unique, it resonates with what other consumers I interviewed said about what they wanted to see and consume via the Japanese restaurant—or what I have framed as Japanese gastro-cool (see Chapter 1). Japanese gastro-cool co-opts the global currency of Japanese popular culture: it occupies a commodified space of what Douglas McGray refers to as Japan’s ‘gross national cool’, which absorbs Joseph Nye’s ‘soft power’ as an ideological means to interest, influence and potentially dominate a market share in other nation-states (McGray 2002; Nye 1990, discussed in Chapter 1). As the soft power of gross national cool’s constituent, Japanese gastro-cool infuses and is infused by a larger mechanisation of desire, power and consumption that gives it meaning and value. My contestation is that the Japanese restaurant operates as a signifying terrain, where Japanese gastro-cool is produced, distributed and consumed through food and non-food products and practices. Note that this representational practice neither starts nor ends at the Japanese restaurant. Rather, it is part of the paradoxical formation of the new exotic, as I argue throughout, that almost endlessly brings the foreign into the familiar or vice versa in the reconfiguring of economic power and cultural representations in the last half-century. But what ‘cool’ factors of Japanese gastro-cool make this ‘foreign’ and ‘familiar’ dialectic possible? And how do they enable the formation of consumership and consumer identities? One of the key findings from my interviews is that some consumers take ‘the place of a niche’ as an alternative to the Australian mainstream by consuming Japanese gastro-cool via the Japanese restaurant. This is summed by one European Australian office worker I spoke to. He said, Japanese stuff is very different from the things that we normally know and experience here. I guess I like it partly because of that reason. I mean, it’s still kind of niche here [in Australia], so by liking it, you can kind of differentiate yourself from others and show a unique you.

62  Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic By taking the place of a niche, they can distance themselves from the Australian mainstream, and by distancing, they can claim their consumership and consumer identities as ‘niche’, ‘different’ or even ‘nerdy’, and hence ‘cool’. Christine Yano describes it as a ‘distancing’ practice, noting that cool ‘refers to a certain subcultural appeal, a certain distance from the status quo or mainstream’ rather than ‘mere popularity’ (2013, 27). While popular culture is sometimes referred to as ‘mainstream culture’, the extent to which it is mainstream is determined by who utilises it and whose popular culture it is. As Ashley Crossman states, ‘To a large degree, popular culture is today something established by niche users’ (2019). Additionally, the images that they identify with the ‘coolness’ of Japanese gastro-cool through their consumption practices are not uniform but vary from ‘urban-cool’ to ‘kitsch-cool’ to ‘rustic-cool’ to ‘pop-cool’ to ‘minimalist-cool’. When it comes to forming consumership and consumer identities, this elasticity lets consumers choose from a wide range of options, thereby differentiating themselves as part of a niche group, particularly those with refined tastes. In short, rather than limiting consumers to rely on a single type of cultural taste for the cool, consuming Japanese gastro-cool in the Japanese restaurant encourages them to be ‘eclectic’ and ‘omnivorous’. Richard Peterson calls this mode of consumption ‘cultural omnivorousness’ (1992). Peterson suggests that omnivorous consumers have ‘an increased breadth of cultural taste and participation and [...] a willingness to transgress previously entrenched boundaries between hierarchically ranked cultural items or genres’ (Hazir and Warde 2015, 77). What is notable is that this cultural omnivorousness coincides with the ‘cool’ factors of Japanese popular culture that consumers often associate with their consumption practices at the Japanese restaurant. What allows them to do so, I suggest, is the fact that Japanese popular culture is inherently cross-cultural and often transgressive. Using the metaphor of the Möbius strip, Roland Kelts outlines the cross-cultural formation of Japanese popular cultural assets as ‘Japanamerica’ (2006). He exemplifies this by tracing a succession of cultural cross-pollination within and across Japan, America and Europe since the pre-modern times: This started centuries ago with Japanese scroll paintings and woodblock prints, some of which both influenced and were influenced by European artists when Japan was officially isolated from the rest of the world, and has continues on up through Disney, Fleischer, and Tezuka—from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Yoshida brothers’ Sandy Frank-produced Battle of the Planets, from the Tokyo-noire mise-enscène of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to Otomo’s Akira, from The Matrix to the Animatrix. The anime-influenced Powerpuff Girls and Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi are now produced in the United States, and no doubt many American kids believe that Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Naruto are homespun as well—just as an entire classroom of Japanese kids I encountered were certain that McDonald’s originated in Japan. (2006, 69; emphasis in original)

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  63 In the cross-cultural creation of Japanese popular culture, we can also see a fold between the inside (that is, Japan) and the outside (in this case, America and Europe), allowing the outside to become part of the inside, akin to the Möbius strip. Contextual distinctions, such as histories, cultures, media and geographies, are collapsed into the proximate by this dialectical inside-outside affair. I propose that this inside-outside loop, which gives rise to the new exotic that is both close and far, constitutes the ‘cool’ factors of Japanese gastro-cool that appeal to some consumers. More importantly, inside-outside popular cultural dialectics are not limited to the ‘East’ and ‘West’ interactions but expanded beyond them. In the edited volume Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture, Koichi Iwabuchi discusses this emerging dynamism spearheaded by recent intra- and inter-Asian links that are intensifying and therefore reconfiguring the global climate of popular culture: Cultural mixing and adaptation have also been occurring among East Asian popular cultures, which can be seen especially in the region-wide influences of Hong Kong, Japanese, and, more recently, South Korean popular culture. As East Asian popular culture markets become synchronized, as producers, directors, and actors work across national borders with increasing frequency, and as capital continues to flow around the region, cultural mixing and adaptation have in fact become conspicuous constituents in the production of popular culture in East Asia. (2017, 28) Iwabuchi writes, ‘Inter-Asian adaptation works as a channel through which the intricate juxtaposition of the specificity and commonality of East Asian modernities is freshly articulated’ while the differences are apparent in specific cultural and sociohistorical contexts (2017, 29).2 In the cross-cultural-ethnic-racial site of the Japanese restaurant, I am also concerned about the incorporation of other Asian representations, such as ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Koreanness’, into ‘Japaneseness’ and vice versa, using the fold and other conceptual frameworks that are alternatives to notions, such as ‘fusion’ and ‘hybridisation’ (also see Chapter 4 for further discussion). Noteworthy is that this juxtaposition of complex layers of cultural difference and commonality is not always obvious to consumers. Some consumers in my interviews viewed the infusion of other Asian components (such as Chinese influences) into Japanese restaurants as another ‘pan-Asian’ interpretation of Japan’s culinary resources. At the same time, they did not think that such an interpretation would simply smooth out regional differences in Asia. Instead, they perceived a cultural-culinary hierarchy in Asian fantasies, in which they gave ‘Japan’ the title of being the ‘coolest’. In order to distinguish between ‘cool’ and ‘less cool’ in the construction of consumer identities, I refer to this as the ‘perceived hierarchy of cool’ for now. Andrew’s following comments regarding local Japanese eateries with Chinese ownership serve as an illustration of this:

64  Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic I’m aware that there are a number of Chinese-owned businesses in Melbourne who advertise themselves as a Japanese café or something similar. But these are basically Asian cafés that sell a variety of Asian foods since, in my opinion, Japanese sounds cooler. When it comes to cool East Asian culture, Japan is perhaps the most developed. It’s been looked at as ‘very cool’. Japan, in his eyes, is at the top of the perceived hierarchy of cool. Crucially, this imagined configuration of ‘who is the coolest in Asia’s cultural-culinary space’ is not static and fixed, and the question of ‘who becomes cooler (or less cool)’ involves ‘its own passing, shaped by both cultural and market forces’ (Yano 2013, 260), as evidenced, for example, by ‘Hallyu’ or the ongoing dominance of the ‘Korean wave of culture’ in the last decade (Hong 2019). And yet, for some consumers, like Andrew, dining out in the Japanese restaurant serves to display their positioning in the perceived hierarchy of cool because it allows them to consume the ‘exotic other’ whose ‘coolness’ is current and pervasive. Their consumership and consumer identities are further intricated by class and aesthetic taste, as we will see later in this chapter when we discuss dining out in the Japanese restaurant as ‘high-class’ and ‘cosmopolitan consumption’. ‘It’s the Whole Package’: Dining Out in the Japanese Restaurant as Entertainment While the cool factor of Japanese gastro-cool may draw some consumers into the endless loop of the new exotic, diverse experiences available in dining out in the Japanese restaurant can go beyond that. In fact, some consumers told me that they want to have a range of experiences while they are dining rather than just one specific thing. In other words, they want it all—quality, value and surprise through their dining experiences in the Japanese restaurant—or what they describe as ‘the whole package’. This is neither new nor exclusive to the Japanese restaurant. Consumers in the current millennium are more insatiable than ever before: they want to socialise, learn, be entertained while also sharing their experiences via photos and videos on their social media platforms. Whatever their needs may be, it can be said that central to this multi-layered mode of consumption is consumers’ desire for an experience-based connection. And this is part of a larger phenomenon known as the ‘experience economy’, in which ‘a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event’, as Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore put it in the July–August 1998 issue of Harvard Business Review. Just like any other industry, today’s restaurant industry revolves, to varying degrees, around rising demands for customer experience. ‘If you’re a restaurant operator, you have to go above and beyond to get people out of their houses and promise them an experience that makes it a destination, and hopefully the destination is where they keep coming back’, said a Melbourne-based restaurateur I once spoke to.

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  65 While this presents a significant challenge for many restaurant businesses of all sizes and kinds, the type of challenge varies. What makes the Japanese restaurant (and perhaps other ‘ethnic-themed’ restaurants) distinctive is how it represents its own ‘otherness’ as part of the challenge. The consumer narratives in this section portray how they perceive the otherness that the Japanese restaurant expresses as the whole package that allows an experience-based connection. The Japanese restaurant’s ability to offer the whole package matters to some customers. But what do they exactly want to see and consume in the whole package? Sophia, a European Australian social worker in her 40s, commented, I think [dining in Japanese restaurants] is really the whole package. It’s almost theatrical. People would probably expect something entertaining and spectacular as well in a way. So it’s not just food, but other things, like how they serve and what kind of ambience they create and all that. Likewise, Vivian, a Vietnamese Australian medical practitioner in her 30s, said, I’d like to go to a nice restaurant. [Japanese restaurants] have a nice atmosphere. Places like YAKITORI ROKU [a high-end Japanese restaurant specialising in yakitori chicken skewers that will be discussed in Chapter 4] have a lot of atmosphere. I’m not sure whether or not they offer the best food in the world, but I think they’ve got this atmosphere. They’ve got the whole cool thing going. It has a lot of atmosphere so you go there for that. The atmosphere and all other things count, but if the food is not good, I’m not going to go back. I’m not going to go to a restaurant for great service and atmosphere but the food is crap. It’s not worthwhile. If there’s the whole package there, then it’s of course amazing. You know, if you’ve got the whole package, then it’s fantastic, but if the only thing you’ve got is good service, then I don’t want to go there. The experience-based connection that they seek through dining out in the Japanese restaurant is thus multi-sensory. For them, the Japanese restaurant is a place where different sensory modalities—sight, sound, smell, touch and taste—arise through their bodily interactions with both food and non-food elements. In Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place, Paul Rodaway explains this body-sense-place synergy, drawing on the notion of ‘sensescapes’ (1994). The term was coined by geographer Douglas Porteous to describe the spatially organised senses that contribute to individual experiences with given locales (1985). Rodaway contends that people perceive and potentially understand their environment by using the senses or individual bodies that both convey and organise information about it (1994, 3). In this light, the Japanese restaurant can also be understood as a sensescape, where the body-sense-place

66  Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic synergy is enacted and the space’s constitutive elements (food, utensils, interior design, language, meaning, desire, socio-cultural climate and so on) are sensed and potentially made sense of. Here, the human body becomes a necessary apparatus in order for sensing and sense-making to take place. Dining out in the Japanese restaurant allowing for this body-sense-place synergy can also be seen as ‘entertainment’. Certainly, ‘dining out’ as entertainment can take several forms (for example, ‘eatertainment’ or ‘edutainment’), but the underlying denominator is that it ‘surrounds the food and elevates food consumption to a multifaceted experience’ (Mkono 2013, 42). To put it another way, entertainment has the power to communicate directly to consumers through their senses, enabling bodily sensations, delight and an experience-based connection. Importantly, dining out in the Japanese restaurant as entertainment also involves ‘travell beyond literal travell’. Therefore, it is not products or services per se but the culture of the ‘other’ underpinning dining out in the Japanese restaurant that elevates the experience to the realm of entertainment. The question remains, How does the culture of the other communicate to consumers within the sensescape of the Japanese restaurant? What dimension of the senses does it most appeal to? My examples show that the culture of the other is often experienced first through the vision, allowing for aesthetic imagination. Emily, a European Australian medical researcher in her 50s, cited aesthetics as the primary reason why she chose to dine out in the Japanese restaurant. She further detailed this in a follow-up email correspondence, I like Japanese food because of the aesthetics of presentation—especially in a high-class place or ryokan [traditional Japanese inns] with lots of different beautiful Japanese ceramics—and because it feels healthy to me. Japanese food suits my constitution (of course, I choose the food which suits me. Not everything is my favourite). There are other cultures which I like for the atmosphere and sensory experience (Italy, some Czech food, some Chinese food…) but Japanese food covers all those other factors as well for me. Sally also values aesthetics. This European Australian high school teacher in her 30s recalled a particular Japanese restaurant in Melbourne that she frequented: I guess I like the aesthetics. I kind of feel there is a sense of tranquillity there which is sort of like Zen element which I like. I’m keen on the Zen minimalist kind of ambience so that the atmosphere has to do with that kind of stuff, like a certain Japanese-style painting, or kake-jiku [hanging scrolls], which reflects Japan. I’ve been in a private room a few times [at the restaurant] through work and being in the tatami room certainly feels almost like I’m in Japan. Similarly, aesthetics are also a way for Sophia, the social worker, to bodily experience and connect to the culture of the other in the sensescape:

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  67 For me, why I was attracted by Japanese culture and food and everything, I think, is because of a clean line. I like Japanese food because it’s a light meal and it’s clean, a clean line. I’ve always had fascination with Japanese culture. I also have fascination with Spanish culture, but Japanese sort of took control. I think there’re a number of things. I like Japanese art. I love cartoons, Japanese cartoons, and I love again borrowing from a clean line of Japanese multi-usage of things. What those consumers’ comments suggest is that the visual appeal of those products—‘beautiful Japanese ceramics’, ‘Japanese-style painting’, ‘tatami room’, ‘Japanese art’ and ‘Japanese cartoons’—is a crucial part of their experience-based connection to the sensescape of the Japanese restaurant. It speaks to them so powerfully that it shapes not only their sensory experience within the sensescape but also their perception of the other (for example, ‘healthy’, ‘tranquil’, ‘clean’ in their terms). Equally important, the senses do not form one’s perception of the other in isolation. My examples show that the sensescape of the Japanese restaurant invites diners to engage with different senses almost simultaneously albeit variously, which would otherwise appear to be competing—that is, ‘vision versus taste (or other senses)’, ‘body versus mind’ and ‘object versus subject positions’. This mode of sensing is, for example, detailed by Amy. The Singaporean university student in her 20s told me about her dining experience at a traditional Japanese restaurant in Melbourne: The quality of food [in the Japanese restaurant] is really good. The dishes are really fresh. The presentation of the food is really neat as well. It’s good to look at. When the food is first served, you’re like, ‘wow’. You feel really good. And after eating it, you feel like you’re kind of a different person. It’s really exciting. What happened to Amy’s body and mind during the dining experience is a sensory chain reaction. First, her aesthetic sensitivity was stimulated by the visual presentation of the food. The awakened visionary sensation then opened the door to pleasure via tasting. This visceral sensation subsequently resonated with the mind, making her ‘feel good’ and ‘excited’. Consequently, the whole experience brought the outside in, enabling interactions between subjective and objective perspectives. What we can see from Amy’s dining experience is how this almost synesthetic reaction within the sensescape of the Japanese restaurant may bridge between the senses and cognition. In Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy, Carolyn Korsmeyer argues that tasting is closely linked to aesthetic cognition, thereby posing a challenge to the dichotomy between ‘intellectual senses’ (that is, vision and hearing) and ‘bodily senses’ (that is, taste, smell and touch), and the superiority of the former over the latter—a thought traditionally held in Western theory and philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant

68  Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic and Hegel (1999). Tasting, as a sensory and perceptual experience, extends the boundaries even further by permitting interactions between the subject and object positions. When dining out in the Japanese restaurant, tasting enables the body to move between the subject and object boundaries, whereby the outside is connected to the inside through embodiment in a continuous loop—in other words, tasting functions as ‘incorporation’, both literally and metaphorically. Literally, tasting is the oral ingestion of organic materials (that is, food) into more organic matter (that is, internal body organs). It also describes the metaphorical process of incorporation, or in other words, the process of identification through which one internalises ideas, beliefs and practices surrounding a culture that is not necessarily one’s own, and therefore (sympathetically) to become the other. As Elspeth Probyn writes, ‘[I]n eating we lose ourselves in a wild morphing of the animate and the inanimate; what Foucault calls “that obscure desire […] to become other than oneself ”’ (2000, 8). From here, one can see the logic of the fold that describes the incorporation of the outside into the inside. The two domains—a self and the other—can no longer be clearly distinguished as they fold through the senses and cognition. It is in this condition that the body and the mind interact, and the object-subject relationship is reconfigured—as Amy stated in the interview, ‘after eating that, you feel like you’re kind of a different person’. Dining Out in the Japanese Restaurant as ‘High-Class’ If dining out is inseparable from aesthetic taste, then so is class (Warde 1997; Warde and Martens 2000). This is precisely what Pierre Bourdieu argues in his study of social distinction: one’s aesthetic taste and choices determine where they fall in the hierarchy of social class (1984). Although dining out in the Japanese restaurant is not always class-based, the consumers I interviewed often viewed it as ‘high-class’. My examples show three major indexes that can be drawn to shape this perception: the Japanese restaurant’s relatively high price settings, its emphasis on product and service quality and its conscious use of aesthetics. Note that these are relative indexes rather than absolute ones: consumers use the indexes to compare different dining experiences that they have had in different time-space contexts, in order to determine whether their consumption experience is perceived as ‘high-class’. First and foremost, price matters. Consumers in my interviews typically perceived dining out in the Japanese restaurant as a privileged consumption activity due to the relatively high price settings targeted at those in an aspirational socio-economic class. Brian, a European Australian IT engineer in his 30s, who had lived five years in Japan, described, I must say that Japanese restaurants in Melbourne are very expensive. Japanese food here, you have to pay ridiculous prices. It’s something that should be far cheaper. Japanese restaurants as well, they really should be something like café style, other than letting us pay top shelf restaurant

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  69 prices to get average Japanese dishes like donburi [a rice bowl meal usually served in a casual eatery in Japan]. You know, they are just ‘B-kyū gurume’ [‘B-grade gourmet’] dishes [affordable, comfort food]! So if you think of the popularity of Japanese restaurants here, then I have to assume that a majority of people in Melbourne are wealthy. I think highend Japanese restaurants are using their peculiarity as an excuse for serving exceptionally expensive food, which is taken as a sign of quality for most Australian people. Here, his ‘insider’ experience as a former resident of Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture—Japan’s fourth largest city with a population of about 2.3 million people—gives him a point of reference with which to view dining out in the Japanese restaurant in Melbourne as ‘very expensive’ and thus classed (statistics show that overall restaurant prices in Tokyo, for example, are about 45 percent lower than in Melbourne [Numbeo 2021]). He also believes that their price settings are ‘ridiculous’ since they do not reflect what customers pay for. In his view, a dish like donburi is a ‘B-grade gourmet’ meal in a Japanese culinary context, which does not generally require the ‘finest’ ingredients. Charging a premium price for such a meal in a high-end restaurant is therefore, for him, ‘an excuse for serving exceptionally expensive food’. There is a myriad of factors including the so-called ‘fixed costs’ and ‘variable costs’ that go into determining pricing.3 And these factors are in turn shaped by the economic, political and ecological circumstances of a given time and location. It is also very important to remember that the market value of a product or service varies depending on how rare it is (for example, given that restaurants serving donburi are less common in Melbourne than in Nagoya or Tokyo, the dish is priced higher in Melbourne than in those cities in Japan). While Brian’s view on the price settings of the Japanese restaurant may not take these factors into account, it is nevertheless noteworthy in terms of the perceived price-quality equation, which is the second major index that concerns us here. Consumer behaviour researchers have long studied the mechanism by which price shapes consumers’ perceptions of the quality of commercial goods and services. Studies have shown that consumers tend to use price as a cue to quality: they expect market prices to reflect the quality of products and services (Boyle and Lathrop 2009; Shugan 1984). More importantly, this tendency becomes prominent especially when customers have limited knowledge about a particular product or service (Boyle and Lathrop 2009). An example of this can be illustrated by Brian’s comments about why highly priced Japanese ‘B-grade gourmet’ meals like donburi are (willingly or unwillingly) accepted in Melbourne’s Japanese restaurant industry. He believes that ‘most Australian people’ tend to associate ‘expensive food’ with ‘a sign of quality’ because they may not be as knowledgeable about the calibre of the food served at the Japanese restaurant as he is. In the interview, he defined ‘most Australian people’ as ‘Anglos’ who ‘most likely spend their whole life in Australia’. Here, it is also necessary to point out that Brian leverages his ‘insider’ perspective and

70  Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic experience to set himself apart from what he refers to as ‘most Australian people’ (I will go into more detail about ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspectives in regard to issues of authority and authenticity later in this chapter). He asserts that in contrast to his first-hand experience of living and eating in Japan, ‘most Australian people’ perceive ‘exceptionally expensive food’ as ‘a sign of quality’, and this perception is based on their ‘limited’ points of reference. The link between the perceived price-quality equation and class is further highlighted in my interviews. Sophia, the European Australian social worker, stated, [Eating out at Japanese restaurants] is a bit like elitism. [Elitism?] Yes! I mean, I think a Japanese restaurant is an elitist place because of its inaccessibility and because it’s quality-oriented. You know, if you dine out at a Japanese restaurant, you would like to have high quality food and service and all that. Sophia views the Japanese restaurant as ‘inaccessible’ because she thinks that prices are typically set for a socio-economically privileged group of consumers. Here, the perceived price-quality equation is closely linked to class, as indicated in her depiction of the Japanese restaurant as an ‘elitist’ place. In the interview, she then went on to extend this perceived ‘price-class’ linkage to authenticity, stating that ‘[Japanese restaurants] tend to focus more on quality rather than quantity. They are also relatively expensive, so when I eat out [in a Japanese restaurant], I expect the place to provide an authentic dining experience’. Sophia expects Japanese restaurants with relatively high price settings to provide products and services that are both ‘quality’ and ‘authentic’. Indeed, the quality-authenticity connection made by Sophia has been a central topic in the field of tourism. For example, a study by Ana Domínguez-Quintero, Maria González-Rodríguez and José Roldán highlights that authenticity is a key factor in enabling cultural tourists to attain a high level of what they call ‘experience quality’—that is, ‘the affective component of the experience, which includes subjective, emotional, and personal responses to various aspects of service development and leads to overall satisfaction’ (Otto and Richie cited in Domínguez-Quintero et al. 2019, 483). They suggest that when products or services are offered to cultural tourists in a way that results in an ‘authentic’ experience, they are seen as being of ‘quality’. Dining out in the Japanese restaurant can be viewed as a particular form of tourism both literally and figuratively, and as Sophia’s comments illustrate, authenticity is integral to enabling the quality of the experience (issues of authenticity will be discussed in more depth later in this chapter). The final index that I want to highlight is aesthetics. Aesthetics serve as a compelling signpost of class status, authority and authenticty. The ‘proper’ usage of it allows the Japanese restaurant to establish its authenticity, but it also allows consumers to display their individual aesthetic tastes, consumer identities and potentially class position. Sophia said,

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  71 I’ve been to a Japanese restaurant down the road run by probably Chinese, you know, you can kind of tell whether they are Japanese or not, but they just at most put a few lanterns up and are very limited in their presentation of Japanese aesthetics. I can kind of tell because I have lots of Japanese things in my house, like Japanese antique furniture and all that, so I kind of know. In her view, ‘the Japanese restaurant down the road’ fails to deliver signs of ‘quality’ and ‘authenticity’ becuase aesthetics are not used properly. For her, the restaurant’s use of aesthetics is not aligned with her expectations, and as a result, the restaurant is neither legitimate nor ‘high-class’. By making this judgement, Sophia also demonstrates her ability to appreciate aesthetics (or more precisely, a ‘Japanese’ way of using aesthetics) and discern the difference. This further indicates that she uses aesthetics to construct and display her identity as a patron of the Japanese restaurant. She achieves this by showcasing her possession of ‘Japanese antique furniture’ as a marker of her understanding of Japanese aesthetics and her refined aesthetic sensibilities, thereby conveying her social status and consumer identity as a discerning patron of the Japanese restaurant. Similarly, Vivian also sees aesthetics as an essential factor that shapes her dining experience at the Japanese restaurant and influences her perception of what this type of establishment should offer. Like Sophia, the Vietnamese Australian medical practitioner regards the dining experience at the Japanese restaurant as ‘high-class’. However, she specifically highlights this by contrasting it with her experiences at ‘other Asian restaurants’: [Japanese restaurants] are a little bit different from other Asian restaurants, you know. You don’t get many top-class Chinese or Vietnamese restaurants, but you have lots of expensive, top-class Japanese restaurants, and I think that reflects the food and also the aesthetics they present. I think that’s the most obvious difference between Japanese restaurants and other Asian restaurants because [Japanese restaurants] are not selling themselves as cheap eats, ahh, most of them are not. [Would you say that aesthetics is an important factor in discerning the difference?] Absolutely. Vivian perceives dining out in the Japanese restaurant as a ‘high-class’ experience, while she views ‘other Asian restaurants’ as being of Japan’s other. The contrast between the Japanese restaurant as being ‘expensive, top-class’ and other Asian restaurants as being ‘cheap eats’ is further extended to different starting points in modernisation processes among the Asian countries that she has travelled to. She went on to say, ‘Even travelling in Japan is different from travelling in China or Vietnam. It’s cleaner, it’s more organised and it’s more technologically fast. It’s more like going to a western country, but there are more Asian people. It’s just different for me to travell in China, Japan and Vietnam’.

