James Farrer

Please join us in welcoming Prof. James Farrer (Sophia University, Tokyo) for the first talk of the 2025/26 Culinaria Seminar Series. Prof. Farrer will speak about his recent research in a talk entitled “The Small Good Place: Restauranteurs Creating Urban Third Places in Japan's Capitalist Ruins” in ES1047 (5 Bancroft Ave., UTSG), 11-1pm on Sept. 12, 2025.

This study examines the phenomenon of gastronomic micro-entrepreneurship in Japan, focusing on how middle-class individuals, often with higher education credentials, are shifting away from traditional corporate employment to self-owned food-and-beverage (F&B) businesses. Based on a decade-long ethnographic study in a Tokyo neighborhood, this research documents the motivations, economic realities, and social meanings attached to small-scale culinary work. The study involved in-depth interviews with 90 restaurant owners and extensive field observations. Findings reveal that these culinary micro-businesses typically operate with minimal (usually no) staff, often relying on intimate partnerships or occasional volunteer labor. While traditional family-run businesses persist, a growing number of proprietors are newcomers to the trade who lack formal culinary training and have transitioned from corporate careers. Despite economic precarity—characterized by low profits, financial instability, and difficulties supporting a family—many owners express high job satisfaction, prioritizing meaningful work over financial security. Unlike prevailing narratives of craft work in Western contexts, which emphasize individual self-expression, this study highlights the relational and emotional dimensions of culinary labor in Japan. Owners describe their work not just as food preparation but as a type of personalized care work, fostering close-knit communities among their customers, who are often described as a type of extended family. This emotional labor is particularly significant in a rapidly aging society where social isolation is on the rise. It is also gendered labor, with men and women expressing their care in different fashions, though both engage in emotional work in various ways. Ultimately, while gastronomic micro-entrepreneurship provides fulfillment and social connection, it also reinforces patterns of self-exploitation and financial precarity, with potential demographic consequences such as delayed childbirth and reduced family formation. This study contributes to broader discussions on new forms of craft work, precarious labor, and the shifting meanings of work in contemporary Japan.

Tokyo is not only the largest but perhaps the loneliest city on earth, with increasing rates of singlehood, childlessness, solo living – and solo eating. Dining independently (though not necessarily alone) is highly visible and accepted in Tokyo, whether at a convenience store, a noodle shop, or one of the tens of thousands of tiny dining bars that characterize the nightscape of the city (Farrer 2021). This research examines patterns of eating and drinking independently, not as symptoms of social pathology, but rather as ways of experiencing and negotiating the co-presence of others in urban space. These modalities of commensality range from the practiced conviviality of regulars in an “urban third place” (Oldenburg 1989) to silent commonality among strangers with no verbal cues in a neighborhood café (White 2012). It is important to note that the same person may make use of a variety of such spaces. The modalities of commensality (including the degree of social interaction) also correspond to different ways of managing and directing affect, through the cultivation and expression of feelings towards, self, others, and the objects present within the space of dining. The research is based on a decade of ethnographic observation and interviews in independent eateries in a Tokyo neighborhood (Farrer 2024). This paper reports on the participant observation practice that accompanied this larger study, conversations with customers, owners, and media professionals producing content about food culture in Tokyo.

Tokyo hosts one of the densest and most complex agglomerations of small businesses of any city in the world, partly due to its legacy human-scale built environment organized around the commuter rail stations (Almazán 2022). This paper reports on long-term ethnographic research on the social lives of small eateries in Tokyo as places where a sense of community is created and sustained while social boundaries are also constructed. Neighborhood businesses have long been recognized as a mainstay of the social lives of urban communities. They support lively foot traffic that keeps “eyes on the street,” supporting public safety and a sense of social trust (Jacobs 1961). These small businesses were also spaces in which community boundaries were defined and maintained (Suttles 1968). At the same time, small businesses serve as “third places” in which people cultivate social ties, have casual fun, and engage in the life of the community in ways that are not possible in work and home settings (Oldenburg 1989). In Tokyo, small eating and drinking spots are spaces in which regulars create social networks that operate as a type of social capital sustaining the social infrastructure of the neighborhood (Farrer 2023). This research provides ethnographic evidence of these social processes of community formation in Tokyo’s small eateries.

With more than 170,000 Japanese restaurants around the world, Japanese cuisine has become truly global. This talk summarizes the research process and principal results of The Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries, and Politics (University of Hawaii Press, 2023). Drawing heavily on untapped primary sources in multiple languages, this book centers on the stories of Japanese migrants in the first half of the twentieth century, and then on non-Japanese chefs and restaurateurs from Asia, Africa, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas whose mobilities, since the mid-1900s, have been reshaping and spreading Japanese cuisine. This expansion is also entangled in culinary politics, ranging from authenticity claims and status competition among restaurateurs and consumers to societal racism, immigration policies, and soft power politics that have shaped the transmission and transformation of Japanese cuisine. Such politics involves appropriation and oppression, as well as cooperation across ethnic lines. Ultimately, the restaurant is a continually reinvented imaginary of Japan produced by restaurateurs, cooks, and servers of various nationalities and ethnicities acting as cultural intermediaries and interpreters of a new globalized Japanese cuisine.

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.