User:10000BL/Ashkenazi

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

Like any other cuisine, Japanese food establishments can be placed on a a scale of quality and of class. By class is meant, simply, price: higher class establishments cost more, for the producer and consumer alike. Quality is a far more difficult issue. The Japanese tend to be fastidious, highly aware consumers.
The thread of quality, of the need to proper consumer - enlightened, open, demanding - runs through the film.
Tampopo takes series of lessons from individuals occupying very different stations in life: from Goro the driver, from the homeless professor, from Chinese cooks, from Shuhei the chauffeur.
Improving the product by attention to every tiny detail is impossible without seishin: the process of improving the person, both physically and mentally, that is intrinsic to most Japanese manpower management theory.
It is related rather to the concept of self-cultivation, of providing oneself with a skill that, whatever one's class, is practiced to the utmost: the secret, many say, of Japanese economic success.
Itami's Japan is instead the Japan of its people, whose cultural principles have now left the old material culutre behind while maintaining the inner culture of Japanese-ness within the new context of modern life.

The social relationships

Japanese society has been characterized as being hierarchic, group oriented, obsessed with cleanliness and formality, dedicated to providing good education, and strongly oriented toward the family.
There is less formality in Japanese life today than there was in the middle of the twentieth century.
The incidence of divorce and other marital strains is rising. Nonetheless, Japanese society is far more rigid than is the norm in European or American societies. It is useful, therefor, to look at the social relations Itami portrays in Tampopo.
It should be said at the outset that these social relationships are all portrayed through the lens of the protagonists' relationships to food. And while some of these relationships are familiar to non-Japanese people, some of them have particular Japanese twists to them that ought to be examined more closely.
Japanese culture borrowed manu of its features from China ---> elements of Confucius
Within the confucian system, pride of place is given to set of five hierarchical relationships 1) those of parent and child, 2) Ruler and ruled, 3) Husband and wife, 4) Teacher and student, 5) Friend and friend. This view of interpersonal dealings has had great impact on Japanese social relations.
Looking at family relationships, it becomes apparent that there is no single 'standard' husnband-wife-child relationship in the entire film.The closest one is that of the family of the dying mother cooking last meal for family.
In Itami's view, the husband-wife relationship is virtually nonexistent in its Confucian and conservative qualities. And the two protagonists exist outside marriage: Tampopo is a widowed woman and Goro is a divorced man. It is not, apparently, that Itami has anything against marriage or the family. It is rather that, unlike Japanese conservatives, Itami is ready to state that the Japanese family system is not the be-all and end-all of Japanese society. Marriages and families are necessary - they exist - but absence of the normative arrangements is not a destroyer of society. Nor is marriage the necessary inner location in which sex takes place.
There are two clear sexual contrasts that Itami gleefully explores. One is the relationship between the food-obsessed yakuza boss and his girlfriend; the other is the relationship btween Tampopo and Goro, her truck-driver mentor. The yakuza boss and his companion consummate their relationship joyously in two scenes in the film, in which sexuality is expressed by the erotic use of various foods - whipped cream, ebi odori (a bowl of live 'dancing prawn' in strong liquor), and a raw egg passed from mouth to mouth by the lovers to enhance sex, until the crushed yolk expresses their climax. The second sexual liaison is expressed in much more repressed terms - Goro's shy brushing of his hair in the bath, using Tampopo's hair brush, and her own nervous handling of underpants she folds and leaves for him to use.
Lustfully consumes a raw oyster
The erotic symbolism of eggs is well documented in Japan as well. And the same is true of the ebi-odori: the death throes of the fish on the mistress's belly are not only erotic, but they also evoke that very Japanese thrill of death in association with sex.
Stepping outside the relationships if family members and lovers, it seems that the Confucian virtues are somewhat upheld. There are two relationships that Itami deals with sympathetically and at length: the relationship between pupil and master, and the relationship younger people have with the aged.
The sincere student mortifies himself before the master until accepted as a student - Goro and Tampopo. ---> also in opening scene, professor teaches young man to eat noodles.
And the role of the teacher, Itami continues, is to make a student greater than oneself. At the end of the film, with Tampopo established as a master of her craft, the teachers (Goro and others), masters all, fade unnoticed into the background. In effect, Tampopo's real teacher has been the totality of the Japanese culture.
The 'graying' of the Japanese population is causing a great deal of concern to the authorities. The Japanese, who enjoy strong family ties, with a Confucian concern for the aged, are unable to cope. Itami demonstrates the problem in a characteristic way. An elderly woman enters a posh convenience store late at night. ---> squeezing products, chased by store clerk. Rushes after her, trying to stop the vandalism, and in the process, provides the old lady with at least a modicum of human contact.
old-young relationships.

Style in all things

The idea of perfect style has been a hallmark of Japanese culture for more than a millennium. Elegance and style - in life as in death - have been considered more important, in many ways, than actual success.
The same is true of Japanese food, in which the presentation is at least as important as the taste and consistency and where elements of presentation are matter for lengthy and dedicated training.
The transformation of Lailai to Tampopo is an important stylistic change in two ways. Bothb Tampopo the erson and Tampopo the place are refurbished.
Goro and the rest of his gang feel uncomfortable about it is almost give. They do not fit anymore, though their values and style will be transmitted in the new form. Only the young driving assistent Gan, understands and approves of the transformation: it is part of his world and of Tampopo's son's world: the modern Japan of today.
'Japaneseness' or Nihonjin-ron(????).
While Itami is clearly satirzing most Japanese prentensions, here and in his other films, it also seems clear that at least in the matter of style, he agrees with the supporters of Nihonjin-ron: style is everything and even those who are down-and-out in Japanese society have it, and (at leastin the film) can flaunt it.

The food, the film, and the satirist

It is difficult to do justice to a film as complex as Tapopo in a short essay. Yet it is possible only to scratch the surface of Itami's inentions and of the richness of this film. Clearly Itami is critical of his fellow Japanese; at the same time he is also just as clearly proud of them.
Itami seems to be rather heavyhanded here in utilizing a symbolic ending, saying, apparently, Look at us, we Japanese. The entire world comes to learn from us.
But Itami the satirist cannot end on a mawkish note. In the final scene, completely unrelated to any scene that has come before, but directly related to the theme fo the film, he shows a mother breastfeeding her baby. The baby's expression says it all, and very smugly: no matter what our style, we're all obsessed with food.