72  Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic This mental map—where Japan is located ‘in but above Asia’ and more towards the West (Iwabuchi et al. 2002, 8)—has been challenged, as the world order has shifted dramatically over the last few decades, as exemplified by Japan’s extended economic recession and the parallel expansion of its Asian neighbours’ economies and modernities, most notably the rise of China.4 However, my interviews indicate that the mental map still dominates the thoughts of some consumers, like Vivian, who symbolically place Japan (and by extension, related cultural products and practices, including the Japanese restaurant) above other Asian countries. Cosmopolitan Consumption Not only is dining out in the Japanese restaurant about class and aesthetic taste, but it is also about the imbricated culture of the other. This is because dining out in the Japanese restaurant involves the movement, transaction and translation of the codes of Japan’s culinary system between different timespace contexts, and it is thus cross-cultural (see Chapter 1; I will also further discuss the process of cross-cultural translation in Chapter 4). Given this, I propose that the consumption mode of dining out in the Japanese restaurant can be seen as cosmopolitan. The term ‘cosmopolitan’ stems from the Greek kosmos (‘world’) and polis (‘city’); therefore, a cosmopolitan literally means ‘a citizen of the world’. With this, cosmopolitanism is colloquially considered an interest in other cultures, or what Ulf Hannerz famously cites as ‘a willingness to engage with the other’ (1990, 239). One way to engage with the other is through travell. Within the framework of cosmopolitanism, travell—whether it be actual or virtual—is more than mere mobility: it has a dimension of leisure-based consumption as a way of expressing the cosmopolitan practice of engaging with different cultures. Travell can be for the privileged, however, this privilege is not only socio-economic but also cultural.5 In other words, cosmopolitanism is associated with a sense of worldly sophistication, as well as a socio-economic privilege that affords the resources required for travell. Here, I want to emphasise that cosmopolitan consumption is not an unproblematic, utopian ideal that promotes a superficial sense of worldliness. Rather, it has political implications in terms of who consumes whose cultures as ‘cosmopolitan’ and for what purpose. In the context of the Japanese restaurant in Australia, cosmopolitan consumption echoes the cultural politics of what Ghassan Hage claims as ‘cosmo-multiculturalism’ (2000). As discussed in Chapter 1, Hage argues that cosmopolitan consumption is characteristic of multiculturalism in Australia. In his view, cosmo-multiculturalism defines a ‘cosmopolite’ as a ‘white’ person with the resources to travell (physically or virtually) and consume ‘high-quality’ commodities and cultures of the other as part of one’s own ‘cultural enrichment’ (Hage 2000, 201). In this framework, the other is ‘non-white’ subjects, including Asians who are positioned antithetically to the ‘white’ subjects who are supposedly privileged. What is at stake here is what Seán Golden describes as ‘a new global order inclusive of the Rest’, which interrupts any assumption that cosmopolitan

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  73 consumption rests on, and generates, white privilege and hegemony (2020; emphasis in original). In the new millennium, this is most apparent in Asia’s growing consumership that connects itself to late capitalism and middle-class attainment. By 2030, Asia is estimated to account for nearly 60 percent of the world’s middle-class consumption with more than two-thirds coming from China and India, whereas North America and Europe will account for 30 percent, down from 64 percent in 2010 (Wong 2017). This paradigm shift is also looming in Australia, where middle-class consumership has historically been supported by the Anglo-Celtic population. According to the most recent census data, nearly 30 percent of Australia’s population was born overseas, and for the first time in its history, Asia rather than Europe supplied the majority of the nation’s immigrants (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2022). Further, Asian immigrants now account for more than 60 percent of the immigrants in the Skilled Stream (which makes up about 70 percent of the migration programme), who are characteristically ‘highly educated, English-speaking, young (under 45 years of age) and middle class’ (McDonald 2019, 99). This trend is expected to continue, indicating that Asian immigrants play an increasingly vital role as consumers, as workers and as cultural producers in Australian society. Given this ongoing trend, the newly emerging Asian middle-class consumership in Australia poses a question to the hegemonic and bipolar perspective on the world order, or more specifically, the view that ‘cosmopolitan consumption is a white privilege’. The new paradigm shift destabilises hegemonic power relations that tie cosmopolitan consumption monolithically to whiteness and its associated privileges, as well as to one’s cultural dominance over the other, such as ‘the West consuming the East other’. In terms of reassessing the East-West production and consumption relations, it is useful to consider what Peter Wong discusses as ‘the emergence of an East-East trade’, which he suggests ‘will form the spine of a new world order—goods will continue to be made in the East, but an increasingly large portion will also be sold in the East’ (2017). Wong further suggests that this East-East flow is bolstered by two developments originating in Asia: the regional comprehensive economic partnership and the Belt and Road Initiative, which is reminiscent of the Silk Road, a global infrastructure project adopted by the Chinese government in 2013 that would stretch from East Asia to Europe (2017). As Wong argues, the current world order underpinned by an East-West flow, where goods are manufactured in the East and sold in the West, is under scrutiny. Wong proposes that ‘[t]he result is less global trade but vastly increased regional trade’ (2017). The Japanese restaurant in Australia exemplifies the emergence of ‘the East-West-East-in-the-West flow’. I refer to the EastWest-East-in-the-West flow as a cross-cultural movement that involves interactions and exchanges between the East and the West, which then circle back to the East again, even when located in the West. The term ‘East’ here is not limited to geographical locations, but is extended to the diasporic, expansive mobility of Asians. This circular movement is not intended to neatly demarcate the boundaries between the East and the West or the other and the self. Instead, it represents a movement of the fold, where each culture incorporates the other as an essential part of itself. In the context of the Japanese restaurant in

74  Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic Australia and its middle-class Asian consumers, this flow can be seen in the way these consumers invest their own taste preferences, capital and shared experiences into their cosmopolitan consumption practices. This, in turn, influences the ways in which Japanese cuisines are prepared and served to cater to this market, resulting in a reciprocal yet asymmetric exchange of cultural influences. Middle-class Asians and Asian Australians are now the leading sources of its shifting consumer (and provider) profiles. The Japanese restaurant in Australia is a valuable case study in this regard for considering this reconfiguration and the issue of ‘who consumes whose cultures as cosmopolitan’. This changing landscape of ‘who consumes whose cultures as cosmopolitan’ in Australia and elsewhere then creates new trajectories of cosmopolitan affiliations, thereby intervening in fixed identities. Motti Regev’s perspective on cosmopolitanism becomes instructive in examining the question. Regev argues that cosmopolitanism in late modernity, where a rigid form of ethno-national formation has come under scrutiny, dissolves the distinction between ‘a culture of our own and cultures of “others”’ (2007, 124–5). Regev illustrates this in the context of art, suggesting that cultures from different parts of the world are incorporated into art as an expression of what the scholar calls ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’—a perspective that makes ‘ethno-national uniqueness’ a fluid concept (2007, 125). According to Regev, aesthetic cosmopolitanism involves the processes of ‘co-production’ between ‘a culture of our own and cultures of “others”’, thereby replacing ‘a rigid form of national culture’ (2007, 125). What Regev’s concept of aesthetic cosmopolitanism posits is therefore an intervention into fixed identities and one’s vertical relationship to the other. The process of co-production through aesthetic cosmopolitanism can potentially displace the ‘self’ and ‘other’, the ‘West’ and ‘East’ binaries (2007, 126), because it illuminates cosmopolitan affiliations that address what Ulrich Beck refers to as ‘[t]he otherness of the other [that] is included in one’s own self-identity and self-definition’ (Beck in Regev 2007, 216). Although Regev’s use of the concept of aesthetic cosmopolitanism is specific to the art world, it is also worthwhile for our discussion of the politics of desire, power and consumption—both in terms of the way the Japanese restaurant offers a site of cosmopolitan consumption and the way this mode of consumption interrupts essentialist thinking of otherness. As a particular practice of cosmopolitan consumption, dining out in the Japanese restaurant allows one to taste the other both symbolically and aesthetically through a ‘virtual’ travell. Importantly, this bodily and aesthetic experience of the other involves a series of displacements that occur through the movement of the fold. That is, it essentially displaces people from one context to another without entirely pulling them out of their ‘familiar’ territory, but it incorporates the external world into its own otherness (see Chapters 1 and 2). What this movement produces is hence the new exotic—an alternative perspective that folds between the inside (virtual, mind and subject) and the outside (actual, body and object). Instead of placing the exotic other merely as an object and pure projection of an essentialist fantasy, the new exotic figures its otherness through sensing and making sense, thereby departing from subject-centred and fixed identities. While cosmopolitan consumption highlights class and otherness, it also

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  75 embodies one’s interest in the cultures of the other, rather than one’s cultural dominance over the other. Conceiving of dining out in the Japanese restaurant as cosmopolitan consumption, therefore, helps us seek a more flexible mode of otherness—otherness that is embodied, not so much as a complete stranger, but more as the new exotic that is both familiar and foreign. Claiming Authenticity, Desiring the Consumable When I asked Amy about a moment when she found herself contemplating the authenticity of her dining experience at the Japanese restaurant, the Singaporean university student in her 20s said, ‘They have gyōza but inside the gyōza they use rosemary. This is so western. We’re like, “Why does the gyōza taste so strange?” That would be an example of the problem of authenticity’. Authenticity becomes an issue in any process or formation that transgresses presumed boundaries. Put differently, authenticity ‘most often come[s] into play when [it] has been put in doubt’ (Peterson cited in Vannini and Williams 2009, 8). The Japanese restaurant, whereby products, practices, images and meanings traverse and deviate, deeply concerns authenticity, as illustrated at the outset—Amy’s doubt about a local Japanese restaurant in Melbourne where she had gyōza dumplings that were ‘so western’ (in Chapter 4, I will discuss issues of authenticity from restaurant workers’ perspectives). In fact, consumers’ fascination with, and anxiety about, the Japanese restaurant too often revolve around this theme. When I asked Sophia, the European Australian social worker, whether authenticity would matter to her when choosing which local Japanese restaurant to eat out at, she responded, Absolutely. Even though I haven’t been to Japan, I’d expect to have authentic Japanese food. I’d rather go to restaurants run by those who have been to Japan and know what the authentic Japanese food is, so they probably, reproduce, not in the exact sense, but try to bring pretty much authentic food and atmosphere as you might get in Japan in here. What is intriguing about Sophia’s response is that her judgement on authenticity relies on this imagined ‘Japan’. Here lies the uneasiness in the question of how and why authenticity matters when dining out in the Japanese restaurant. What is it about authenticity that disturbs yet engrosses consumers like Sophia? How do they come to terms with their consumership in the Japanese restaurant, which is intrinsically cross-cultural and transgressive, in their pursuit of authenticity? And more importantly, what do we mean by ‘authenticity’ in this context to address these questions? Rather than as a ‘single truth’ or a ‘fixed state of being’ that can be accessed, I conceive of authenticity here as a claim—‘a claim that a category is genuine, natural, true and pure’ (Barker 2003, 435–6). Authenticity is conceptual in this regard, yet it should be noted that it has a real effect in its consequences. In other words, as Vannini and Williams suggest, it is ‘the objectification of a process of representation, that is, it refers to a set of qualities that people in a particular time and place have come to agree represent an ideal or exemplar’

76  Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic (2009, 3). My examples here show that consumers make claims of authenticity in relation to their experience, knowledge and shifting positions. And notably, their claims of authenticity count on a point of ‘origin’—whether it be imagined or embodied. It is this symbolic and aesthetic proximity to the ‘root’ that gives authority to their claims of authenticity. Brian’s stories encapsulate many other consumers’ concerns about authenticity, on which the Japanese restaurant centres. In the interview, he recounted a story about having okonomiyaki savory pancakes with his parents at a local restaurant in Melbourne. He said, ‘I took my parents to a Japanese restaurant run by Chinese people, and we ordered okonomiyaki, but it was totally different from the okonomiyaki that I would have had in Osaka. It was very thin and didn’t even look like okonomiyaki’. His claim of authenticity for the dish was made based on his prior experience having okonomiyaki in Osaka—the birthplace of Kansaistyle okonomiyaki—and knowledge gained through that experience. This then formed his judgement on how proximate the okonomiyaki served at the Chinese-run Japanese restaurant was to the anchor point, leading to his claim that the okonomiyaki he had with his parents in Melbourne was ‘not authentic’. It is also this prior experience and knowledge that gives his claim of authenticity authority, and this authority rests in the ability to ‘tell the difference’—or connoisseurship. Brian detailed how he came to know what distinguishes ‘authentic’ okonomiyaki from an ‘inauthentic’ one. Additionally, he claimed that the distinction should be exhibited by accumulated knowledge, repeated practices and long-trained skills that form a culinary tradition—or craftsmanship: At quality okonomiyaki restaurants [in Japan], they have specialist chefs who have spent their whole life making okonomiyaki and have a degree of passion about it. And you can tell quite easily. [In Australia] now a lot of other places have okonomiyaki as their side dishes, not the main, and they produce it quite quickly, which was strange and wrong. Of course, real okonomiyaki does take quite a while to make, so that they can whip it up so quickly is a telling sign that they are using completely different methods and different ingredients and different styles and different everything, and the end product wasn’t very good. In Japan, the person cooking the food is really, when you think of the primary example, the number one example, was the people who have a mastery of what they have in traditional Japan and often the whole family has done that and you can tell, I think, the subtlety. That’s the only thing that you are going to pick up just after having been to fifty of different restaurants and watching which one is really good one and how the good ones are run and watching how the other ones are run, which is probably usually in a more casual or an ad hoc fashion. In his view, the ‘original’ cannot easily be reproduced, as it designates a culinary tradition that has been repeatedly practiced, accumulated overtime and tacitly codified. In order for Brian to tell the difference and substantiate his claims of authenticity, he believes that he must understand the lexicon of the

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  77 original, and during the interview, he hinted that he had the required knowledge to do so to some extent. What is fascinating is that, despite his confidence in his capability to ‘tell the difference’, he is nevertheless humble about it since he understands that the breadth and depth of Japan’s culinary tradition go far beyond the time he spent there, as well as the knowledge he has: Authentic or not, I don’t know. I can’t answer that. You know, I have been there for five years, but maybe what I thought was fantastic was not authentic. I can’t judge what is authentic Japanese food. I think you would have to ask a Japanese food expert, not me [he said with a grin]. But I think I can be a generally good judge, like an intuition or a feeling and you can suspect that there’s something really good or something really high quality, and there’s a lot more subtlety and a lot more skill going to be making it. And when you see any other versions of the same thing, which is poor, and then you watch people making it, and you can sense that they wouldn’t have the same level of passion or interest or skill as the one that you thought was good. I think I’ve picked up over time. I said I love eating so I ate a lot over many years. We used to eat out a lot [in Japan]. Nearly always eating out. Over the years of many, many restaurants and, you know, trying something new, trying something new and trying something new, and then going back to the other ones and then you would think that ‘ah, these people are so much better!’ And then there’s a natural curiosity to wonder why they are so much better, and then once you’ve learned back then and you could move around in Japan and you’ll start to see the same practice in other cities and other towns or in other restaurants, and then you’d assume that that’s the authentic way. But then, this is my own personal opinion, and I don’t think many other Australians [in Australia] would be able to have any clue whatsoever. Note that he is certain about his claim of authenticity only when he presents himself as an ‘insider’—in this case, the title bestowed on those with knowledge of Japan’s culinary tradition and experience eating there. What is remarkable is that his position as an ‘insider’ constantly switches depending on to whom he speaks about authenticity. This became clear, for example, when he adopted an ‘outsider’ viewpoint in contrast to the ‘insider’ one he presumed me to hold and said, ‘I can’t judge what is authentic Japanese food. I think you would have to ask a Japanese food expert, not me’. But then as shown in the earlier comments, his positionality shifted back to an ‘insider’ when he mentioned ‘many other Australians’, whom he classified as ‘outsiders’, stating, ‘I don’t think many other Australians in Australia would be able to have any clue whatsoever’. Another instance of him switching positions was when he told a story about the Chinese-run Japanese restaurant in Melbourne where he and his parents had eaten okonomiyaki that was ‘very thin and didn’t even look like okonomiyaki’. In his account of the incident, Brian said, ‘It was very embarrassing especially since I took my parents there. So we now have a lot of places

78  Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic that have been run by Chinese, but I think that’s a big problem in regards to authenticity’. It is worth noting that Brian’s embarrassment did not stem from the quality of the dish, but rather from the fact that the restaurant he chose was unable to establish his authority as an ‘insider’ to his parents. Brian’s story brings us back to the heart of what we are concerned with here: how and why authenticity matters. It matters because, by claiming authenticity, one can demonstrate the reliability of the person’s experience and knowledge, which together establishes the person’s authority. By doing so, Brian claims his position as an ‘insider’ of Japan’s culinary tradition. Here, the boundary of positions symbolically exists in a state of flux. On the one hand, Brian places himself as an ‘insider’ of Japan’s culinary tradition in relation to ‘many other Australians [in Australia]’ and potentially his parents, whom he thinks know little about Japan. But on the other hand, he also plays the role of an ‘outsider’ when his authority is challenged by someone whom he thinks knows more about Japan than him. What I am suggesting here is that authenticity claims are subject to social relations and thus constant negotiations, and this is why and how conceptual divisions between ‘is and ought, reality and principle, facts and norms’ can be contested, rewritten and possibly reconfigured (Ferrara 2009, 22; emphasis in original). Provided that authenticity claims are open to contestation, how do consumers handle these competing ideologies in the process of making their claims of authenticity? What is it about their claims that allow them to reconcile their quest for authenticity through dining out in the Japanese restaurant? Or more to the point, what authenticity do they want to see and consume? Consumable Authenticity While consumers often seek authenticity and make claims about it, what they actually find ‘consumable’ may be something different. Sophia, for example, spoke about certain kinds of Japanese food that are proximate to the purported point of origin yet may not always line up with her expectations or preferences. During the interview, she recounted a time when a Japanese student prepared a meal for her while he was visiting Melbourne. Despite the student’s claim that the meal was ‘authentic’, Sophia found it to be ‘very strange’, ‘unfamiliar’ and even a bit of ‘culture shock’: I didn’t know a terrible amount of Japanese food, but I remember once I met a young male Japanese student. He came over and cooked an extensive meal of true, you know, Japanese food for me, and a lot of them I found it very strange, you know, compared to what I’ve sort of been used to, the, yeah, taste-wise. There was black jelly seaweed you know, there were a few other things. I’m sure I’ve developed the palate for it, but I’d say it was a bit of culture shock initially. And there was tōfu, which, I like tōfu but it was the way he did with tōfu. His father owns a restaurant in Japan, and he said, ‘this is really true Japanese cooking’. That’s not, you know, what’s normally for the Western palate. It was interesting. Because my palate used to a lot of garlic and spice, so you see?

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  79 So I suppose there’re not too many authentic Japanese restaurants here, but I don’t know. I’m not 100 percent sure, but it’s like anything, you’ve got used to it. The first experience was, there was lots of stuff that I thought, ahh, how can I say? Ahh, very humble, I would say. There were a lot of humble sort of meals. Like I expected, [Japanese food] uses a lot of fish, you know, that sort of thing, but he didn’t serve a lot of fish, but the ingredients themselves were quite expensive, [I know this] because I’m out and purchase them so [what he cooked] wasn’t cheap. It was just unfamiliar to me. But having said that, I also like to dine out in a Japanese restaurant and have a nice meal there, so a bit of contradiction. The Japanese student’s cooking did not resonate with Sophia as ‘authentic’ or palatable. This was likely because the ingredients he used (such as the black jelly seaweed) and the methods he employed (such as the preparation of tōfu, although the ingredient itself is relatively familiar to her) did not suit her ‘Western palate’. Instead, Sophia thought of his cooking as ‘very humble’, which contrasts with her perception of ‘expensive’ (authentic) Japanese food. To highlight the tension between what consumers want to see and consume and what it is, I call the former ‘consumable authenticity’, which is exemplified by Sally’s experience as well. The European Australian high school teacher described the food she had eaten in Japan during her university exchange programme as ‘culture shock’ and ‘all foreign’: When I arrived in Japan on the first night, I was quite in culture shock. I remember I was walking around in Osaka from the hotel, and I really didn’t know what to eat. It was all foreign to me. And when I went to a host family, I think they tended to give me a lot of Western food. I remember going to a kiosk in the university and I felt the food was all foreign to me, like sandwiches with yakisoba [a Japanese stir fried noodles dish with vegetable and often pork seasoned with a sweet and savoury sauce], which at that time seemed very foreign to me, and I was really young, so I wasn’t really into it. Sally found Japan’s everyday culinary scene and its foods (such as ‘sandwiches with yakisoba’) to be ‘foreign’ both to her culinary background and to her perception of ‘Japanese food’. She explained, ‘I grew up with really plain food, like vegetables and meat as a main dish, so it’s very standard. I didn’t have a lot of ethnic food, I suppose. A little bit of Chinese but that would be it. Typically Australian’. Likewise, Andrew, the university student, shared his version of consumable authenticity with me in the interview. He told me his experiences with the breakfasts served by his Japanese host family during his time as an exchange student in Japan: At breakfast time, it was a bit weird. So they were like, ‘He’s Australian. He won’t eat any of our food’. Every morning, I had chocolate cereal and

80  Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic bread. I was like, ‘God, I’m in Japan, why am I eating all this kind of stuff ?’ Then, they went to eggs, bacon, sausages and baked beans, which are, I don’t know, do Japanese people eat those things? [I’m not sure about baked beans, but I don’t see why not.] Right, but I mean that’s really a heavy breakfast. It’s just cereal. Cereal and yoghurt and water. Or just a big bowl of cereal. But I was like, ‘Okay. This is even more different than what I was expecting’. And finally, we got down to sort of rice and stuff. So, I was a bit more, like, happy with that. Eventually, we got down to normal Japanese stuff. This anecdote presents a compelling example of how the concept of ‘consumable authenticity’ highlights the disparity between what food in Japan is like and what is considered ‘consumable’, as well as the complex interplay between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ elements that contribute to the composition of Japanese cuisines. The Japanese host family tried to adapt their food to suit what they assumed were ‘Australian’ tastes and expectations, but this was then further complicated by the fact that the food they served for breakfast (‘eggs, bacon, sausages and baked beans’) already reflected a cross-cultural genre of what is called ‘wayō-secchū’ (literally meaning ‘blending of Japanese and Western styles’). In a sense, the breakfast offered by the host family was ‘authentic’ because it reflected its own reality. However, it did not make sense to Andrew precisely because it was not ‘consumable’ for him, rather than because it was not ‘authentic’. Authenticity Impossible Authenticity makes more sense to consumers when it is ‘consumable’. And yet, when it comes to their quest for authenticity, there is more to it than that. In this final section, I briefly discuss why the Japanese restaurant seems to be almost perpetually unable to fulfil one’s desire for authenticity, which I tentatively term ‘authenticity impossible’. I use the term to describe the limits of authenticity—or the limits of accessing, capturing and justifying what is deemed ‘authentic’—and how the Japanese restaurant, as a site of cross-cultural transaction, translation and transgression, builds on the limits while also acting as a catalyst for stretching the limits. As authenticity impossible is at odds with consumers’ quest for authenticity, it often leaves their pursuit of authenticity feeling ‘hopeless’. Consumers respond to this hopelessness in various ways: some come to terms with it while others do not. Vivian, the Vietnamese Australian medical practitioner, is an example of the former. She views authenticity impossible as ‘part of the deal’ when it comes to dining out in the Japanese restaurant: I care about authenticity, but I also understand that you have to change a menu depending on the country you’re in. I mean, you can’t expect another country to have the same taste as in your country. So if you are going to have a profitable business, you have to sort of change a little bit

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  81 of it to meet the taste of the country you’re in. But at the same time, I think, Japanese food is very pliable and valuable, you know. I mean the very traditional kind of thing is never going to be in Australia. You are just not going to have it. I think that most of [Japanese food in Australia] is traditional, but whether or not it has got a variety of traditional flavours like in Japan, then no. Then you are not going to experience new food much because no one is going to eat and no one is going to pay for it, you know what I mean? [So you don’t think you get the same level of Japanese food in Australia that you would get in Japan?] No. That’s why you have to go to Japan! If Australia has the exact same thing, there is no reason to go to Japan. You can’t have things exactly like things in another country because it’s just, you can’t. You can’t have the variety and you can’t have the flavours, but you’re kind of happy with the taste of Japan in Australia. That’s part of the deal. You’re just not going to have the variety. So you actually go to Japan to get that. In her view, ‘actually going to Japan’ is the only way to fulfil one’s desire for the authenticity that the Japanese restaurant cannot present, but she also thinks that it is ‘part of the deal’ and is not what the Japanese restaurant is really for. While some people like Vivian take the condition of authenticity impossible into account and seemingly come to terms with it to some extent, others appear less willing to do so. Maki, for example, is reluctant to dine at the Japanese restaurant precisely because she thinks it makes authenticity impossible. In the interview, this Japanese graduate student in her 30s told me a story about a local Japanese-run sushi restaurant where she once had dinner with her Vietnamese Australian husband and his family to celebrate her birthday: They’re a popular one but not a ‘cheap eat’ type of restaurant, but how they cooked and what ingredients they used were very different from what I expected. The food didn’t taste as authentic as I expected. They had oysters, but they were slightly grilled and were topped with mayobased sauce. The taste was like, ‘Nooo!’ But all of my family looked really happy, but I was like, ‘Well, this isn’t right’. They also had beef sushi, but it tasted like, a bit like they had used Ebara sauce [a mass-produced yakiniku barbeque sauce produced by Ebara Foods Industry, Inc.]. There was only one kind of sushi that I thought was good—bream sushi with a bit of salt and lemon. That was good. It had no thick sauce and was very orthodox. The atmosphere was okay, but I don’t think I would go back again. With that kind of experience, I’m not very keen on eating at a Japanese restaurant here unless I’m starving [laugh]. I sometimes go to a takeaway shop to grab some sushi rolls for a quick snack, but that’s just it.

