ファーラー ジェームス

The concept of social sustainability presents many questions for food studies, both about how communities sustain foodways, and how foodways sustain communities. Based on an ethnographic study of restaurants in a single Tokyo neighborhood, this research focuses on how commercial restaurant scenes in a busy area of Tokyo serve as social infrastructure, supporting community life. First, they are an economic resource for employers, workers, and customers, an accessible, though risky, point of entry into business ownership for disadvantaged or resource-poor people. Secondly, eateries are a resource for social organization and networking, that is, spaces in which varieties of social capital can be created and deployed. Thirdly, neighborhood eateries are infrastructure for political mobilization both in the formal organization of local merchant associations but also for informal and oppositional social movements. Overall, the research shows how urban neighborhood restaurant scenes may serve as a “place framing” device through which a community defines and spatially locates what is worthwhile in community life. (8497 words)

The most significant and lasting contributions of Ken Plummer to the sociology of sexuality have been his work on sexual storytelling. Best represented in Plummer’s 1995 book Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds, this approach to sexuality made two key points. One is that sexual storytelling is fundamental to the formation of individual sexual identities and a process of sexual self-discovery. The second is that sexual storytelling is a key social process in a broader sexual politics and struggles for “intimate citizenship.” Plummer’s work has significance, however, far beyond studies a simple model of sexual identity formation. Building upon a review of the research literature citing Plummer as well our own research, this essay explores three dimensions of Plummer’s narrative sociology that include but also take us beyond sexuality studies. One is Plummer’s contribution to the concept of “storytelling” as anti-foundationalist social ontology practice. The second is narrative sociology as humanistic methodology. The third is the significance of the narrative method for a dialogic pedagogy, not only in teaching about sexuality but also in other areas of social life.

Neighbourhood gastronomy, the agglomeration of restaurants and smaller eateries in residential urban areas, contributes to the lives of residents and visitors economically, culturally, and socially. Since winter 2020, neighbourhood gastronomy in Asian cities has been severely disrupted by COVID, compounded by many other long-term stressors. In urban Japan these stresses include gentrification, the aging of proprietors, urban renewal, and corporatization of gastronomy. Empirically, this paper discusses how independent restaurants in Tokyo contribute to community life by supporting grassroots creative industries, small business opportunities, meaningful artisanal work, convivial social spaces, local cultural heritage, and a human-scale built environment. The study uses intensive single-site urban ethnography to discuss how restaurateurs face immediate and long-term crises at the community level. By using the “neighborhood as method,” a concept of sustainable neighbourhood gastronomy is developed that should be applicable in other urban contexts.

In global cities such as London and Tokyo, there are neighbourhoods where ethnic, religious, cultural and other forms of diversity associated with migration are commonplace and others where migrants are regarded as unusual or even out-of-place. In both types of contexts, migrant-run eateries are spaces in which people of various backgrounds interact. In some contexts, eateries may serve as ‘third places’ in which regular forms of intercultural conviviality occur, yet in others, interactions are civil but fleeting. This comparative paper is based on findings from two ethnographic neighbourhood studies in West Tokyo and East London. The Tokyo neighbourhood of Nishi-Ogikubo is one of emerging diversity, in which migrant entrepreneurship is rather new and uncommon, whereas East London has seen immigration for decades and migrant-run businesses are so common as to be taken-for-granted. In Tokyo the Japanese norms of ‘drinking communication’ in small eating and drinking spots inevitably involve migrant proprietors and their customers more deeply in social interactions. In East London, in contrast, intercultural interactions are much more commonplace in public and semi-public spaces, but in the case of migrant-run eateries, they are characterized by somewhat superficial encounters. This paper contributes to scholarship on the role of third places for intercultural relations, highlighting the importance of established cultural norms of interaction in specific third places. By comparing two vastly different contexts regarding the extent of immigration-related diversity, it demonstrates how encounters between residents of different backgrounds are deeply embedded in cultural norms of interaction in these places, and how migrant entrepreneurs in each context adapt to these established norms.

Culinary borrowings are so common as to seem trivial, and yet they are consequential for many of the actors concerned. People’s livelihoods, professional status, and social identity may be tied to their stake in the defining boundaries of culinary cultures. When dominant groups or powerful actors such as multinational corporate chains adopt or reinvent the cuisine of weaker and marginal groups, it may be regarded as cultural appropriation. However, the definition of the situation becomes more complicated when multiple weak and marginal actors compete over ownership of a cuisine. This article discusses how Japanese and other Asian migrant actors participate in grassroots culinary politics surrounding definitions and uses of Japanese cuisine in the context of a Japanese food boom in Europe. It shows how the “borrowed power” of one migrant group may threaten the status and even livelihoods of the foundational stakeholders in a culinary field.

