The Popularization of Eating Out — Cafés and Department Store Dining Halls

In the previous episode, we saw how, through the state mechanisms of the military and the school, food came to be standardized under the yardstick of nutrition. That was, so to speak, a story of the table being arranged from above.

But around the same time, in the city’s entertainment districts, an entirely different force was moving the table. Neither to be fed by someone nor to strengthen the body, but simply to enjoy, by one’s own will, going out to eat — such a new habit was being born among the people.

From Taisho into the early Showa years, great cities such as Tokyo and Osaka transformed into towns of modern consumption and amusement. The lights of cafés, the bustle of department store dining halls. In this episode, let us look at the story of the urban table, where eating out spread from something special for a few into a pleasure for ordinary people.

Lights Flickering On in the City — The Age of the Café

At the end of Meiji, a new shop appeared in Ginza.

In 1911, the ‘Café Printemps’ that opened in Ginza is said to have been founded as a place of social gathering evoking the cafés of Paris. There one could drink genuine coffee, and yoshoku such as beefsteak, cutlets, and rice curry was served. Artists and cultured people gathered to converse — it was a third place, neither home nor traditional restaurant.

Entering Taisho, such cafés, coffee houses, and milk halls increased in the cities. Places to casually enjoy coffee, Western confections, and light yoshoku at an affordable price. They became symbolic spaces of the modern city, where novelty-loving youths, students, and office workers passed their time. Making an appointment to meet someone, waiting for a rendezvous, reading a book alone — there flowed an open time that the home table did not have.

Beer halls for enjoying beer, milk halls selling nutritious drinks, soda fountains serving carbonated beverages — shops around drinks and light meals stood side by side in rich variety. The clientele widened too, and families, women, students, and office workers each passed their time as they pleased within the same block — such a scene became part of the everyday life of the city.

In any case, in this era the habit of ‘eating something Western, outside, as a pleasure’ took root in urban life. Food became, while an act of satisfying hunger, also a stylish, novel, enjoyable experience.

Across the Earthquake — The City’s Food Recovering

In 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake shook that urban table to its very roots.

Centered on Tokyo and Yokohama, the streets burned, and many lives and livelihoods were lost. Eating and drinking establishments were no exception, and countless lights were once extinguished. Yet this destruction, ironically, also became an occasion to repaint the form of the city anew.

In the midst of recovery, reinforced-concrete buildings rose in the streets, roads were widened, and modern entertainment districts took shape once more. Eating and drinking establishments too increased in number, and it is said that after the earthquake cafés showed even greater bustle. The lost lights returned more numerous and more gorgeous than before.

Between destruction and rebirth, the city’s food in fact broadened its base. With the earthquake as a turning point, eating out was no longer the province of only the well-off few, but drew closer to a pleasure that a wide stratum could reach for. After calamity, a new everyday life unexpectedly sprouted — the urban table showed its resilience.

The Grand Dining Hall and the Children’s Lunch — Toward a Family Pleasure

In the recovered city, what most symbolized the popularization of eating out was the grand dining hall of the department store.

Department stores, developed from kimono shops, became, from Taisho into Showa, palaces of consumption and amusement where a whole family could spend a day together. The grand dining hall set on their upper floors was bright and spacious, offering a varied range of dishes from yoshoku to washoku, and bustled with families bringing their children. Eating yoshoku together, on the side of shopping. It was a modest yet heart-lifting pleasure of a holiday.

From that dining hall, a single plate still beloved today was born. The children’s lunch. In 1930, Ando Taro, head of the dining hall division of Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi, is said to have devised a set meal for children, the ‘children’s yoshoku.’ It was a special yoshoku for children, arranging spaghetti, croquettes, sandwiches, and more on a single plate.

Because the deviser was fond of mountain climbing, an anecdote has been handed down: he heaped white rice over ketchup-seasoned rice in the shape of a snow-capped Mt. Fuji, and planted a tiny flag at the peak. The following year a similar item was served at the dining hall of Matsuzakaya in Ueno, and under the name children’s lunch it is said to have spread across the country.

The Mt. Fuji-shaped rice with a flag standing on it. It was not merely a meal. It was a modest piece of staging, meant to delight children and remain in a family’s memory. Food going beyond ‘deliciousness’ to become ‘experience’ and ‘memory’ — the prototype of that sensibility, which continues to the present day, dwells in this single plate.

Yoshoku That Became the Food of Ordinary People

And so, from Taisho into the early Showa years, yoshoku at last became the food of ordinary people.

Once, in the days of civilization and enlightenment, both meat-eating and Western cuisine were special and somehow forbidding. That spread through the military and the schools, and further, through the city’s cafés and department store dining halls, came down into the everyday life of ordinary people. Curry rice, cutlets, and omurice were no longer the dishes of a distant foreign land, but a familiar pleasure to gather around with family on a holiday.

Eating outside, eating for pleasure, going out to eat as a family. The habit that the city nurtured in this era, while bracketed by the great rupture of war, would be handed down to the eating-out culture of postwar Japan. The lights of the bustling dining hall had surely shaped the prototype of the table of a later age.

But those bright lights did not last long. In time the world tilted toward war, and into Japan’s cities too its shadow crept. The table that had looked so abundant would be swallowed into an age of rationing and austerity. The next episode will turn toward a bitter story of the table, where the bustle was taken away and people faced hunger.