82  Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic Similarly, Aya, a Japanese full-time homemaker in her 30s, also does not consider the Japanese restaurant as ‘authentic’ as she would like. When I asked how regularly she would go to a local Japanese restaurant, she responded, Not recently. We did go in the first year we were here, but we don’t go anymore. [Do you have any reason for that?] I guess it’s because we don’t know which [Japanese] restaurants are worth visiting any more. Nowadays it seems like most of the [Japanese] restaurants are kind of domesticated, you know, they adjust their food to Australian people, which doesn’t quite suit my taste. I have sushi rolls sometimes because they’re quite cheap and taste pretty much the same wherever you get them. To me, they’re almost like McDonald’s hamburgers. But other than that, anywhere you go, things are really over-priced and not really worth trying out. To me, it’s quite ridiculous to pay ten dollars for a bowl of ochazuke [cooked rice topped with savoury toppings such as pickled umeboshi plums or salmon flakes, served with hot water, dashi or Japanese tea, which is traditionally considered a quick, easy dish cooked at home in Japan]. If I have to pay ten dollars for that kind of food, I’d rather cook it myself at home because that way I can cook whatever I want and however I want it. Other consumers—mostly Japanese consumers—share similar views. Their expectations are hardly met because, for them, the Japanese restaurant makes authenticity impossible. In the interview, Tomoki, a Japanese-born office worker in his 30s, shared his view on why this is the case: The Japanese population here is too small to support the Japanese restaurant industry, which forces them to appeal to consumers other than the Japanese. So, I think it’s understandable that they modify their menus to suit local tastes by making the flavour stronger or simpler so that people here can understand it better. It can’t be helped, I guess. While Japanese migration to Australia has grown over the past decade, with an increase of almost 20 percent, the number of Japanese-born residents still makes up less than 1 percent of Australia’s entire population (ABS 2022).6 Equally important is understanding whose tastes are referred to as ‘the local tastes’, which helps us better understand the condition of authenticity impossible. In my interviews, some consumers consider that the Japanese restaurant caters to the tastes of non-Japanese target clients. When Brian, the European Australian IT engineer, spoke about connoisseurship and craftsmanship regarding Japan’s culinary tradition, he stated, ‘I don’t think many other Australians in Australia would be able to have any clue whatsoever’, suggesting that the majority of Australians have limited experience and knowledge on which to judge the closeness of the Japanese food that they eat at the Japanese

Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  83 restaurant to the asserted point of origin. When asked to clarify what he meant by ‘most Australian people’, Brian responded, ‘I mean Anglos’. Likewise, when Aya and Tomoki were asked to elaborate on whom they referred to as ‘Australian people’, they responded that they refer to them, respectively, as ‘white people’ (‘haku-jin’ in Aya’s words) and ‘Anglo-type’ (‘Anguro-kei’ in Tomoki’s words). Although these views do not necessarily reflect the racial-ethnic diversity in Australia,7 they do represent the widely held perceptions of who Australians are and to whom the Japanese restaurant tends to cater its products and services—that is, socio-economically privileged ‘white’ Australians as discussed in Chapter 2 (this point will also be further examined in Chapter 4). At the same time, the Japanese restaurant permits a contradictory urge where customers perpetually search authenticity. This is best expressed by Noriko, a Japanese-born full-time housemaker in her 40s, who said, Even if I get the chance to eat out at a Japanese restaurant, I always find my experience disappointing. It may sound contradictory, but I always have this hope that ‘this time might be different’ when I go to a Japanese restaurant, but I’ve never had a satisfying dining experience. I know it’s weird, but it’s almost like obsession. Her comments suggest that authenticity impossible is a by-product of the Japanese restaurant as an exotic genre that embraces the ‘foreign’ as a necessary part of its formation, as figured through the fold metaphor. Paradoxically, authenticity impossible is also this counterintuitive force that keeps consumers searching for authenticity. This is because the Japanese restaurant incorporates the foreign, which ineluctably constitutes the original. As a result, it produces novelty and surprise as well as familiarity, or the new exotic. Thus, it is this conundrum of authenticity impossible that contradictorily draws consumers into the Japanese restaurant. On the other side of issues of authenticity is the ideological tension between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’, and the ‘original’ and the ‘translated’, which I analyse by seeing the Japanese restaurant as a site of cross-cultural translation in the chapter that follows. Notes 1 Year Two (6 to 7 years old) in Australia is roughly equivalent to first grade in the United States, while Year Nine (13 to 14 years old) is roughly equivalent to the final year of middle school. 2 One example of the ‘East-East’ popular cultural interactions is the inter-Asian adaptations (and divergences) of the Japanese notion of shōjo (literally translating to ‘girls’) in the media space. Shōjo can be referred to as ‘an ambivalent and resistant genre that narratively and stylistically defers incipient womanhood— and its attendant responsibilities—by maintaining the open-ended possibility of adolescence’ (Le 2009 cited in Iwabuchi et al. 2017, 29). In the edited volume Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture, Jinhee Choi investigates a

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South Korean reality TV show as a popular media platform for penetrating shōjo sensibility and transnational imagination in East Asian popular culture (2017, 178–90). Choi demonstrates how this Japanese concept is transformed into an East Asian regional sensibility throughout Japanese colonial expansion in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as contemporary shōjo culture in South Korea and beyond since the 1980s. 3 Fixed costs are expenses that remain unchanged regardless of whether sales or production volumes rise or fall. Property taxes, rent, salaries and the cost of benefits for non-sales and management staff are examples of fixed costs. Variable costs are expenses that fluctuate depending on the quantity of goods or services that a business produces. Direct materials, direct labour, transaction fees, commissions and utility prices are some of the most prevalent variable costs. 4 Japan is often conceived as being in a triangular relationship with both the West (especially America) and ‘Asia’. Koichi Iwabuchi notes that ‘Japan is unequivocally located in a geography called “Asia”, but it no less unambiguously exists outside a cultural imaginary of “Asia” in Japanese mental maps’ (2002, 7). It has been argued that the increasing inter- and intra-Asian cultural transactions occurring through globalisation are most apparent in the field of popular culture. This cultural phenomenon is by no means symmetrical, because Japan has increasingly become a keen consumer of popular cultures from other Asian nations, but it remains a dominant producer (Iwabuchi 2002, 6). 5 In culinary contexts, the notion of cosmopolitan consumption may overlap with some aspects of what Lisa Heldke characterises as ‘food adventuring’, a quest for ‘new’ foods by ‘food adventurers’ who ‘tend to be persons with middle-class status—or person who pass as, or aspire to, the middle class’, and ‘also tend to be with a significant amount of education’ (2003, xxii). Heldke’s concepts of ‘food adventuring’ and ‘food adventurers’ explicitly ‘engage’ with the consumption practices of ‘new’ foods from a colonialist perspective. 6 The Japanese community in Australia is relatively small compared to other immigrant communities from other Asian countries, such as China. According to the 2021 Census, the population of individuals who were born in Japan was 45,266 (ABS n.d.), while 595,630 people declared that they were born in Mainland China in Australia, accounting for about 2.3 percent of Australia’s population (ABS 2022). 7 In the 2021 Census, there were about 17.4 percent of ancestry responses that were classified as belonging to Asian ancestral groups, including 6.5 percent from Southern and Central Asia, 6.4 percent from North-East Asia and 4.5 percent from South-East Asia (ABS 2022).

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Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic  85 Boyle, Peter J., and E. Scott Lathrop. “Are Consumers’ Perceptions of Price-Quality Relationships Well Calibrated?” International Journal of Consumer Studies 33, no. 1 (January 2009): 58–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1470-6431.2008.00722.x Choi, Jinhee. “Shōjo Sensibility and the Transnational Imaginary.” In Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture, Edited by Koichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai, and Chris Berry, 178–90. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Crossman, Ashley. “How Did Pop Culture Originate?” ThoughtCo, 9 December 2019. https://www.thoughtco.com/popular-culture-definition-3026453 Domínguez-Quintero, Ana M., Maria Rosario González-Rodríguez, and José Luis Roldán. “The Role of Authenticity, Experience Quality, Emotions, and Satisfaction in a Cultural Heritage Destination.” Journal of Heritage Tourism 14, no. 5–6 (2 November 2019): 491–505. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743873X.2018.1554666 Ferrara, Alessandro. “Authenticity without a True Self.” In Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. Edited by Phillip Vannini, and J. Patrick Williams, 21–36, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Golden, Seán. “CIDOB – The US and China in the New Global Order.” CIDOB, 2020. http://www.cidob.org/en/publications/publication_series/opinion/seguridad_y_ politica_mundial/the_us_and_china_in_the_new_global_order Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge, 2000. Hannerz, Ulf. “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture.” In Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, Edited by Mike Featherstone, 237–52. London: Sage, 1990. Hazir, Irmak Karademir, and Warde, Alan. “The Cultural Omnivore Thesis: Methodological Aspects of the Debate.” In Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, Edited by Laurie Hanquinet and Mike Savage, 77–89. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Heldke, Lisa M. Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. New York: Routledge, 2003. Hong, Euny. “Why It Was So Easy for Korea to Overtake Japan in the Pop Culture Wars.” Quartz. Last modified 21 February 2019. https://qz.com/21468/why-it-wasso-easy-for-korea-to-take-over-japan-in-the-pop-culture-wars/ Iwabuchi, Koichi. “Nostalgia for a (Different) Asian Modernity: Media Consumption of ‘Asia’ in Japan.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 10, no. 3 (1 December 2002): 547–73. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10-3-547 ———. “East Asian Popular Culture and Inter-Asian Referencing.” In Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture, Edited by Koichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai, and Chris Berry, 24–33. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Joseph Pine II, B., and James H. Gilmore. “A Leader’s Guide to Innovation in the Experience Economy.” Strategy & Leadership 42, no. 1 (14 January 2014): 24–29. https:// doi.org/10.1108/SL-09-2013-0073 Kelts, Roland. Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Making Sense of Taste: Food & Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. McDonald, Peter. “Migration to Australia: From Asian Exclusion to Asian Predominance.” Revue Européenne Des Migrations Internationales 35, no. 1–2 (1 October 2019): 87–105. https://doi.org/10.4000/remi.12695

86  Eating Out and Tasting the New Exotic McGray, Douglas. “Japan’s Gross National Cool.” Foreign Policy no. 130 (May 2002): 44. https://doi.org/10.2307/3183487 Mkono, Muchazondida. “Augmenting Foodservice Experiences through Cultural Eatertainment at Tourist Destinations.” Journal of Foodservice Business Research 16, no. 1 (January 2013): 40–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/15378020.2013.761019 Numbeo. “Cost of Living,” 2021. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/ Nye, Joseph S. “Soft Power.” Foreign Policy, no. 80 (1990): 153. https://doi. org/10.2307/1148580 Peterson, Richard A. “Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore.” Poetics 21, no. 4 (August 1992): 243–58. https://doi.org/1 0.1016/0304-422X(92)90008-Q Porteous, Douglas J. “Smellscape.” Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment 9, no. 3 (September 1985): 356–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/030913338500900303 Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Foodsexidentities. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Regev, Motti. “Cultural Uniqueness and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism.” European Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 1 (February 2007): 123–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1368431006068765 Rodaway, Paul. Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Shugan, Steven M. “Comments on ‘Pricing a Product Line.’” The Journal of Business 57, no. 1 (1984): S101–7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2352926 Vannini, Phillip, and J. Patrick Williams. “Authenticity in Self, Culture and Society.” In Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society, 1–20. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Warde, Alan. Consumption, Food, and Taste: Culinary Antinomies and Commodity Culture. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997. Warde, Alan, and Lydia Martens. Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption, and Pleasure. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Wong, Peter. “How Asia Will Change the World via East-East Trade Corridor.” South China Morning Post, 16 April 2017. https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/ article/2087687/made-asia-asia-how-rise-its-middle-class-remaking-world Yano, Christine R. Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

4

Cross-Cultural Translation Decoding the Japanese Restaurant

Introduction This chapter examines what happens when ideas, products, practices, meanings and values that make up ‘Japanese cuisines’ are transferred from one context to another via the Japanese restaurant. Japanese cuisines, like any other cuisine, do not exist in a self-contained bubble of status quo (also see Heldke 2003, xix). Instead, they have evolved over time in tandem with, and tension against, the ‘foreign’, resulting in forms that are inherently cross-cultural and transgressive. In the context of the Japanese restaurant, this process is undone and redone, often in a more intricate way: Japanese cuisines become classified as ‘foreign’ from the outside view yet continue to transform by taking in elements from the destination contexts by way of the Japanese restaurant. Once again, the classification of what is ‘foreign’ and what is ‘not’ becomes unstable, because it depends on one’s point of view or positionality at any given time or place (discussed in Chapter 1). In this chapter, I view the Japanese restaurant as a site of ‘cross-cultural translation’—a method of translating Japanese cuisines as ‘foreign texts’ into something intelligible and palatable to ‘readers’ in a given time-space context. As Naoki Sakai writes, ‘Translation is not a task limited to the domain of linguistic knowledge’ (2014, 12). In analysing how the Japanese restaurant fits its products and services into the Australian context, I see ‘domestication’ as a particular mode of cross-cultural translation. In The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference, Lawrence Venuti writes that ‘domestication occurs with any translating and indeed is necessary if the foreign text is to become intelligible and interesting to domestic readers’ (1998, 114). Venuti claims that translation is a ‘domesticating practice’ that lends a foreign text some level of intelligibility so that ‘domestic readers’ can understand it. One may ask, How does domestication situate diverse readers within a domestic intelligibility? In his examination of literary translation, Venuti refers to readers as ‘domestic subjects’. He defines them as those who represent the domestic dominating groups’ moral codes, interests and agendas (Venuti 1998). From here, one can see that domestication normalises both the readership and the foreign texts. Put differently, this ideology by domesticating practices may DOI: 10.4324/9781003362463-4

88  Cross-Cultural Translation diminish (or repress) the diversity of readers and the foreign texts. Some workers at the Japanese restaurant are constantly negotiating what ‘foreignness’ they should or should not translate, as well as for whom and how. Venuti’s concept of domestication allows us to conceptualise this cultural politics of ‘who translates what foreignness of the foreign texts, for whom and how’ in domesticating practices, in which the Japanese restaurant is involved. Domesticating practices are political because they reveal power asymmetries between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’, as well as the ‘original’ and the ‘translated’. As James Clifford once put it (1997, 182), ‘[c]ross-cultural translation is never entirely neutral; it is enmeshed in relations of power’. So is the process of domesticating practices. As discussed in Chapter 1, the foreignness of foreign foods is carefully diluted, purified and ultimately accepted as part of Japan’s culinary lexicon. Part of what governs this process, I have claimed, is the codes of Japan’s culinary system—such as ‘naturalness’, ‘rawness’, ‘seasonality’ and ‘domesticity’—which serve as benchmarks for gauging how neatly the foreignness of foreign foods fits into domestic cuisines, practices, interests, norms and values. Domestication as a mode of cross-cultural translation offers an alternative analytical lens to popular frameworks, such as ‘fusion’ and ‘hybridisation’, which do not fully articulate how the foreign texts confront ‘domestic’ values, expectations and norms via the Japanese restaurant. My goal is therefore to unpack the cultural politics of domesticating practices through the Japanese restaurant and provide critical insights that take us beyond a simple celebration of diversity or random fusion. Crucially, domestic subjects are not of one kind and stable. They may be from multiple racial-ethnic and social groups, and the composition changes as demographic realities, economic circumstances and socio-cultural factors transform. I have witnessed this through a gradual shift in the restaurant operators’ views on who their target clientele is throughout the course of my decade-long investigation. When I first started my fieldwork in 2009, most restaurateurs and chefs perceived ‘European Australians’, or more specifically, socio-economically privileged Anglo-Celtic Australians, as domestic subjects, and therefore their domesticating practices were situated by this clientele group. While this perception is still operative in their domesticating practices, restaurateurs and chefs are now increasingly embracing middle-class Asians and Asian Australians as new groups of their clientele. This shift shapes restaurateurs’ and chefs’ domesticating practices as a particular mode of cross-cultural translation, as will be illustrated by my recounting of their experiences. In this chapter, I gather various restaurateurs’ and chefs’ experiences and opinions to highlight a broad spectrum of perspectives on who constitutes the domestic subjects in their domesticating practices. My earlier examples (2009–2011) tend to portray domestic subjects as some privileged Anglo-Celtic and European Australians whereas my more recent examples (2020–2021) paint a different picture of ‘translator-reader’ relationships, as well as how restaurateurs and chefs translate their culinary products and practices for a wider range of the domestic subjects.

Cross-Cultural Translation  89 In this chapter, I query, How does the Japanese restaurant fit its products and services into the needs of a market that is predominantly ‘white’ yet increasingly ‘Asianising’? In what ways does this changing social condition allow us to rethink the notion of domestic subjects as the underpinning of domestication? What challenges do restaurateurs and chefs face while domesticating the ‘foreign’ texts of Japanese cuisines that were once ‘purified’ in the ‘homeland’? And is it ultimately worth it for them to overcome the challenges? In responding to these questions, I consider at least two conditions that allow domestication to function as a cross-cultural translation. First, domestication is, as Venuti claims, ‘fundamentally ethnocentric’ and thus ‘can never simply be communication between equals’ (1998, 11). Second, due to this primary condition, domestication is by nature ‘imperfect’. My intention here is to critique the assumption that translation is ‘simply communicating between equals’ through the case study of the Japanese restaurant in Australia, where Japanese cuisines and related practices are cross-culturally translated, transgress and continue to transform. Two Perspectives on Translation Translation is often thought of as a way of enabling communication between (at least) two entities that would otherwise be unable to communicate. Naoki Sakai calls this view a ‘homolingual address’, suggesting that it renders languages unified, homogenous entities (1997, 2). Because the homolingual address leads a translator and the target reader to assume that the languages being translated are symmetrical, it claims that meaning can be transferred between them (1997, 2). Alternatively, Sakai proposes ‘heterogeneous address’, which allows one to see translation as ‘a practice producing difference out of incommensurability (rather than equivalence out of difference)’ (1997, xiii). In the heterogeneous address, Sakai writes, ‘[E]very utterance can fail to communicate because heterogeneity is inherent in any medium, linguistic or otherwise’ (1997, 8). In other words, the heterogeneous address indicates that translating from one context—linguistic or otherwise—to another is not linear, transparent or automatic. Sakai’s theories of linguistic translation have broader cultural and ethno-political implications. They suggest not only different ways of perceiving translation but also how differently translation can treat texts. In the heterogeneous address, translation is an ‘imperfect’ method of communicating two distinct languages and cultures because every text as a medium is heterogeneous. The homolingual address, on the other hand, uses translation to communicate between two ostensibly homogenous entities. Any gap created by translation, in this perspective, elicits fear. As Venuti addresses, ‘Translation provokes the fear of inauthenticity, distortion, contamination’ (1998, 31). The most obvious demonstration of this fear was the Japanese government’s reaction to the globalisation of Japan’s cuisines via the Japanese restaurant. As part of their Japanese restaurant authentication strategy, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) allowed undercover inspectors, dubbed ‘Sushi Police’,

90  Cross-Cultural Translation to offer official stamps of approval to overseas eateries serving food as ‘genuinely Japanese’ in 2006 (Council of Advisors for the Recommendation of Japanese Restaurants Outside Japan 2007; Daliot-Bul 2009, 257).1 In a 2006 Washington Post article, then-Minister of the MAFF Toshikatsu Matsuoka emphasised the need for preserving cultural and culinary purity for the sake of national interest, commenting, ‘What people need to understand is that real Japanese food is a highly developed art. It involves all the senses; it should be beautifully presented, use genuine ingredients and be made by a trained chef’ (Faiola 2006).2 Matsuoka continued, ‘What we are seeing now are restaurants that pretend to offer Japanese cooking but are really Korean, Chinese or Filipino. We must protect our food culture. […] We take our food very seriously’ (Faiola 2006). The Sushi Police made international headlines when they delivered a xenophobic address of ‘what and how food ought to be’. According to Anthony Faiola of The Washington Post, the Sushi Police is ‘yet another expression of resurgent Japanese nationalism. […] So beware, America, home of the California roll. The Sushi Police are on their way’ (2006). Others argue that policing the cross-cultural translation of Japanese cuisines that fails to meet the MAFF’s criteria as a high culinary crime is likewise hypocritical. ‘After all, Japan is a country that has in equal measure bastardised western cuisines to suit local palates’, Mariko Sanchanta says in a 2007 Financial Times article. ‘Will the Italian food polizia crack down on restaurants in Japan that serve spaghetti topped with mentaiko—spicy cod roe? Will the US culinary brigade outlaw fast food outlets that serve rice burgers?’ (Sanchanta 2007). Sanchanta also points out a paradox in Japan’s cultural promotion and protection: while the government has been pushing Japan’s cultural products, including cuisines, to cross national boundaries in order to spread specific images of Japaneseness as part of the national branding of ‘Cool Japan’ (see Chapter 1), they do not allow others to do so unless their crossing over supports their objective of making the translated texts ‘genuinely Japanese’. Sanchanta claims, Japanese food has spread in popularity abroad in great part thanks to restaurants owned by enterprising individuals—many of whom are Chinese and Korean in the US—who saw a business opportunity and successfully exploited it. Sure, kimchi and sashimi probably don’t mix. But instead of separating the authentic from the inauthentic, the government should hand out thank you notes to everyone who tries to promote Japanese food—especially the genius who invented the California roll. (2007) This is precisely where the problem with what Sakai defines as a homolingual address lies. In the MAFF’s policing by way of the Sushi Police, Japanese cuisines are deemed a unified, closed and homogeneous entity in cross-cultural translation, despite the fact that they are not. By addressing one way of translating Japanese cuisines as ‘correct’ and thus ‘superior’ to the others, a homolingual perspective articulates them as such.

