9

Making the Multi-Dimensional Taste of

Japanese Cuisine Public
Greg de St. Maurice

Introduction

“Where on your body do you register taste?” Chef Sonobe Shingo asks the elementary
school students he teaches about Japanese cuisine. “Tongue!” students shout first.
“Where else?” he asks. Usually students answer “Nose!” next. He continues: “Where
else?” Eyes, ears, mouth, throat, brain, heart . . . When the students have run out of
suggestions, Chef Sonobe explains that the tongue can perceive sweet, sour, bitter, salty,
and umami via the sense of taste. The sense of touch makes other foods astringent or
spicy, he tells them. Then he asks what apples taste like. “Sweet!,” “Sour!,” “Sweet and
sour!” they respond quickly. His next question is: “How about shiitake mushrooms?”
Silence ensues.
Sonobe explains: “I get students to understand that it’s not just apples and shiitake;
the taste of foods can’t be explained just in terms of tastes you perceive with your
tongue” (Sonobe 2017: 188, my translation). When Chef Sonobe and his colleagues
teach not only young Japanese people but also foreign chefs about the taste of Japanese
cuisine they teach them to be attentive to all their senses and sociocultural factors,
including ethical values, food attributes, and aesthetics.
In this chapter, I focus on the Japanese Culinary Academy (JCA) and its direct
interaction with foreign chefs, publications aimed at professional cooks of Japanese
cuisine abroad, and food education in local schools (from elementary through
university). To find out about these activities, I interviewed members of the non-profit
organization, including chefs and researchers. I also interviewed foreign cooks brought
to Japan on special programs spearheaded by JCA members. Another source of data
for this chapter is its series of professional cookbooks. I conducted the bulk of this
fieldwork from summer of 2016 through summer 2017.
The JCA’s approach to domestic food education and international outreach reminds
us that social and cultural factors form tastes and mediate taste experiences, perhaps
even more so for cuisine than for food. Through my ethnographic fieldwork, I saw that
JCA members use culinary discourse and opportunities to cook and taste high-quality
Japanese cooking first-hand to attune the senses and sensibilities of new audiences to

34826.indb 113 20/03/2018 12:10

 114 Making Taste Public

the array of tastes and culinary philosophy that characterize Japanese cuisine. By
making the “true” taste of Japanese cuisine public, they hope to rectify the popular
reduction of Japanese cuisine to a limited repertoire of dishes (sushi, tempura, ramen,
tonkatsu, etc.), ingredients (miso, soy sauce, wasabi), tastes (umami), and flavors (yuzu,
matcha). To these chefs, sensory attributes and sociocultural frames are just as
integral—if not more so—to the true taste of Japanese cuisine.
My investigation in this chapter of how Japanese chefs are making the taste of
traditional Japanese cuisine public could not have taken place forty years ago. It is
only in the past few decades that Japanese chefs have endeavored to take what was once
closely guarded and often tacit, unverbalized professional culinary knowledge and
actively share it not just with fellow chefs (potential competitors) but with cooks across
the world and younger generations within Japan.
The impetus for opening up of the world of traditional Japanese cuisine was a
perceived two-part threat: a weakening of culinary heritage at home and the
proliferation abroad of what to chefs is a poor imitation of “authentic” Japanese cuisine.
Making the taste of traditional Japanese cuisine public is meant to secure a measure of
continuity domestically and ensure that even as Japanese cuisine evolves with its
expansion across the globe, the discourse of “authenticity” and Japanese cuisine is
informed by Japanese culinary philosophy and professional cooking standards. This is
a very personal mission for JCA chefs, many of whom belong to families that have
owned and operated a restaurant for generations. They have undergone years of
grueling training in a traditional Japanese kitchen and wish to ascertain a sustainable
future for this culinary heritage as they pass it on to the next generation.

The Complex World of Taste: Umami and the Taste of

Japanese Cuisine
Taste, a term we use to mean so many different things, is hard to pin down. While
people use the terms “taste” and “flavor” interchangeably in everyday English language
conversation, for psychologists, neurologists, and biochemists, the term “flavor”
conventionally refers to the combination of what is perceived by the senses of taste and
smell. For them, a “basic taste” is one that cannot be created by combining any of the
other basic tastes, can be discerned by unique taste receptors, and is commonly found
in foods across the world. Natural scientists purposefully exclude sensory characteristics
such as those perceived by retronasal olfaction (smells like cinnamon or smokiness)
and somatosensory sensations (the coolness of menthol or the heat of chilies) from
their scientific definitions of what they call “true taste,” but they acknowledge that
“somatosensory modalities such as texture and visual cues such as color also
significantly influence the “taste” of foods” (Chaudhari et al. 2009: 286) According to
experimental psychologist Charles Spence, “what can be agreed upon is that there is an
increasingly large body of scientific evidence demonstrating that the senses (all of
them) interact in the multisensory perception of flavor” (2017: 33, emphasis in
original). Our sense of sight determines whether we deem food appealing or not before
we can even smell its aroma, much less take a bite. Texture and mouthfeel also matter,

