The Taste Spread by the Military and Schools — How the State Standardized the Table

In the previous episode, we saw how ‘yoshoku’ dishes such as curry rice, tonkatsu, and croquettes were born out of reworking Western cuisine to suit the Japanese palate. Yet these still remained a pleasure confined to city diners and a handful of households.

For a single taste to truly spread across an entire country, a large mechanism is needed to carry it. For Meiji Japan, the bearer of that role was the state itself.

The military that fed soldiers, and the schools that raised children. Through these two enormous apparatuses, food would eventually come to be measured by the modern yardstick of ‘nutrition,’ standardized across regions and social ranks. In this episode, let us look at the story of how the modern state arranged the national table, entering through these two gateways of the military and the school.

Young Men Falling at Sea — The Shadow Called Beriberi

The story begins not in a bright dining room, but in a dark ship’s hold.

In the early Meiji years, a disease tormented the Japanese navy. It was beriberi. The limbs grew numb, strength drained away, and in severe cases the heart weakened and life was lost. At the time, its cause was still unsolved; some said it was an infectious disease, others a disease of the land.

An event conveying the gravity of the situation is recorded as having occurred in 1883. On a training ship that set out on an ocean voyage, many of the crew came down with beriberi, and a not insignificant number of deaths are said to have resulted. Out at sea, young men were falling before they ever fought. For the state, this was a crisis that could not be overlooked.

The one who took on this mystery was a naval medical officer, Takaki Kanehiro. He suspected that the cause might lie in the soldiers’ diet. In the navy of that time, meals centered on white rice were provided. Rice was the taste of home and a feast besides, but the side dishes were sparse, and the nutrition is said to have been unbalanced.

Takaki is said to have used ships setting out on ocean voyages, varying the content of meals and comparing the results. On the side that took meals revised in a Western style, incorporating meat and barley, beriberi was said to have greatly decreased. Though various theories remain about the finer details of the cause, the experience that improving the diet checked the disease became a great push toward changing the navy’s soldiers’ rations.

Bowls of Barley Rice and Plates of Curry — The Nutrition the Military Carried

And so, from around the mid-1880s, the navy is said to have revised its soldiers’ meals into a Western style. It stopped relying on white rice alone, taking in barley rice mixed with protein-rich barley, and dishes using meat.

Here, the curry that appeared in the previous episode shows itself once more. Simmering meat and vegetables together in a single dish and eating it poured over rice, curry let one take in nutrition all at once, could be made in great quantity in a large pot, and had a rich flavor that encouraged eating. As a meal for a military feeding many soldiers, it is said to have been a convenient dish. The theory that curry spread from the navy’s soldiers’ rations is well known.

That said, one cannot simply declare that curry was devised for the prevention of beriberi. It is more reasonable to understand that there was an improvement of the whole diet, including barley rice and meat-eating, and that within it there was curry. Stories about the origins of dishes are often arranged after the fact and handed down.

In any case, the young men who learned about food in the military would in time finish their service and return to their hometowns. The memories of taste they carried back — the aroma of curry, the texture of barley rice, the savor of meat — are thought to have quietly sown seeds at the tables of their villages. It is sometimes pointed out that the conscription system, unintentionally, functioned as a nationwide ‘school of food.’ The food the state had arranged to feed its soldiers seeped into the provinces through people.

From a Single Rice Ball — The Sprouting of School Lunch

The other gateway lay in the children’s classroom.

The beginning of the school lunch in Japan is said to be the private Chuai Elementary School in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture, in 1889. This did not begin as a national system. It is said to have originated when temple priests, crossing sectarian lines, pooled donations and served lunch for children who were too poor to bring a packed meal.

That menu is recorded as having been quite plain: a rice ball, salted salmon, pickled greens. It was a meal whose very purpose was simply to ‘feed’ — far removed from luxury. On an empty stomach one cannot learn. First filling the belly was the first step toward learning.

This small undertaking would in time spread into charitable efforts in various places. Giving food to undernourished children became, while a matter of education, also a concern of the state in building the bodies of its people. The idea of supporting children’s food through society as a whole put out its sprout here.

The school lunch would be greatly organized as a national system, reaching children across the whole country, only after passing through the great rupture of war. That story we shall look at again in a later episode.

The Table Being Standardized

The military and the school. The hallmark of this era lies in the way these two places, utterly different in character, came together to be involved in the food of the people.

What ran through both was a new way of thinking: ‘nutrition.’ Food was measured not only by deliciousness, season, or social rank, but as material that builds the body and produces strength. What, and how much, must a person eat to grow healthy — such questions became firmly bound to the concerns of the modern state in strengthening its army, raising its children, and enriching its nation.

This standardization has both light and shadow. There is certainly an aspect in which food, prone to imbalance by region and by household wealth, was raised up from the bottom. On the other hand, it was also the gateway to food being managed for the sake of the state’s power, and in wartime becoming an object of control and mobilization. The yardstick of nutrition both saves people and binds them together.

Even so, the seeds sown in this era ran deep. The taste learned in the military mess hall; the single bowl shared in the classroom. Crossing regions, crossing ranks, the experience of eating the same thing spread. Here lay the first great step by which the Japanese table drew closer to becoming ‘everyone’s table.’

And while the state arranged food from above, another force was being born in the streets. In the city’s entertainment districts, eating outside the home, for one’s own pleasure — such a new culture was about to bloom. The next episode will turn toward another story of the table, where cafés and department store dining halls bustled with life.