Japanese Cuisine in Taiwan: Cultural Nostalgia and Global Imagination

David Y. H. Wu

《Chinese and Northeast Asian Cuisines: Local, National, and Global Foodways.》 第11屆 (2009/10) Pp. 9-1-9-19

https://doi.org/10.6641/PICCFC.11.2009.08

並列摘要

Japanese food and cuisine are omnipresent in Taiwan as an integral part of powerful representation of Taiwanese culture and society. This paper attempts to understand the Japanese foodscape in Taiwan in terms of interrelated historical processes: a colonial background since the 19th century; emergence of the late capitalism in Asia in the late 20th century; and post-modem global connections of the early 21st century This paper aims to explain in the broad cultural context of the practice, the imagination, and the nostalgia of Japanese culture that is prominently presented in Taiwanese foodways. In Taiwan urban areas today, people eat out more frequently than eating at home when their daily meals are considered. Japanese (style) food is one of the most popular choices when people eat out. My research is based on fieldwork conducted from 2007 to 2008, including participant observation at various types of Japanese restaurants in the northern cities of Taipei and Hsin-chu, and rural counties in their vicinities. I frame my analysis and interpretation in the global debate of whether foodways in Taiwan demonstrate an alternative modernity, which can be seen as modem but traditional, global but indigenous, national but local; whereas Japanese cuisine becomes exotic but familiar, old but new, old but young, and masculine but feminine.