34826.indb 114 20/03/2018 12:10

 Making the Taste of Japanese Cuisine Public 115

with attributes like crunchy, crispy, smooth, and rich often more desirable than stale,
soggy, clumpy, and thin. Research has also demonstrated that sounds, music or
background noise affects the taste of chocolate and toffee, for example, and can even
inhibit one’s ability to perceive specific tastes (Spence 2017: 30). The English language
fails us here, as it lacks the vocabulary for talking clearly about multisensory experiences
with food that go beyond tastes and flavors in terms of their conventional scientific
definitions. Consequently, though I do in this chapter discuss the five basic tastes
(sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and especially umami) when appropriate, I use the word “taste”
as a verb and noun in ways that acknowledge that our entire sensorium is engaged
when we eat and drink.
But to speak of the sensorium is to speak of a realm that has inextricable sociocultural
dimensions. For one thing, tastes—such as those for sweet things, alcohol, or particular
combinations of spices, for example—are linked to cultural categories and social
prescriptions. Identities and affiliations exert their influence simultaneously, sometimes
with what seem like contradictory results. Due to their ethnic identity, male Yadavs in
Mathura, India, for instance, are supposed to practice vegetarianism, but as democratic,
muscular, and secular politicians they are expected to develop a taste for chicken, goat,
and whiskey (Michelutti 2010). Such examples remind us that consumption and
connoisseurship, even when enacted in private, become practice in the social
dimensions of taste (Douglas and Isherwood 1996 [1979]; Veblen 1994 [1899]).
Separating culture and “good taste” from the five basic tastes is not simple. In 1904,
Charles Myers compared the terms different societies regularly used to describe the
taste of solutions of sugar, salt, weak acid, and quinine (as sweet, salty, sour, and bitter
essences). Myers gathered data on groups like the residents of the Torres Straits who
use a phrase that literally means “tasting good” to describe both sweetness and saltiness
(1904: 119), who do not have a linguistic equivalent for the term bitterness, and who
“confuse” the taste-names for saltiness and sourness. Myers concluded that the people
of the Torres Straits and other such “primitive peoples” had not evolved “sense-
vocabularies” sophisticated enough to describe what he considered to be the four basic
tastes. Several years after Myers published his paper, however, Japanese scientist Ikeda
Kikunae published research declaring that he had discovered evidence of a fifth taste,
that was prevalent in Japanese cuisine (Ikeda 1909). His research showed that where
glutamic acid was present, this taste was perceived.
Ikeda’s findings did not gain ground outside of Japan quickly, no doubt due to the
fact that the particulars of his research were published in Japanese and also due to the
difficulty of translating what seemed to be a culturally restricted “taste.” Ikeda called
this taste “umami,” which can also mean “good taste” in Japanese. What would Myers
have made of this?
It was Japanese researchers Kodama Shintaro (in the early twentieth century) and
Kuninaka Akira (in the 1960s) who furthered Ikeda’s research, finding that inosinic
acid (in dry-smoked bonito) and guanylic acid (in shiitake mushrooms) are other
umami substances, and that they have a synergistic effect on the taste of umami when
combined with glutamatic acid (Yamaguchi and Ninomiya 2000). Yamaguchi and
Ninomiya write that “[o]ne of the impediments to the recognition of umami as a basic
taste may have been the lack of traditional words to describe it in Western languages,”

