Connoisseurship of B-grade culture: consuming Japanese national food ramen
Tez Türü: Doktora
Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: University of Hawaii at Manoa, Sosyal Bilimler, Antropoloji, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri
Tez Danışmanı: Christine Yano
Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2010
Tezin Dili: İngilizce
Özet:
This dissertation analyses connoisseurship of rāmen as a B-grade gourmet food in Japan. ‘B-grade gourmet’ is a recently developed cultural category that refers to ordinary foods that have become increasingly aestheticized. Early in its history in Japan, rāmen was associated with immigrant Chinese and working-class Japanese. It then became an inexpensive, everyday food for the masses and was gradually claimed as a national food. Later, middle-class and working-class people transformed rāmen into a ‘gourmet’ food by lowering the bar on elite conceptions of connoisseurship and raising the status of the food.
How and why has this inexpensive food for the masses gained the status of a national food and become fetishized in contemporary Japan? To answer this question, I conducted field research at rāmen shops in Tokyo and online, among owners, fans and food critics between 2006 and 2007. Aspects of contemporary Japanese culture— including fetishism, obsessive fans with highly developed kodawari (individual aesthetics), traditional business practices, mass media, and nostalgia for the past—all have contributed to the aestheticization of this everyday food. Fetishism and kodawari in particular constitute connoisseurship of B-grade culture.
My argument is that in contemporary Japan connoisseurship is not limited to the upper-classes; it exists among the middle and working classes as well. Appreciation of nearly any commonplace object can turn it into a connoisseurial object. In Japan, connoisseurship allows consumers to blur the ‘tastes’ normally related to specific classes. For example, middle-class consumers fetishize B-grade gourmet or working-class culture by incorporating Japanese values—traditions, hardship, and social relationships—into their consumptive practices. At the same time, producing B-grade gourmet food gives working-class people confidence, pride, and satisfaction in their work that compensates for lack of a middle-class, university education. Through their mutual involvement in, appreciation of, and nostalgia for this food, the different classes together claim rāmen as people’s food and a national food without recourse to official or elite designations.