27 Mar 2008, 00:01
#17171
NEW YORK TIMES
March 26, 2008
Spaghetti Stir-Fry and Hambagoo: Japan Looks West
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
TOKYO
IN New York or Los Angeles, fans of Japanese cuisine can rattle off orders for uni and o-toro, or urbanely express a preference for soba over udon. But what about gNapolitan,h cooked spaghetti that is rinsed in cold water, then stir-fried with vegetables in ketchup? Or gmenchi katsu,h hamburger covered in bread crumbs and deep-fried? Or gomu rice,h an omelet lying over a mound of ketchup-flavored rice?
At once familiar and alien, these dishes may make Americans feel, with some justification, that they have wandered into a parallel culinary universe. All are standards of a style of Japanese cuisine known as yoshoku, or gWestern food,h in which European or American dishes were imported and, in true Japanese fashion, shaped and reshaped to fit local tastes.
Today yoshoku is thoroughly Japanese. It is a staple of television cooking shows and mainstream magazines. The lines outside venerable upscale yoshoku restaurants here in Tokyo are as long as ever, mostly with older Japanese for whom yoshoku provided a first taste of a Western world they had not seen. Yoshoku restaurants are also a requisite of the trendiest new shopping districts, like Midtown and Roppongi Hills, where they cater to younger Japanese whose mothers made the food at home.
And yet it is virtually unknown to foreigners. The first Michelin guide to Tokyo, published in the fall of 2007, listed 150 restaurants; not one was a yoshoku establishment. Indeed, visitors to Japan seldom enter the places where yoshoku is served: homes, chain diners, family-owned neighborhood restaurants or upscale yoshoku establishments of long standing. Outside Japan, yoshoku is rarely seen except in former Japanese colonies like South Korea and Taiwan, which were introduced to Western cuisine through Japan.
Shiseido Parlor is a storied yoshoku establishment in the heart of Tokyofs Ginza district, a restaurant to which many Japanese make a pilgrimage at least once. But the restaurant, the flagship of what is now a chain, is rarely mentioned in Western travel guides, and few Westerners ever wander in.
gProbably this thing called eyoshokuf is difficult to grasp from a foreignerfs perspective,h said Tatsuya Yokokawa, an executive at Shiseido Parlor. gIf itfs not traditional Japanese cuisine, and itfs neither French nor Italian, theyfre thinking, What is it? And so theyfre unlikely to give it a try.h
But the story of yoshoku goes beyond the familiar one of fusion cuisine. It sheds light on Japanfs tumultuous modern history, from its traumatic early encounters with the West to its often uneasy embrace of Western values.
Yoshoku was born during Japanfs Meiji Restoration, the period that followed this isolationist countryfs forced opening by Americafs so-called Black Ships in 1854. Japanese were dispatched to Europe and America to learn about Western laws, weapons and industry. They also brought back the cuisine. Shocked to discover how much shorter they were than Westerners, Japanese determined that they would catch up not only economically and militarily but also physically, by eating their food.
That desire survived at least until the 1970fs, when a businessman named Den Fujita established McDonaldfs in Japan and claimed that its menu would make Japanese as tall and attractive as Americans.
gJapanese are poorly built because they eat rice,h he said at the time. gWefll change that with hamburgers. After eating hamburgers for a thousand years, Japanese will even have blond hair.h
The yoshoku category is broad, and includes dishes that have become so integral to the diet that many Japanese wouldnft consider them Japanized Western food at all, but simply Japanese food.
Still, all yoshoku dishes have their roots in Western counterparts. A key ingredient or a step in the cooking has been altered, or violated outright, with surprisingly delicious results. Instead of being served as soon as it is cooked, Napolitan spaghetti is allowed to sit, then reheated and stir-fried with vegetables; it was the only pasta known to most Japanese until a couple of decades ago, when ketchup was still widely considered an Italian sauce. Done well, menchi katsu, bread crumb-covered ground beef, or tonkatsu, a thicker version of pork cutlet, are deep-fried but manage to remain juicy inside.
A demiglace sauce with tomato juice served over hashed beef was named hayashi sauce — because the words sounded similar, by one theory, though a rival one suggests that it was the invention of a Mr. Hayashi. A stewlike curry with onions, potatoes and carrots, served over rice, became gkare rice.h
Hamburgers were considered American food and called ghambagah,h but the yoshoku version was called ghambagoo.h (The burger was served without the bun and often covered with demiglace — the real thing at expensive restaurants, but mostly out of a bottle elsewhere.) Au gratin dishes, breaded oysters and various croquettes — cream of crab croquettes with white sauce is considered a classic — rounded out the yoshoku menu.