34826.indb 115 20/03/2018 12:10

 116 Making Taste Public

with English language translations including evocative but ambiguous terms like
“amplitude,” “mouth fullness,” and “bloom” (Yamaguchi and Ninomiya 2000: 923S).
Only after scientists in the United States found evidence for a receptor for umami
(Chaudhari et al. 1996) did umami finally start gaining widespread acceptance as a
basic taste.
Chaudhari and her team describe umami as “the meaty, mouth-filling, rich taste in
many types of seafood, seaweed, fish, meats, and mushrooms” (Chaudhari 2009: 738S).
Foods like Parmesan cheese, ripe tomatoes, and Jinhua ham contain umami—and West
Africa’s fermented locust beans possess a tremendous amount of free glutamic acid at
1700mg per 100g—but Japanese cuisine is said to be unlike any other cuisine because
it is based around the taste of umami.
The Japanese seasoning agents miso and shoyu (soy sauce) add umami to dishes.
Texts about umami and Japanese cuisine, however, place even greater emphasis on
dashi soup stock. A staple for cooking Japanese food at home, in restaurants, and even
in temple kitchens, the most typical dashi is made from kombu kelp (rich in glutamic
acid) and dry-smoked bonito (katsuobushi, rich in inosinic acid), with regional
variations and vegetarian dishes. Most households today no longer prepare dashi from
scratch, but rather purchase powdered dashi or pre-mixed bags containing kombu and
katsuobushi that can be used to quickly prepare stock.
JCA chefs have been teaching new audiences to discern the “true” taste of Japanese
cuisine beyond umami. Japanese attempts at defining Japanese cuisine—for instance in
the application to have it registered as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage—focus
not on dishes but aesthetics and principles, including seasonality, visual presentation,
and quality standards for ingredients and flavors. These function as a frame that
mediates the experience of tasting.

The Japanese Culinary Academy and its Outreach

Chefs, cooking school teachers, and other actors founded the Kyoto-based non-profit
organization the Japanese Culinary Academy in 2004. Though Japanese cuisine had
gained popularity and could be found across the globe by the early 2000s, chefs in
Kyoto were concerned that what was being offered as “Japanese cuisine” and particularly
high-end Japanese cuisine consisted of foods that mimicked Japanese food in certain
respects but misrepresented Japanese tastes, aesthetics, and culinary techniques, and
worse sometimes lacked the knowhow and sanitation standards that are important
when serving raw fish, uncooked eggs, and other ingredients that must be carefully
prepared. They saw Japanese cuisine as little understood overseas and often reduced to
certain forms (the sushi roll, tempura, etc.) or flavors (umami, yuzu, matcha) in ways
that glossed over the diversity and sophistication they understand to be part of Japanese
culinary heritage (see Yomiuri 2004). Umami’s success outside of Japan has raised the
profile of Japanese food culture. But JCA chefs—and other actors in Japan—wish to go
beyond what they feel is a superficial representation of Japanese cooking.
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson has argued that “The social survival of food in any
given form depends entirely upon the critical discourse that translates the cultural

34826.indb 116 20/03/2018 12:10

 Making the Taste of Japanese Cuisine Public 117

presuppositions about food for the reader–diner . . . culinary discourse secures the
transitory experience of taste. It figures the material as intellectual, imaginative,
symbolic, aesthetic” (Ferguson 2004: 19). Culinary discourse can transform “mere”
food and “mere” flavors into cuisine for those who cook and those who eat, amplifying
the cultural and social dimensions of taste experiences.
From its inception, the JCA perceived foreign chefs to be the natural and ideal
audience for disseminating knowledge of Japanese culinary heritage abroad. In 2005
The Daily Yomiuri reported on the Academy’s activities, stating that “the academy
wants foreign chefs to learn the essence of Japanese cuisine, which originates in dashi
soup stock, as well as the aesthetics of Japanese dishes” (Yomiuri 2005). This notion of
an “essence” is critical because it captures the sense that there exists some kind of core
that can be experienced and understood (if not always taught or explained), even if it
is constantly evolving. Again, this core consists of more than specific dishes, forms, or
flavors: its components are both sensorial and sociocultural.
The JCA also coordinates locally oriented outreach in schools. A number of Kyoto’s
chefs had been visiting local schools to teach about Japanese culinary heritage
independently, but once Japan passed a law establishing food education nationally in
2005, the JCA coordinated with the Kyoto City Board of Education to create what
became the “Learning Food Education through Japanese Cuisine Curriculum.” That
year they taught sample lessons using the curriculum in five public elementary schools.
In the years that followed, they visited an increasing number of schools and by the time
the curriculum was officially put in practice in 2011, they were teaching in fourteen
schools. The range of schools chefs visit today extends from elementary through to
university. Demand has now reached the point where knowledgeable individuals who
are neither chefs nor teachers—including homemakers with expertise in cooking, for
example—can be certified to teach these lessons in chefs’ stead.
Whether in elementary school or university classrooms, chefs aim to familiarize
younger generations with the taste of plain dashi made from scratch and low-fat and
low-calorie umami-rich foods. They see this as necessary because the vast majority of
households today do not make their own dashi and some do not even regularly
consume “traditional” Japanese cuisine (washoku). The result is that as children eat
meals that include greater amounts of meat, fat, oils, and processed foods (if not salt or
sugar) than in the past, their taste preferences become aligned with them, and as a
generation they become “distanced from washoku” (washoku banare) and the
“traditional” taste of Japanese cuisine. The extent of this is evident in a recent national
campaign (in which a few JCA members are active) to designate November 24 as
Washoku Day, urging elementary schools to offer students a traditional Japanese lunch
and teach students about Japanese culinary heritage on this one day every year.
The Academy has increased its efforts to share the taste of Japanese cuisine with
foreign chefs in recent years. What was once closely guarded knowledge is widely
disseminated and recipes published in multiple languages. The first volume of The
Japanese Culinary Academy’s Complete Japanese Cuisine, Introduction to Japanese
Cuisine: Nature, Culture, and History was published in English and Italian (and
subsequently Japanese) in time for the 2015 World Expo in Milan (where a number of
the chefs in the Academy cooked for the Japanese pavilion). The first of the volumes

