Rice as Self

"I chose this book not only for its intrinsic worth, but also for another reason – because I didn’t want to make my list perfectly ethnocentric by focusing only on the places that I have studied and that I know best, which are Western and European. Nothing is more intimately linked to Japanese self-representation than rice, and this book represents a remarkable effort to make sense of the way in which Japanese notions of identity have been linked by their representation of rice across periods of time. Now it’s no secret that after the Second World War Americans tried to “democratise” Japan in part by using food – by getting the Japanese to eat Western foods. There was massive exporting of wheat products in an effort to promote the eating of bread, and massive exporting of chicken as well. This was all part of Public Law 480, a law passed by the American Congress in the mid- or late 1950s. It was instituted in part simply to create outlets for American surplus agricultural production – but it also had a kind of ideological edge to it. In fact, this is in some ways linked to the next book on the list, Nelson Algren’s America Eats . Algren was part of a group of writers whose work was later called upon by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who was drafted, as it were, by the American government to help run a committee on food habits, which counselled both the American military and the State Department on ways in which they could use food to further American national interests in the aftermath of the wars. General MacArthur tried to get the Japanese to eat “Western”, because the thought was that by getting them to eat Western foods, the US could wean the Japanese from imperial adoration, from ancestor worship, and from other practices that seemed to be inimical to the development of democracy. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That’s an interesting story in itself, but what Ohnuki-Tierney does in Rice as Self is talk about an older and a more persistent Japan. She’s an anthropologist who’s tried to historicise in part her point of view, and she shows the way in which rice had acquired, early on in the long Japanese trajectory, a role that was not purely reducible to calories or to carbohydrates or that sort of thing, but one that had a sacral aspect to it. Rice participated in the construction of the community, in exchange relations that helped the family to be linked to a larger clan or to a lineage. It spoke to the way in which the Japanese saw themselves as being apart from other people. Even today, in certain regions – and, until quite recently, globally – the Japanese resisted importing rice from outside. There was tremendous pressure from Californian producers for many years. I believe they’ve had access to Japanese markets for a certain time now, but for a long time the Japanese felt that rice that was not grown in Japanese soil, nurtured by Japanese water and cultivated and harvested by Japanese hands, somehow didn’t carry that quality of “Japaneseness” that spoke to their collective sense of self. Even though this book is, strictly speaking, “anthropology”, I view this field in very eclectic and (if you will) omnivorous terms. For me, this speaks as much to historical questions as Caroline Bynum’s book, or Fernand Braudel’s. It does it with a very different methodology, of course, and that was also something I wanted to do with my list – I wanted to embody the field with works that were of a very different character, to underline the inherently trans-disciplinary nature of a subject like the history and culture of food."