Cross-Cultural Translation  91 Food, like any other medium, crosses discrete conceptions of geography, culture and identity: it marks, translates and disorients as it moves between symbolic borders such as ‘us’ and ‘them’. It is thus this transgression that reveals where power lies, or ‘a form of politics’ (Cresswell 1996, 9). In In Place/ Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, Tim Cresswell writes, ‘To have transgressed […] means to have been judged to have crossed some line that was not meant to have been crossed’ (1996, 23). Here lies this anxiety or fear over crossing boundaries—that is, it makes what is ‘in place’ ‘out of place’. The Sushi Police is an example of this emotional dilemma at an institutional level, demonstrating how movement across ideological (as well as physical) boundaries leads to mixed responses to cross-cultural interaction, contamination and evolution. Shoji from KOHARU: The Ethics and Ethos of a Homolingual Address For Shoji, a veteran kaiseki owner-chef of a multiplex fine restaurant in Melbourne’s Chinatown, what is widely described and interpreted as ‘Japanese cuisine’ outside of Japan is ‘wrong’, and the Japanese restaurant is to blame. ‘I came here [to Australia] because I felt the urge to correct the wrong idea about Japanese cuisine that some people had overseas’, the Japanese owner-chef in his 40s stated in the interview. In 1988, Shoji relocated to Australia to start his own establishment. He was head-hunted by a hotel enterprise subsided by a Japanese airline and hired as their sushi chef shortly after securing a job as a sous chef at an upscale Japanese restaurant in Sydney. 13 years later, he moved to Melbourne to look for a new business opportunity. In 2003, Shoji met a Malaysian entrepreneur with whom he formed a business partnership and opened the doors of KOHARU. Shoji’s two-decade career in Australia’s Japanese restaurant industry shows how different ways of translating Japanese cuisines produce gaps and hierarchies in perceptions, as well as frustration over ‘im-perfect’ translation. Shoji’s way of translating Japanese cuisines as foreign texts relies primarily on the principles of kaiseki multi-course haute cuisine. At the age of 16, Shoji started working in the restaurant business under the guidance of his father, who owned a restaurant in his hometown. He acquired his extensive kaiseki culinary training at some of Japan’s most prestigious high-end traditional restaurants, including a 90-year-old ryo ̄tei high-end establishment specialising in kaiseki cuisine. His business philosophy, pride and vision on ‘what Japanese cuisine genuinely is’ are all based on his decades-long devotion to the world of kaiseki cuisine, which he believes sets his own culinary profession and enterprise apart from others in Australia’s Japanese restaurant industry. One of these principles of kaiseki cooking that shaped his view on Japanese cuisines is ‘naturalness’, which also underpins the codes of Japan’s culinary system (see Chapter 1). Naturalness in the context of kaiseki is achieved by a style of cooking that accentuates the inherent aroma and flavour of ingredients, instead of masking them with thick sauces or spices. Shoji’s ability to

92  Cross-Cultural Translation interpret this code in his cooking is best demonstrated by his rigorous attention to the process of preparing dashi, a Japanese stock. Dashi, which literally means ‘extract fluid’, is a clear cooking broth created by gently boiling one or two ingredients, such as kombu (kelp), katsuo-bushi (dried, fermented and smoked bonito flakes) and dried shiitake mushrooms, in water, generally for 20 to 30 minutes. Shoji in the interview noted how using good, homemade dashi in his cooking helps to mark his establishment out from other local Japanese restaurants: People say, ‘Your place is different’. Of course, it is. We make dashi ourselves out of katsuo-bushi. […] Homemade dashi is without a doubt an integral part of Japanese cuisine. We’ve been working hard to maintain this most important aspect of Japanese cuisine. We haven’t cut any corners since we started this restaurant. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why our restaurant has earned such a prestigious position in the industry. Although Shoji’s dedication to dashi may seem extreme to some Japanese restaurant operators, it is not uncommon in the world of kaiseki. In fact, dashi is often regarded as a reflection of a kaiseki chef’s level of skill. Chefs who specialise in kaiseki cuisine, such as Yoshiyuki Kashiwabara of Restaurant Yoshi in Singapore, share Shoji’s enthusiasm. In a Michelin Guide article, the owner-chef underscores the indispensable role that dashi plays in his culinary practices: Many recipes are derived from trial and error and it may take the chefs many years of experimenting before they perfect their own personal dashi recipe. […] Even when two people cook the dashi using the same recipe, the taste can differ widely as there are many other aspects that affect the taste, such as timing and precision. (Michelin Guide 2016; emphasis in original) Despite its relatively simple ingredients and cooking process, dashi is seen as the ultimate expression of kaiseki. It imparts a subtle flavour to seafood, vegetables, tōfu and other vital ingredients in delicate kaiseki compositions. This umami-rich and versatile stock is also a key component of kaiseki courses, known as ‘sui-mono’ (literally ‘meal you can drink’). Sui-mono soup is a plain, clear dashi broth that is often garnished with vegetables, tōfu or shellfish, and is considered ‘the most important course in a kaiseki sequence—and the mark of a chef’s ability’ (Michelin Guide 2016). In Shoji’s opinion, good, homemade dashi is what makes cooking ‘genuinely Japanese’, whereas manufactured dashi products are not. He believes that making dashi at the highest possible level requires extra effort, which demonstrates how much a chef cares about what they cook and how they cook it. What frustrates Shoji is when a chef claims that their cooking is ‘genuinely Japanese’ even if they use manufactured dashi products:

Cross-Cultural Translation  93 What really gets me is that even renowned Japanese restaurants here [in Melbourne] use Hondashi [a powdered soup stock made with dried bonito, manufactured and supplied by Ajinomoto Co., Inc.] for their miso soup. […] It’s just so wrong. If you’re going to charge your customers a premium price, you should at least offer them what they paid for instead of taking shortcuts. Those restaurants, in my opinion, are not genuinely Japanese. Using an instant dashi product such as Hondashi in preparation and claiming it as ‘genuinely Japanese’ is ‘wrong’ in his opinion—both in terms of translating the codes of Japan’s culinary system that underlie kaiseki cuisine, and proving the codes’ value proposition. His frustration highlights the disparity between what he expects Japanese cuisine to be and what he thinks other restaurateurs and chefs believe it to be. ‘I think our restaurant is fairly rare in that regard’, He added. ‘Others don’t make their own dashi, but we do.’ This gap then produces perceived hierarchies—the superiority of ‘homemade dashi’ over ‘an instant processed dashi product’, as in this case. The idea that food has hierarchies is also demonstrated when Shoji excludes Japanese-style gilled gyo ̄za dumplings from his definition of what genuine Japanese cuisine should be. Shoji explained, ‘People often ask us, “Don’t you have gyōza here?” But we say, “No, we don’t. And gyōza is not Japanese”. Then, they say, “Well, at other [Japanese] restaurants we go to, there is always gyōza”. So we’ve been blamed [for not serving gyōza]’. Gyōza dumplings, whose origins are in China, have become a popular Japanese food both in Japan and globally. Shoji, however, sees gyōza as a transgression. Hence, he considers the Japanese restaurant serving gyōza to be ‘not quite right’. He continued, When people ask us whether we have gyōza or not, we say, ‘There is a Chinese restaurant across the street’. Those restaurants that serve gyōza as Japanese food are mostly run by Chinese people. [Could Japanese-owned eateries in Melbourne also be included?] Some of them are. They call themselves a ‘Japanese restaurant’, but what they’re doing doesn’t seem to me to be quite right. I think they’re partly responsible for why people see gyōza as Japanese food. These hierarchies, which uphold Shoji’s culinary standards and work ethics, have the potential to limit the diversity of Japanese cuisines and to present the Japanese restaurant as a homogeneous entity, thereby establishing one category as conceptually superior to the other. Therefore, Sakai’s perspective of ‘a homolingual address’ discussed in the previous section corresponds to Shoji’s way of translating Japanese cuisines as foreign texts. Importantly, Shoji’s view on Japanese cuisines and the Japanese restaurant is not entirely a personal one; rather, it is formed by his culinary and professional practices in the realm of kaiseki, which strictly follow the codes of Japan’s culinary system. Another chef at a traditional Japanese restaurant in

94  Cross-Cultural Translation Melbourne I interviewed, Toru, shares Shoji’s belief in food hierarchies. This experienced Japanese sushi chef in his 30s had worked in the restaurant industry in Japan and the United States for a total of 13 years before coming to Australia. ‘From a Japanese point of view’, he explained, ‘food can be hierarchically ranked, and you can see this, for example, in the price ranges associated with a particular food’. He went on to say, In Japan, different foods are ranked hierarchically, but outside of Japan, these hierarchies are often jumbled together. For example, in Western gourmet food magazines featuring Japanese cuisine, teriyaki chicken is often featured alongside sushi. But in Japan, teriyaki is commonly thought of as a fast food and isn’t as highly regarded as sushi, even though it is well-liked outside of Japan. Like Shoji, Toru believes that different types of food should be categorised separately and not mixed or juxtaposed. Once again, Sakai’s theory of homolingual address appears relevant because even though foods are neither inherently uniform nor distinct, Toru perceives them as such. Here, different types of food are considered distinguishable, making it possible to evaluate one type of food over another, such as the ‘teriyaki chicken’ versus the ‘sushi’. What seems to disturb both Shoji and Toru is the collapse of perceived hierarchies through displacement, crossover and transgression, which occurs as part of domestication as a mode of cross-cultural translation. Yet, Shoji is not a member of the Sushi Police. Despite his homolingual way of understanding and decoding the codes of Japan’s culinary system, he has no intention of exposing other eateries for their transgressive translations. What is intriguing, instead, is that he permits himself to cross boundaries in his cooking—between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, and the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’. KOHARU’s menu incorporates European (mostly modern French) cooking styles into kaiseki with aesthetically elaborate presentations. Examples of the end results of KOHARU’s cross-cultural culinary practices include salmon carpaccio, steamed savoury egg custard, grilled red king taraba crab legs and steamed quail thigh in a green tea–scented bamboo leaf. With these dishes, chefs manage to retain a traditional Japanese culinary style while incorporating elements of other cultures. Shoji explained, I believe that our approach to presenting our food and designing our space is modern, which works well here [in Melbourne]. By combining traditional and modern styles, we can differentiate ourselves from other Japanese restaurants and create a unique identity. The modern style of presenting food is also advantageous for marketing purposes, as it can serve as a point of differentiation in the Japanese restaurant industry, which tends to focus on traditional dishes. But when it comes to the way we cook and the ingredients we use, such as basic seasoning ingredients and dashi broth and so on, we stick to traditional Japanese methods.

Cross-Cultural Translation  95 While we present food in a modern way, we strive to stay true to our traditional roots. We push the boundaries within those traditions, so we play both traditional and modern styles out on the edge. Shoji’s practice seems paradoxical since he allows himself to cross over boundaries, but views others who do so as transgressive. This paradox, however, makes complete sense to Shoji because he sees his own crossovers, such as blending kaiseki and modern French cooking, as occurring within the same food hierarchy of haute cuisine. But what about the crossover between the traditional and the modern? Is there a way to cross those boundaries in a manner that still aligns with Shoji’s homolingual address? When asked about this, Shoji used the metaphors of ‘inside’ (‘nakami’, ‘naiyō’) and ‘outside’ (‘sotogawa’, ‘hako’) to explain how they maintain a certain level of order on the inside while engaging with the outside: We’re using a modern style to transfer the content [nakami] through the vessel of the presentation [sotogawa], which is only the decorative aspect for me and isn’t as important as the content. It’s just the surface in the end. What really matters to me is the content [naiyō]. So, the box [hako] wouldn’t really be an issue as long as it allows me to put in what I think is right. This inside-outside analogy does not refer to a fixed set of dimensions. Instead, it is used in such a way that allows the outside (or ‘sotogawa’, ‘hako’, as Shoji describes it) to fold into the inside (or ‘nakami’, ‘naiyō’) and makes the foreignness of the inside understandable and acceptable to the domestic subjects. ‘Good Copy’ and ‘Bad Copy’: Translating Sushi into Mass Exoticisms If perceived food hierarchies, whereby food and food practices are ranked accordingly, describe a homolingual address, crossing over the hierarchies through domesticating practices produces ‘copies’. The term ‘copies’ here refers to deviating results from translating (and reading) some purported origin or norm. In this section, I discuss two types of copies—a ‘good copy’ and a ‘bad copy’—depending on how closely they adhere to the codes of Japan’s culinary system. To illustrate this, I will draw on two Japanese sushi chefs based in Melbourne as examples: Makoto from TOKYO EXPRESS, a Chinese-owned takeaway sushi shop, and Toru from ZEN, a high-end Japanese restaurant. I analyse how different copies of sushi—arguably the most popular marker of Japanese cuisines—can be regarded as either a proximate or distant copy of the ‘original’. To do this, I use Clara Gallini’s concept of ‘mass exoticisms’. Gallini argues that an object labeled as ‘exotic’ loses its value and exclusivity when it is mass-produced and turned into a symbol of popular consumer goods. She shares an example from her childhood in Italy where her family had

96  Cross-Cultural Translation a drawing-room suite filled with Chinoiserie artifacts, which they displayed for ‘pleasure and prestige’ (1996, 215). However, when Chinoiserie became more widely available in the local market, the ‘exoticness’ of these items and their ownership privilege diminished, becoming what Gallini describes as a ‘mass exoticism’: If it is true that art is polysemic, what are the few but essential signs which can reduce a piece of merchandise represented as exotic to a mass market object? Exoticism, in Fanon’s words, is a form of simplification. It encapsulates, imprisons, encrypts. […] Exoticism, then, generates the stereotype, and mass production reproduces it in its numerous variations. (1996, 216) Gallini’s concept of mass exoticisms underscores our main concern here, which is how can we understand the exoticism of Japanese cuisines such as ‘sushi’ that appeals to global consumers yet is mass-produced? How do those sushi chefs, such as Makoto and Toru, who play a key role in the cross-cultural translation of sushi, handle ‘copies’ created in that mass production? And under what circumstances can cross-cultural translation determine whether a copy is ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Makoto, the head sushi chef at TOKYO EXPRESS, located on Melbourne’s largest commercial strip, has been handling fish over four decades. He used to work as a chef in established restaurants in Tokyo that specialise in sushi, kaiseki ryōri and the Japanese delicacy fugu blowfish for more than 20 years.3 In 1987, he moved to Australia with his wife and 3-year-old daughter, who now works with him at the sushi counter of TOKYO EXPRESS. The Chinese-owned casual eatery sells competitively priced sushi and sushi rolls starting from AU$2, 365 days a year. Although it is a small shop with just a few seats, it specialises in sushi takeaway, sushi bento and other Japanese foods like okonomiyaki savoury pancakes (AU$5.50). Even though TOKYO EXPRESS is one of those ubiquitous sushi takeaway shops, I noticed that it was always filled with university students, office workers and tourists whenever I walked by. In August 2009, I had an interview with Makoto, the pink-haired veteran sushi chef in his 60s. When asked him about the secret to success, he responded that there is a ‘theory’ (or ‘seorı ̄’ in his words) on how to make ‘good sushi’, which he claimed each sushi chef should know: We once hired a Chinese chef because he said he could make sushi, but he wasn’t any good. He knew nothing about how to prepare for sushi. He didn’t even know how to handle raw fish. He messed with it a lot and ruined it. You know, the more you touch fish, the less fresh it gets. There’s a theory behind sushi preparation, and one needs to understand it to make sure that it tastes like sushi, not just looks like sushi. Some of my Chinese friends who own takeaway sushi shops here [in Melbourne] once told me that they prepare and serve sashimi, but never

Cross-Cultural Translation  97 taste it. So I said to them, ‘Man, how could you tell the difference between what’s good and what’s not good without tasting it?’ They said they don’t like raw fish. Look, they don’t care about the critical part of sushi preparation or how the fish works. I guess, they’re only concerned that it sells. Those who do not follow the proper method of handling raw fish, according to Makoto, neglect the theory of sushi and thus the codes of Japan’s culinary system, such as the importance of ‘rawness’, which are essential to sushi crafting. Makoto believes that those Chinese chefs touch the surface of fish ‘too much’ yet refuse to taste the meat, failing to bring out the rawness of raw fish. In other words, they may be able to replicate the ‘original’, but because their handling of raw fish does not abide by the codes of Japan’s culinary system, it reduces sushi to a mass exoticism. ‘I teach those Chinese chefs how to handle a fish, the basics of sushi making, and tell them to just copy what I’m doing, but they don’t’, the trained sushi chef explained. ‘They’re not willing to copy it, but it’s funny that they kind of copy, ah, in a different way. I mean, it’s not a good one’. In fact, in a Japanese traditional style of learning and mastering, there is a fine line between ‘copying’ and ‘creating’. As Keiko Clarence-Smith notes, ‘The Japanese tradition of copying in more traditional contexts hints at a more complex relationship between copying and creating, such that the act of perpetual copying may become in itself a form of sublime creativity’ (2008, 64). In this traditional sense, the copy is not antagonistic to the ‘original’. Rather, ‘the notions of “original” and “copy” are mutually dependent, in that one definition would refer to the other. […] a “copy” entails an “original”’ (Clarence-Smith 2008, 52; emphasis in original). In Japanese traditional skills, such as artisanal craftsmanship, the practice of copying has long been an element of learning on the path to mastery (Cox 2007). In fact, it is believed that the Japanese word ‘maneru’ (‘to copy’) stems from the word ‘manebu’ (‘to copy/to learn’), which developed into the word ‘manabu’ (‘to learn’).4 Copying as a method of learning entails the process of embodying, internalising and thus understanding. Since repetition involves reproducing what is already established, and relies on the legitimacy of the ‘original’ work, it is seen as a crucial element in the process of copying for the purpose of acquiring mastery. Understanding by copying also requires attention to detail and precision, as well as the replication of the master’s form. As Joy Hendry notes, ‘Accurate imitation is an accomplishment esteemed as the most appropriate method of acquiring artistic, and other (such as technological) skills’ in the traditional Japanese context of learning and mastery (2000, 218). Toru, another well-trained sushi chef, also claims that different modes of copying result in different outcomes—either a good copy or a bad copy. He uses the tropes of ‘craftsmen’ and ‘businessmen’ to explain the contrasting approaches of two types of copying:

98  Cross-Cultural Translation It’s really about the difference between craftsmen [shokunin] and businessmen [bijinesuman]. Sushi rolls are currently largely mass-produced at Chinese-run establishments. Those Chinese suppliers are quite good at copying, but I think how they do it is rather superficial. They start off working at a Japanese restaurant to get some experience, and then soon after they launch their own Japanese restaurants. They may believe that making sushi is simple and they can master it quickly, but it’s not. It’s a pity, but what can we do? I guess they don’t really care about how sushi should be crafted. Yeah, it’s really a craft. But they may see it simply as a business opportunity, nothing more than that. We’re not businessmen, but more like craftsmen. We don’t mind putting in extra effort because we want to make sure that our customers enjoy the freshest possible sushi. If it’s just for money, we’d simply scrimp on expenses. And that’s very much what they do, really. It’s just a bad copy. Equating the translation of sushi by Chinese-run Japanese restaurants with a ‘bad copy’ is a stereotype that does not allow for a reflection of a range of realities. Nevertheless, Toru’s comments are noteworthy for at least two reasons. Firstly, they indicate that a deeper understanding of the codes of Japan’s culinary system—in this case, the theory of sushi that achieves ‘rawness’—is essential to making a ‘good copy’. Secondly, they imply that a good copy benefits from the same mass exoticism that produces a bad copy. That is, a mass exoticism sets a good copy apart from a bad copy, and yet counterintuitively, it is a bad copy that serves as the necessary other of a good copy. This is because having a bad copy validates a good copy’s mode of copying as learning, mastering and ultimately making a difference. Im-perfectly Translated, Positively Transgressive A bad copy as the necessary other of a good copy within a mass exoticism can be seen as positive transgression. This is illuminated in my interviews with other experienced chefs including Ken. Ken had received French culinary training in Japan before obtaining a managerial position at YAESU, one of Melbourne’s oldest Japanese restaurants. When interviewed, the Japanese chef and restaurant manager in his 60s said that the expansion of the Japanese restaurant run by non-Japanese (mainly Chinese and South Korean) had a positive impact on the industry, saying, ‘They’re the ones who are helping expand our market’. He also viewed that they would contribute to the industry’s growth since their ‘unorthodox’ ways of reading and translating Japanese cuisines could break through the repetitions of the ‘original’, thus potentially providing new meaning and value. Ken explained, I’ve seen that many of my friends who worked as chefs in Japan are now based in Australia have a sense of pride in Japanese culinary traditions, which they’ve been a part of for many years. They base their culinary

Cross-Cultural Translation  99 methods on Japan’s culinary history and tradition, even though they now work in Australia. However, this can have a downside because they may be hesitant to try new things or things they haven’t done before. Chinese chefs, on the other hand, are relatively free from such shibari [rules and prohibitions]. They may be seen as jadō [an unconventional or inappropriate manner of doing things], but this is precisely why they are often considered innovative. According to Ken, how those Chinese restaurant operators read and translate the foreign texts of Japanese cuisines is transgressive since it breaks the rules governing Japan’s culinary history and tradition. Yet, he considers their transgressive translations are also a positive step towards that which is ‘innovative’. A similar view was also shared by Minoru, a trained Japanese chef who arrived in Melbourne in 1968 and opened SAKURA-GI in the CBD in 1986. Until it closed its doors in 2010, SAKURA-GI, which was surrounded by commercial buildings and international hotels, had entertained both local clientele and international tourists with classic Japanese delicacies, such as wagyū sukiyaki, teppanyaki, tempura and sashimi. During the interview, he remarked, Now we have Japanese restaurants managed by Chinese and Koreans, as well as a bunch of other eateries claiming to offer Japanese cuisine. Certainly, Japanese cuisine is getting popular, and this has created new business opportunities for those involved. Personally, I have no objections to this as it is their business, not ours. If they want to make low-cost sushi rolls and it works out for them, that’s great. We don’t have the power to stop them from doing so. We don’t have the right to dictate what they should and shouldn’t do. They’re different from us and not ōdō [an orthodox and proper way of doing things], so we can’t expect them to follow the same practices as we do. After all, it’s the consumers who decide what they want, not us. Minoru describes his own restaurant as ‘ōdō’ producing a ‘good copy’, while placing those Chinese and Korean restaurant operators on the other end of the spectrum—or in the realm of mass exoticisms. However, like Makoto and Toru, he does so by citing them to define who produces a good copy in the industry of the exotic genre. Once again, a bad copy serves as the necessary other of a good copy within a mass exoticism. Similarly, Ken at YAESU believes that different rules apply in the world of mass exoticisms. His following comments highlight this, demonstrating how, for example, a Chinese-run Japanese eatery that recently opened near his restaurant works with a different priority than his own: There’s a lot of demand for those cheap eats where students can eat sushi and other Japanese dishes for seven or eight dollars. They’re cheap and they’re popular. On another business street, there is a small Japanese

100  Cross-Cultural Translation restaurant that recently opened, managed by a Chinese family. The father prepares meals as his daughter serves customers. They also provide lowpriced meals, but the turnout is big, with over 200 customers a day. They’re starting to do well, and you can see it from the way they dress now. But the operation of those Chinese-run restaurants is different [from us]. Or to put it this way, if they can make money, they will do whatever it takes. Money is more important to them than purinsipuru [principles]. Running Japanese restaurants is, for them, a pure business opportunity. If you go to one of those Chinese-owned restaurants, you can get what you want to get. That’s, I suppose, one of their strengths. At the end of the day, customers choose us, not us choosing them. If you can please your customers by offering what they want, they’ll come back to your restaurant. We’re not that kind of restaurant. In terms of our pricing range and the sort of food we serve, which is traditional Japanese cuisine, we’re a high-end establishment. The Chinese family-run restaurant, in Ken’s view, is one of the ‘numerous variations’ produced and reproduced in mass exoticisms (Gallini 1996, 216): for him, they create a simplified, ‘cheapened’ version of the exotic other through the Japanese restaurant, but they are playing a different game – the game of mass exoticisms – albeit in the same marketplace of the exotic genre. Therefore, they do not bother him too much. However, the effects of the game of mass exoticisms in the Japanese restaurant business can be devastating. Minoru from SAKURA-GI was caught between embracing mass exoticisms and rejecting them in order to maintain the exoticness, quality and authority of the ‘original’, which he felt had been ‘cheapened’ by mass exoticisms. He openly expressed his dilemma near the end of our conversation, saying, It’s true that Chinese-run Japanese restaurants are growing, and that’s making the whole [Japanese restaurant] industry more competitive and difficult to survive in. It’s not easy to continue doing well in the market. So there’s always the temptation, especially when your business is in trouble, to say things like, ‘Forget about tradition. Cut corners to cut costs. Sell it cheaper’. But, in my opinion, the most important thing is to do what you believe is right. In our case, we believe it’s all about quality. But I have to admit that Chinese people may be performing better than us financially. But if we get jealous of them and let ourselves swayed by their approach, we risk losing our mission. So we’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing and continue to provide good food and service that meet or even exceed our customers’ expectations. Just about a year after I interviewed Minoru, SAKURA-GI closed its doors after 24 years of operation. His struggle was to maintain the lineage of his restaurant while fighting against the mass exoticisms that he tried to distance

Cross-Cultural Translation  101 himself from. However, it was ultimately the pervasive influence of mass exoticisms that forced him out of the exotic genre’s marketplace entirely. Crossing and Double-Crossing between ‘Mass’ and ‘High-Class’ One of the key observations in my investigation is that some restaurateurs strive to produce a surplus of meaning that can generate extra value and deliver value for the price. In this section, I examine how they achieve this through the process of ‘displacement’, which is part of cross-cultural translation. According to Ian Cook and Philip Crang’s research of culinary geographies, food is ‘geographically constituted through the process of “displacement”’ (1996, 138; emphasis in original). Here, the term ‘displacement’ refers to the cultural process of dislocating and relocating images, meanings and values associated with cultural goods and practices through travell, translation and ethnography. I argue that displacement generates a surplus of meaning, which is subsequently exchanged for both economic and social value in a given time-space context. I focus on three key figures to show how displacement operates within the Japanese restaurant industry in Australia and its impact on the business operations: Atsushi, the co-owner-chef of a modern yakitori restaurant YAKITORI ROKU; Hiro, the manager and chef of a ramen shop MENYA; and Sachi, the co-owner-chef of a yakiniku barbeque restaurant YAKINIKU HOUSE JŪ JŪ . While each of these restaurateurs has their own culinary and business style and focus, they all, in various ways, symbolically and commercially cross over between ‘mass’ and ‘high-class’ in their displacement practices. One crucial element of their displacement practices is their representation of the target clientele, which Venuti refers to as domestic subjects. They tune into who the domestic subjects are and what they know about Japanese food cultures. In other words, they focus on identifying a perceived gap in consumer knowledge and turning a surplus of meaning into a marketable and competitive value. Atsushi from YAKITORI ROKU

