Kikkoman Corporation

Sometimes a single picture offers a richer image of the distant past than do reams of documents; such pictorial records are significant sources of historical research. In our new Feature series, we introduce Japan’s pre-modern food culture through old prints and paintings. The first installment focuses on various mannerisms that defined Japanese popular food culture into the nineteenth century.

Dining on Tray and Floor

The ancient Japanese aristocracy had very specific etiquette and protocols which defined their lifestyle and deportment; perhaps surprisingly, so did the humbler classes. Figure 1 depicts a mealtime scene featuring some commoners from the twelfth century: of particular interest here is the meal tray (zen) placed before the diners. The trays used by ordinary folk were only simple boards on the floor, while those of higher status dined from tray tables that stood as high as 30 centimeters (about 12 inches).

In this illustration, the tray holds two large and three smaller vessels, as well as one small vessel half-concealed behind one of the larger ones. Three shallow black lacquer bowls are lined up in the foreground: the bowl at the far left holds three small fish, while the contents of the other two are not recognizable. Central to the tray is a large bowl piled high with rice—and we can see that some of it has been eaten. Chopsticks are standing upright in the rice, and while this may have been common practice at the time, today it is considered uncouth and inauspicious to thrust one's chopsticks into rice this way.

The bowls lined up along the front of the tray are assumed to be accompanying dishes called o-sai; and because there are three of them, they are called san (three)-sai (dishes). The san-sai comprise one main dish and two side dishes. The san-sai are accompanied by soup, which stands to the left of the rice; therefore this meal is clearly of the traditional “one soup, three dishes,” or ichiju san-sai style (ichi meaning “one”; ju is “soup.”) Not counted but always served are konomono pickled vegetables and rice. The small dish half-hidden behind the rice bowl is probably a teshiozara, or salt dish.

This illustration thus portrays a typical menu of the masses in the twelfth century—a basic menu that has remained essentially unchanged in Japan for 1,000 years.

Among the general population, those who used even simple trays without legs like this one were nevertheless comparatively well-off, or perhaps city dwellers. Simple country folk would gather around an irori, a hearth built in the middle of the floor of a house (see Food Forum Vol. 21, No. 2). Over the hearth a pot was hung on a hook and suspended over the fire to cook soups, stews and steam rice, while fish, fowl and game were roasted on spits thrust into the ashes surrounding the fire. People placed their dishes directly on the edge of the hearth or on the wooden floor. It is interesting to note that in these homes there was no particular person in charge of cooking; meals were prepared by all and were not the responsibility of women alone.

Eating Outside the Home

As the cities began to develop, meals were not only taken at home. The practice of eating out became more widespread, and in sixteenth century Kyoto, shops began to prepare meals and other foods. At first, these were teahouses that catered to weary pilgrims who had paid their respects at temples or shrines; these developed into regular public eating establishments. Sometimes the temples themselves prepared and served meals to paying customers, but these establishments were usually expensive—and so it was that teahouses and stand-up stalls drew the common classes.

The scene shown on the cover page is one of a series of genre paintings depicting various scenes of life in and around the city of Kyoto from the sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries. These include many settings related to food, and in this painting, a zosui rice porridge is shown bubbling in a pot on an outdoor cookstove. Customers stand around the cookstove enjoying the thick porridge from large lacquerware bowls using long chopsticks. Other paintings from the same series show peddlers selling mochi and tea, as well as shops serving “one soup-one dish” meals to travelers or busy people just looking for a quick bite to eat.

“Fast Food” Stalls

By the early nineteenth century, eating out had become a daily affair among Japan’s city folk. The dishes famously known today as “Japanese cuisine”—including sushi and tempura—were served at stalls known for “fast food” that catered to popular tastes, and not surprisingly, these tiny shops flourished. In marketplaces, at festivals, wherever people gathered, stalls would be lined up selling all kinds of foods. There were apparently literally thousands of noodle vendors in the city of Edo (Tokyo) during the nineteenth century who carried their equipment in kits suspended on shoulder poles.

An early nineteenth century scroll (fig. 2) depicts a line of these very stalls: at the far left is a tempura stand, where we see that children, too, enjoyed their tempura. In the center, grilled squid is being sold, and to the right is a yonmon’ya where various dishes were served for a standard 4 mon, about 100 yen/US$1.00 in today’s currency.

There were people during these times who were starving, but from what we can observe in these pictorial records, there was also a fair amount of opportunity among the common people to enjoy what appears to have been a quite diverse and abundant food culture.

Author’s profile

Isao Kumakura was born in Tokyo in 1943. He taught at Tsukuba University from 1978 to 1992 and then held the position of Professor of Japanese Culture at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. Since 2004, he has served as professor emeritus of the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka and as director of the Hayashibara Museum of Art, Okayama. Dr. Kumakura is the author of many publications on Japanese food culture and Japanese tea culture; his most recent publication is Nihon Ryori no Rekishi (History of Japanese Food).