In postwar Japan vast black market districts surrounded urban commuter train stations with warrens of small-scale retail, food and alcohol vendors. Most were bulldozed during the period of high economic growth and replaced with modern shopping centers. Only a few of these dense, lively pedestrian alleyways survived into the 21st century, including the one called "Willow Alley" described in this paper. Recently there has been a widespread revival of these vintage yokocho. Still as spaces for drinking and eating, the forced intimacy in these cramped interstitial spaces fosters sociability and association among strangers, but with changes in recent years. One trend is the opening up of windowless doors and walls and the use of the alleyway itself as a space of eating and drinking. Another is their transformation from semi-private male-oriented bars to more welcoming mixed-gender venues. In general, the case study shows how both historical legacies and the spatial organization and scale of public drinking streets influence the forms of sociability and community that are sustained there.

Globally, independent restaurants have been dealt a double blow by COVID-19. Restaurant staff face the risk of infection, and restaurants have been among the businesses hardest hit by urban lockdowns. With fewer resources than corporate chains, small independent restaurants are particularly vulnerable to an extended economic downturn. This paper looks at how independent restaurants owners in Tokyo have coped with the pandemic both individually and as members of larger communities. Both government and community support have been key to sustaining these small businesses and their employees during this crisis.

This introduction outlines the conceptual framework of the special issue. Culinary politics involves a contest over the social organization and cultural meanings of food by a variety of actors: both civil and state, the powerful and the grassroots. In particular, we consider food governance as a form of culinary politics entailing a two-way traffic, in which policies and regulations are set by state actors, while the responses of civil actors often reshape the foodscape and complicate the outcome of food policies. Food governance also points to the reshaping and contestation of collective and individual food identities, and how different power hierarchies can be challenged through acts of food-making. While food is an enduring cultural concern in human life, food governance and culinary politics should be two important concepts for researchers to engage with when examining individuals' soft skills of food-making and the exercise of soft power through food.

Migrants do not simply move across physical spaces but within institutionalised social fields, including occupational fields. This ethnographic study takes a globalised culinary field - the social and economic space of fine restaurant dining - as an example of an emergent transnational social field. Focusing on culinary migrants to Shanghai, it shows how the institutionalisation, professionalisation and globalisation of the culinary field create new opportunities for the mobility of workers. Transnational mobility can be advantageous to the career mobility of culinary workers at all levels, from line cooks, to head chefs, and further to celebrity chefs building global brands. More generally, the mobility of skilled labour is shown to depend on the transnationalisation of the fields in which skills are socially defined, and migrants themselves are key players in instantiating and expanding a field.

The MIT Visualizing Cultures controversy is linked to a series of anti-Japanese street protests in China during the previous year. As a comparative analysis of these two very different types of protests, this article produces a reading of protest through a series of linked contexts of reception, or interconnected interpretive communities. To elaborate this idea, this article focuses on one of these events, the anti-Japanese protest of April 2005, and in conclusion, compares the reception of this event to the reactions to Visualizing Cultures website. Both events followed a familiar twentieth-century pattern of Chinese youth reacting against perceived insults to China in the realm of international affairs, accusing the Chinese state of weakness in the face of foreign insults. Like the MIT webpage controversy, however, the Shanghai protest unfolded in the borderless context of global media coverage, and also in the particular local and transnational contexts of Shanghai, a rising global city with a large resident foreign population, including the largest Japanese population in any city in the world outside Japan. The interpretations of the protest thus developed across a series of interlinked contexts of reception in Shanghai, in Japan, and further afield. In particular, the article discusses reactions in the Japanese community in Shanghai, and subsequent reactions of Japanese public intellectuals writing about the protest from Japan. Finally, as the events of protest become embedded in opposing nationalist narratives, the article asks how they can be brought back into the classroom, and how the social space of the classroom can serve as an alternative interpretive community for the exploration of both historical memory and the meanings of protest.

This qualitative research documents the educational strategies of international migrants to Shanghai who are attempting to raise their children as cosmopolitans through immersion in local Chinese schools. We distinguish this localizing educational strategy from the established network of international schools designed to serve the families of corporate expatriates. Instead, our research subjects consist of self-initiated expatriates, or middling transnationals', who have chosen to prioritize immersion in the language and culture of China by sending their children to local schools. This localized, or Sinocentric, model exposes non-Chinese children to a challenging and nationalistic Chinese curriculum. Our analysis of these practices as a form of cosmopolitan education challenges both the goal of teaching a universal and placeless ethical cosmopolitanism and the assumption that a meaningful cosmopolitan education must take place in the idealized setting of a liberal cosmopolitan school system. We also highlight the difficulties families face in this approach, describing this as an entangled cosmopolitanism', an enriching but uncomfortable engagement with both local and home-country educational cultures.