Atsushi is a third-generation sushi chef. After World War Two, his grandfather founded a sushi restaurant in a seaside village in Wakayama Prefecture, which his father took over when his grandfather died. Atsushi spent many hours honing his skills and knowledge, first in his hometown with his father, who used to take him fishing and to local fish markets when he was a child, then in Osaka, where he worked as a sushi chef, and finally in Melbourne with other experienced Japanese chefs. He started YAKITORI ROKU with his Japanese wife Michi in 2005, after working at an established sushi restaurant in Melbourne, and operated it until 2015, when it was taken over by the proprietors of an Asian-inspired modern Australian restaurant. ROKU was a well-received restaurant that specialised in yakitori, Japanese-style skewered grilled chicken, along with other meats and vegetables. When Atsushi and Michi bought the restaurant, they preserved the same

102  Cross-Cultural Translation business formula tested by the previous Japanese restaurateur—a limited menu and a refined setting with minimalist modern décor. Diners chose from a selection of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ small meals on the menu, rather than from the European tradition of an entrée and a main course. ROKU was located in one of Melbourne’s most iconic alleyways in the CBD, hidden underground with a small sign next to its entrance that was easily overlooked. The establishment’s primary promotion strategy was through client recommendations rather than overt advertising. Despite its understated setting, it was regularly featured as an awarded restaurant in major local newspapers. Atsushi’s artistic presentation of yakitori and related culinary practices is central to the operation of ROKU. This ‘street food’ was elevated to a ‘highclass’ fare by the skilled chef in a visually appealing setting, after being transferred from Japan to Australia. The space’s minimalist urban modern aesthetics, defined by a range of fine materials including smooth concrete surfaces, polished stainless steel and dark solid wood, play a vital role in this ‘mass to high-class’ displacement. The underground dining area, which is tastefully illuminated and theatrically staged, creates a mise en scène around a central yakitori grill that is encircled by a long timber bench and blue velour seats. Diners become spectators, as chefs, food and culinary practices form a spectacle at this choreographed central dining counter. Atsushi is the main protagonist in the performance of yakitori grilling, which is intended to draw attention to the surplus of meaning and added value produced by the displacement and relocation of yakitori and related practices from mass to high-class. I arranged an interview with Atsushi in October 2009 after dining at the restaurant. During the interview, the nearly six-foot-tall Japanese man in his 30s described how he used the process of displacement to elevate the status of yakitori from ‘street food’ to ‘high-class’ cuisine: For Japanese people, watching someone prepare yakitori over the counter is not that spectacular. It has a certain fun element to it, but it won’t be really exciting. But here in Australia, it’s different. It depends on how it is presented, but yakitori can be entertaining and a good spectacle. We focus on the ‘wow’ factors, which include not just the food but also other elements surrounding it. In Japan, yakitori is a cheap snack. It’s a sort of street food that many Japanese people have at nomi-ya [a Japanese casual bar]. […] Over there, you can get one skewer for around 50 yen [less than a dollar]. But here [in Australia], we charge $3.50 [for one skewer of yakitori], which is slightly more expensive than what you’d pay at a nomi-ya in Japan, but they think this is a fair price given how well it is presented. When Atsushi referred to ‘they’, he was referring to a specific group of people. When I asked him to clarify who he meant by ‘they’, he explained,

Cross-Cultural Translation  103

Figure 4.1 Nomi-ya. Photograph by artist @ilhamnandana from iStock.com. Image source URL: https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/osaka-beauty-gm69474 6438-128429173

I’m talking about Australians, Westerners [uestanā in Atsushi’s words] in general. Because there aren’t many Japanese people in Melbourne, we’ll have to adjust the way we serve our food to make it more suitable for them. They may not be as familiar with Japanese cuisine as we are, and they have their own taste preferences and expectations. Tastes like saltiness [karasa] and sweetness [amasa] are well received here, but I believe that subtler flavours, such as the taste of ingredients [sozai no aji], are not very appreciated. […] For example, we offer handmade soba noodles, which are challenging to convey in taste since their flavour is very subtle. They often say that soba noodles have no taste, but for us, they are incredibly flavourful and aromatic. While we provide them the opportunity to enjoy those underrepresented delicacies, we also make sure we have the Japanese dishes they are familiar with. For this purpose, we serve teriyaki and yakiniku, which are easier to translate. More people are now familiar with yakitori as there are a few yakitori places. They have a better basic understanding of Japanese food, which helps our business to some extent. But they don’t know everything about yakitori and other Japanese foods. I think that’s also great because it allows us to add value. We try not to offer our food too cheaply, and we also avoid providing typical Japanese foods like sushi, which are already saturated in the market. If anything becomes overly typical and lacks truly unique characteristics, it

104  Cross-Cultural Translation becomes harder for us to provide value. So we need to be strategic and try to be as exclusive as we can. In Atsushi’s practice of displacement, he refers to ‘they’/‘them’ as ‘Australians’ whom he also equates with ‘uestanā’, a symbolic category referring to people from ‘Western’ countries, including Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, in a Japanese context. This group of domestic subjects, linked to a middle- and upper middle-class status, has access to and support a ‘highclass’ Japanese restaurant like ROKU. Importantly, Atsushi’s understanding of domestic subjects is not just personal but also socially constructed, reflecting the existing power structure in Australian society. Ghassan Hage frames Australia as a ‘white nation’, in which whiteness is privileged within the existing hegemonic system, as discussed in Chapter 1 (2000a). Atsushi carefully crafted and displayed the foodscape of yakitori to fit the needs and wants of the target group of consumers—or socio-economically privileged Anglo-Celtic and European Australians, whom he refers to as ‘uestanā’. By doing so, he aimed to raise the symbolic position of yakitori and related practices from mass to high-class, crossing between Japanese and Australian contexts. The concept of displacement aptly frames what is central to this particular mode of cross-cultural translation, which leverages the perceived gap in consumer knowledge, or what they know and do not know about Japanese food cultures, to create a surplus of meaning and consequently value. Hiro from MENYA

With the increase in Asian immigrants and the economic rise of Asian countries over the last few decades, it has been argued that Australia as a ‘white nation’ has declined (Hage 2000b, 85–6). While the presence of Asian consumers in the domestic market has become more prominent in recent years, particularly in the domain of middle-class consumption, where the Japanese restaurant typically operates. Importantly, what Hage describes as ‘white decline’ does not suggest that ‘white supremacy’ in the social order is being overthrown. Nor does it necessarily mean that the presence of Asians is uniformly recognised and represented in the society. In the exotic genre of the Japanese restaurant, the Asian presence has grown extensively yet unevenly, further compounding the perceptions of domestic subjects for whom Japanese cuisines are communicated as ‘foreign’ texts. Sydney’s ramen restaurant MENYA and its sister shop MENYA-S demonstrate the impact of the influx of Asian clients on restaurant operators’ perceptions of domestic subjects and how those perceptions affect their translating practices and consequences. In August 2021, during lockdowns in the State of New South Wales, where Sydney is located, I conducted an online interview with Hiro, the Japanese manager and chef of MENYA. During the interview, he explained that they customise their business focus and approaches to cater to diverse customer groups:

Cross-Cultural Translation  105 In Sydney, we have two ramen shops. One is in the CBD’s tourist area, while the other, which I manage, is in a more business district with a higher concentration of white-collar Anglo-Australians. [What can you tell me about the operation of each shop and how does the demographic makeup of the area their business?] We have a lot of Asian customers coming in to the one in the tourist area. Maybe over 90 percent of our customers there are Asian. We primarily offer quick noodle dishes that are affordable, which makes it convenient for consumers who are looking for a quick snack. It operates like a fast-food noodle chain. The shop’s main features are speed, convenience and affordability. The second restaurant that I manage is a casual dining establishment where customers can sit down and enjoy their meal. We serve not only ramen but also other Japanese dishes, like sushi, sashimi and teriyaki. We also experimented a lot and tried to make our ramen accessible and understandable to our target market, which is primarily composed of Anglo-Australian business people. There’s no doubt that ramen is becoming popular here [in Sydney] too, but it’s still new to them. So we adjusted it to help them get used to it. For example, I developed ‘cappuccino ramen’, a creamy ramen soup made with chicken and pork bones simmered for 24 hours. We froth the soup’s surface like cappuccino. The froth on the surface makes the soup milky and keeps it from being too hot to sip. I got this idea from how they like their coffee. They like it with a lot of milk, and frothed milk on top, you know. This is an added value that is also reflected in the price of a bowl of ramen at MENYA [between $16 and $20], which is more expensive than at MENYA-S. […] We exclusively do this for our customers in MENYA, not MENYA-S, because the target customers are different. Asian customers are more accustomed to eating a hot noodle soup and know how to lift the bowl and bring it to their lips to sip the soup. But the customers in MENYA are different, so we use a very different approach for them. The symbolic movement of ramen from ‘mass’ to ‘high-class’ for MENYA and back to ‘mass’ for MENYA-S exemplifies the crossing and double-crossing of meaning and value. In the process of displacement, they diversify their consumer segments depending on location-based demographic characteristics, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach. One of the important aspects of their process is that the domestic subjects are not always a single group, but can be multiple groups with distinct needs, interests, preferences and values. While diversifying a consumer base through chain stores is a well-known marketing strategy in many industries, it may not be as common in the Japanese restaurant industry in Australia. This is possibly because most Japanese restaurants in Australia are small, independent businesses that tend to rely on repeat customers rather than aggressively seeking out new ones. However, part of what is pushing enterprises like MENYA and MENYA-S to diversify their

106  Cross-Cultural Translation consumer base is the changing landscape of Australia’s consumer market, which has become more diverse and complex owing to the shifting global economy driven by the emergent economies and modernities of Asia, particularly China. I will further discuss how this paradigm shift affects the formation of domestic subjects and the displacement between ‘mass’ and ‘high-class’ through the lens of the Japanese restaurant, in this case, YAKINIKU HOUSE JŪ JŪ . Sachi from YAKINIKU HOUSE JŪJŪ

Yakiniku, a Japanese-style barbeque dish popularised after World War Two and influenced by Korean delicacies such as galbi and bulgogi, is Sachi’s lifelong passion and current professional focus. ‘I love yakiniku. I just love it. When I first started working at a yakiniku restaurant in Nagoya, I was all fired up. It ignited my passion for yakiniku [ yakiniku damashii ni higa tsuita]’, said the Japanese co-owner-chef of YAKINIKU HOUSE JŪ JŪ in her 40s, during an online interview conducted in February 2021 during the third lockdown in Victoria State. For Sachi, yakiniku is not merely a means to fill the stomach or generate profit, but rather it holds a deeper significance as both her ‘lifework’ and ‘a way to enjoy good times with family’. She further added, ‘Yakiniku holds a special place in my heart as it brings back fond memories of going to a local yakiniku restaurant [in Japan] with my family’. It is this personal attachment to yakiniku that drives the restaurant business, which Sachi and her Taiwanese husband have been devoted to since 2018: I wanted to bring yakiniku from high-end to everyday. There is a common perception here [in Australia] that yakiniku restaurants are expensive, so yakiniku has yet to become a casual pastime. When I arrived in Melbourne in 2001, there were no yakiniku restaurants that families, especially young families, could go to. All of them were high-end establishments catering to corporate chūzai Japanese expats and well-off locals. I wanted to change that and make yakiniku restaurants more accessible. Sure, yakiniku restaurants are becoming popular in Australia, but I think they still have a long way to go before becoming a part of the everyday food scene. So, like the yakiniku places I used to go to with my family in Japan, we really want our restaurant to be family-friendly and approachable, so that people get together and enjoy yakiniku more casually. What is highlighted here is Sachi’s intention to translate yakiniku—an integral part of today’s food scene in Japan and an increasingly popular segment of the Japanese restaurant as an exotic genre—between ‘mass’ and ‘high-class’. While her translating practice closely overlaps with those of Atsushi at ROKU and Hiro at MENYA, she and her team target very different domestic subjects. Atsushi and Hiro primarily cater to socio-economically privileged European Australians who are willing to pay for the value of their focal food items—yakitori and ramen—as ‘high-class’ commodities. Sachi and her team, on the other

Cross-Cultural Translation  107 hand, translate yakiniku—which is typically seen as ‘high-class’ in Australia— into something more accessible and commonplace, or the ‘mass’ food that appeals to a broader audience, including middle-class young families. It is important to note that this displacement should not be viewed as an attempt to devalue yakiniku. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Sachi stated, ‘We offer high-quality yakiniku at a more reasonable price’. In order to achieve this, they implement several interconnected business strategies. The first strategy they implemented is a careful selection of the location for JŪ JŪ . The restaurant is located about 25 kilometres from Melbourne’s CBD, which is where numerous renowned Japanese restaurants, including several yakiniku establishments, are concentrated. By choosing this ‘off-centre’ location, they can save on expenses, such as base rent and parking permit fees, allowing them to offer quality yakiniku at a more affordable price. Additionally, they save on costs by renovating and repairing the venue themselves. There are other benefits to choosing this specific off-centre location that Sachi believes outweigh its disadvantages. These benefits include proximity to major highways, easy access to public transportation, a large parking space and being in close proximity to residential areas surrounding stores that helps generate foot traffic for their business. Secondly, the cost-effective location allowed them to invest in high-quality equipment, which Sachi described as ‘the secret to serving quality yakiniku’. Instead of using smokeless roasters, which are commonly used at yakiniku restaurants in Melbourne and elsewhere, they chose to use portable charcoal ‘shichirin’ grills and smoke exhaust pipes. The shichirin grills were developed by Nagoya-based Japanese business Shinpo Co., Ltd. in 1980 and have since been transported to South Korea and other countries where yakiniku is in demand: Smokeless roasters are popular in Japan, Australia and other parts of the world, and they’re more convenient [than shichirin grills], but we wanted to achieve better results. In my view, the shichirin cooks yakiniku meat better. We use a special type of shichirin called ‘keiseido’ [珪藻土], which is made of porous clay.5 Keiseido transmits heat evenly and can tolerate temperatures of up to 1700 degrees Celsius. The shichirin is more expensive [than the smokeless roaster], but we believe that using proper equipment is the key to achieving the best results. We also use smoke-absorbing exhaust pipes with the shichirin, which helps us attract more customers, including those who are worried about the smell of the smoke from the grill staying in their clothes. Thirdly, they have ‘strong networks’ from which they source high-quality meat. Sachi continued, We utilise fullblood wagyū [cows that can be traced back to Japanese herds with no indication of crossbreeding] from a very reputable brand that I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you! We tried many other brands before settling on this one. We also have strong networks. We share insider knowledge.

108  Cross-Cultural Translation The word ‘wagyū’ is so widely used that it has come to mean any premium beef to many consumers. However, even cows with only ten percent true Japanese wagyū bloodlines can be classified as wagyū, which shows us how broadly the term can be used. The flavour [of wagyū] varies greatly depending on the grade and brand. We have business with three to four different local suppliers and source some products from Zen-Noh [The National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations, one of the world’s largest exporters of Japan’s agricultural products]. We have access to premium quality meat that we can purchase at a reasonable price. The networks that they have developed over the years in Australia provide them with significant advantages, including the ability to offer competitive products and services. The fourth aspect is the employees, who are carefully selected based on a set of criteria deemed essential by Sachi and her husband in delivering the best possible value to their customers. She said that they specifically seek out individuals who possess qualities such as attentiveness, the ability to follow instructions, and a thorough understanding of the desired level of product and service quality that they aim to achieve and uphold. She further explained that the third criterion is the ability to ‘sense’ and that they place a particular value on one sensory region—‘mikaku’, which refers to the ‘sense of taste’. ‘We look for people with a strong sense of mikaku, or the ability to sense and understand what good yakiniku tastes like’, she said. When asked who would meet these criteria, Sachi responded, They are usually Japanese or have lived in Japan, so they have a good understanding of Japanese cuisine. Before coming to Australia, I had worked in Japan, Taiwan and Singapore, so I’ve worked with a wide range of people from varied backgrounds. Based on my experience, over 90 percent of the people who meet these criteria are Japanese. Their restaurant now employs four staff members, two full-time and two parttime employees, all of whom are either native Japanese or bilingual Japanese and English speakers. Sachi stated, ‘Some of them are of Japanese descent, but they grew up in Australia, so they are aware of both cultures. I think it’s great that they can provide service to our customers in both languages’. These are the defining criteria that enable JŪ JŪ to offer high-quality yet affordable products and services, but how do they apply these business strategies to produce positive outcomes? And for whom are these factors calibrated to provide added value? Like MENYA-S, JŪ JŪ mostly serves Asian customers. ‘Our clientele is diverse, but the majority are Asians, including Japanese people’, Sachi said. ‘In this neighbourhood, there are a large number of Asian residents. My husband attends if they only speak Chinese or Taiwanese’. As Sachi described, Asians and their descendants, mainly Chinese citizens, make up a significant part of the population in the surrounding suburbs, accounting

Cross-Cultural Translation  109 for around 7 percent of the overall population, nearly three times the average rates of both the state and the country (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] 2021). In comparison to the state and national average, there are also slightly more younger families with children residing in the neighbouring suburbs (ABS 2021). Another distinguishing feature is the area’s relatively large population of university students, which is almost double the state and national average (ABS 2021). ‘We’ve recently seen a large influx of university students in our restaurant because of their social media networks’, Sachi said. ‘One of those students, who is apparently quite famous in their online community, posted photos of our restaurant on her Instagram. She has lots of followers, so they all started to come [to the restaurant]’. In addition to the neighbouring area’s demographics, Sachi credits the restaurant’s appeal to Asian customers to its extensive range of barbeque meats: We have a lot of Asian customers since we offer a wide selection of meat, from premium wagyū to intestines. They’re used to preparing and eating innards, and some of them request fatty wagyū. Recently, a family from Hong Kong visited us and spent a total of $1,600. They loved our premium wagyū and innards. Although we don’t specifically target wealthy customers, and mind you, this sort of thing doesn’t always happen, I believe that having a variety of barbeque meats on the menu attracts Asians who enjoy various cuts of meat and are familiar with Japanese yakiniku. Many Asians travell around Japan and enjoy Japanese food, so they are familiar with our cuisine. Sachi’s story highlights that translating a surplus of meaning into additional value is the key to the process of displacement. As also demonstrated by the examples of ROKU and MENYA, Sachi and her team pay close attention to who the domestic subjects are, as well as what they know and do not know about Japanese culinary cultures. In short, they leverage a sweet spot in consumer knowledge—the point at which the foreign texts of their foods are translated in a way that allows consumers to sense and understand their foods while still experiencing novelty in the cross-cultural translation. Novelty becomes valuable for customers who are willing to expand their horizons and pay for it. But what happens when customers are hesitant? How can restaurant operators turn the sweet spot into value for customers with little familiarity with Japanese cuisines? The final section investigates these issues, demonstrating how restaurateurs and chefs manage different levels of consumer knowledge and maximise value through what they often refer to as ‘kyōiku’—a process of education that is another dimension of cross-cultural translation. Kyo ̄iku: A Way to Read, Sense and Make Sense of Foreign Culinary Texts In the interviews, some restaurant operators used the term ‘kyōiku’ (literally meaning education) to describe what they implement as part of their

110  Cross-Cultural Translation translating practices—the delivery of knowledge about how to read, sense and make sense of ingredients, dishes, cooking methods, dining etiquette and other key aspects constituting products and services offered at their restaurants, which would otherwise be unintelligible and thus provide little or no value. Although their methods for kyō iku differ, their ultimate goals are the same: to enhance their customers’ culinary knowledge, expand their product offerings in terms of both variety and depth, distinguish themselves from their competitors and ultimately reach a broader audience within their niche. Shoji of the upscale restaurant KOHARU sees both tangible and intangible benefits in using kyōiku to interact with their customers: Table talk [tēburu tōku] is very important for us. We not only offer food, but also provide our customers with useful information. We engage with them during service and share a little about what we offer, which allows us to educate them [ejukēto suru] them. I believe that Japanese restaurants are the perfect setting for customers to learn about Japanese food and culture. ‘Table talk’ is an effective way for them to educate their customers. They believe that by sharing stories about their restaurant and food, they can add both monetary and brand value to the business. The interview with Minoru also highlights the critical role of kyōiku in their cross-cultural translation practice. The owner of the established Japanese restaurant SAKURA-GI commented, ‘Knowing what you eat and how you eat it will help you taste it better’. He gave me examples, saying, I constantly encourage our wait staff to have a chat with our customers and tell them a little bit about our food. It’s a small action, but it has a significant impact. I think people feel more comfortable and happier when they know what they are eating. I don’t want to come off as arrogant, but I believe this is our style of kyōiku. One of the best opportunities for us to provide kyōiku is when we see our customers eating sushi and sashimi with wasabi. We often advise them, ‘Please put wasabi on top of sushi and sashimi, rather than mixing it with soy sauce. That way, you can fully appreciate the delicate flavours of the dishes’. They may not understand straight away, but eventually they will recognise the benefits of this method. Wasabi, a native plant of Japan and a traditional condiment in Japanese cuisines, has now become a popular ingredient used in various cuisines around the world.6 However, not every consumer necessarily knows what wasabi is and how it works, making it a potential knowledge gap that restaurateurs like Minoru can leverage through kyōiku. By using kyōiku as a tool to convert the gap into value, they can legitimise the value of the dining experiences that their customers invest in. Not only that, by increasing consumer literacy through kyōiku, consumers may have more agency and a better dining experience. In other words, they can

Cross-Cultural Translation  111 take an active part in sensing and making sense of dining within the exotic genre. Minoru also touched upon this possibility, noting, ‘We respect clients who know what they eat and how they eat it. We give them our best attention’. So what would happen if someone did not know what they ate and how they ate it? Trevor Corson, author of The Story of Sushi, shares his story about what sushi chefs he met in Tokyo had to say about it on the American public radio show The Splendid Table: When they see us mixing extra wasabi into our soy sauce, they stop giving us their best fish, because we’re not going to be able to taste the difference with all the spiciness in there. They’re going to save the best fish for somebody else. A good sushi chef is actually putting a little bit of wasabi into the piece of sushi when he makes it. He’s actually calibrating the amount of wasabi to that particular fish. There shouldn’t be any more or any less— any more is usually going to overwhelm the very delicate flavors of some of these fish. My recommendation is sit at the bar, tell the chef that you’re not going to add extra wasabi and could he please season the sushi for you the way he wants and you’ll just eat it like that. A good chef will paint a little sheen of sauce with a brush across the top of the piece of sushi and maybe add a little garnish and give it to you. You don’t have to do anything else to it. That’s the ideal way to eat sushi, just put it right in your mouth. (Jinich 2013) Corson’s anecdote illustrates the power of informed consumers. This is the bargaining power that consumers can exercise, but certainly, it can also set the bar high for businesses. Nevertheless, restaurateurs like Minoru do not mind offering kyōiku to educate their clients. Why? Because it is this bargaining power that can elevate the overall dining experience, which in turn helps them establish the legitimacy of their business value. It should be stressed here that what those restaurant operators refer to as kyōiku is by no means a one-way transmission. Rather, it is a non-linear, collaborative process that involves active facilitation between restaurant operators and consumers. Effective kyōiku can thus speak to the core of what consumers want to experience, and it is better delivered if knowledge is internalised through the senses. This is highlighted by Ken from YAESU, one of Melbourne’s oldest Japanese restaurants. The trained chef and manager in his 60s told me a story about the dish that they had on the menu in the 1980s, ‘Sake Steamed Abalone’ (awabi no saka mushi), and how it became accepted by the locals: We had a dish on the menu called ‘Sake Steamed Abalone’, but we found it difficult to market to customers who were unfamiliar with abalone. Many people here don’t eat abalone often, and they find the texture tough and chewy. To make the dish more appealing, we adjusted it to suit their preferences. We started to hit the flesh of the abalone to soften it, which helped customers eat it more easily.

