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Introduction

This essay examines the image of 'Japaneseness' created by the director Itami Juzo as he looks at Japan through the lens of food in his 1985 film Tampopo. The film, which chronicles the (re)construction of he character Tampopo's noodle restaurant, hybridizes 'traditional' and 'modern' aspects of Japan (through multiple images of food and food consumption).
Two main aspects of the film are examined here:

The nature of the foods shown, prepared, and consumed. Itami chose those foods with great care, and each instance of food refers to multiple layers of social reality within Japanese culture. My essay attempts to advance an answer to the question of why certain foods are featured.
The interplay of social relations and status that all scholars and native Japanese agree are critical for understanding Japanese society. Virtually all important relationships and social issues (sex, violence, breakdown of Japanese traditional isolationist position e.g.) are expressed in the film through individual's relationship to food rather than directly.

Non-lineair structure, in between food related sketches.
Insight into the relationship between the Japanese and their food.
Summary in book (Goro, Gan, Pisken, Tampopo and son, Noodle shop, sensei, quest to make perfect ramen)
Sketches: Gangster and mistress (food fetish), young man being thought to eat noodles by an old master, group of business man and Western menu card, etiquette training for young Japanese women interupted by Western man (spaghetti), thief/scam in restaurant, husband rushing to the bedside of his dying wife, who cooks last meal for family, toothache man that dreams about dumplings and offers ice cream to a kid, gangster is shot to dead and reveals before he dies to his mistress about a special sausage he never tried, baby that is breastfeeded.
Whether in the film's main storyline or in the various asides, the setting is almost wholly within an urban landscape, making this Japanese film remarkable for the fact that there is not a cherry blossom nor a pretty temple, shrine, or perfect volcano to be seen: Itami's Japan is a thoroughly modern and cosmopolitan one.

The foods

A large number of meals and items of food are consumed throughout the film. However, within the broad spectrum of Japanese cuisine, which encompasses many types of food, Itami has chosen to show only a few of the foods that Japanese people consume. Why those foods?
Japanese culture has exhibited a fondness for visual and verbal puns and for extracting meaning from the juxtaposition of items and activities, and it is therefore likely that these foods were chosen with special care. However, the implications and even symbolic meanings of these foods cannot be understood without some understanding of the underlying cultural contexts.

Noodles

The major food in this film is noodles, and this would appear to be paradoxical. Everyone knows that the Japanese staple is rice, yet rice appears only twice in the film, in very specific contexts.
The Japanese eat a wide array of noodles. Roughly three classes: 1) Indigenous Japanese noodles, 2) Noodles of Chinese origin, 3) European noodles (spaghetti).
Japanese-style noodles come in roughly 2 major classes: Soba (thin buckwheat noodles) and Udon (thick wheat noodles), consumed in or with a broth based on traditional Japanese dashi (bonito and seaweed stock).
Chinese-origin noodle dishes, crinkled egg-flour noodles that are most often served in a pork- or other meat-baed stock with vegetables, foten referred to as ramen (Japanese rendition of the Chinese lo-mien) or as Chuka soba (Chinese soba).
Sapporo ramen
Spaghetti
Japanese-style and Chinese-style noodles can be clearly distinguished. First, most dedicated noodle shops, of which there are a great number, will serve either one or the other, and will be clearly identified as such. Japanese noodle shops, usually referred to as sobaya, will have Japanese decor, and usually sport a blue or white norem (a small banner suspended over the sjop entrance to announce it is open). Chinese noodle shops will have a white noren with red characters, and probably a Greek-key design. Their interiors often include some evocation of China as well.
The presentation of Chinese and Japanese noodle dishes is also clearly identified, even in shops that sell both. Chinese noodles come in white porcelain bowls, often with a motif of flowers of a classic Greek-key design around the rim. Japanese soba comes in earthenware bowls, often in colors of black or brown, with little or no decoration.
The use of specific utensils for specific foods is well documented in Japanese food culture, and so it is not surprising to find that a specific garnish-noodle combination will appear in a specific type (color, shape, glaze) of bowl for Japanese noodles.
Finally, European noodles will appear on a European-style plate witch sauce with fork and spoon.
11 times are noodles consumed in Tampopo, 1 is Japanese (Sapporo ramen?), 1 is European, rest are Chinese.
Certainly the choice of noodles as the focus of the film is not accidental. Noodles are a minor food in Japanese cuisine and do not have the sacerdotal and formal centext of rice. However, they are quintessentially popular, consumed in standing-only bars as well as noodle speciality shops, and can also be a gourmet food. Thus the issue of class, in its Japanese guise, emerges through this most humble and common of Japanese dishes.

