The Birth of Yoshoku — The Flavor of Japanese Spirit and Western Technique

Several decades after the steam of the beef pot announced civilization and enlightenment, the Japanese table came to be set, one after another, with dishes that, though supposedly from the West, could only seem somehow Japanese. Smooth, brown curry rice; tonkatsu with its crisp coating; fluffy croquettes; omurice softly wrapped in egg. These were not the genuine cuisine of the West carried over as it was. They were flavors reworked by Japanese hands so they would go with rice, could be eaten with chopsticks, and could be enjoyed on a common person’s purse. In time, such dishes came to be distinguished from authentic Western cuisine and to bear a name of their own — the genre called ‘yoshoku.‘

The Invention of ‘Going With Rice’

When Western cuisine first came into Japan, it was, to begin with, a foreign formal meal savored with knife and fork. Rich sauces, ample butter, a single dish complete upon the plate. Yet to take that flavor into daily life just as it was proved no easy matter for many Japanese. The answer the cooks found there was the device of ‘pairing it with rice.’

Come to think of it, this was a small invention. At the center of the Japanese table there is always rice. The side dishes exist to carry the rice along. Fit the Western flavor into this relationship, and even an unfamiliar dish becomes, all at once, something familiar. Curry became a meal in a single plate by being poured over rice. Cutlets and croquettes were set out as side dishes to rice, or as the main player clad in sauce. To draw Western ingredients and techniques into the logic of Japanese food, which centers on rice — this very idea, one may say, was the backbone that made the dish called yoshoku possible.

The Road Curry Rice Traveled

The history of curry rice, that representative of yoshoku, is layered with any number of theories. The one widely told is the line of reasoning that the British, who ruled India, carried a spiced dish home to their own country, arranged it in the British manner, and that this was conveyed to Japan in the early Meiji era. In other words, the common understanding is that Japanese curry came not directly from India but by way of Britain.

In the early Meiji era, recipes for curry were set down in books introducing Western cuisine, and the cooking introduced at first is said to have used wheat flour to thicken beef or chicken. In time, in 1903, a medicine wholesaler in Osaka is said to have put a domestically made curry powder on the market, and curry, which had until then relied on costly imports, drew gradually closer to something within reach of the home. Potatoes, onions, and carrots simmered in chunks, with a smooth roux poured over rice — this style is said to be a uniquely Japanese form, seen neither in the genuine cuisine of India nor in the curry of Britain. It should also be noted that there are many anecdotes about who the first Japanese to eat curry was, and that it is difficult to fix the matter upon a single person.

Tonkatsu, Croquettes, Omurice

The frying of meat, too, underwent its own evolution at the Japanese table. The Western cutlet was thin meat coated and pan-fried in a little oil, but in Japan this transformed into a dish of thick meat deep-fried in ample oil. The one said to have created that turning point is the yoshoku restaurant Rengatei in Ginza, Tokyo. It is said to have devised the ‘pork cutlet’ using pork, and to have garnished it with raw shredded cabbage in place of warm vegetables. That said, its date and circumstances, and who is to be regarded as the deviser, are matters of differing accounts, and it is thought that several shops and figures took part in the process by which it was later perfected as the thick-cut, deep-fried ‘tonkatsu.’

Croquettes, too, while taking the French croquette as their groundwork, spread as a uniquely Japanese side dish that made the potato its main player. Cheap and filling, sold even at the shopfronts of butchers, croquettes are said to have brought handy yoshoku to the table of the common folk. Omurice is a dish in which ketchup-flavored rice is wrapped in a thin omelet, and it too is said to have come from yoshoku shops, but several theories about its place of origin have been handed down, and the matter is not settled upon one. The origin of a dish is often, in just this way, something in which the memories of many shops and people overlap.

A Genre by the Name of ‘Yoshoku’ Was Born

Thus curry rice, tonkatsu, and croquettes were all assembled, and by the Taisho era they came to be called the ‘three great yoshoku.’ What matters is that these did not stop at being individual menu items but came to be consciously grouped together as a single genre, ‘yoshoku.’ Apart from authentic Western cuisine — the so-called full course of the Western restaurant — a group of uniquely Japanese dishes that went with rice, could be eaten with chopsticks, and could be enjoyed by the common folk rose up with a clear outline of its own.

The birth of this genre is often spoken of with the phrase ‘Japanese spirit and Western technique’ (wakon yosai). While taking in the ‘technique’ of Western methods and ingredients, the ‘spirit’ of Japanese food, centered on rice, is not let go. Yoshoku, one may say, is that spirit crystallized upon the table. It mirrors the soft tenacity of Japanese food culture — neither merely imitating what comes from abroad nor stubbornly refusing it, but drawing it toward one’s own life and reworking it.

Yet for this new flavor to reach the tables of every corner of the land, the yoshoku shops of the towns alone were not enough. Behind the spread of curry and cutlets from the pleasure of a portion of the cities to a flavor for all the people, another great force was at work. It was the very machinery of the modern state — the army and the schools. The newborn yoshoku was, from here on, to be carried throughout Japan by the hand of the state.