Food is Emptiness
An excerpt from my Senior Honors Thesis in Dept. Asian Languages and Civilizations at Amherst College, from Chapter One: The Way to Advance Civilization? Beef!: A Meiji Period Survey. Published in Thoughts on Amherst in Spring 2007.
During the Meiji Period (1868 - 1912), although beef appeared in few people’s bowls each night, it was in many people’s thoughts. Constantly publicized, over a short period of time beef became a more naturalized symbol with associations to modernization and strengthening that no longer needed exposition. Popular artists and writers helped firmly set beef as a symbol in the Japanese subconscious, often exploiting and complicating its status to satiric and comic ends. Kanagaki Robun (1829 - 1894), one of the most popular fiction writers of the Meiji Period, set one of his fanciful comic novels in a beef restaurant on Asakusa Street in Tokyo. Aguranabe, sometimes translated as Sitting Cross-Legged at the Beef Pot, was published in five folios in three volumes in 1872 and 1873.(1) It evinces the depraved reputation that beef restaurants, known as gyû-nabe-ya, had at the time. Kanagaki recognized that beef existed in the same conflicted space as Western culture: People saw beef as both civilizing and destructive, part of the new modes that were assaulting traditional Japanese culture.
As part of this ambivalence, many Japanese considered beefeaters to be both society’s most exemplary members and its most ignoble and degenerate. Aguranabe explores the latter category, offering twenty-two short vignettes, each with a visual description of one or two patrons of the beef restaurant and snippets from their conversations.(2) The characters include an ill-tempered samurai, a hack writer, a lazy man who frequents brothels, and an easygoing prostitute who enjoys snacking.(3) In his book of literary criticism, Novel Japan, John Pierre Mertz explains that in Aguranabe, “Individual personalities emerge to some extent from these conversations,” but the book serves largely to create memorably stereotypical beefeaters.(4) Through his inflated characterizations, Kanagaki plays with this layered meaning - beefeaters and beef-eating as sophisticated and depraved - poking fun at anyone who might blindly valorize Westernization.
The novel opens with a vignette about the Seiyôzuki, “Lover of Western Things.”(5) The man appears to have come to the restaurant alone. He is about thirty-four or thirty-five with no known occupation. He has “long and flowing” hair with sheen from his use of Eau de Cologne.(6) Kanagaki is writing before Western shirts and trousers had infiltrated Japan; the beefeater wears a silken kimono and carries a Western-style gingham-covered umbrella, taking every measure he can to express his supposed modern sophistication. “From time to time he removes from his sleeve with a painfully contrived gesture a cheap watch, and consults the time,” Kanagaki narrates. “As a matter of fact this is merely so much display to impress others, and the chain is only gold-plate.”(7) The beefeater has more pomp than substance.
Next, the beefeater “turns to his neighbor, who is eating beef, and speaks:”
Excuse me, but beef is certainly a most delicious thing, isn’t it…. I wonder why we in Japan haven’t eaten such a clean thing before?… We really should be grateful that even people like ourselves can now eat beef, thanks to the fact that Japan is steadily becoming a truly civilized country.(8)
Kanagaki’s decision to select the word “clean” - the word he uses is seiketsu (清潔), which can mean cleanliness, neatness, and purity - is laughable considering that throughout Japanese history one of the primary arguments against eating beef came from Shinto dogma and the insistence that red meat is polluting.(9)
People saw beef as both civilizing and destructive, part of the new modes that were assaulting traditional Japanese culture.
