Udon is from where???

Wikipedia and other sources (1, 2, 3) say that udon, like almost every traditional Japanese dish, traces its history to China. Most Japanese, however, think of udon as truly Japanese.

When I first came to Japan to teach English, nearly 20 years ago, I taught in a rural junior high school. I ate the regular school lunch, along with the teachers. Most days, lunch was served with a pair of waribashi, the throw-away chopsticks used by nearly all Japanese when they're away from home, and sometimes at home as well. (I carried my own re-usable chopsticks, the subject of a future blog entry.)

Occasionally, however, lunch was served with a spork, the familiar combination spoon and fork. Curry was served with a spork. So was spaghetti, though udon and yakisoba, other noodle dishes, were presented with waribashi. I asked one of the other teachers what the logic was and he told me that waribashi were used for Japanese foods while sporks were used for food of foreign origin. I told him that I thought the rule should be, Which is the better tool for eating this particular food? I went on to say that, from then on, I planned to use chopsticks to eat spaghetti.

Of course, as I know now, udon also is of Chinese origin. In fact, so is yakisoba, which is simply the lamien I ate all across northern China, noodles fried with chunks of meat (and, in Japan, vegetables). Obviously, this is ramen, another Japanese food, by its Chinese name, though here it is virtually always served in soup.

So where do all these foods come from and what difference does it make? It makes a lot of difference if you think of food as one of the core elements of your national identity. What does it say about you if what you consider emblematic of your national identity was imported. In the U.S., nearly everything was imported from one country or another by an immigrant group from that country. This is accepted pretty well. After all, we've never tried to come up with new names for that emphatically American dish, the hamburger. (Anyone who have never heard of Hamburg, Germany, please return to school.) Think of all the other typically American foods that are still known by their original names, as imported, or names identifying their place of origin.

Part of the difference may be that Americans take pride in the idea of being a polyglot culture, a melting pot, as we used to say. Japanese, on the other hand, are mostly descended from people who immigrated before English was a language. In the two millennia before Japan open to the outside world, only about 150 years ago, probably no more than a few tens of thousands of people immigrated to Japan, mostly from Korea, one of the places of origin of the prehistoric Japanese. This, plus Japan's relative isolation from the rest of Asia, strictly enforced from 1639 to 1854, fostered a feeling of uniqueness. However, throughout this time, educated Japanese were aware that much of their material culture was imported from their much larger and more powerful neighbor, China. In considering this relationship, Japanese scholars developed the idea that, whatever the source of origin of ideas and cultural artifacts, they had been transformed in Japan and had become uniquely Japanese. Moreover, especially in the late 19th century, Japanese scholars identified certain ideas (and foods) as definitively Japanese. So, in 1873, the Japanese emperor emphasized his descent from heaven by creating a national holiday, Foundation Day, which we celebrated yesterday. There's even a style of presenting rice, especially in bento, called Hinomaru bento, plain white rice with a red umeboshi (pickled plum) in the middle. It's modeled after the Japanese flag. Talk about making a foreign food (rice) your own!