Most yoshoku dishes can be accompanied by rice and eaten with chopsticks, although better yoshoku restaurants have silverware and an option offered only in this style of Japanese cuisine: grice or bread.h The dishes come with traditional Western sauces, or their Japanized versions, like demiglace, white sauce, Worcestershire or ketchup.
The yoshoku menu has changed little over the decades, said Hiroshi Modegi, 40, whose grandfather founded Taimeiken, a famous yoshoku restaurant in Tokyofs Nihonbashi district, in 1931.
gOur customers want the old favorites,h said Mr. Modegi, now the restaurantfs head chef, explaining that nostalgia was a big part of yoshokufs appeal. gItfs O.K. to change the menu once in a while, but not too much, because theyfre basically coming here to eat things like your standard omu rice.h
The standard fare, though, is fairly new, considering the stretch of Japanfs history. For 1,200 years, an imperial edict banned the eating of meat because of a Japanese Buddhist belief that it was unclean. Fish was central to the Japanese diet, and meat was consumed furtively, only for medicinal purposes.
Then in 1872, the emperor lifted the ban.
gTo catch up with and overtake the superior culture of the West, Emperor Meiji believed that eating habits had to be changed first,h said Tetsu Okada, an expert on Japanfs culinary culture and an author of a history on tonkatsu. gHe told everyone to eat meat, and to get the ball rolling, ate it himself.h
The first Japanese to go overseas brought back dishes — filled with meat, butter, unfamiliar spices and other ingredients utterly foreign to the Japanese diet — that eventually became the basis of yoshoku. In contrast, Japanfs neighbors, China and Korea, dealt with the threat from the West by first rejecting it. To this day, neither Chinese nor Korean cuisine has much Western influence.
Japan borrowed from Germany to modernize its legal system and from Britain to reform its military and industry. For the food that would eventually become yoshoku, it looked mostly to France. But the cuisine had other, unexpected sources. The Japanese Imperial Navy, which modeled itself after Britainfs, is said to have introduced to Japanese of the late 19th century a dish popular among British naval officers: Indian curry, which eventually became the kare rice eaten in homes, school cafeterias and restaurants today.
gIt wasnft curry from India, but curry from Europe, that we now find everywhere in this country,h said Takeshi Ninomiya, the executive chef at Nakamuraya, a famous Indian curry restaurant in Tokyo. gThis dish that came from Britain, and was considered Western food, was then assimilated here.h
Yoshokufs popularity reached its peak in the decades following World War II. For mothers, it was easier to prepare than traditional Japanese food. For children, a big treat was an gokosama lunch,h or gkidfs lunch,h at a department store restaurant, consisting of small portions on a single plate of Napolitan spaghetti, hambagoo and ketchup-flavored rice with a little flag of a country like Switzerland or New Zealand on top.
Meanwhile, in the decades before most Japanese could afford to fly overseas, upscale yoshoku restaurants grew into symbols of the longed-for, glamorous Western world. The most famous, Shiseido Parlor, became a gathering place for artists, intellectuals and writers, and appeared in the work of many novelists, including Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima. Ordinary Japanese dined there, blowing a weekfs salary on a meal.
gJapanese who had never set their eyes on this thing called the Western world probably used their imagination and were able to see it in yoshoku,h Mr. Yokokawa of Shiseido Parlor said.
Until the economic boom of the 1970fs and 1980fs, yoshoku was the only version of Western food known to many Japanese. Ingredients to make authentic French or Italian dishes were simply unavailable. Before expressions like gpastah and gal denteh became known in Japan, there was only Napolitan spaghetti or gspaghetti with meat sauce.h
That changed in the 1980fs, when the yen grew so strong that Japan could import anything from anywhere. Restaurateurs from all over the world began gravitating here. Nowadays, in a neighborhood like Roppongi, you can find just about anything: French and Italian, American steaks, even Nigerian pounded yam and egusi soup.
But this does not mean yoshoku is in danger of disappearing. In fact, yoshoku dishes make up the bulk of the menus at Japanfs biggest chain diners, or family restaurants, like Jonathanfs, Royal Host and Dennyfs.
Thatfs right: Dennyfs. Several years after arriving in Japan in the 1970fs, Dennyfs gave up its American fare for a menu heavy on yoshoku. So, as some homesick Americans seeking comfort food have found out, a Dennyfs in Japan has no Grand Slam breakfasts or hamburgers.
But itfs just the place to go when you want omu rice, Napolitan spaghetti and a hambagoo.
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