112  Cross-Cultural Translation But then they started to complain about it and said there was something missing. No wonder! When you tenderise raw abalone, the muscle fibres in the collagen-rich sections are broken, releasing all the delicious juice. So we stopped tenderising it and started serving it in the original way. And do you know what they said this time? They said, ‘This is it!’ So the lesson was that customers won’t know what works and what doesn’t until they test it out for themselves. There are certain things that we can learn only by doing. And I believe that’s what we call kyōiku. Ken’s tale demonstrates how kyōiku involves bodily processes, including ‘chewing’, ‘tasting’ and ‘ingesting’, through which to internalise the knowledge delivered through kyōiku. However, achieving this requires consumer trust. Consumer trust—a sense of reliability, safety and transparency that consumers have in a business—is at the heart of the food service industry, and the Japanese restaurant is no exception. Since food is such an intimate and indispensable part of human life, consumer trust can only be earned when the entire restaurant supply chain—from producers to processing factories, distributors, restaurants and consumers—proves to be reliable, safe and transparent. Kyōiku is a critical part of this trust building cycle since it enables businesses to communicate with customers’ senses and shape their bodily experiences. The cross-cultural nature of the Japanese restaurant industry renders the target of kyōiku culturally and linguistically diverse. This diversity can be liberating when kyōiku is performed effectively, but it can also present challenges for someone like Tetsu who owns and runs BIMI, a traditional Japanese restaurant with 36 seats in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. In the interview, the experienced Japanese kaiseki owner-chef in his 40s described how cultural and linguistic differences can be barriers that made it difficult for him to educate his customers. This occurs, for example, when he verbally communicates his knowledge about the codes of Japan’s culinary system, such as ‘seasonality’, with the local customers: It’s always challenging for me to describe what Japanese food is all about to Australians. Seasonality and ‘sozai no aji’ [the taste of ingredients] are particularly difficult concepts to explain, but they’re essential building blocks of Japanese cuisine. We can’t make our food understood without making those concepts understood. [Would you say that’s partly because of cultural, culinary and also perhaps linguistic differences?] I think so. I wish I had a better command of the English language. But, given that people’s cultures and culinary backgrounds are so different here, I feel it’s still challenging to translate such principles into another language in a precise sense. It’s frustrating because these limitations prevent me from educating my customers the way I would like to. We can only provide meals that the locals are familiar with and can comprehend. We serve sushi, tempura

Cross-Cultural Translation  113 and a variety of other popular Japanese dishes, but not a complete kaiseki meal. I’m not very confident that I can explain what the kaiseki is really about in English [to the local customers]. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks wrote that to engage in education as dialogue is ‘to cross boundaries, the barriers that may or may not be erected by race, gender, class, professional standing, and a host of other differences’ (1994, 130–1). Similarly, kyōiku serves as another form of translation, enabling individuals to bridge between different languages, cultures, culinary systems among other differences. However, as highlighted by Tetsu’s comments, kyōiku may also encounter such boundaries as it translates. From here, we can see that kyōiku as translation presents both opportunities and challenges. Despite the cultural, culinary and linguistic barriers, the benefits of kyōiku can outweigh its costs. My examples suggest that kyōiku can enable restaurant operators and consumers to push and expand their boundaries, leading to more in-depth and critical examinations of oneself, social structures and the company of others. In the end, kyōiku plays a role in illuminating and contributing to the sociality of the Japanese restaurant. Notes 1 According to the Council of Advisors for the Recommendation of Japanese Restaurants Outside Japan, the requirements include the quality of ingredients, culinary expertise and food safety awareness, as well as the establishment’s setting, service, menu and the preparation and presentation of food (2007, 4). 2 Matsuoka Toshikatsu was a member of Abe Shinzo’s Liberal Democratic government and served as minister of the MAFF from 2006 to 2007. He committed suicide in 2007 after being accused of financial misdeeds. 3 Blowfish cuisine (fugu ryōri) is a traditional Japanese cuisine that requires a certified chef’s preparation and presentation. 4 The term ‘maneru’ (‘to copy’) has religious roots and refers to a method of learning. ‘Kagura’, which is a genre of performing arts based on Japan’s earliest Shinto religious rite, literally means ‘the great copy’ (Averbuch 2007, 21–39). It is a physical representation of the ancient ritual described in the Shinto story of ‘Opening the Rock-Cave Door’, which tells of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu Ō mikami, hiding in a rock cave and causing complete darkness in the world. In the story, the Shinto goddess of performing arts, Ame no Uzume no Mikoto, performed a kagura dance to persuade Amaterasu to come out of the cave (Lancashire 1997, 92–8). 5 Keisōdo is made from diatomaceous earth, a soft naturally occurring white sedimentary rock that contains fossilised sea plankton and volcanic ash. It can be found throughout Japan. 6 Most of the products sold commercially as ‘wasabi’ in both domestic and international markets contain very little of the actual wasabi plant. The grated wasabi rhizome, which is the subterranean stem of the plant and considered difficult to cultivate, is in limited supply. Instead, the products are usually made up of a mixture of horseradish, mustard flour, corn starch and green food colouring.

114  Cross-Cultural Translation Bibliography Averbuch, Irit. “Body-to-Body Transmission: The Copying Tradition of Kagura.” In The Culture of The Culture of Copying in Japan: Critical and Historical Perspectives, Edited by Rupert A. Cox, 21–39. Japan Anthropology Workshop Series. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Search Census Data.” 2021. https://www.abs.gov.au/ census/find-census-data/search-by-area hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Clarence-Smith, Keiko. “Copying in Japanese Magazines: Unshamed Copiers.” In The Culture of the Culture of Copying in Japan: Critical and Historical Perspectives, Edited by Rupert A. Cox, 51–68. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Cook, Ian, and Philip Crang. “The World on a Plate: Culinary Culture, Displacement and Geographical Knowledges.” Journal of Material Culture 1, no. 2 (July 1996): 131–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/135918359600100201 Council of Advisors for the Recommendation of Japanese Restaurants Outside Japan. “Proposal for Japanese Restaurant Recommendation Program (Draft).” Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 16 March 2007. http://www.maff.go.jp/e/ soushoku/sanki/easia/e_sesaku/japanese_food/pdf/proposal_e.pdf Cox, Rupert A., ed. The Culture of Copying in Japan: Critical and Historical Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Cresswell, Tim. In Place/out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Daliot-Bul, Michal. “Japan Brand Strategy: The Taming of ‘Cool Japan’ and the Challenges of Cultural Planning in a Postmodern Age.” Social Science Japan Journal 12, no. 2 (1 December 2009): 247–66. https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyp037 Faiola, Anthony. “Putting the Bite on Pseudo Sushi and Other Insults.” 24 November 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/23/AR20061 12301158.html Gallini, Clara. “Mass Exoticisms.” In The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, Edited by Iain Chambers, and Lidia Curti, 212–20. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge, 2000a. ———. “‘Asia’, Hansonism and the Discourse of White Decline.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (January 2000b): 85–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/146493700361015. Heldke, Lisa M. Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. New York: Routledge, 2003. Hendry, Joy. “Foreign Country Theme Parks: A New Theme or an Old Japanese Pattern?” Social Science Japan Journal 3, no. 2 (2000): 207–20. Jinich, Patricia. “What Should You Do with That Extra Wasabi Next to Your Sushi? Nothing.” The Splendid Table, 4 September 2013. https://www.splendidtable.org/ story/2013/09/04/what-should-you-do-with-that-extra-wasabi-next-to-your-sushinothing Lancashire, Terence. “Music for the Gods: Musical Transmission and Change in Iwami ‘Kagura’.” Asian Music 29, no. 1 (1997): 87–123. https://doi.org/10.2307/834412.

Cross-Cultural Translation  115 Michelin Guide. “Kaiseki 懐石 or Kaiseki 会席?” 5 June 2016. https://guide.michelin. com/en/article/dining-out/kaiseki-cheatsheet-sg Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism. Public Worlds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———. “The Figure of Translation: Translation as a Filter?” In European-East Asian Borders in Translation, Edited by Joyce C.H. Liu, and Nick Vaughan-Williams, 12– 37. London: Routledge, 2014. Sanchanta, Mariko. “Japan’s ‘Sushi Police’ Are on a Roll.” Financial Times, 27 January 2007. https://www.ft.com/content/b2d884e2-ad78-11db-8709-0000779e2340 Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

5

The Exotic Genre’s Formula The Supply and Demand of Japanese Ethnicity

Introduction Japanese ethnicity serves as a marker of the presumed ‘original’, whereby it is in demand in the Japanese restaurant. And this demand is perpetual. In accounting for the supply-demand loop, I claim the presence and presentness of Japanese ethnicity as the exotic genre’s necessary formula. To wit, a lack of it inevitably evokes suspicion: it is this preoccupation with the ‘original’ that can also be suspended when one finds the absence of Japanese ethnicity that is filled with other ethnicities. Sally, the European Australian social worker who self-claimed to be ‘a regular customer of Japanese restaurants’, echoes this sense of preoccupation. She said, ‘I suppose I’m a bit…I’m very suspicious. When I go in and look at the waitresses if they look like Korean or Chinese, then I really carefully look at the menu and I might walk out’. For her, the absence of Japanese ethnicity suggests a lack of authority and authenticity, which makes her suspicious about the establishment’s proximity to the ‘original’ and therefore the quality of what is offered on the site (see Chapter 3 for consumers’ perceptions of authenticity). In parallel, this preoccupation with Japanese ethnicity reinforces the supply of it within the exotic genre. Keiko, the co-manager of the izakaya CHIKA, encapsulates this. She said, ‘Customers do care about what kind of people work in Japanese restaurants. They are more likely to find a place authentic if they see the presence of Japanese staff or at least Asian looking staff there’. For restaurateurs like Keiko, it is essential to respond to the demand for Japanese ethnicity, both symbolically and commercially. Symbolically, Japanese ethnicity operates as a perceived ‘authentic’ point of origin (specifically, mainland Japan), whereby the presence and presentness of it allow the Japanese restaurant to claim the authority of authenticity. This is then capitalised in global marketplaces: Japanese ethnicity can ‘sell’ within the exotic genre as far as it fulfils an expected role performed by certain racial-ethnic subjects. In her seminal book The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Rey Chow discusses how a society interpellates (non-white) ethnic subjects to mimic ethnicity that is recognised and recognisable as such; otherwise, they

DOI: 10.4324/9781003362463-5

The Exotic Genre’s Formula  117 become the focus of criticism for not being ‘ethnic enough’. Chow frames this imperative as what she calls ‘coercive mimeticism’, defining it as a process (identification, existential, cultural, or textual) in which those who are marginal to mainstream Western culture are expected […] to resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended to them, […] to objectify themselves in accordance with the already seen and thus to authenticate the familiar imagings of them as ethnics. (2002, 107) Chow further stipulates that (non-white) ethnic subjects voluntarily and involuntarily put coercive mimeticism into practice by repeating mimetic ethnicity in their ‘utterances, attitudes, gestures, writings, behaviors, and psychologies’ (2002, 118) so that they ‘come to resemble what is recognizably ethnic’ (2002, 107). In Mimesis: Culture–Art–Society, Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf define mimesis as ‘an intentional construction of a correlation’ (1995, 1). What mimesis correlates to is some form of identification—in other words, identifying or equating one form with another. In the context of the Japanese restaurant, it is a normative form of Japanese ethnicity that equates certain racial-ethnic images with ‘Japanese’. The images are marketed and circulated, and hence become the exotic genre’s formula. And this mimetic form of Japanese ethnicity is perpetually in demand within the site of meaning-making, sensing and sense-making, as well as money-making. In order to respond to this demand, I argue that (non-white) ethnic subjects are called on to not simply be ‘present’ but also ‘perform’ Japanese ethnicity. As Chow cites, performing ethnicity (Japanese ethnicity, in this case) is part of ‘the mimetic enactment of the automatized stereotypes that are dangled out there in public, hailing the ethnic: “Hey you! You X!”’ (2002, 110). In this chapter, I analyse how restaurant workers respond to the perpetual demand for the presence and presentness of Japanese ethnicity and how they perform to do so through their racial-ethnic bodies. My aim here is therefore to revisit the questions Chow asks—‘Does the ethnic have a choice of not responding? What happens when she responds? How might she respond? What happens if she does not respond?’—from three restaurant workers’ perspectives (2002, 110). In exploring these questions, Judith Butler’s formulation of ‘performativity’ also becomes useful. Although the focus of performativity is on gender and sexuality, it helps us to see performing Japanese ethnicity as a way of reproducing and perpetuating particular representational forms that are coded in a normative society.1 Butler argues that the performative ‘works’ if it repeats a prior and authoritative set of practices, thereby accumulating the force of authority (1995, 206). In the case of Japanese ethnicity, Butler’s framework of performativity enables us to consider that performing Japaneseness through a racialethnic body repeats what has been performed before, thereby making the performance identifiable as such. It is this accumulative force that maintains the

118  The Exotic Genre’s Formula lineage of ‘origin’ while demarcating what is ‘imitated’. Here lies the tension between the ‘original’ and the ‘imitation’ that Chow also discusses through her notion of coercive mimeticism: (non-white) ethnic subjects attempt to authenticate themselves; however, they also ‘continue to come across as inferior imitations, copies that are permanently out of focus’ (Chow 2002, 127). This (self-) referential mimesis is exactly what some restaurant workers confront within the Japanese restaurant, leading us to Chow’s line of questioning, this time, about agency: ‘How is imitating whom and how agency would be imagined? Does agency lie with the originator or with the mimic? What kind of agency?’ (2002, 103). Considering the agency of (non-white) ethnic subjects whose self-referential mimesis renders ‘the position of the inferior, improper copy’ (Chow 2002, 104), Butler’s theory of performativity exposes the constructedness of representational forms, such as ethnicity. While performing ethnicity is not an entirely liberating practice, the notion of performativity illuminates the possibility of intervening in the maintenance of normative forms of ethnicity and therefore the potential for agency. Therefore, seeing Japanese ethnicity as ‘performative’ allows us to recognise the instability inherent in ethnicity, which otherwise appears to be a closed category. In this chapter, I consider restaurant workers’ strategic incorporation of other ethnicities into Japanese ethnicity as part of counterintuitively liberating effects of performativity. I suggest that it is their performative racial-ethnic mimesis that disrupts a normative form of Japanese ethnicity, which they imitate or copy through their ‘Asian’ bodies. ‘Irasshaimase’ at Renewed RURŌ TENTEN: Mimetic Utterances through ‘Asian’ Bodies Performing ethnicity requires (non-white) ethnic subjects to utilise their bodies to represent their racial-ethnic mimesis in a way that is performative. Put differently, instead of permitting them to say whatever they want, performative voices restrict (non-white) ethnic subjects to recite that which has already been recited. In the Japanese restaurant, the scripted line of ‘irasshaimase’ (‘welcome to the shop’) resonates with this confining nature of performativity. The formal Japanese greeting, which is used when welcoming customers, is expected to be uttered through voices that conform to ethnic norms within the exotic genre. This scripted line brings one’s attention to the presence and presentness of Japanese ethnicity, thereby suggesting the authority and authenticity of the ‘original’. In other words, uttering the line irasshaimase through performative voices establishes an unspoken ‘contract’ between the provider (as in the utterer) and the consumer (as in the uttered), particularly where a racially and ethnically ‘marked’ subject is involved. This contract, however, can be broken when the line fails to deliver what it promises, revealing the absence of the presumed racial-ethnic marker and the lack of authenticity. The perfectly scripted line of irasshaimase echoed within the space as expected when I walked through the door of the renewed RURŌ TENTEN for

The Exotic Genre’s Formula  119 the third time. However, the next line that was uttered during my previous visits to the restaurant—‘How many?’ (or in Japanese ‘nanmei sama desuka?’)—was not uttered this time. Instead, there was an awkward pause that was long enough to compel me to break the silence and ask in English whether I could get a counter seat. ‘Okay’, one of the Asian wait staff members replied stiffly in English. This awkward moment raised questions about my own racial-ethnic body—should I attempt to blend in with their Asian bodies or remain understated to avoid threatening the perceived authority and authenticity of the site? Is my utterance in Japanese allowed, or would that cause any problems? And who would expose whose ‘inferior imitation’? At this point, the fact that there was no expected line after their scripted ‘irasshaimase’ caught my attention and made me realise not only what was present, but also what was absent. About a year after my interview with the previous owner chef Ryo (see Chapter 2), this Japanese-style bistro was taken over by a Korean restaurateur. The space was bought as a complete package—the restaurant’s Japanese logo, shop decorations, cooking and food prep facilities (including an open kitchen and drink bar), table layout and utensils, a bilingual menu written in English and Japanese and the structure of the dining service, which Ryo had initially set up when he opened the restaurant in 2005. The most significant change, however, was in the staff: the former Japanese staff were replaced by Korean wait staff and cooks. It was just before lunchtime when I visited the renewed restaurant in early 2011. The RURŌ TENTEN lunch special had followed the same format since it first became available, which allows customers to sample three dishes and a carbohydrate of their choice (bread or rice). The new management retained this structure. When the wait staff who had first seated me returned to take my order, I still had not heard any Japanese spoken among the staff, so I communicated with her in English. However, when she took my order, I heard her recite the Japanese phrase ‘onegai shimasu’ (‘please’) over the counter to pass the order to the other workers. She then returned to the bar kitchen and started talking to them in Korean and sometimes in English. While I waited, more customers entered, quickly filling the space. Most of them were European Australian office workers, presumably from nearby office buildings. The staff repeatedly recited the two Japanese phrases—‘irasshaimase’ and ‘onegai shimasu’—while waiting for their tables. My lunch was served at the same time when a dark-suited middle-aged Asian customer came in. He walked right up to the counter and took a seat two seats away from me. He was also greeted with ‘irashaimase’, but rather than responding in English like I did, he started chatting in Japanese with one of the staff members. They were both native Japanese speakers, and I noticed that after he seated at the counter table facing the bar kitchen, the other kitchen staff members became very quiet. They did not even respond to him or speak to one another. Instead, they sent the Japanese-speaking wait staff to the customer whenever he required assistance. Later, I discovered that the wait staff was the restaurant’s only Japanese-speaking employee.

120  The Exotic Genre’s Formula My return visit to RURŌ TENTEN following the handover exemplifies the central role of performative racial-ethnic mimesis in the Japanese restaurant. As I mentioned earlier, the workers of the renovated restaurant used scripted Japanese lines as a racial-ethnic marker to create the impression that Japanese ethnicity is present within the site. They accomplished this by continuously allowing their ‘Asian’ bodies to vocalise the scripted lines of what is marked as ‘Japanese’. Through their Asian bodies, the visual and aural effects of this performative racial-ethnic mimesis collapsed ‘Japaneseness’ and ‘Koreanness’ into ‘Asianness’, although attempts were made to maintain the original’s authority and authenticity.2 Through this performative racial-ethnic mimesis, the boundary between the ethnic categories—Japanese ethnicity and Korean ethnicity—becomes vague, compounding the lines between the status of the ‘original’ and the ‘imitation’ and ultimately producing the folding effects of the new exotic. However, when in contact with a Japanese customer as a ‘native insider’, this performative racial-ethnic mimesis may paradoxically disclose other ethnicities and bring them to a native insider’s attention at the same time. In the case of the renewed RURŌ TENTEN, it is Korean ethnicity that serves to both allude to and obscure the ‘inferior imitation’ of the ‘original’. Steve from MUSASHI: Who ‘Makes Believe’? Steve’s fascination with Japanese izakaya began in 1986 when he visited Japan for the first time to participate in a hands-on training programme at a McDonald’s Tokyo branch as part of the launch project of the first McDonald’s in Southern Seoul. During the interview, this South Korean restaurateur in his 40s recounted, ‘Back then, I was travelling back and forth between Japan and Korea. I used to go to izakaya for a drink when I was in Japan, and I really like it’. Years later, he was given another opportunity to visit Japan, this time through his business connections in the South Korean film industry: I had been in the film industry for quite some time. It was fun. My job was to organise promotional tours for people in showbiz, media and theatre companies. I would take them to Japan and entertain them during their stay. All the Hollywood stars, like Nicole Kidman and Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, they would visit Japan for their promotions and then fly back to America, without visiting Korea. So we needed to fly over to Japan to meet those movie stars. In Japan, he often took his clients to izakaya to show them the ‘real’ Japan. ‘They loved it. You know, it’s very similar, but it’s also very different from our culture’, he said. Our culture shares many similarities with Japanese culture, particularly in terms of values related to family and work. Korean people also enjoy going out for drinks after work, whereas here [in Australia] people tend

The Exotic Genre’s Formula  121 to go straight home to spend time with their family. So it’s very close, but we don’t have anything like izakaya. It’s very different. In 1998, Steve relocated to New Zealand to study business. When there, he had the opportunity to take over a small Japanese shop from a Japanese couple who had previously owened the business. In 2002, he moved to Australia, and two years later, he opened his first izakaya in Melbourne’s CBD. His second izakaya, MUSASHI, was opened on the CBD’s main street in 2008. On a sunny mid-day in early spring of 2011, I stopped by the bar for a light snack. From the bar counter, one of the wait staff greeted me with the expected line, ‘irasshaimase’. She handed me a glass of water after I sat down at the counter. A bottle shelf with a large selection of Japanese drinks, ranging from sake to shōchu (distilled beverage), was behind her. A yakitori grill was set up at the end of the counter, where another staff member was turning yakitori skewers. I hardly heard them speak when I was there drinking a glass of umeshu (plum liqueur) with yakitori, except when the female wait staff occasionally disappeared into the rear kitchen to chat with other staff members in Korean. I returned to the bar a week later for an interview with Steve. ‘Hi’, the owner said as he emerged from the back kitchen. We took a seat at one of the small café tables in the dining room, which opened onto the busy street through the front door. ‘So, what do you think of our restaurant?’, Steve asked abruptly, looking me straight in the eyes from the other side of the table. That prompted me to get right to the heart of the interview, Whose performative racial-ethnic mimesis of Japanese ethnicity, how and why? I started talking to him about my first visit to MUSASHI, mentioning the two staff members working at the bar counter. He responded, ‘Did you notice that they’re actually both Koreans? Is that the guy at the yakitori grill over there? Is that the one that you saw the other day? Yeah, he’s good. He’s our head chef. He spent eight years studying Japanese in Japan. He knows about Japan and its culture. Or to put it this way, he’s good enough to make believe’. In order to enact this ‘make believe’, the staff at MUSASHI utilise their bodies to perform what Butler refers to as ‘stylised acts’. These acts involve ‘the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, [who] come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief’ (1988, 520). In the context of the Japanese restaurant, these stylised acts require a racial-ethnic body: they are enacted by certain appearances, mannerisms and utterances that deliver the authority and authenticity of Japaneseness, to make it believable. In the case of MUSASHI, it is the head chef’s Asian body, his Japanese language skills and his hands-on cultural experience in Japan that are relied on to make their performance believable. Steve explained, ‘When customers are around, he speaks in Japanese. He’s fluent in Japanese. He said to me once that it doesn’t really matter whether they understand it or not, but what matters is whether they believe it or not’. When the head chef’s Asian body is presented, seen and recognised as such, the performative racial-ethnic mimesis can become effective. It is not just a

122  The Exotic Genre’s Formula racial-ethnic body enacting stylised acts but also the audience’s expectations, recognitions and even misrecognitions that make the enactment possible. Steve’s following comments illuminate that a racial-ethnic body requires an audience whose ‘seeing’ and ‘experiencing’ can complete its performative racial-ethnic mimesis. He said, ‘Some Aussies want to speak Japanese in a Japanese restaurant. When they speak Japanese, they will probably feel as if they’re in Japan. They come here and have a chat with me in Japanese. I’m not doing so badly, I guess. They still think that I’m Japanese’. Notice that there is a tension between ‘performing’ and ‘being seen’, and this tension points towards Steve’s fear of the audience ‘knowing too much’ or seeing through his performative racial-ethnic mimesis. In fact, he told me that the head chef had once given him a warning, ‘One day, he came up to me and said, “You shouldn’t tell them that you’re Korean. Just keep quiet about it, otherwise they’re not going to buy it”. People do ask me whether I’m Japanese or not. When I say I’m actually Korean, they look kind of disappointed, and they say things like, “Oh, you’re not Japanese?” So I’m trying to keep it quiet.’ If the audience knows too much, they may be able to see through the performative racial-ethnic mimesis, exposing the lack of Japanese ethnicity in the establishment. Steve expressed this fear, exclaiming, I can speak basic Japanese, so that’s not a problem. But the real problem is when I need to talk to Japanese customers. They can instantly tell that I’m faking it. It’s great to have Japanese customers in our restaurant. For us, it’s almost like a compliment because it kind of shows that we’re doing alright as a Japanese restaurant. But at the same time, their presence also makes us nervous as we don’t want to be exposed as imposters. The presence of Japanese customers in the establishment can highlight the power asymmetry between the ‘original’ and the ‘imitation’, as illustrated in the example of the renewed RURŌ TENTEN in the previous section. While their presence can help validate the space as ‘authentic’, it can also raise questions about the degree of fidelity between the ‘imitation’ and the asserted ‘original’. How Steve handles this dilemma is worth a mention. Instead of completely concealing his ‘Koreanness’, he strategically aligns it with Japaneseness within the exotic genre. Here ‘Koreanness’ is folded into ‘Japaneseness’, although ‘Japan’ is still marked as the primary source of their performative racial-ethnic mimesis. This, for example, can be observed on the menu where Korean-origin foods, such as yukhoe (seasoned raw beef) and kimchi (chilli and garlic pickled vegetables distinct from traditional Japanese tsukemono pickles), have been incorporated into Japanese dishes with Korean (and Chinese) inspirations, such as ‘Yukke’ (Japanese-style Korean beef tartare) and ‘Kimuchi Chāhan’ (fried rice with kimchi). Steve conveniently characterises these Korean-inspired Japanese dishes on the menu as the culinary innovation of ‘sōsaku ryōri’, literally

