James Farrer

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.