34826.indb 117 20/03/2018 12:10

 118 Making Taste Public

that followed was dedicated to seasonings and flavorings, the second to knife skills
used for fish. Subsequent volumes are planned.
Up and coming chefs from thousands of miles away are today invited to learn to
cook in Kyoto’s most renowned kitchens. In the Academy’s early years, foreign chefs
attended cooking workshops in Japan and visited elite restaurant kitchens. In 2014,
chef-owners of traditional Japanese restaurants successfully realized their goal
of establishing a two-year work visa for foreign chefs seeking to learn to cook authentic
Japanese cuisine. A handful of chefs have taken advantage of this visa since the
first arrived in early 2014 to work in Murata’s restaurant, Kikunoi. Due to the JCA’s
efforts, Kyoto has become the only city in Japan with such a work visa system in place.
At the time of writing this chapter, seven chefs have obtained this visa, two have
graduated, and it has been extended to allow chefs to work for a restaurant for up to five
years.
Kyoto institutions have joined restaurants in other parts of the country to create
another program for foreign chefs to learn Japanese cuisine in Japan. In 2016–2017 this
program, sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries and
organized by the Japanese Cuisine and Food Culture Human Resource Development
Committee, offered fifteen foreign cooks a six-month apprenticeship after an intensive
language and culture course and training in Japanese cuisine at Le Cordon Bleu
Japan in Tokyo. A second incarnation of this program is being implemented for
2017–2018.

Old Words and New Words: Bridging Experiential Difference

Culinary discourse can, in Ferguson’s words “secure the transitory experience of taste”
and bring about the “social survival of food.” Language matters all the more when it
comes to cuisine rather than food. Sidney Mintz argued that an authentic cuisine (as
opposed to restaurant cuisine or a national cuisine, in his mind) only emerged where
one had a community that cared about the styles of food they ate and made this a
matter of discussion (Mintz 1996). Moreover, cuisine is a form of communication
(Farrer 2015: 4), with reception an integral but hardly straightforward component.
The sharing of taste, especially across cultures and languages is complicated by the
ways that language, cultural frames, and taste experiences are tied together. Because the
taste of umami is considered to be an essential aspect of Japanese cuisine, it serves as a
good example of how the JCA has used a combination of old and new words to
articulate the taste of traditional Japanese cuisine and attract new audiences. The JCA
(along with other actors including the Tokyo-based Umami Information Center)
introduced umami to foreign chefs as a key concept for grasping Japanese cuisine and
its aesthetic ideals. Indeed, umami appears on the first pages of the JCA’s Introduction
to Japanese Cuisine, where historian Kumakura Isao states, “The basic flavor of Japanese
food is umami” (Kumakura 2015: 9). Umami appears throughout the text, most
frequently when discussing dashi and the “essentials” of Japanese cuisine as well as
fermented seasonings. Following an explanation of why it is a basic taste, the text
shows that umami is neither a taste restricted to Japanese cuisine nor one that only