The Exotic Genre’s Formula  123 meaning ‘creative cuisine’ (see Chapter 2 on sōsaku ryōri discussed in the section on Ryo from RURŌ TENTEN): I see Korean food is really becoming a part of Japanese food culture. Now you can find many restaurants in Japan that feature Korean food and incorporate it into their own sōsaku ryōri. For example, dishes like kimchi, bibimbap and yakiniku all came from Korea, but they have been adapted and reimagined as Japanese cuisine. So for me, serving Korean food in a Japanese restaurant is not a bad thing to do at all. I mean, in a way, if it’s done properly, it can be very authentic because that’s what you’ll get in Japan. In Chapter 1, I discussed how the intersections of diverse food types at the local, national and regional levels have shaped the food spaces in Japan. One example is the incorporation of Korean foods into Japanese culinary scenes, which has grown noticeably in the post-war period, due to increased cultural exchanges between Korea and Japan. These include the expedient mainstreaming of zainichi Korean culture earlier on and the promotion of ‘Korean Cool’ more recently (Cwiertka 2006, 151–2). Korean foods have been ‘permitted’ into Japan’s national food spaces, albeit with the historical tension between the colonised and the coloniser that still lingers and can erupt at any time. Steve’s use of both Japanese and Korean ethnicities works in tandem to create a distinctive dining experience. This brings us back to Chow’s questions about agency—that is, ‘How is imitating whom and how agency would be imagined? Does agency lie with the originator or with the mimic? What kind of agency?’ (2002, 103). I argue that Steve exercises his own agency through his performative racial-ethnic mimesis, which responds in part to the demand for Japanese ethnicity within the exotic genre. Furthermore, I suggest that this kind of agency inhabits the places of both ‘the originator’ and ‘the mimic’ as Chow puts it. By subsuming his own Korean ethnicity under what he presents as sōsaku ryōri, Steve is able to situate his agency in the competing places that he takes advantage of. However, it is important to note that his Korean identity is not solely derived from its origin, but rather is diasporic in nature, thereby calling into question the dichotomy of the ‘original’ and the ‘imitation’. In effect, Steve’s stories uniquely highlight that Japanese ethnicity can be displaced and reconfigured by other ethnicities, such as diasporic (de-territorialised and re-territorialised) Korean ethnicity. Takeshi from AOI-TORI: A Hyphenated Ethnicity After finishing my sushi burger at AOI-TORI—the signature dish of this casual Japanese eatery in Melbourne’s CBD—I asked one of the Japanese-speaking staff members waiting at my table if there was anyone I could interview for my research. She went to the kitchen where the chef who had prepared my sushi burger was located. A minute later, she came back and

124  The Exotic Genre’s Formula said in Japanese, ‘Please meet our manager, Takeshi-san. He’s in the kitchen right now’. I followed her back to the kitchen. ‘Yes’, he answered in Japanese, looking at me. I greeted him in Japanese, introducing myself by handing him my business card. He quickly dried his wet hands with his black apron before accepting the card with both hands and bowing simultaneously. After briefly explaining my research project and asking him if he would be interested in participating in an interview, he responded in Japanese, ‘Ahh, okay. Then please give us a call’. The next day, I called him and reintroduced myself, and there was an awkward pause. Takeshi barely responded, so I quickly switched to English. He then broke the silence by saying, ‘Oh, so you speak English? That’s great!’ It was the first time I realised that Japanese was not his mother tongue. During the interview, Takeshi stated that despite his family’s extensive background in the Japanese restaurant industry, he had never seen himself as the right fit for it. Takeshi, a floor manager and chef in his 20s who was born and raised in Melbourne, claimed that he never felt that working in a Japanese restaurant was his ‘thing’: It’s because of my family. I’m working here because my brother asked me to help him running the space. Yeah, he runs the business and heads the kitchen. If it wasn’t family, I wouldn’t get involved in this business. I would look for something else. I don’t know why I’ve put myself into this, but yeah, it’s because it’s a family thing. His parents immigrated to Australia in the early 1980s and opened a restaurant in Melbourne’s CBD in 1985. ‘They are both Japanese. My dad opened his first restaurant when he came here. Yeah, so I’ve been in the Japanese food industry all my life, but I didn’t really know much about it until very recently’, he explained. Takeshi recalled his parents’ early days in the restaurant business, remarking, ‘My parents were always at their restaurant. They weren’t home very often, so I’d spend the rest of my day at home waiting for them’. He asserted that his childhood was ‘not influenced by Japanese stuff’ because his parents were not home often. His detachment from Japan and its culture was highlighted when he commented in the interview: I grew up here [in Melbourne]. I’ve spent all my life here. I don’t know much about Japan. I don’t go back there that often. I’ve been to Japan, but I wasn’t really interested in the country much. I couldn’t speak Japanese until about six years ago. I grew up here and all my friends are Australian, and I spent more time with them and just really wasn’t in a Japanese environment. Takeshi’s upbringing and cultural background enable him to fold between at least two distinct positions—being partly Japanese and partly Australian. It is this hyphenated subject—Japanese-Australian—that ‘draws attention to

The Exotic Genre’s Formula  125 identity formation as an ambivalent and contingent process’ (Lo, Khoo and Gilbert 2000, 2). In this process of identity formation, Takeshi’s appearance, utterance, mannerisms and other ethnic features make him recognisable as ‘Japanese’, thereby giving legitimacy to the Japanese restaurant where he works. Simultaneously, his ‘Australian’ identity breaks the fixed category of ‘Japaneseness’ and ‘Asianness’, bringing both closeness and otherness to his performative racial-ethnic mimesis. The provisional category of Takeshi’s identities—being partly Japanese and partly Australian—thus produces paradoxical effects. He performs, imitates and becomes (like) the ‘original’ as the exotic genre’s necessary formula. However, because his performative racial-ethnic mimesis is not a return to the ‘original’ but a differential repetition, it introduces the ‘other’ while allowing for proximity at the same time. Hence, Japanese ethnicity is folded into his Australian identity through his Asian body, suggesting ‘the multiple ways of imagining being “Asians in Australia”’ (Lo, Khoo and Gilbert 2000, 2). The Supply and Demand of Japanese Ethnicity in and beyond Capitalism The examples discussed in this chapter have shown us how the supply and demand of Japanese ethnicity define the exotic genre’s necessary formula. In other words, the expected and accepted ethnicity of ‘Japanese’ is habitually defined by and feeds into the mainstream consumer market, which is determined by social conventions, expectations and ‘familiar’ images. In response to this loop of capitalist economy, those restaurant workers seek to fulfil their presumed racialised and ethnicised roles by performing, imitating and becoming (like) the ‘original’ through their Asian bodies. Using Chow’s notion of coercive mimeticism, I have highlighted the compulsion towards an ethnic identity that calls on (nonwhite) ethnic subjects to mimic the presumed ‘original’. Chow argues that ethnicity and capitalism have a ‘symbiotic’ relationship, but a conflicting one (Metzger 2005). She articulates this through what she refers to as the ‘ethnicisation of labour’, whereby (non-white) ethnic subjects contribute their labour to the mechanisation of capitalism, from which they also benefit. Yet, as a result of that labour, they are continually placed in the position of ‘the outsider, the ethnic’ (Chow 2002, 34): As laborer becomes ethnicized because she is commodified in specific ways, because she has to pay for her living by performing certain kinds of work, while these kinds of work, despite being generated from within that society, continues to reduce the one who performs them to the position of the outsider, the ethnic. […] A workforce that actively contributes labor toward the accumulation of capital yet at the same time receives the least of its rewards—namely, an ethnicized population of historical capitalism—its simultaneous thrust for theoretical equality and practical inequality. (2002, 34)

126  The Exotic Genre’s Formula Then the question becomes: What is at the root of this dilemma? Chow’s concept of coercive mimeticism makes it clear by bringing our attention to the burden of identification and identity that (non-white) ethnic subjects must bear yet is not entirely imposed on them (Chow 2002, 110): Identity is […] the result not exactly only of an imposition of rules from the outside or only of a resistance against such an imposition; it is also the result of a kind of unconscious automatization, impersonation, or mimicking, in behavior as much as in psychology, of certain beliefs, practices, and rituals. It is such automatization, impersonation, and mimicry that, in turn, give that identity its sense of legitimacy and security—and, ultimately, its potentiality and empowerment. (2002, 110; emphasis in original) In order to legitimise their own places to exist in a given society, (non-white) ethnic subjects engage in identification processes that require their bodies and consciousness. This demonstrates, as Chow implies, that there is agency or capacity for empowerment. In the case of the Japanese restaurant, there is also a cross-cultural desire for mimetic connection that can overflow the capitalist economy, or the supply-demand loop of Japanese ethnicity. This is exemplified by Steve’s performative racial-ethnic mimesis. His urge to keep the presence and presentness of Japanese ethnicity within his izakaya arises from not only economic considerations but also his personal cross-cultural desire for the Japanese other. Further to this, Steve’s performative racial-ethnic mimesis, where Korean ethnicity constitutes the cross-cultural construction of Japanese ethnicity, shows that performing ethnicity is a discursive practice. Drawing on Butler’s performativity, I have emphasised that performing ethnicity is not simply a repetition of fixed categories and images but can also have the potential to challenge and reshape those categories. Performativity suggests that there is an opportunity to disrupt the homogeneity of ethnicity, which in turn creates space for agency and resistance, even though the performer is not entirely free to fully play out their own ethnicity or that of others. Specifically, in the case study of the Japanese restaurant, the performative racial-ethnic mimesis of the workers shows how they can rework and play with the ‘familiar’ images of Japanese ethnicity, indicating the potential for a more fluid and dynamic understanding of ethnicity. From this vantage point, the case study of the Japanese restaurant in Australia adds another dimention to the symbiosis of ethnicity and capitalism, demonstrating how (non-white) ethnic subjects capitalise on the perceived exoticism of Japanese ethnicity through their performative racial-ethnic mimesis. And this allows for the creation of a supply and demand for the new exotic that is similar but different.

The Exotic Genre’s Formula  127 Notes 1 See John Austin’s work (1975) for a more detailed explanation of the theory that inspired Butler’s theoretical position. 2 There may be a phenomenological overlap between the Korean restaurant workers’ performing of Japanese ethnicity and the zainichi Koreans’ ‘passing’ as Japanese, because they both seem to attempt to appear to be members of the ethnic group in demand, albeit for different cultural, social, economic and political reasons and ends. See David Chapman’s work (2008) for further discussion on the zainichi Korean ethnicity and identity.

Bibliography Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893 ———. “Burning Acts—Injurious Speech.” In Performativity and Performance, Edited by Andrew Parker, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 197–227. New York: Routledge, 1995. Chapman, David. Zainichi Korean Identity and Ethnicity. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Cwiertka, Katarzyna J. Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Gebauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf. Mimesis: Culture–Art–Society. Translated by Don Reneau. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Lo, Jacqueline, Tseen Khoo, and Helen Gilbert. “New Formations in Asian-Australian Cultural Politics.” Journal of Australian Studies 24, no. 65 (January 2000): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/14443050009387580 Metzger, Sean. “The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” MCLC Resource Center, February 2005. https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/the-protestant-ethnic/

Conclusion

Through the lens of the Japanese restaurant in Australia, this book has presented the ethnographic evidence that unsettles colonialist, essentialist underpinnings of the exotic as the West’s ‘inferior other’. Further, it has challenged traditional discourses of ‘Japaneseness’ by situating the grounded narratives of what it means to be ‘Japanese’ in the global marketplace of ‘Japanese gastro-cool’. In so doing, the book has highlighted complex manifestations of cross-cultural desires (Chapters 2 and 3), translating practices and the translated (Chapter 4) and the performative racial-ethnic mimesis of Japanese ethnicity (Chapter 5). Across the chapters, I have utilised Gilles Deleuze’s ‘fold’ as a trope of the movement that suggests a potential interruption of the polarisation of the West self and non-West other (1993). What I hope to do with the trope is to bring a new sensibility to questions about what is or should be considered ‘Japanese’ in terms of food, culinary practice, utterance, performance and ethnicity within the exotic genre. The movement of the fold, whereby the inside (‘familiar’ and ‘fashionable’) is continually entangled with the outside (‘foreign’ and ‘strange’), has figured the paradoxical operations of the Japanese restaurant. The fold marks a series of displacements, divergences and disorientations that destabilise the fixity of origins and roots. While there is a movement without a centre, the fold does not eliminate the centre; rather, it challenges closed, hierarchised systems while still invoking the centre from which deviations emerge. The examples in the book have demonstrated how the Japanese restaurant relates to the centre, or ‘mainland Japan’, and how it requires the centre for its definition, while simultaneously deviating from it or Japa-resu (ジャパレス). This inherent paradox compels the Japanese restaurant to use, capitalise and circulate images of certain lifestyles or aesthetics positively associated with the country of origin that appeal to global consumers. The effects of its reliance on the centre are also deeply paradoxical: some customers may experience nostalgia and longing for the ‘homeland’ that the Japanese restaurant represents, while others may find novelty and surprise, or even a range of emotions at once. Although this depends on the perspective being considered, I have argued throughout the book that it is the new exotic that the Japanese restaurant generates and leads into as it folds between the inside and the outside. DOI: 10.4324/9781003362463-6

Conclusion  129 Parallel to this strategy is domestication—a particular mode of cross-cultural translation that aims to make a product or service more accessible to global consumers. Unlike the notions of ‘fusion’ and ‘hybridisation’, which have limited critical engagement with cultural ideologies, the process of domestication reveals where power lies and how it operates. To identify whose intention it is to translate what text for whom under what conditions, this book has employed Lawrence Venuti’s framework of the ‘domestic subject’ (1998). It has suggested that what is offered within the Japanese restaurant is a product of the intentional process of domestication, where some socio-economically privileged Anglo-Celtic Australians specifically, and European Australians more broadly, are often the primary target population for the perceived domestic subject to whom Japanese cuisines are translated as ‘foreign’ texts. I have made it clear that this representation of the domestic subject is not solely a personal construction. Rather, it is informed by the socio-historical conditions that determine and reflect whose hegemony holds power. This construction process of the domestic subject is, I have argued, closely related to what Ghassan Hage frames as ‘white multiculturalism’ (2000). The notion suggests that multiculturalism is viewed by some (white) Australians as a means of cultural enrichment, rather than as a reflection of the society’s actual composition and the realities experienced by its members. Hage argues that this points to the hegemonic power that governs Australia’s policy of multiculturalism, where both white and non-white minorities, including some immigrant minorities, are given ‘the right to express their own identity, culture and belief, [yet] they are simultaneously obliged to subsume themselves within the pre-existing Australian imagined community’ (Ang 2010, 6). In this book, I have detailed how this power structure shapes the intentional domestication of Japanese cuisines as foreign texts via the Japanese restaurant. Simultaneously, however, it would be unrealistic to claim that the fantasies of white supremacy in Australia’s multiculturalism remain consistent and unchanging. By drawing on the discourse of ‘white decline’, I have illustrated how restaurateurs’perceptions of the domestic subject have evolved as Australia’s sociohistorical conditions have changed over time. The notion of white decline itself is a socio-historical construct that reflects the changing demographics, marketplaces, human and capital flows and media technologies to a certain extent. This book has included examples from my recent fieldwork to show how the surge in Asian immigration to Australia, as well as Asia’s economic rise in recent decades, have complicated restaurateurs’ perceptions of who the domestic subject is or should be. Restaurants like MENYA-S in Sydney and YAKINIKU JŪ JŪ in Melbourne now see middle-class Asian consumers as an increasingly critical part of their target market, offering products and services that they believe would better meet the needs and preferences of this consumer group. Domestication as the Japanese restaurant’s modus operandi calls into question the asserted authenticity of Japaneseness, which has concerned us

130 Conclusion throughout. I have underscored that the authenticity of the Japanese restaurant is constantly put into doubt, while also underlying the impulse for consumers to devour ‘the taste of Japan’ within the parameters of the exotic genre. This tension arises precisely because the cross-cultural construction of the Japanese restaurant perpetually contests the point of ‘origin’, which authenticity elicits. Equally important, my examples have also demonstrated that there is no inherent authenticity to be uncovered nor a uniform consensus about what ‘genuinely Japanese’ is. While some may share similar ideas about it, there is no one definitive answer. The stories of both restaurant workers and consumers have highlighted that the authenticity of a restaurant being ‘Japanese’ cannot be defined by a single truth or a fixed state of being. Instead, it can be viewed as a ‘claim’ made based on one’s experience and knowledge of a certain product or service that is marked as ‘Japanese’. Authenticity claims made about the Japanese restaurant extend beyond food and related practices to include ethnicity. I have argued that ‘Japanese ethnicity’ serves as a necessary formula for the Japanese restaurant, and thus there is an ongoing demand for it. However, this demand is not always met by the supply in Australia’s Japanese restaurant industry. The lack of Japanese ethnicity lets some restaurant workers perform, imitate or become (like) the ‘original’ through their ‘Asian’ bodies. Rey Chow’s concept of ‘coercive mimeticism’ has allowed us to see the mechanisation by which restaurant workers are called upon to engage in a mimicking process (2002). When ethnic subjects mimic Japanese ethnicity verbally or nonverbally, they draw upon a prototype in their minds. Yet, the prototype can be a fictitious representation of what Japanese ethnicity is expected to look like and perform. If ethnic subjects have ‘Asian’ bodies, they use them as a collective marker to repeat what has been repeated. In this process, ethnic differences are collapsed into ‘Asianness’, but the repetition is not a return to sameness but to a presentness that at the same time others. Judith Butler’s argumentation of ‘performativity’ has provided a useful theoretical tool to underscore this constructedness of Japanese ethnicity, where different nationalities, ethnicities and races are involved (1988). Based on these theories, the ethnographic examples in the book have proposed that Japanese ethnicity, as the exotic genre’s necessary formula, is not a homogeneous category, but a cross-ethnically (and cross-racially) constructed, inherently unsettling the monolithic power imbalance between the ‘original’ and the ‘imitation’. In writing this book, I hope to shed light on a shift in the formation of the exotic and Japaneseness as emerging from popular cross-cultural spaces, such as the Japanese restaurant. The boundaries of the Japanese restaurant are indeterminate and contestable; what is represented as ‘inside’ (or ‘outside’), depending on a point of view, is always subject to critique and social construction. This is because the formation of the exotic genre is influenced

Conclusion  131 by the ebbs and flows of social conditions that shape images, representations and people’s perceptions of them (and therefore both text and context become necessary points for consideration). The 2011 Great Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami, which occurred during my research for this book, was a major moments of social change. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident caused by the natural disasters posed a number of questions about safety, authenticity, authority and ethnicity around food and eating (Kimura 2016; Sternsdorff-Cisterna 2018). The symbolic categories of ‘purity’ and ‘danger’ were thrown off balance (Douglas 2003), for example, by media reports about radiation detected in domestically produced food. The invisible and odorless threat of food contamination cast doubt on the authority of food products labeled as ‘Made in Japan’, while also raising concerns about global consumers’ preoccupation with the authenticity of such foods. The Japanese restaurant, as a hub of the global production and consumption of Japanese cuisines, was among those who impacted by the paradigm shift. The aftermath also prompted restaurant workers to reflect on the meaning and value of Japanese food while being questioned by concerned customers. The COVID-19 pandemic was another watershed moment for the Japanese restaurant industry in Australia and elsewhere, in terms of negotiating the meaning and value of the exotic and Japaneseness. While the global crisis exposed the industry’s vulnerability, it also highlighted the resilience of restaurant workers who not only provide food and drink but also fulfil a human need for connection. In the case of Australia, the massive exodus of migrant workers and the closure of businesses during the outbreak have adversely impacted the hospitality and restaurant industry on various levels, of which the Japanese restaurant is a critical part. One of the major challenges for the Japanese restaurant has been to ensure the presence or presentness of Japanese ethnicity, on which the industry rests. International students and working holiday makers from Japan are always essential to the industry’s workforce, but their absence due to social and mobility restrictions creates a lack of their presence within the exotic genre. As a result, this can invite consumer suspicion and ultimately lower the establishment’s business value. To write a conclusion for a book in the midst of a rapidly changing world is not to offer a definitive ending, but to encourage us to envision the world anew. As an increasingly prominent part of global cross-cultural platforms and marketplaces, the Japanese restaurant will persist as a prime example of how the world folds, unfolds and refolds in a Deleuzian fashion. As social circumstances evolve, so will the operations of the Japanese restaurant. This book is only the beginning of the reimagining process, and it is my hope that it will open up conversations about how we can better understand what we become through food, culture, practice and the relationships among them, both within and beyond the exotic genre.

132 Conclusion Bibliography Ang, Ien. “Between Nationalism and Transnationalism: Multiculturalism in a Globalising World.” University of Western Sydney, 2010. https://doi.org/10.4225/35/ 57A94F550F198 Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2003. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge, 2000. Kimura, Aya Hirata. Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Sternsdorff-Cisterna, Nicolas. Food Safety after Fukushima: Scientific Citizenship and the Politics of Risk. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2018. Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

Index

Pages in italics refer to figures and pages followed by “n” refer to notes. aesthetics: ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ 74; class status 70–1; MARU 52–3; and otherness 66–7; tasting and aesthetic cognition 67–8 Akira (film) 42, 58n4 Allison, Anne 17 alternative modernities 11, 13 Ang, Ien, and Stratton, Jon 13 anime: ‘Kimber the White Lion’ 41, 58n3; Melbourne bookshop’ shelves 42 AOI-TORI, owner/manager interviews 123–5 art, as polysemic 96 Asian Century White Paper 26 Asian countries: Asian middle-class 73; economic rise 129; growing consumership 73; Japanese restaurants 1; middle-class 73 Australia: Asian middle-class consumership 73; Asian population 108–9, 129; Asianisation 26, 89; Asia’s economies and modernities 26; changing consumer market 105–6; cosmo-multiculturalism 25, 26, 72; demographic composition 26, 27; exodus of migrant workers (COVID-19) 131; identity ‘crisis’ for white Australia 26; Japanese migration 82; Japanese population 82, 84n6; multiculturalism 25, 26; population born overseas 73; racial-ethnic diversity 83, 84n7; republicanism 23; Skilled Stream Asian immigrants 73; White Australia Policy (abolition) 25; white decline 26; as ‘white nation’ 104; and whiteness 25–6 Australian drinking culture, izakaya dining bars 43–4

Australian Food: In Celebration of the New Australian Cuisine (Saunders) 23 Australia’s national cuisine 22–7; Asian immigrant traditions 22; class-based tastes/social distinction 24; culinary patriotism 23; defining 23; ethnicity of the food 24–5; foreign influences 24; Gallegos case study 24–5; guilt free fast food 24; healthier alternatives 24; Japanese gastro-cool as niche 61–2; ‘modern Australian cuisine’ 23; national identity 22; pub culture 42–4; and republicanism 23; rise of Asia and legacy of white supremacy 26–7; shifting foodscapes 24, 49; vegetarian/ vegan 39, 57n2 authenticity: boundary transgression 75, 90, 99; business value and Japanese ethnicity 131; consumable 78–80; consumer interviews 75–80, 116; distancing practice 40; and ‘domestication’ 129–30; impossible 80–3; inherent paradox 128; and Japanese ethnicity 116; Japanese food (judging) 76; limits 80; ‘Made in Japan’ 131; new exotic 74–8; objectification 75; and quality connection 70; why it matters 78 Baker, Tony 23 BAR POP 41–2 Beauty Is Perfection (Speakman) 15 Belt and Road Initiative 73 Bestor, Theodore C. 15 BIMI: kyōiku (food education process) 112–13; owner/manager interviews 112–13; seasonality 112–13 bluefin tuna 4