This paper describes the policies of the People's Republic of China (PRC) for attracting skilled migrants and uses ethnographic fieldwork to discuss the actual employment situations of non-Chinese skilled migrants. Employing the concept of social fields, it describes skilled migrants in three employment sectors in the PRC: (1) Chinese academic and research institutions, (2) managerial work in multinational corporations, and (3) skilled culinary work in international restaurants. The discussion shows that ideas of "skill" are constructed with reference to cultural and ethnic traits perceived as assets in particular economic fields or ethnic capital. Moreover, migrants' ability to adjust to their professional contexts depends both on their cultural and ethnic capital and on their structural positions in the relevant field of work.

Beginning in the 1980s, bars and dance clubs re-emerged as important zones of intercultural interaction within Shanghai, particularly for expatriates with otherwise little casual social contact with Chinese citizens. Based on interviews with bar- and clubowners and customers, and on field-notes from participant observation over the last 15 years, this historical ethnography describes the changing organisation of the ethnosexual contact zone of the nightlife. Nightlife is a context in which casual interactions among foreign travellers, sojourners and settlers and the increasingly mobile People's Republic of China (PRC) citizens are common and relatively spontaneous. Despite the complexities of these interactions, the ethnographic evidence here points to the continued relevance of postcolonial racial categories in which a struggle for gendered status within the nightscape is described as a competition between a dominant but declining Global Whiteness and a rising Global Chinese racial identity. This mapping of a fractious global nightscape challenges the idea of a seamless transnational capitalist class, and instead points to racial and gendered sexual competition as an important feature of the leisure culture of transnational mobile elites.

As in the early twentieth century, Shanghai has again become a site for Western settlement. This paper focuses on case studies of long-term Western settlersthose in the city more than five yearsand how they situate themselves in the city through their 'narratives of emplacement' or stories of a personalised relationship to the city. Settler stories reference both a postcolonial nostalgia for the lifestyles of the 1930s Shanghailanders, and a newer post-socialist model of cosmopolitan citizenship for mobile urban elites, related to the state-sponsored ideal of the 'New Shanghainese.' Taken as a whole, expatriate narratives of emplacement construct an idealised image of a culturally cosmopolitan, locally integrated and economically successful immigrant entrepreneur. Few settlers may actually live up to this ideal, but these narrative strategies allow settlers to construct imagined links to a place and polity that substitute for more substantive forms of urban citizenship, while excluding other categories of migrants.

This study examines the experiences of past and present members of a popular Japanese online dating site in order to explore the extent to which Western-based theories of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the development of online relationships are relevant to the Japanese online dating experience. Specifically, it examines whether social information processing theory (SIPT) is applicable to Japanese online dating interactions, and how and to what extent Japanese daters overcome the limitations of CMC through the use of contextual and other cues. Thirty-six current members and 27 former members of Match.com Japan completed an online survey. Using issue-based procedures for grounded theory analysis, we found strong support for SIPT. Japanese online daters adapt their efforts to present and acquire social information using the cues that the online dating platform provides, although many of these cues are specific to Japanese social context.

This article uses qualitative interviews with 135 Japanese in their 20s to discover the meanings and purposes they associate with tsukiau ("going steady") relationships. Relating our findings to Sternberg's triangular theory of love, we find that all three components of intimacy, commitment, and passion are emphasized in tsukiau relationships, though in culturally specific ways. The findings suggest that in a society in which people marry later than before, dating relationships can be a new type of comfort zone for young Japanese adults redefining the boundaries of the "inner" and "outer" self, often replacing or displacing family ties as the context for displaying a backstage "true self." The tsukiau relationship thus represents a transitional life stage for heterosexual Japanese young people.

Extramarital affairs have become standard fare on Chinese television and in discussions of public morality in China. Chinese journalists and academics have related an apparent increase in extramarital affairs to the commercial values of the money economy and a general moral vacuum in contemporary society, but there has been little scholarship devoted to the social and cultural construction of the affair by those directly involved. Based on 69 interviews with Shanghai residents involved in extramarital affairs, this paper discusses how ordinary Shanghai people experience and describe extramarital affairs in the reform era.