SEMINAR: Asian Studies Seminar Series

This presentation focuses on the transformation of everyday food into a connoisseurial object in contemporary Japan. Ramen (noodle soup) as a case study, I analyze various methods and styles to transform this everyday food into a "gourmet" food. Ramen was mostly inexpensive and peripheral food until the emerging contemporary ramen culture in Japan in the 1990s. Today, it is no longer consumed solely for physical sustenance and offers the aesthetics of food in terms of quality and consummative environment. I emphasizes that the aesthetics are heavily influenced by producer's and consumer's kodawari (peculiar taste and obsession), which is complex and vary depending on individuals. Producer's main concern of kodawari is distinctiveness rather than appeal to a universal standard of aesthetics. Distinctiveness can be attained through stories of histories, unique presentation, terroir, and the personality of producers. Producer's kodawari may manipulate consumer's choice of products and shops, yet consumers know how to be please with the kodawari in their own ways and form one for themselves through the graduate accumulation of cultural capital and repetitive consumption. In the processes of exchanging food, producers and consumers influence each other's taste and create aesthetics of food. I argue that it is not producers who craft products, but the rapport among producers, consumers and their kodawari creates connoisseurship of a commonplace commodity.