134 Index Bongie, Chris 10 Bourdieu, Pierre 24, 68 Bruni, Frank 3 Butler, Judith 28, 117, 118, 126, 130 Cabinet Office Intellectual Property Headquarters, ‘Cool Japan’ 5–6 California roll 90 Central Business District (CBD): AOITORI 123; CHIKA 48; IZAYAKAYA ICHI 41, 43; MUSASHI 121; RURŌ TENTEN 53; SAKURA-GI 99 ‘cheap eats,’ Asian restaurants 71 CHIKA: beverage menu 48; classed experience 49; clientele 49–50; European Australian co-owner 49; fold concept 48–50; Japanese born coowner 45; Japanese gastro-cool 48, 49; Japanese-style wait service 48; local produce 48–9; lunch specials 49; open kitchen 48; owner/manager interviews 45–50, 116; research in Tokyo 47; signature dishes 48; staff members 116; staff uniforms 48; Tokyo-style izakaya dining space 45; update of old representations 46; vegetarian/vegan cuisine 48 Chikaranomoto Holdings 2, 5 China, economic and military rise 12 Chow, Rey 28, 116–8, 123, 125–6 Clarence-Smith, Keiko 97 clientele: Anglo-Celtic/European Australians 26–7, 83; Asian middleclass consumership 1, 104, 105; Asians and Asian Australians 27; basic understanding of Japanese food 103; CHIKA 49–50; cross-cultural translation 102–4; ‘experience economy’ 64; globalisation Japanese restaurant 60; insatiable 64; kuchikomi (word of mouth) 55; mainstream white market 37, 39–41; MENYA 105; middle-class Asians/Asian Australians 88, 129; and popular culture (Japanese) 60–1; social media reach 109; socio-economically privileged ‘white’ Australians 83, 88, 104, 129; target consumers 82, 83, 88, 106–7; see also consumer interviews Clifford, James 7, 88 colonialist understandings, the exotic 7, 9–13, 27, 52, 128 consumer identities 62, 76

consumer interviews 60–1; aesthetics 66– 7, 70–1; authenticity 75–8, 80–3, 116; connoisseurship 76–7, 82–3; consumable authenticity 78–80; cultural-culinary hierarchy 63–4; culture shock 78, 79; elitism/’inaccessible’ pricing 70; exchange student experience in Japan 79–80; food quality 67; good service 65; high prices 69–70, 82; humble traditional dishes 79; ‘insider’ perspective 69, 76, 77; Japanese consumers 82; Japanese restaurants as ‘high-class’ 68–72; Japanese student’s cooking 78–9; multi-sensory experience 65–6; ‘outside’ viewpoints 77, 78; sushi 81; taste of Japan 81; theatrical otherness 65–7; visual appeal 66–7; Western palate 78–9 Cook, Ian, and Crang, Philip 101 ‘Cool Japan’ 90; vague definition 5–6 Cool Japan Fund 5, 6 Corson, Trevor 110 cosmo-multiculturalism 25, 26, 72 cosmopolitan consumption 72–4, 84n5; ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ 74; travell 72 cosmopolitan (term) 72 COVID-19: exodus of migrant workers 131; restaurant industry’s vulnerability 131 Crang, Philip, and Cook, Ian 101 Cresswell, Tim 90 cross-cultural translation 87–113; accurate imitation 97; boundary transgression 90, 99, 130–1; Chineserun cheap eats 99–100; clientele 101, 108; consumer literacy 110; consumer trust 112; content and decorative aspect 95; ‘copying’ and ‘creating’ 97; ‘craftsmen’ or ‘businessmen’ tropes 97–8, 100; crosscultural culinary practises 94–5; displacement 101–4, 107, 109; ‘domestication’ 87–9, 105, 129–30; fold concept 95; food hierarchies 93– 5; gaps 89, 91, 93; ‘heterogeneous address’ 89; high-end to everyday offer 106; ‘homolingual address’ 89, 90–5; Japanese culinary traditions 98– 9; kyōiku (food education process) 109–13; ‘maneru’ (to copy) 97, 113n4; ‘mass’ and ‘high class’ crossing/

Index  135 double-crossing 101–9; national culinary borders 88; ‘original’ and ‘imitation’ 98, 99, 130; owner/manager interviews 91–113; perspectives on translation 89–91; price ranges/ particular food 94, 102; rawness 98; staff members 108; subtler flavours 103; surplus of meaning 101, 109; table talk 110; translating sushi into mass exoticisms 95–8, 100 Crossman, Ashley 62 culinary aesthetics 17 ‘culinary triangle’ 14 ‘cultural omnivorousness’ 62 dashi: homemade 92; Hondashi 93; manufactured products 92–3 De Niro, Robert 3 Deleuze, Gilles, fold concept 8–9, 37, 53, 128, 131 diets: healthy 24; plant-based diet 39; vegetarian/vegan cuisine 39, 48, 57n2 dim sim 24 dining out: as entertainment 64–8; Japanese restaurants as ‘high-class’ 68–72; meal pricing 69–70 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu) 24 ‘domestic subject’ framework (Venuti) 129 domesticity 19–21; haku-mai (white rice) 19–21, 29n7; nationalist ideology 21 Domínguez-Quintero, Ana M., González-Rodríguez Maria Rosario and Roldán, José Luis 70 Dubecki, Larissa 43, 50 Duggal, Ekta, and Verma, Harsh V. 6 essentialist understandings, the exotic 7, 11–3, 27, 37, 45, 74, 128 ethnic foods 24–5; corporatisation 25 ethnicity, staff members 117–18, 121, 122, 125, 127n2, 130, 131 exotic: colonialist understandings 7, 9– 13, 27, 52, 128; essentialist understandings 7, 11–3, 27, 37, 45, 74, 128; as West’s ‘inferior other’ 128 exotic genre’s formula 116–26; AOLTORI 123–5; audience knowing too much 122; Aussies wanting to speak Japanese 122; business value and Japanese ethnicity 131; CHIKA 116; ‘coercive mimeticism’ 117, 118, 125,

126; consumer interviews 116; customers’ utterances in Japanese 119; ‘ethnicisation of labour’ 125–6; fold concept 124–5; hyphenated ethnicity 123–5; Japanese customers 119, 122; Japanese ethnicity/Australian identity 125; Japanese/Korean ethnicity 120, 126, 127n2, 130, 131; Japanesespeaking employees 119; ‘make believe’ 120–3; menu with Koreanorigin foods 122–3; MUSASHI 120– 3; ‘original’ and ‘imitation’ 118, 122, 123; owner/manager interviews 116, 120–5; owner’s cultural Japanese/ Australian background 124–5; ‘performativity’ 117–18, 120–2, 126, 127n1; ‘performing’/’being seen’ tension 122; phrases in Japanese 118–20; racial-ethnic mimesis 120, 127n2; RURŌ TENTEN 118–20; scripted language (staff) 118–20; ‘sōsaku ryōri’ (creative cuisine) 122–3; ‘stylised acts’ 121–2; supply and demand of Japanese ethnicity 125–6; see also staff members Exotic Memories: literature, Colonialism and the Fin de Siécle (Bongie) 10 exoticisms and modernities 10–3; Asia’s economies 13; China’s economic and military rise 11; Fanon 96; Japan panic 11; new-Orientalism 13; Orientalism (Said) 12–3; politics of identity 10; see also new exotic ‘experience economy’ 64 ‘experience quality’ 70 Faiola, Anthony 90 Fanon, Frantz Omar 96 fast food, guilt free 24 fine dining restaurants 2–4, 16 fish: expected use 79; performance of preparing alive 18–9, 18 Fitzgerald Inquiry report 25 fold concept: CHIKA 48–50; Deleuze 8– 9; displacements, divergences, disorientations 128; incorporating the outside 39; ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ notions 8, 48–50, 53, 57, 68, 95, 130–1; MARU 51–2, 53; model of the ‘Baroque House’ 9; monadic theory 9; the new exotic 8–9, 48–51, 53, 83, 128, 131; owner’s cultural Japanese/ Australian background 124–5; and

136 Index restaurateurs’ cross-cultural desires 37–58; RURŌ TENTEN 57; virtual and actual 48, 53; ‘virtual’ travell 74; ‘what not to change’ 39–40; whiteness/ Japaneseness 51–2 Fold Leibniz and the Baroque, The (Deleuze) 9 food and food practices 14–7; ‘culinary triangle’ 14; to express otherness 17; fish 18–9, 18; food as cool 14; food’s meaning and social value 15; Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident 131; ike-zukuri/iki-zukuri (prepared alive) 18, 18, 29n6; positive perceptions in US 16, 29n3; sushimaking performance 15 Food of Australian, The (Baker) 23 Foucault, Paul-Michel 68 fugu blowfish 96, 113n3 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident 131 furniture: ‘high-class’ 71; MARU 51, 52 Gallegos, Danielle 24–5 Gallini, Clara 95–6 Gebauer, Gunter, and Wulf, Christoph 117 Gillard, Julia 26 Gilmor, James H., and Pine, Joseph B. II 64 globalisation phenomenon, Japanese restaurants 1, 4, 29n2 Go-Jek 5 Golden, Seán 72–3 González-Rodríguez Maria Rosario, Domínguez-Quintero, Ana M. and Roldán, José Luis 70 Goodbye Culinary Cringe (Ripe) 23 Great Tōkoku Earthquake and Tsunami 131 ‘gross national cool’ 4, 61 Grosz, Elizabeth 53 gyo ̄za dumplings 75, 93 gyu ̄don-ya 22 Hage, Ghassan 25, 26, 72, 104, 129 hako-zushi 21 haku-mai (white rice), ideology of domesticity 19–21, 29n7 Hannerz, Ulf 72 haute cuisine restaurants, Japanese cooks 16 haya-zushi 21, 29n9 Hendry, Joy 97

‘Home-style’ dishes 51 hooks, bell 113 Huggan, Graham 11 humble traditional dishes 40 Hutcheon, Linda 8 ike-zukuri/iki-zukuri (prepared alive) 29n6; fish 18, 18 iki-jime (to force to live) 16, 29n4 In Place/Out of Place (Cresswell) 90 incorporation 8, 52, 63, 68, 118 Ippudo 2; food as cool 14; Japanese gastro-cool 7; ramen noodles 2, 5; urban interior design 2 Ippudo Outside 2 ‘irasshaimase’ (welcome to the shop) 118–20 Ishige, Naomichi 21 Iwabuchi, Koichi 63 izakaya dining bars 1, 43; Australian drinking culture 43–4; food and wine pairings 44–5; ni-uriya 43, 58n5; owner/manager interviews 120–3, 126; sharing dishes/repeating orders 49; Spanish tapas/mezze style of eating 44, 58n6; tablescape 49; too ‘foreign’ 49; see also CHIKA; IZAYAKAYA ICHI Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook (Robinson) 46–7, 49 IZAYAKAYA ICHI 42–5; Central Business District (CBD) 41; owner/ manager interviews 41–5; whiteness and Japaneseness 45 Japan 45; bastardised western cuisines 90; breakfast for exchange student 79– 80; culinary scene/foods 79; as cultural superpower 4; economic aggression 11; economic bubble period 11; Korean-origin foods 123; modernisation 11; Osaka 79; postbubble reengagement 4; protecting food culture 89–90, 113n1, 113n2; sakoku (seclusion policy) 10; shin-jinrui (new breed) generation 45, 58n7; ‘Sushi Police’ 89–91, 94, 113n1; triangular relationship with Asia/West 72, 84n4; ‘West’ as Japan’s essential other 11, 13 Japan panic 11 ‘Japanamerica,’ Möbius strip metaphor 62–3

Index  137 Japanese commodities, export after WWII 16 Japanese gastro-cool 1–7, 128; CHIKA 48, 49; consuming 60–4; ‘cool’ factors 6, 41–2, 63; cultural purification 17; food like fashion 3; ‘foreign’ as part of formation 83; foreignness (diluted) 88; global market 1, 29n2; images of 42; inherent paradox 128; Japanese government’s reaction 89–90; Japanese restaurants as ‘high-class’ 68–72; MARU 51; multi-sensory experience 65–6; multitude of meanings 6; as niche 61–2; ‘perceived hierarchy of cool’ 63, 64; popular culture production/consumption 2; rise of Asia and legacy of white supremacy 26–7; specifically Japanese 7, 8; subcultural appeal 62; tension what consumers want to see/consume 79; visual appeal 66–7 Japanese popular culture see popular culture (Japanese) Japanese technology, love for 41 Japanese turn 16 Japaneseness: aesthetically appealing 2; as commodity 37; culturally/ethically sanctioned representations 57; of owners/managers of restaurants 39– 40; and whiteness 51–2; whiteness of owners/managers of restaurants 45 Japan’s culinary system: ‘B-grade gourmet’ meal 69; connoisseurship 76–7, 82–3; cultural purification 21; decoding 17–22, 72, 88; deviancy and dubiety (Japa resu) 22; domesticity 19–21; foreign influences 21, 29n10; gokan (five senses) 40, 41; humble traditional dishes 40; ike-zukuri/ikizukuri (prepared alive) 18, 18, 29n6; naturalness 17–8, 91–2; pride in 98–9; ‘purity’ and danger 131; rawness 18–9, 29n5, 97, 98; and religious beliefs 17– 8; seasonality 19, 112–13; value proposition 93 Japonism 10, 11 kaiseki haute cuisine 53 kaiseki restaurants 1, 53, 54, 113; cooking principles 91–2 KANARI-YA: communal table 38; customers’ ask about dining experiences 38–9; folklore ornaments 38;

home-style meals 38; humble traditional dishes 40; as meeting point 39; menu 39; owner/manager interviews 38–41; vegetarian/vegan cuisine 39, 57n2 Kandiyoti, Dalia 10, 11 karē raisu (curry rice) 52, 58n10 Kashiwabara, Yoshiyuki 92 Kawahara, Shigemi 2 Kelts, Roland 5, 62 kissaten coffeehouses 52 KOHARU: cross-cultural culinary practises 94–5; owner/manager interviews 91–5, 110; table talk 110; ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ menu 94; translating Japanese cuisines 91 ‘Korean Cool’ 123 Korean-origin foods 122–3 ‘Koreanness’ 63, 120, 122 Korsmeyer, Carolyn 67–8 kuchi-komi (word of mouth), ichigen-san okotowari (no referral, no entry) 55 kura-moto 43 kyō kaiseke restaurant 54 kyōiku (food education process) 109–13; bargaining power 111; consumer literacy 110; consumer trust 112; table talk 110; as translation 113 labour, ‘ethnicisation of labour’ 125–6 Leheny, David 4–5 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 9, 37 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 14 linguistic translation 89 Lowe, Lisa 13 ‘Made in Japan,’ authenticity 131 Making Sense of Taste (Korsmeyer) 67–8 ‘maneru’ (to copy) 97, 113n4 MARU: aesthetics 52–3; beer glasses 51; fold concept 51, 53; furniture 51, 52; ‘Home-style’ dishes 51; Japanese gastro-cool 51; and kissaten coffeehouses 52; less-is-more lifestyle 50–2; open kitchen 51; owner/ manager interviews 50–3; soul food 50; themes 51; whiteness/ Japaneseness 51–2 mass exoticisms 95–6, 100–1 matcha muffins 51 Matsuhisa, Nobuyuki 2–4, 16 Matsuoka, Toshikatsu 90, 113n2 matsutake mushrooms 19

138 Index McGray, Douglas 4, 61 meal pricing: business fixed costs 69, 84n3; ‘insider’ perspective 69–70; market value/guide to quality 69–70 meaning-making process 42 Melbourne: anime bookshop’ shelves 42; Central Business District (CBD) 41, 43, 48, 53, 99, 121, 123; Chinatown 91; Chinese-owned ‘Japanese cafés’ 64, 77, 95–100; expansion of nonJapanese ‘Japanese restaurants’ 98; yakiniku restaurants 106 MENYA: clientele 105; customised business focus/sister shop 104–5; domestic customers 105; middle-class Asians/Asian Australians 129; owner/ manager interviews 104–6 mimesis: ‘coercive mimeticism’ 117, 118, 125, 126; staff members 121, 122, 127n2 Mimesis: Culture-Art-Society (Gebauer and Wulf) 117 Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) 113n2; ‘Sushi Police’ 89–91, 94, 113n1 miso soup 93 momiji oroshi (Japanese maple garnish) 19 monadic theory, fold concept 9, 37 Morley, David, and Robins, Kevin 11–2 Motoori, Norinaga 19–20 multiculturalism (Australia): cosmomulticulturalism 25, 26; top-down political strategy 25; white multiculturalism 25, 129 MUSASHI: Aussies wanting to speak Japanese 122; Japanese customers 122; Japanese/Korean ethnicity 122, 126; Korean owner ‘hiding’ ethnicity 122; menu with Korean-origin foods 122–3; owner/manager interviews 120–3, 126; owner speaks in Japanese (not mother tongue) 121, 123, 126; scripted language (staff) 121; ‘sōsaku ryōri’ (creative cuisine) 122–3; staff members 121 nare-zushi 21, 29n8 new exotic 7–8; Asian middle-class consumership 73; Asia’s economies and modernities 7–9, 11–3; authenticity 74–8; colonial exotic formation 8; cosmopolitan consumption 72–4, 84n5; deviancy

and dubiety (Japa resu) 22; eating out/ tasting 60–84; entertainment (whole package) 64–8; and fold concept 8–9, 48–51, 53, 57, 83, 128, 131; genre/ realm of Japanese restaurant 8; Japanese restaurants as ‘high-class’ 68–72; mainstream white market 40– 1; as the new exotic 130–1; otherness 7, 72; owner/manager interviews 38– 41, 42–57; paradoxical formation 12– 3; and restaurateurs’ cross-cultural desires 37–58; reverse exoticism 52; sense of space 44; sharing dishes/ repeating orders 49; taste of Japan 81; tasting and aesthetic cognition 67–8; too ‘foreign’ 49; update of old representations 46; ‘West-East’/’highlow’ distinctions 54; Western palate 78–9 ni-uriya, izakaya dining bars 43, 58n5 nihonjin-ron (theories of the Japanese) 19–20, 29n7 Nobu 2–4; food as cool 14; Japanese gastro-cool 7; ‘lack of originality’ 3; newness 3–4; signature dishes 4; sushi in US 29n3 Nobu Hospitality LLC 3 nomi-ya 102, 103 Nomiya Buchi 47 nouvelle cuisine 16, 23 Nye, Joseph 4–5, 61 Nyman, Marcus 14, 15 obentō (packed lunch) 17 ochazuke 82 okonomiyaki savoury pancakes 76–7 okonomiyaki-ya 22 omakase feast 1, 29n1 Ong, Aihwa 11 open kitchen 48, 51 Orientalism (Said) 12–3 oshi-zushi 21 oshibori (hand towels) 48 otherness: aesthetics 66–7; essentialist narrative 13; exotic as West’s ‘inferior other’ 128; food and food practices 17; and Japanese gastro-cool 7; new exotic 7, 72; non-white subjects 72; theatrical (consumer interview) 65–7; ‘West’ as Japan’s essential other 11, 13 owner/manager interviews: Atsushi from YAKITORI ROKU 101–4; Chris from IZAKAYA ICHI 41–5; Hiro

Index  139 from MENYA 104–6; Jun from KANARI-YA 38–41; Kanta from MARU 50–3; Keiko from CHIKA 116; Ken from YAESU 98–101, 111– 12; Makoto from TOKYO EXPRESS 95–8; Minoru from SAKURA-GI 99, 100, 110–11; Sachi from YAKINIKU HOUSE JŪ JŪ 106–9; Shoji from KOHARU 91–5, 110; Steve from MUSASHI 120–3; Takeshi from AOITORI 123–5; Tetsu from BIMI 112–13 Palestinian homeland 13 ‘Pan-Asian cuisine’ 23, 63 ‘Pan-Asian pop’ 8 ‘performativity’ 117, 126, 127n1, 130; Japanese ethnicity/Australian identity 125; ‘stylised acts’ 121–2 personal recommendation, ichigen-san okotowari (no referral, no entry) 55 Peterson, Richard 62 Pine, Joseph B. II, and Gilmor, James H. 64 plant-based diet 39 popular culture (Japanese): anime 41, 42, 58n3; and clientele 60–1; global climate 63; government’s arbitrary handling 6; Inter-Asian adaptation 63, 83n2; manga 5, 41, 42; Melbourne 41– 2; Nintendo (64) 61 private rooms 66 Probyn, Elspeth 68 Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Chow) 116–17 ramen noodles 1, 105; foreign influences 21, 29n10; Ippudo 2, 5; tonkotsu pork base soup 2 Raw and Cooked, The (Lévi-Strauss) 14 Regev, Motti 74 religious beliefs: and Japan’s culinary system 17–8; Shintō deities (kami) 17–8 research fieldwork 37, 57n1, 88, 129; ethnographic examples 130; see also consumer interviews; owner/manager interviews research limitation and scope 27–8 restaurateurs’ cross-cultural desires, and fold concept 37–58 rice, ideology of domesticity 19–21, 29n7 Ripe, Cherry 23

Robins, Kevin, and Morley, David 11–2 Robinson, Mark 46–7, 49 Rodaway, Paul 65–6 Roe, Emma J. 15 Roldán, José Luis, Domínguez-Quintero, Ana M. and González-Rodríguez Maria Rosario 70 RURŌ TENTEN: advertising 56; Age Cheap Eats Guide winner (2007) 56–7; crossing national culinary borders 54– 5, 57; fold concept 57; ‘irasshaimase’ (welcome to the shop) 118–20; Japanese-born owner 53; Japanese customer 119; Japanese-speaking employee 119; kaiseki haute cuisine 53; kuchi-komi (word of mouth) 55, 56; lack of customers 55–6; location 55; lunch specials 119; owner/manager interviews 53–7; restaurant’s early days 54–5; scripted language (staff) 118–20; staff members 118–20; takeover by Korean restauranteur 119; ‘West-East’/’high-low’ distinctions 54 Said, Edward, Orientalism 12–3 Sakai, Naoki 11, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94 sake: BAR POP 41–2; professional courses 42 Sake Education Council 42 SAKURA-GI: mass exoticisms and closure 100–1; owner/manager interviews 99, 100, 110–11; wasabi 110, 111, 113n6 Sanchanta, Mariko 90 sashimi, naturalness 17 Saunders, Alan 23 Scandals of Translation, The (Venuti) 87–8 scripted language (staff) 118–20 seasonality, shun 19 ‘sensescapes’ 65–6, 67 Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place (Rodaway) 65–6 ‘shichirin’ grills 107, 113n5 Shinsuke (Yushima) 46–7 signature dishes: CHIKA 48; humble traditional dishes 40, 79; KANARI-YA 40; MARU 51; Nobu 4; RURŌ TENTEN 119; YAKITORI ROKU 65 soba noodles 103 soba-ya 22 social class, study of social distinction 68

140 Index social media, YAKITORI ROKU 108–9 soft power 4–5, 61 sōmen noodles 19, 20 ‘sōsaku ryōri’ (creative cuisine) 54, 122–3 soul food cafés 50 Spanish tapas/mezze style of eating, izakaya dining bars 44, 58n6 Speakman, William 15 staff members: agency/capacity for empowerment 126; ‘Asianness’ 130; CHIKA 116; ‘coercive mimeticism’ 117, 118, 125, 126; commodification 125; ‘ethnicisation of labour’ 125–6; Japanese/Asian 116–17; Japanese/ Korean ethnicity 120, 122, 127n2, 130, 131; MUSASHI 121; negotiating ‘foreignness’ 88; owner’s cultural Japanese/Australian background 124–5; ‘perform’ Japanese ethnicity 117–18, 125; ‘performativity’ 130; racial-ethnic mimesis 120, 122, 127n2; recognisable as ‘Japanese’ 125; RURŌ TENTEN 118–20; scripted language (staff) 118–20 Storey, Nate 3 Story of Sushi, The (Corson) 110 Stratton, Jon, and Ang, Ien 13 sugi-dama 46–7, 47, 58n8 ‘sui-mono’ (meal you drink) 92 sushi: bad copy 98; consumer interviews 81; designer food 15; evolution of 21, 29n8, 29n9; explosion in interest 42; ‘good sushi’ 96–7; international growth 15–6; making performance 15; mass exoticisms 95–8, 100; massproduced 96; meaning and social value 15; naturalness 17; New York Times 16; rawness 97, 98; street snack 21; wasabi 111; Western food magazines 94; Yo!Sushi 42 ‘Sushi Police’ 89–91, 94, 113n1 sushi roll 24, 98, 99 sushi takeaway shops 1 Sydney: Japanese restaurants 91, 104–5, 129; MENYA 104–5 taste of Japan 81 Tastemade 5 tatami room 66 Teaching to Transgress (hooks) 113 Techno-Orientalist discourses 11 tempura-ya 22

teriyaki chicken, Western food magazines 94 TOKYO EXPRESS: Chinese-owned casual eatery 96; Chinoiserie artifacts 96; owner/manager interviews 95–8 tonkotsu pork base soup 2 translation see cross-cultural translation Vannini, Phillip, and Williams, J. Patrick 75 vegetarian/vegan cuisine: CHIKA 48; growing demand 39, 57n2 Venuti, Lawrence 28, 87–9, 129 Verma, Harsh V., and Duggal, Ekta 6 Viaud, Louis Marie Julien 10 wagyu ̄ meat 107–8, 109 wasabi 110, 113n6 ‘wayō-secchū (blending Japanese/Western styles) 79–80 Western palate 78–9 white decline 26, 129 white multiculturalism 25, 129 whiteness: Australia’s immigration policy 25, 29n11; colonial era 26; and Japaneseness 51–2; of owners/ managers of restaurants 45; political/ social influence Australia 26; privileged in Australia 104; ‘white aliens’ 25 Williams, J. Patrick, and Vannini, Phillip 75 Wong, Peter 73 Wulf, Christoph, and Gebauer, Gunter 117 YAESU: Japanese culinary traditions 98– 9; owner/manager interviews 98–101, 111–12; Sake Steamed Abalone 111–12 YAKINIKU HOUSE JŪ JŪ: displacement 107; high-end to everyday offer 106; middle-class Asians/Asian Australians 129; owner/ manager interviews 106–9 yakiniku restaurants: high-end to everyday offer 106–7; Melbourne 106 yakisoba 79 yakitori, cheap snack in Japan 102 YAKITORI ROKU: affordable prices 107; Asian customers 108–9; atmosphere 65; client recommendation 102; clientele targets 106–7; demographics of area 108–9;

Index  141 displacement 103, 109; food supplier network 107–8; off-centre location 107; owner/manager interviews 101–4; ‘shichirin’ grills 107, 113n5; social media and customers 109; staff members 108; teriyaki and yakiniku 103; underground dining area 102; wagyu ̄ meat 107–9; yakitori chicken skewers 65; yakitori grilling performance 102

Yamashita, Samuel H. 16 Yano, Christine R. 62 Yokohama, cultural/gastronomical diversity 54 yōshoku meals 52, 58n9 Yo!Sushi 42 zainichi Korean culture 123 Zen elements 66 ZEN-NOH 108