Diet of Japan

“ Japanese food is unpalatable to most foreigners, and the eating of it is an art which must be acquired gradually. After repeated experiments we learn to like it, and can live on it fairly well; but most foreign residents usually take more or less European food with them every time they go into the interior.
From of old Buddhism forbade the eating of anything that had animal life, and hence it came about that the Japanese are probably as vegetarian in their diet as any people on earth. Even such animal food as butter and milk is not used. ”

“ It is inexpensive, becoming, and leaves our limbs to their natural action; what more do we want? As to your food, I acknowledge that a meat diet is more strengthening than our usual bill of fare, and most of us indulge in it once a day. But to prepare dishes merely to tickle the palate, is both [Pg 232] foolish and wicked. We want no waste. That is the reason why I prefer dressing in haori, hakama, and Kimono, and why I prefer to live in a Japanese house. If I, or any other Japanese, visit your country, we conform with your customs and habits, because we do not wish to give offense. ”

“ It was a matter of great amazement to the Japanese of Mito that the foreigners living there bought a whole chicken or two, or five or six pounds of beef, at one time, and devoured them all in two or three meals!
Rice is, of course, the staple article of diet, “the staff of life” of the Japanese; and yet, in poverty-stricken country districts, this may be a luxury, with55 barley or millet as the ordinary food. Various vegetables, particularly beans, are much used, fresh or pickled; seaweed, fish, eggs, and nuts are largely eaten ”

“ Everybody knows that rice is a daily food stuff not only of the Japanese, but of the Chinese and many other Asiatic peoples. In the case of the inhabitants of northern China, however, other kinds of cereals are eaten as well as rice, as a natural consequence of the scanty production of the latter in those regions. And it is worthy of notice that even in southern China this cereal is eaten not as is customary in our country. There they eat rice as well as meat, or rather more meat than rice, while here in Japan meat and fish are mere ancillary foods, rice being the chief article of diet. ”

“ This is the diet of the Japanese—the kind of food that kept the samurai in the best of health, in phenomenal strength, and with muscles that defied strains that would be appalling to the average Caucasian. If any hearty eater among the white races believes such a diet would prove weakening, let him try it for a few weeks, and he will discover that his strength is on the increase. Such stomach troubles as indigestion will have disappeared. The man who goes to Japan with a dyspepsia cure, unless he can find trade enough among the foreign residents, is sure to fail. ”

“ A HEALTHY STOMACH THE BASIS OF ALL STRENGTH—WHAT THE JAPANESE EAT IN SUMMER AND IN WINTER
In the opinion of the samurai of old Japan the first step to the upbuilding of the physical body lay in the direction of choosing a sound, sensible diet. This did not mean a diet in which meats and condiments figured largely. Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese seldom cared for meat, even when they could well afford it. In fact, meat has but little vogue among the natives of Japan to-day. ”

“ So far as meat diet went, the commission reported that the Japanese had always managed to do without it, and that their powers of endurance and their athletic prowess exceeded those of any of the Caucasian races. Japan's diet stands on a foundation of rice. ”

“ To understand why, one should remember that the modern knowledge which the modern Izumo student must acquire upon a diet of boiled rice and bean-curd was discovered, developed, and synthetised by minds strengthened upon a costly diet of flesh. National underfeeding offers the most cruel problem which the educators of Japan must solve in order that she may become fully able to assimilate the civilization we have thrust upon her. As Herbert Spencer has pointed out, the degree of human energy, physical or intellectual, must depend upon the nutritiveness of food ”

“ It will thus be seen how completely our diet differs from the European; and it is no matter for wonder that the other conditions of life should be as dissimilar. Many Europeans in Japan find our meals unsatisfying; but at the same time there are not a few Japanese who do not feel that they have had a full meal unless they finish up a European dinner with rice and-pickled vegetables. ”