The beefeater then describes how “Western” entities created the world’s most remarkable inventions. “Balloons,” he begins, were invented by the king of the part of the world where the people “are all burnt black by the sun.” This king tried a number of schemes to bring cool air to his people, finally inventing “a big round bag they fill with air high up in the sky. They bring the bag down and open it, causing the cooling air inside the bag to spread out all over the country.” The beefeater goes on to say that in Russia they invented the steam engine to keep people inside protected from the cold. He adds casually, “I understand that they modeled the steam engine after the flaming chariot of hell.” It would seem from the beefeater’s depiction that Africa and Russia both lay within the West, a place where everything outstanding and socially beneficial originates. His harebrained explications are an overblown instance of a common phenomenon in which the West became a figment of the Japanese imagination with any associations that fit the purpose of its suggestion.(10) The real activities of Westerners often mattered less than the opportunity to pit Japanese inferiority or difference against the specter of a tremendous, amorphous other. If the West could contain anything and have accomplished everything, then Japan was always behind. Overall, the beefeater’s ridiculous description and analysis make plain to modern and likely many Meiji Era readers the falsity and fantasy of this and many similar constructions of the West.(11) Additionally, this section serves as a sly reference to the incongruities built up around eating meat, an act that was cast as Western but immediately took on the contours of a Japanese meal.
The real activities of Westerners often mattered less than the opportunity to pit Japanese inferiority or difference against the specter of a tremendous, amorphous other.
Kanagaki also plays on the anti-Buddhist implications of eating red meat. His introduction to Aguranabe, written in choppy, unfinished sentences in imitation of contemporary advertisements, includes numerous layers of wordplay that often reference Buddhist recitations and precepts. In one instance he writes a Buddhist mantra - shiki-soku-ze-kû - with four kanji, or ideograms, that have different meanings from the mantra but are a homonym.(12) Shiki-soku-ze-kû, when incanted in a religious context, means something akin to “form is emptiness.” The mantra, 色即是空, begins with the kanji for iro, which refers to both color and material form, and ends with sora, which connotes both sky and the Buddhist concept of emptiness. In Kanagaki’s introduction he writes shiki-soku-ze-kû as 色則是食, which concludes with the kanji for food and eating; this construction reads “form is eating,” a statement with any number of meanings. Perhaps one of his intentions is to point out that both beefeaters and non-beefeaters take the subject too seriously. His stylistic choice to imitate an advertisement refers to the fact that beef is at base a commodity.
Kanagaki’s goal then was not advocacy for or against eating beef. Aguranabe attempts to expose the ridiculousness of any stance that takes a commodity as proof of civilization. Kanagaki’s Buddhist references and incessant wordplay at the outset of the novel showcase the fact that eating beef had deep cultural significance for most Japanese. His references were effective because people still carried the Buddhist and Shinto sentiments with them. Kanagaki layers on top of these associative meanings a third, which iterates that beef is essentially no more than an overwrought commodity. Nevertheless, by setting an entire novel, which became a great success, in a beef restaurant, Kanagaki encouraged the beef craze. Aguranabe may have mocked the way that beef had become a powerful metonymy for Westernization, but by bringing its myriad connotations to the fore, Kanagaki inadvertently fueled its symbolic proliferation.
References
1. Robun Kanagaki, “Aguranabe 牛店雜談安愚樂鍋,” in Kanagaki Robun 仮名垣魯文, Meiji no Bungaku 明治の文学 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô, 2002).
2. John Pierre Mertz, Novel Japan: Spaces of Nationhood in Early Meiji Narrative, 1870-88 (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003), 3, 8.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 9.
5. Kanagaki, “Aguranabe 牛店雜談安愚樂鍋.”
6. Robun Kanagaki, “The Beefeater,” in Modern Japanese Literature, ed. Donald Keene (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 31.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 32.
9. Kanagaki, “Aguranabe 牛店雜談安愚樂鍋,” 272.
10. Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 137.
11. Mertz, Novel Japan: Spaces of Nationhood in Early Meiji Narrative, 1870-88, 12.
12. Kanagaki, “Aguranabe 牛店雜談安愚樂鍋,” 268.
Works Cited
Gluck, Carol. Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Kanagaki, Robun. “Aguranabe 牛店雜談安愚樂鍋.” In Kanagaki Robun 仮名垣魯文, 267-341. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô, 2002.
______. “The Beefeater.” In Modern Japanese Literature, edited by Donald Keene, 31-33. New York: Grove Press, 1956.
Mertz, John Pierre. Novel Japan: Spaces of Nationhood in Early Meiji Narrative, 1870-88. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003.
About the Thesis
My thesis offers a survey of beef-eating and the beef industry in Japan since the mid-nineteenth century as a way to approach modern Japanese cultural identity.