Japanese foods

Only 2 instances involving the consumption of indigenous Japanese foods in the entire film --> 1) Morning after Goro wakes up after beating by Pisken; Breakfast: rice, seaweed, and raw egg beaten into natto (fermented beans). 2) Japanese noodle shop, decorated in conventional Japanese style, with both tables and tatami mat seating. Old man orders Kamo-nan (ban) soba (soba noodles in stock garnished with slices of duck and leeks), tempura soba (soba noodles in stock garnished with battered deep-fried prawn), and oshiruko (a thick sweet soup - almost a porridge - of azuki beans garnished with balls of mochi (pounded glutinous rice cakes). ----> these all 3 dishes have foreign referents. Nanban (means barbarian/foreign) are those introduced by the Spanish/Portuguese, Tempura derives from Tempera (with egg), and oshiruko part of okashi class usually called wagashi is introduced by China.
Noted that the Japanese have been inveterate borrowers of foreign culture virtually since the formation of Japanese culture in the fourth or fifth century CE. The original diet of the inhabitants of the islands - millet, iris bulbs, and shellfish - was modified by borrowings from the Chinese and the Koreans. Rice replaced millet as a staple. A formal dining arrangement evolved over centureis, as did, the standard structure of the Japanese meal, ichiju sansai (one soup, three side dishes, and rice as a unstated given).
Tampopo is a tradtional woman (she makes her own pickles, which most housewives no longer do, but which was a measure of a housewife's domestic skills in the past), and her household is a traditional one(with a Japanese breakfast rather than today's more common toast and coffee).
Japnese food displayed in the film are thus to type as an eclectic mixture of influences and foodstuffs that the Japanese have made uniquely their own. In effect, these foods celebrate the diversity within homogeneity that is the true expression of Japanese culture.

Non-Japanese foods

'Japanization' (Ashkenazi): foreign influences are absorbed, then transformed and fitted into the Japanese scheme of things socially, behaviorally, and aesthetically. Thus, the fact that most of the foods (in about thirty-two different food scenes throughout the film) are of non-Japanese derivation is unimportant. These are Japanese foods because that is what the Japanese eat, and, in fact the entire culture of Japan is composed of objects, actions and iadeas of non-Japanese origin that the Japanese have modified to their taste. In film 2 cultural influences pre-dominate: East-Asian and European.
Domestification of foreign food as an expensive delicacy and in the home environment.
Scene where Tampopo and Goro discuss their personal lives; the foreign exotic is domesticated and made a part of uchi, the intimate realm of Japanese life.
The European foods displayed in Tampopo are also the foods of the powerful as well as the powerless: all of the Western foods appear in the paradigms of social power that interest Itami.
The businessmen are, with one exception, ignorant of Western food culture and stuck in a group mentality, but the reverse is true of the common people, as is shown via members of a homeless gang, who are at the other end of the social scale.
'Unlike the Japanese, who make a slurping noise when eating noodles, Westerners never slurp.'
Itami, whose sympathies are often with the powerless, seems to be indicating here that while the elite in Japan are often prisoners of the social forms the control, the powerless are free to choose from many cultural paradigms, and do so with gusto.

Class and Quality in Japanese food

hunger - helmuth