“ Every town and village on the way being well provided with cooks-shops and victualling houses, where they could get every thing they had a mind for, and diet themselves at any sum they pleased, between the value of an English penny and two shillings. The most generally used article of food in Japan is rice of different qualities, as with our wheats and other kinds of grain, the whitest being reckoned the best, and is used instead of bread, to which they add fresh or salted fish, some pickled herbs, beans, radishes, and other roots, salted or pickled ”

“ The first is founded on the climate, the best-flavoured fruits being produced in dry climates, whereas in Japan the heat and wet come together, and make the fruit rot instead of mellowing. Thus European stock, which has improved in America and Australia, rapidly deteriorates in Japan. The second cause—itself partly dependent on the first is that the national taste for fruit is unformed, fruit never having been here regarded as a regular article of diet, and circumstances having accustomed the Japanese to prefer that such fruit as they do take should be hard. ”

“ The staple diet has in it much more of meat and fat than that of the Japanese, and the average Corean can eat twice as much as the Japanese. Beef, pork, fowls, venison, fish, and game are consumed without much waste and rejected material. Dog flesh is on sale among the common butchers’ meat. The women cook rice beautifully, and other well-known dishes are barley, millet, beans, potato, lily-bulbs, seaweeds, acorns, radishes, turnips, macaroni, vermicelli, apples, pears, plums, grapes, persimmons, and various kinds of berries. All kinds of condiments are much relished. ”

“ Indeed, to the Japanese mind, to be seen solemnly preceding a caravan of cattle for purposes of diet would certainly suggest insanity. For cows in Japan are never milked. Dairy products, consequently, are not to be had on the road, and the man who fancies milk, butter, or cheese must take them with him.
It used to be the same in Tokyo, but in these latter days a dairy has been started at Hakone, which supplies fresh butter to such Tokyoites as like it. ”

“ Instead of forming the national diet, as we are inclined to suppose, rice is really such a luxury that many people never eat it except in sickness or on feast-days.
For all the Japanese farmer is so independent, he is often miserably poor. An acre of rice may in good years produce an annual profit of a dollar and a half, but there is quite likely to be a deficit instead. When one considers that it takes the labour of seventeen men and nine women to cultivate two and a half acres of rice, this is not surprising. ”

“ The grain comes to the table—which, in Japan, is usually the floor—soft, steaming, and a palatable food that requires no condiments to make it highly acceptable to the stomach. When the rice is boiled it is never stirred. When the rice is steamed it of course requires no stirring. Of late years an attempt has been made to introduce white wheat flour into Japan. While a few of the natives have added this to their diet wheat flour is still unpopular. The Japanese find rice more palatable, more healthful, and productive of greater strength and energy. ”

“ In the plains he subsists mainly on rice boiled in water, precisely as do the workpeople in the towns, a little fish seasoned with soy, or Japanese sauce, flavours this very simple menu, which also includes a few eggs, and occasionally a chicken, a little game, or a wild duck. In the mountains, where the people are very poor, and rice is considered a luxury, barley and millet are sometimes substituted. The fisher-folk replace this almost exclusively vegetarian diet by the produce of their work. Even among well-off people in the towns the principal dish at dinner consists of boiled rice. ”

“ Japan is a small country, having but 147,655 square miles in its area. Japan is very hilly, and little terraces are formed on the slopes for cultivation, as in Italy and Switzerland. But a very small portion—maybe half—of these hills is rich enough to produce any abundant crops, hence rice and fish remain the chief articles of Japanese diet.
In Nagasaki we visited a Buddhist temple, a huge, roomy edifice the floor of which was covered with matting. ”

“ A silk-conditioning house at Yokohama; experimental tea-farms; laws to prevent and remove diseases of plants, cereals, silk-worms and cattle, and regulations to check dishonesty in the matter of fertilizers, complete the record of official efforts in the realm of agriculture during the Meiji era.
One of the problems of modern Japan is the supply of cattle. With a rapidly growing taste for beef—which, in former days, was not an article of diet—there is a slow but steady diminution in the stock of cattle. ”

