Overview:

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.

Speaker:

James Farrer is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. His research focuses on the contact zones of global cities, including ethnographic studies of sexuality, nightlife, expatriate communities, and urban food cultures. Recent publications include The Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries and Politics (with David Wank eds.), International Migrants in China’s Global City: The New Shanghailanders, Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City (with Andrew Field), and Globalization and Asian Cuisines: Transnational Networks and Contact Zones (ed.). He is a frequent contributor to media programming on urban life in Asia, including NHK World's "Tokyo Eye 2020” and “Matsuko’s Unknown World” (Matsuko no Shiranai Sekai).

Moderator:

Kyle Cleveland is the co-director of ICAS and associate professor of Sociology at Temple University, Japan Campus. His expertise ranges from political and theoretical sociology to race and ethnicity, popular culture and ideology.

Venue:

Temple University, Japan Campus

Room 408 (4F)

Address & Floor Guide