34826.indb 118 20/03/2018 12:10

 Making the Taste of Japanese Cuisine Public 119

Japanese people can discern: “Often described as ‘savory.’ umami is associated with
foodstuffs as diverse as kombu kelp, aged cheese, and ripe tomatoes” (104). Later,
this use of examples is expanded upon: “Many kinds of soup are made around the
world by boiling meat, bones, and vegetables, and almost all of them are built around
the taste of umami” (106). In the second volume of the series: “The umami taste may
have been identified in Japan, but umami-rich broths very close to Japanese dashi, like
Russian borscht soup made from beets and beef, or high-quality Chinese tang broth
made with Jinhua ham, have been used in cooking since long ago in places all over the
world” (7).
As with umami, in explaining flavor aesthetics, Japanese terms are used. While it has
yet to be used in the book series, Academy chefs often emphasize the importance of the
concept of hin’i (alternately, hin), a subdued and refined taste that is created with
precision and restraint (de St. Maurice 2012). There is a parallel here with French cuisine,
as the use of French cooking terminology contributed to the Frenchness of the cuisine
as it was taught and promoted (Ferguson 2004). Words that French chefs of modern
French cuisine purposefully invented “for the tastes meant to seduce the diner”—like
ragout and garniture (garnish)—have had staying power (Peterson 1994). New words
such as these can establish a cuisine as distinct from others in terms of sensory experience
and culinary philosophy. The Japanese Culinary Academy’s Complete Japanese Cuisine is
replete with Japanese words accompanied by English translations (e.g. suppon soft-
shelled turtle, asatsuki chives, mochigome glutinous rice) and others like bekko-an sauce
or kobujime curing that are followed by explanations and instructions.
To help Japanese taste aesthetics and terminology take root overseas, programs
bringing promising chefs from overseas to train in Kyoto kitchens are similarly
intended to teach a comprehensive vision of taste beyond dishes and umami. The work
visa established by the JCA and Kyoto City, however, is only several years old and
kitchen staff are still in the process of adjusting to working with apprentice chefs who
lack familiarity with the Japanese language and taken-for-granted ways of doing things
in Japan. A further complication is that Japanese kitchens have not traditionally been
workplaces where techniques and recipes were taught outright. One frustration I heard
voiced in interviews with Japanese and non-Japanese chefs alike was that formal
training or learning opportunities in traditional kitchens were rare and that it was the
responsibility of newcomers to find ways to get senior colleagues to teach them. Making
the taste of traditional Japanese cuisine public may have been a conscious choice but
the process has not been entirely smooth. It might be accurate to say that Japanese
chefs are themselves formulating the vocabulary and the tools to create the tutelage or
frame that can build the subjecthood requisite for the preparation of “authentic”
Japanese cuisine not just across languages and cultures, but also in a condensed period
of time.

Visual Elements

Kaiseki cuisine and fine Japanese dining in general place considerable importance on
presentation, and the taste the JCA’s members make public includes visual aesthetics.

34826.indb 119 20/03/2018 12:10

 120 Making Taste Public

There are obvious visual means of doing so. The JCA uses books, website pages and
posts, and other paper and electronic print media to present visual explanations and
representations to foreign chefs. The Japanese Culinary Academy’s Complete Japanese
Cuisine is replete with gorgeous high-quality photographs that include top-shelf fresh
fish and vegetables, production methods for fermented foods, and specially prepared
dishes served on carefully selected tableware that is itself a work of art. The volume’s
stunning photography is not merely a means of attracting buyers or even impressing
audiences. It is also meant to be educational, with the books presenting visual aesthetics
believed essential to “true” Japanese cuisine.
For instance, in Introduction to Japanese Cuisine a section titled “Artistic Awareness”
introduces foreign chefs to Japanese aesthetic concepts like wabi and sabi, concepts
that together reflect a beauty found in simple things that have been worn down by time.
On the page opposite the explanation of wabi and sabi is a photograph of the dish
“Grilled Barracuda with Miso Yuan-yaki Baste.” The glossy earthy and metallic colors
of the pieces of skin-side up barracuda are echoed in the rustic dish on which they
have been arranged.
Directions for the appropriate plating of dishes are part of the recipes in The
Complete Japanese Cuisine. An important component of plating that is evident in the
photographs but not explicitly spelled out is the selection of tableware. This
characteristic of Japanese cuisine can be traced back to the influence of artist
and restaurateur Kitaōji Rosanjin in the early twentieth century (see Stalker,
forthcoming). Dissatisfied with the quality of the dishes and serving vessels he could
afford for his restaurant, Rosanjin (known by his first name) went so far as to make
his own, breaking from tradition by borrowing pottery techniques from all over
Japan rather than perfecting one particular style. When Rosanjin first visited the
United States he was pleasantly surprised by the meals he ate, but declared that
food presentation, tableware included, left much to be desired. Those JCA
affiliated restaurants with the longest history and financial resources have the famous
potter’s wares in their collection of tableware and collaborated with the Museum
of Modern Art Kyoto for a 2015 exhibition titled “Kitaoji Rosanjin: A Revolutionary
in the Art of Japanese Cuisine,” a kind of educational outreach aimed at the general
public.
The notion that presentation matters to the taste of Japanese food is not restricted
to haute cuisine. In fact, teaching plating/food arrangement is an official goal of the
JCA’s food education lessons. Chef Inoue Katsuhiro of the restaurant Imasa teaches
elementary school students to pay attention to the visual appeal they can achieve via
color and the three-dimensional arrangement of ingredients, for example. Students
watch Chef Inoue demonstrate this and then have the opportunity to create—and later
consume—dishes whose visual appeal contributes to their deliciousness. For his part,
Chef Sonobe asks students to consider how a dashi maki tamago (Japanese-style omelet
made with dashi) cut into clean, uniform slices will taste different from one that is cut
sloppily and haphazardly. The students do not make a dashi maki in his class, but the
small groups are reminded that the same tenet applies when they peel daikon, cut
mizuna (a Brassica variety that is considered a Kyoto vegetable), and arrange the final
product in bowls for each student in their class.

