James Farrer

From New York to Shanghai, international migrants prominently contribute to the foodways of global cities. The outsized role played by migrants on urban foodways has both supply-side and demand-side influences. On the provider side, migrants disproportionally seek opportunities in gastronomy due to barriers to entry into the primary urban labor markets. On the consumer side, “ethnic cuisines” are sought-after by well-traveled urban culinary omnivores. Tokyo is no exception to these patterns, with migrants from around the world opening independent restaurants at different price levels creating varied market niches. Still, comparatively little scholarship exists on migrant gastronomy in Tokyo, and this paper attempts to provide an overview, first by using online data to provide a rough statistical overview of “ethnic” cuisine in Tokyo as a whole. It then uses qualitative data from one community to describe the varied pathways of migrant restauranteurs into the food service industry in Japan. The case studies of independent migrant restaurant owners outline the importance of bridging social capital, including marriages and friendships with Japanese. It also discusses how these migrants participate in urban placemaking, including the creation of multicultural urban third spaces attracting diverse regular customers.

From performing artists to engineers and athletes, migrants are not only moving around the world as participants in global industries and cultural worlds but are also among the principal agents who make, shape, and remake these industries and worlds. Global cultural industries can be thought of as a type of migration infrastructure that facilitates the mobility of skilled migrants, but more than this they are assemblages of human and non-human agents working at various scales to produce and reproduce complex social and cultural worlds inhabited by these actors. This paper looks at the movement of Japanese culinary migrants to Europe and the creation of an expansive Japanese culinary infrastructure in Europe. This case study serves as an example of how migrants helped create a cultural industry, as well as a cultural world, a social space that gives meaning to participation both by producers and consumers, in the form of hierarchies of taste, styles of dining, and sources of gustatory inspiration and enjoyment. This industry, largely created by Japanese migrants, subsequently serves as a platform for further migration by non-Japanese people and institutions. The research looks at the participation of migrants and many other actors in the creation of a Japanese culinary infrastructure in Europe, focusing on the Japanese enclave in Düsseldorf as a central locus of this production. The paper begins with the creation of a Japanese culinary infrastructure in the 1960s and continues with examples of how this infrastructure has facilitated the cultural and business activities of a variety of Asian migrants well into the twenty-first century.

Japonská kuchyně se stala opravdu světovou - podává se ve více než 150 000 restauracích mimo Japonsko - od jednoduchých jídelen až po chrámy “fine dining”. Největší rozmach zaznamenala v posledních čtyřiceti letech, ale kořeny konzumace japonských kulinářských výrobků jakožto něčeho módního jsou mnohem starší. Prof. James Farrer ze Sophia University v Tokiu a dr. Lenka Vyleťalová z UP se podělí o bohatá etnografická data ze šesti kontinentů a přiblíží, jak v průběhu jednoho a půl století japonská kuchyně dobyla svět. Přednášející jsou autory kapitol v nedávno vydaném svazku The Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries, and Politics.

Japanese foodways have long been characterized by local diversity, unique products, relatively small-scale production, and attention to culinary artisanry, but all these features are endangered by multiple crises, with many exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Japan is not unique in these challenges and can be regarded as a test case for how local food actors can adapt to crises and stressors such workforce aging, labor shortages, mass tourism, over-fishing, animal diseases (such as swine flu and avian influenza), changing tastes, climate change, import dependency, and, most recently, the pandemic. The panelists in this roundtable all have conducted long-term ethnographic research on Japanese foodways and the Japanese food system, including agriculture and fisheries, school lunches, food education, neighborhood restaurants, culinary tourism, and the careers and activities of chefs. These ethnographic studies center on concrete food practices, and the discussion will focus on how actors in these sites cope with the crises of the pandemic and emerging post-pandemic era. One focus is COVID, but we have found that COVID is often only one contributing and exacerbating factor in the longer-term crises and stresses faced by food actors. We will discuss how the pandemic impacted agricultural producers, tourism professionals, small businesses, culinary workers, food educators, and other food actors. We will hear from each of the panelists how the actors they studied have sustained local foodways and how they have failed to do so. We hope this discussion will contribute to a deeper understanding of the linkages between economic, environmental, and social sustainability in Japanese foodways. Individually the topics we will cover in the discussion are chicken farming (Ben Schrager), wine tourism (Chuanfei Wang), oyster farming (Shingo Hamada), vegetable farming (Greg de St. Maurice), whaling (Akamine Jun), and food education (Stephanie Assmann). Each discussant will briefly describe their fieldwork and discuss crises and responses by local actors. This format will allow us to use the discussion to identify crises and responses that cut across ethnographic sites. Ideas from the online audience will be welcome and the goal is to stimulate discussion of the nature of food crises.