The Land of Rice and Dashi — The Origins of Washoku

Freshly cooked white rice, and a bowl of soup with steam rising from it. Alongside, a few small side dishes. This humble combination still appears, as a matter of course, on countless Japanese tables today. Yet thousands of years flowed by before this scene took shape. A single grain of rice crossed the sea and reached the archipelago; people raised it, cooked it, offered it to the gods, and in time discovered the invisible flavor known as dashi. The prototype of what we call washoku was born from just such a slow accumulation, stretching from antiquity into the medieval age.

A Single Grain of Rice That Crossed the Sea

When we speak of Japanese food, the first thing placed before us is rice. Yet rice was not always present in the archipelago. The ancestor of the rice plant is thought to have originated around the lower reaches of the Yangtze River on the Chinese mainland, and through human hands and exchange it is said to have crossed the sea and reached Japan.

There are various theories about the timing of its arrival, and research continues to be updated. Traces of rice have been found in soil from the closing years of the Jomon period at sites in Kyushu and western Japan, so it is thought that rice itself entered the archipelago at a fairly early stage. On the other hand, the ‘wet-rice cultivation’ in which people prepared paddies and raised rice in earnest is said to have begun around the tenth to ninth centuries BCE in northern Kyushu, and this is spoken of as a great event marking the start of the Yayoi period.

Rice cultivation did not merely bring a new food. To open up fields, draw water, gauge the seasons and plant, and harvest together — this was also a turning point that steered people toward a life of settlement, cooperation, and the accumulation of wealth. Fertile land gave rise to power, and it is thought that differences gradually emerged among settlements. Rice was a food, and at the same time it held within it the power to transform the very shape of society.

Rice also became deeply bound up with the gods. Festivals praying for an abundant harvest and giving thanks for the crop took root across the land, and rituals offering the rice harvest to the gods, such as the Niiname rite, came to sit at the center of daily life. Rice became not merely a staple but a special presence, treated as something sacred.

The Choice to Abstain from Meat — Buddhism and Taboo

Another thing indispensable to the story of the archipelago’s food is the long history surrounding the eating of meat. The people of antiquity are thought to have eaten the flesh of deer, boar, and other game. Yet from a certain period onward, a great hesitation began to cast its shadow over the eating of meat. Behind this lay the thought of Buddhism, transmitted from the continent.

Buddhism carries an admonition against ‘killing living beings,’ the taking of life. When this teaching joined with the policy of the state, meat-eating was gradually kept at a distance in public settings. Well known is the edict said to have been issued by Emperor Tenmu in 675. It is understood to have cautioned, within a fixed span corresponding to the busy farming season, against killing and eating animals such as cattle, horses, dogs, monkeys, and chickens.

Even so, as this taboo accumulated over the long years, game was outwardly kept away from the Japanese table, and a form of cuisine centered on fish, vegetables, and grains was gently nurtured. To devise dishes that did not rely on meat — that necessity became, in the end, the very soil in which a distinctive food culture was refined.

Shojin Ryori, and the Discovery of Dashi

One of the places where the constraint of abstaining from meat bore its richest fruit was the temple kitchen. By the Kamakura period, Zen Buddhism was widely transmitted by Dogen and others who had studied in China, and food as part of monastic discipline — that is, shojin ryori, the cuisine of devotion — is said to have developed greatly.

Shojin ryori uses no animal flesh or fish. What may be used are only ingredients of plant origin: grains, vegetables, beans, and seaweed. Yet it was precisely this strict constraint that drew out the cooks’ ingenuity. Making tofu and yuba from soybeans, grinding, kneading, frying, drying — the art of transforming limited ingredients into a great variety of dishes grew up in this kitchen. Dogen is said to have left a text expounding the proper attitude of one who prepares meals, and the stance of grasping food as discipline itself breathed a deep spirituality into Japanese cuisine.

And precisely because they could not rely on the rich flavor of meat, the cooks sought depth by another path. Their answer was dashi. Steeping ingredients such as kelp, dried bonito, and shiitake mushrooms in water, then drawing out their broth to extract the savor of the ingredients themselves — dashi became the foundation of Japanese cuisine, a pillar of invisible flavor.

Rice and dashi. Cuisine centered on plants, and a gaze that cherishes life. From antiquity into the medieval age, such foundations slowly accumulated upon the Japanese table. This was not yet the ordered style that later ages would call washoku. Yet its ingredients, its flavors, and the heart it brought to cooking were already quietly budding. In time, this table would crystallize into a single refined style, amid the etiquette of the warrior class and the lively bustle of the cities.