34826.indb 120 20/03/2018 12:10

 Making the Taste of Japanese Cuisine Public 121

Experiences Preparing and Tasting

As important as words and images are in communicating taste, chefs in the JCA have
discovered their limitations. Chef Murata puts it this way: “How do you explain
foie gras or truffles to someone who’s never had them? You might be able to read the
sheet music for Beethoven, but unless you’ve actually heard his music, you won’t know
what it sounds like.” Ninomiya Kumiko of the Umami Information Center, who
collaborates with the JCA, echoed this sentiment: “If I just explain that umami is
the taste of glutamate, can you imagine it?” Structured and guided opportunities for
people to familiarize themselves first-hand with Japanese cuisine accomplish what
words cannot.
This is especially important because the taste of Kyoto cuisine is not one that the
uninitiated can easily discern and appreciate. The JCA’s early efforts, aimed at elite
foreign chefs who were invited to Kyoto to experience Japanese cuisine behind the
scenes, were not resounding success stories. Language and cultural barriers and time
constraints imposed limits on the scope of what the invited chefs could learn.
To engage in deeper outreach abroad, the JCA then decided to create immersive,
long-term opportunities for young foreign chefs to come to Kyoto to learn how to
create traditional haute cuisine. The cooks participating in these programs, like their
Japanese peers, are trained to be hyper aware of their surroundings and to take note of
how their superiors are accomplishing their tasks. Interviewees referred to this
approach as “watching and stealing” (mite, nusume) knowledge. It is not just sight that
is involved in kitchen learning and the acquisition of taste discernment. For instance,
one has to be able to determine that a meat has been properly cooked through one’s
sense of touch, either by applying a skewer that has been inserted inside the meat to the
area underneath ones lips or by gently squeezing the meat with one’s fingers. The
temperature and resistance of the meat indicate the extent to which it has been cooked.
Cooks are trained to taste with their entire sensorium and their skills and knowledge
are explicitly talked about as embodied.
First-hand experiences with the senses are also a key component of food education
aimed at young students in Kyoto. I witnessed this when I attended the dashi tasting
event at Kyoto University in December of 2016. After Chef Sonobe’s lecture on kombu,
katsuobushi, and dashi, the students divided into groups assigned to booths run by
the five restaurants in attendance. The five chefs ladled their dashi into tiny plastic
cups for students to sample and compare. Of course, it is neither customary to
consume dashi on its own, nor to drink it out of a disposable plastic cup. But every
student who attends is also offered suimono, featuring a particular restaurant’s dashi
stock with yuba (tofu skin), mizuna, and yuzu (Japanese citrus variety) peel in a fine
lacquer bowl. Each restaurant prepares this simple dish in its own way, varying
preparation techniques and amounts. Chef Tanaka Nobuyuki of Tsuruse demonstrated
how students should take the warm bowl into their hands, hold it under their noses,
slowly open the lid, inhale the fragrant steam, appreciate the visual arrangement, take
a sip of liquid, use their chopsticks to grasp the solid ingredients, and then take their
first bite, mindful of the array of textures, flavors, and other sensations. This was a
carefully structured and guided taste experience, preparing students to engage their

34826.indb 121 20/03/2018 12:10

 122 Making Taste Public

senses and knowledge and understand dashi when they sipped and ate their bowl of
suimono.