“ A nation which largely lives on one article of diet, the production of which is subject to the vicissitudes of good and bad harvests, is, it must be admitted, not in a satisfactory position in reference to the food of its people.
If rice is the national food, tea is emphatically the national beverage, despite the large consumption of saké and the increasing consumption of the really excellent beer now brewed in Japan. Like most other things, the tea-shrub is said to have been imported into Japan from China. ”

“ Physically the Japanese are inferior to the races of the West. They are shorter of stature and lighter of weight than Europeans or Americans. The upper part of their bodies is developed perhaps as fully as our own; but the lower limbs have been so cramped by sitting on the floor for centuries that they are shorter and weaker. Their habits of life and their vegetable diet have combined to make of them a physically weak people. ”

“ The rivers, lakes, and seas of Japan are teeming with splendid fish, which form an important part of the native diet. It seems that Buddhism, while forbidding the use of meats generally, permitted the eating of fish. ”

“ As many as 40 per cent. of the people were just making ends meet. Another 40 per cent. were always dogged by poverty. Millet was the food of 10 per cent. of the farmers; millet, salted vegetables and bean soup were the meagre diet of 5 per cent; the staple food of the remainder was barley and rice. There are few temples in Iwate compared with the rest of Japan. "Education is more backward than in other prefectures," someone said. "The farmers are not able. Too much saké is drunk." Farmers come in to Morioka to sell charcoal and wood and I saw some of them turning into the saké shops. ”

“ A large number of the plants growing wild are of this class, so that even in winter the land has not the bare appearance characteristic of European countries at that time of the year. Coniferous plants are abundant, many of them being peculiar to Japan.
The coasts abound with fish of an excellent quality, and this, with rice, forms the staple diet of the people. Tea is, as I have said, largely cultivated, and indeed may be regarded as the national beverage. It has been cultivated in the country for over two thousand years. It is an article of faith in Japan that tea strengthens the body. ”

“ As far as rice is concerned, it must be borne in mind that there is an increasing consumption per head.]
FARMERS' DIET [XXVI] . It is officially stated in 1921 that "the common farm diet consists of a mixture of cooked rice and barley as the principal food with vegetables and occasionally fish." The barley is what is known as naked barley. Ordinary barley is eaten in northern Japan, but two-thirds of the barley eaten elsewhere is the wheat-like naked barley, which cannot be grown in Fukushima and the north. The husking of ordinary barley is hard work. ”

“ This grain is the basis of the better-class meal, but is not so highly polished as in Japan; and it is too costly for the common people, who replace it with cheaper grains, especially millet. What may seem a hardship is really a blessing. The poverty which denies them some of the refinements of the table imposes upon the people of Korea a more healthful diet than that of their island neighbors; in the mass they are more sturdily built; if all other signs are insufficient one can usually distinguish a Korean from a Japanese by the excellence of his teeth. ”

“ Inasmuch as Japan is an insular country, with a long line of sea-coast, it is natural that fishing should be one of the principal occupations of the people, and that fish, seaweed, and other marine products should be common diet. ”

“ Scarcely less important to Japan than the cereals she raises are her silk and tea, both of which find markets abroad. Her production of the latter staple does not show any sign of marked development, for though tea is almost as essential an article of diet in Japan as rice, its foreign consumers are Silk and Tea. practically limited to the United States and their demand does not increase. ”

“ One globe-trotting wag of a naturalist has declared that in the Japanese waters there are forty thousand varieties of fish, all but three kinds of which are edible. He added that there are something more than forty thousand ways of preparing these fish. There are nowhere in the world such prolific fishing-grounds as are to be found around the shores of Japan. The fish are caught in such numbers, and with so little difficulty, that naturally they form an important item in the Japanese diet and apparently with the best of results. ”