Values

As the previous section hints at, in teaching how to taste, JCA chefs are also teaching
tasters what they should be sensitive to. Perhaps surprisingly, values and notions of
heritage factor into this. At its inception the food education curriculum was modeled
around Jacques Puisais’ methods for teaching French children about food and
gastronomy. However, this approach did not catch on, Chef Sonobe, who leads the food
education project for the JCA, told me. Sonobe elaborated, “Because the Puisais
method is especially about the sense of taste and Japanese cuisine is not just about the
sense of taste, we incorporated ingredients and cooking, energy necessary for life and
feelings of gratitude, and also consideration for others into the contents [of the
curriculum].” While chefs could—and did—concentrate on the sense of taste or even
flavors, this felt disingenuous and beside the point to them.
After all, the JCA does not simply want to teach the taste of traditional Japanese
cuisine for its own sake, but because they hope to extend its history. “We want food to
become a topic of conversation, to generate communication. We want students to go
home and tell their parents about the dashi they made at school,” Sonobe explained.
There seems to be a sense of urgency in teaching values domestically to alleviate
“washoku banare” (distancing from washoku) and make the taste of traditional
Japanese cuisine an intimately familiar one. For this reason, the food education
curriculum takes as its basic unit not the individual child, but the household.
Chef Sonobe and Professor Matoba Teruyoshi made it clear that the food education
curriculum is built around a core set of values. Each point being taught is paired with
a set of ethical goals related to cooking and eating. Honing students’ ability to taste with
the five senses, for instance, can help develop their ikiru chikara (zest for life, ability to
live) by teaching them how to distinguish between good and bad, safe and unsafe
foods. Teaching about gratitude for delicious food, meanwhile, is meant to develop
kansha suru chikara (ability to be thankful). And chefs teach students to put their
hearts into cooking in the aim of helping them develop omoiyari no kokoro (considerate
hearts, thoughtfulness).
While these values are sometimes emphasized in outreach, they are taught more
indirectly. Take the lesson of thankfulness for delicious food, for example. In May 2017
I watched Chef Nakahigashi Hisao teach fifth grade students about dashi and how to
cook it. Chef Nakahigashi’s lecture followed the same general pattern his colleagues
use: he explains how bonito is caught, transported, dry-smoked and mold-cured, and
the time and effort that go into the harvest, drying, and aging process for kombu (and
how all conditions have to be optimal to create the highest grade kombu). Dashi is
taught as a uniquely Japanese phenomenon and superlatives are often used to
accentuate this: dashi is “the quickest” soup stock to prepare (though a great deal of
time and labor are invested in the production of its basic ingredients) and a katsuobushi
fillet (before it is shaved into flakes to make dashi) is “the hardest foodstuff on earth.”

34826.indb 122 20/03/2018 12:10

 Making the Taste of Japanese Cuisine Public 123

The focus of this lesson is not that dashi is delicious because it is full of umami, but that
it is a delicious heritage food that deserves respect and gratitude.
But Chef Nakahigashi made this lesson even more personal for students. At Chef
Nakahigashi’s request the students had grown daikon in their schoolyard specifically
for that day’s lesson. Nakahigashi reminded the students of the three months they had
tended the daikon before harvesting them, drawing a parallel with the time and human
labor involved in kombu harvesting and katsuobushi production. This, students are
reminded, is why before eating Japanese people customarily give thanks using the
expression, “Itadakimasu.”
Efforts are made to share values and notions of culinary heritage with foreign chefs,
too. Chef Murata explains that the first volume of The Complete Japanese Cuisine series
includes material about “the Japanese natural environment and landscape, history,
culture, and basic culinary techniques . . . to provide a unified understanding of and
comprehensive introduction to the background and context within which the arts,
techniques, and wisdom of Japanese cuisine have developed. True appreciation of a
cuisine begins by gaining an understanding of such a background” (2015: 7).
Kumakura’s short essay in the introductory volume notes that “Japanese people are
attuned to nature and keenly aware of their reliance on its bounty. They express
gratitude for the blessings of nature with the customary expressions “Itadakimasu”—I
gratefully receive the blessings of this food—before eating and “Gochisosama”—I have
partaken of the feast—after eating” (Kumakura 2015: 9). The essay goes on to link this
to the Japanese appreciation of seasonality. Kumakura includes this material not
because he expects foreign chefs to adopt Japanese values and customs, but rather
because—like Chef Murata—he wants chefs to appreciate them and how they have
influenced Japanese cuisine.

Conclusion

To extend the social life of traditional Japanese cuisine, the Japanese Culinary Academy
has begun to teach new audiences about what authentic Japanese cuisine should taste
like and how to make it. In their efforts to reinvigorate domestic culinary heritage and
prevent Japanese cuisine from being broadly misrepresented abroad, they have paired
lessons about Japanese cuisine with opportunities for new audiences to experience it
first-hand, through cooking and eating.
Representing the taste of Japanese cuisine with a dish or even a meal is a faulty
proposition. The taste that the JCA is making public lies not in a set of flavors,
dishes, or techniques. It is made by informed cooks and perceived by awakened
eaters and thus produced today in the very act of being made public. Another way of
looking at it is that JCA chefs understand that any taste experience is filtered by our
background, identity, and the information we have about the food being tasted.
They wish to improve (from their perspective) the filter through their outreach,
encouraging foreign cooks to turn to Japan for notions of “authentic” Japanese cuisine
and instilling in younger generations of Japanese people an intimate connection with
what is considered to be their culinary heritage. For chefs in the Japanese Culinary

34826.indb 123 20/03/2018 12:10

 124 Making Taste Public

Academy, all of this—sensory attributes, values, ethics, and aesthetics included—is a

matter of taste.

References
Chaudhari, N., E. Pereira, and S.D. Roper. (2009). “Taste Receptors for Umami: The Case
for Multiple Receptors.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 90, supplement:
738s–742s.
Chaudhari, N., Hui Yang, C. Lamp, E. Delay, C. Cartford, T. Than, and S. Roper. (1996).
Journal of Neuroscience 16(2): 2817–3826.
Daily Yomiuri. (2005). “Refining Tastes/Japanese, French Chefs Share Culinary Ideas.”
November 7, 2005.
de St. Maurice, G. (2012). “Savoring Kyoto: Sensory Fieldwork on the Taste of Place.”
Etnofoor 24(2): 110–22.
de St. Maurice, G. (2017). “Kyoto Cusine Gone Global.” Gastronomica 17, no. 3 (2017):
36–48.
de St. Maurice, G. (Forthcoming). “Sensing Bodies at the Center in Today’s Traditional
Japanese Restaurant Kitchens.” Japanese Studies.
Douglas, M., and B.C. Isherwood. (1996 [1979]). The World of Goods: Towards an
Anthropology of Consumption. London: New York: Routledge.
Farrer, J. (2015). “Introduction: Traveling Cuisines in and out of Asia: Toward a Framework
for Studying Culinary Globalization,” in The Globalization of Asian Cuisines:
Transnational Networks and Culinary Contact Zones, 1–19. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Ferguson, P. Parkhurst. (2004). Accounting for Taste : The Triumph of French Cuisine.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Ikeda, K. (1909). “Shin chōmiryō ni tsuite.” Tokyo kagaku kaishi 30(8): 820–836.
Imai, S. (2015) “Umami Abroad: Taste, Authenticity, and the Global,” in The Globalization
of Asian Cuisines: Transnational Networks and Culinary Contact Zones, 57–78. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ishige, N. (2012). L’art Culinaire Au Japon, translated by E. Marès. Paris: Lucie editions.
Japanese Culinary Academy. (2017). Flavor and Seasonings: Dashi, Umami, and Fermented
Foods. Tokyo: Shuhari Initiative.
Japanese Culinary Academy. (2015). Introduction to Japanese Cuisine: Nature, History and
Culture. Tokyo: Shuhari Iniative.
Kumakura, I. (2015). “What Is Japanese Cuisine?” in Introduction to Japanese Cuisine:
Nature, History and Culture, 8–9. Tokyo: Shuhari Initiative.
Michelutti, L. (2010). “We are Kshatriyas but We Behave like Vaishyas”: Diet and Muscular
Politics Among a Community of Yadavs in North India. South Asia: Journal of South
Asian Studies 31(1): 76–95.
Mintz, Sidney (1996). “Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture,
and the Past.” Boston: Beacon Press.
Myers, C.S. (1904). “The Taste-Names of Primitive Peoples.” British Journal of Psychology,
1904–1920 1(2): 117–126.
Peterson, T. Sarah. (1994). Acquired Taste: The French Origins of Modern Cooking. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Rath, E. (2014). “New Meanings for Old Vegetables.” Food, Culture, and Society 17,
(2): 203–223.

34826.indb 124 20/03/2018 12:10

 Making the Taste of Japanese Cuisine Public 125

Sonobe, S. (2017) “Ryōri nin no torikumi jirei.” in Dashi no kagaku, ed., Teruyoshi Matoba
and Naoto Tonouchi, 188–193. Tokyo: Asakura shōten.
Spence, C. (2017). “Multisensory Flavour Perception.” In The Taste Culture Reader:
Experiencing Food and Drink, ed., Carolyn Korsmeyer, 29–36. New York: Bloomsbury.
Stalker, N. (Forthcoming). “Rosanjin: The Roots of Gurume Nationalism.” In Devouring
Japan, ed., Nancy Stalker. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Daily Yomiuri. (2006), “Young French Chefs to Learn Traditional Japanese Cuisine in
Kyoto.” October 19, 2006.
Veblen, T. (1994 [1899]). The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Dover Publications,.
Yamaguchi, S. and K. Ninomiya. (2000). “The Use and Utility of Glutamates as Flavoring
Agents in Food.” Journal of Nutrition 130(4) supplement: 921S–926S.
Yomiuri S. (2004). “Nihon ryōri wo sekai ni hasshin ryotei shujinra ‘akademi-’ setsuritsu.”
August 26, 2004.
Yoshihara, A. (2005). “Refining Tastes; Japanese, French Chefs Share Culinary Ideas.” The
Daily Yomiuri, November 7, 2005.

34826.indb 125 20/03/2018 12:10